Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [141]
In an era when Americans got their news almost exclusively from newspapers, when every major city had at least two dailies and sometimes three or four, Ruark’s columns, and the avalanche of follow-up coverage they triggered, had huge impact. And long legs. “It was a pretty story while it lasted, and it lasted quite a while,” Ruark wrote, in his best Hemingway-ese, in 1962. It was also George Evans’s worst nightmare: his star client, on ethnic thin ice under the best of circumstances, had done himself no favors by mingling his name with the kinds of names many Americans reflexively associated with the darker side of Italian identity. Sinatra’s first response to the attacks was weak, almost stunned—not to mention self-contradictory: “I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him without first investigating his past. Any report that I fraternized with goons or racketeers is a vicious lie.”
Not long after the trip, Frank told Hedda Hopper what he insisted was “the complete story”:
I dropped by a casino one night. One of the captains—a sort of boss—recognized me and asked if I’d mind meeting a few people … I couldn’t refuse … So I went through some routine introductions, scarcely paying attention to the names of the people I was meeting. One happened to be Lucky Luciano. Even if I’d caught his name, I probably wouldn’t have associated it with the notorious underworld character … I sat down at a table for about fifteen minutes. Then I got up and went back to the hotel … When such innocent acts are so distorted, you can’t win.
The tone of persecution would crop up more frequently over the next few years as Sinatra became ever more embattled; but it’s hard to argue that Frank hadn’t brought the controversy on himself. Hedonism was one thing; lawlessness was something else. Amiability could rapidly become complicity. Very soon after that week in February, attention focused on the picture of the heavy suitcase in Sinatra’s hand. A story circulated that Frank had been acting as a courier for the Fischettis, carrying Luciano a large sum in business proceeds that had mounted up while Lucky was unavoidably out of the country. The story festered and swelled. Sinatra himself claimed, a bit absurdly, that the bag had contained painting and sketching supplies and his jewelry. (Spare pinkie rings?) In 1951 in the New York Daily Mirror, Lee Mortimer formally accused the singer of carrying $2 million in small bills to Cuba.
It was a compelling tale. Who wouldn’t like to open up a suitcase and find that kind of money? But the idea of fitting $2 million in small bills into hand luggage was patently ridiculous, and Sinatra quickly set about bashing the straw man:
Picture me, skinny Frankie [he said, in a Sinatra-bylined magazine piece in 1952], lifting two million dollars in small bills. For the record, one thousand dollars in dollar bills weighs three pounds, which makes the load I am supposed to have carried six thousand pounds. Even assuming that the bills were twenties—the bag would still have required a couple of stevedores to carry it. This is probably the most ridiculous charge that has ever been leveled at me … I stepped off the plane in Havana with a small bag in which I carried my oils, sketching material, and personal jewelry, which I never send with my regular luggage.
But what if the bills were fifties? Or hundreds? By similar logic, since after all a $100 bill weighs the same as a single, a hundred thousand in Benjamins would weigh that same three pounds. Two million dollars