Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [144]
Lee Mortimer was just finishing a late dinner with an Asian-American band singer named Kay Kino when Sinatra walked in. In the syndicated New York Post column he wrote a couple of days later, Earl Wilson, ever eager to excuse Frank for almost everything (in gratitude, Sinatra had given the columnist one of those gold cigarette cases, engraved: OIL, YOUSE A POIL), offered a somewhat incoherent account of the evening’s events, citing Mortimer’s choice of dinner companion itself as dubious. Mortimer, Wilson wrote, was “known in the cafés for liking all champagne (except domestic) and Chinese girls, the latter so much that he sometimes brought in practically their whole families. His preference for Chinese girls brought publicity which he never mentioned suing anybody about.”
Frank had other grievances on his mind. After he and his companion—who was almost certainly Sam Weiss, a song plugger and old New York pal—had been inside the club for about fifteen minutes, Mortimer and Kino left. While Mortimer was standing on the steps outside the entrance to Ciro’s, Sinatra suddenly emerged and blindsided him, hitting him behind the ear with his right fist and knocking him to the ground.
At this point, as is usually the case with stories of fistfights, the tale grows murky. Mortimer seems to have gotten up and asked Sinatra why he had hit him, upon which a large man with black hair and a blue pin-striped suit (probably Weiss) pushed the columnist—who was about the singer’s height and weight, though ten years older—down again. Then Sinatra began to pound the columnist and scream at him (calling him, by one account, a “shit heel” and “a perverted bastard” and, by another, a “degenerate” and a “fucking homosexual”) while either the original large man alone, or he and two others, held him. “I’ll kill you the next time I see you!” Sinatra screamed in Mortimer’s face. “I’ll kill you!” A King Features photographer tried to intervene. And then the beating was over.
Frank, the only one who had done any punching, had not inflicted much damage. Mortimer stood up, went to the West Hollywood sheriff’s substation to lodge a complaint against Sinatra, then stopped at a hospital to have his sore jaw seen to. After phoning his lawyer, he started calling the press. Sinatra, for his part, went back into Ciro’s and ordered a double brandy.
As the phone wires began to buzz, the Los Angeles Herald-Express columnist Harrison Carroll hurried over and found Frank still at the bar, in an explanatory mood. Equipped with a reporter’s notebook and a sympathetic, if tin, ear, Carroll quoted Sinatra on the Mortimer dustup:
For two years he has been needling me. He has referred to my bobby-soxer fans as morons. I don’t care if they do try to tear your clothes off. They are not morons. They are only kids fourteen and fifteen years old. I think I have had more experience with their tactics than any other star in the country, but I have never beefed. Honestly, I intended to say hello to Mortimer. But when I glanced in his direction, he gave me a look. I can’t describe it. It was one of those contemptuous who-do-you-amount-to looks. I followed him outside and I saw red. I hit him. I’m all mixed up. I’m sorry that it happened, but I was raised in a tough neighborhood, where you had to fight at the drop of a hat and I couldn’t help myself.
Frank may indeed have locked eyes with Mortimer inside Ciro’s. His first sight of the columnist—whose cold eyes, puffy cheeks, and pouting lower lip gave him the look of a school-yard tattletale—would not have been a pleasant experience. Yet Sinatra could be a fearsome sight himself, and both men had certainly been building up a head of steam. (“Every time Frank read one of Mortimer’s columns,” Jack Keller later recalled, “he went into a towering rage and threatened that the next time he saw this guy he was going to wallop him.”) What happened outside the club is Rashomon, although a reminiscence tape-recorded by Keller many years later gives a fascinating picture