Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [145]
“You bet your ass we’re in trouble and we better get out of here before the reporters start showing up,” Keller said.
They drove over to Bobby Burns’s house to hash the situation over. After much pacing, Keller came up with a solution:
There’s only one thing to do. It’s the only way to get out of this thing. Otherwise, you’re going to have every newspaper in America against you, because regardless of what they think of this guy Mortimer, they resent any one of their number being manhandled by an actor. So Frank, you’ve got to pick up the phone and call all the papers and say, “This is Frank Sinatra” and listen to their questions. Then you’ve got to tell each one of them that when you walked out of Ciro’s, Mortimer and this Chinese dame were standing there and you heard him say to her, “There’s that little dago bastard now!”
This is a slur on your nationality, and no one in their right mind would expect you to take this in good grace. Knowing your temper, the press will go along with you and be more or less on your side. It’s the only thing you can do to come out of this looking good.
Frank tried. He called all the reporters he knew and told them the fish tale. But when the papers ran it the next morning, Lee Mortimer went into a towering rage of his own, lodging a complaint of battery against Sinatra to the district attorney and announcing he would sue the singer for $25,000 in damages. On Wednesday afternoon, April 9, while Frank was in the CBS Vine Street studio rehearsing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’ ” for the Old Gold broadcast, a deputy sheriff and two investigators from the district attorney’s office marched in and told him he was under arrest.
He phoned his lawyer, then went along quietly to the Beverly Hills Justice Court. The press was already there. The Los Angeles Times’s account was jocular, treating the affair as the non-earthshaking event it clearly was:
SINATRA ARRESTED AND FREED ON BAIL IN ROW WITH WRITER
Columnist Charges Singer Bopped Him; Date of Trial Set
… Frankie was wearing a gray sports suit, regular necktie instead of his usual droopy bow tie, and a smile when he walked briskly into court.
“I plead not guilty,” he announced in a firm voice, “and wish a jury trial—sometime late next month.”
Judge Woodward set the trial for 10 a.m., May 28.
Then, there was the matter of bail—it was set at $500 on the warrant.
Frankie had $400 on him. His attorney, Albert Pearlson, had $300. But, the money would be tied up until the trial. They didn’t want to part with it. So, there was a 30-minute wait until a bail bondsman showed up to post the bail.
Frankie’s smile turned a bit sheepish during the bail episode and then it got practically sickly when a deputy sheriff gently informed him that his permit to carry a gun had been suspended …
Semiofficial weights for the “battle” were listed yesterday as: Sinatra, 130; Mortimer, 135.
Late that night, Frank flew to New York. He was going to receive yet another award for his good works—the Thomas Jefferson Award of the Council Against Intolerance in America. It also didn’t seem like a bad moment to get out of town. He boarded a triple-tailed TWA Constellation—the state of commercial-aviation art in 1947—and caught a little sleep in first class before facing the public the next morning. Continuing its tongue-in-cheek coverage, the L.A. Times wrote:
Frankie … was met by 500 screaming bobby-soxers and newspapermen who immediately changed his title from “The Voice” to “The Punch” … On his arrival in New York … “The Punch” told his version of the historic Hollywood “battle” to a roomful of newspapermen at La Guardia Field.
One reporter wrote:
“ ‘It was a right-hand punch,’ Frankie said. He said it quietly, modestly, in the way of a man awed by his own strength.”
The crooner repeated for New York newsmen his assertion that he overheard Mortimer refer to him as “Dago ——— ——— ———.”
“We all have human weaknesses,” he