Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [146]
In Hollywood Albert Pearlson, Sinatra’s attorney, said he is checking the law which makes calling a person a profane name in public a misdemeanor.
“If my interpretation of the law is correct, I’m going to the District Attorney’s office and demand a complaint against this fellow,” Pearlson declared.
The counteroffensive was in full swing: always blame the victim. That evening, Frank ran into Mr. and Mrs. Earl Wilson at the Copacabana. “Frank came in and greeted both of us warmly,” the compliant columnist recalled.
He wasn’t objecting to my piece [“Frankie, you shouldn’t-a,” Wilson had gently written], but still said he’d done it because Mortimer had called him a name.
“Did you have to hit him?” I asked Frank.
“He was coming toward me. I thought he was going to hit me.”
“He said you belted him from behind.”
“I hit him on the chin! To hit him on the chin and hit him from behind, you got to be an acrobat.” Frank’s eyes lit up with excitement. “When he said what he did, I said to myself, ‘Here goes,’ and I let him have a good right hook. I felt very good about it afterwards. Somebody pinned my arms behind me—there was an awful tussle all at once, people coming out of walls.”
What did he resent most in Mortimer’s writings? That about his fans being moronic was one of the things—he’d always been loyal to them as they had been to him … And, curiously, he hated references to his being an overnight success.
“Don’t make me laugh! All the cream cheese-and-nut sandwiches I ate when I was living on about thirty cents a day, working on those sustaining programs. Nancy was working in a department store and used to slip me a couple of bucks …
“The coldest nights I walked three miles because I didn’t have bus fare. I wasn’t getting anywhere, I was giving up, but after I got married, I got lucky.”
Frank managed to mix lies and braggadocio and self-pity into one unattractive glop. Maybe he was starting to believe his own version of the Mortimer punch-up.
But the public wasn’t. His second Columbia album, Songs by Sinatra, released not long after the Ciro’s incident, wasn’t selling so well. Granted, Songs didn’t have the same novelty and artistic integrity as The Voice, but the avalanche of negative press that spring didn’t help. The L.A. Times, which persistently treated the affair lightly, was the exception that proved the rule. The five hundred Hearst papers were, as Time noted, “[giving] the story headlines and space almost fit for an attempted political assassination. Mortimer suddenly attained the stature of Dreyfus.”
And Hearst, as we have seen, mattered enormously to Louis B. Mayer. When Frank returned to the Coast, he was called, yet again, onto the studio chief’s carpet. Mayer ordered Sinatra to apologize publicly to Mortimer and pay him a settlement of $9,000. On June 4, in Beverly Hills District Court, Frank read a statement saying that the whole incident had sprung from a misunderstanding, that Mortimer had never made any remark about him, and that he keenly regretted his actions. Mortimer read a statement saying that he had received satisfaction for his injuries, and was satisfied, also, at Sinatra’s acknowledgment and apology. The columnist withdrew his charges and, Sinatra having paid $50 in court costs—and some $15,000 to his lawyers, plus the $9,000 to Lee Mortimer—the case was dismissed.
But within a week Old Gold had dropped Frank from his radio show and hired Buddy Clark as his replacement.
In early May, while the Hearst papers were inveighing against Frank and MGM lawyers were parsing the Ciro’s case to see if their star had a leg to stand on, Mortimer requested an audience with none other than J. Edgar Hoover. He had information on Sinatra, he said, and he needed some questions answered. Tit for tat.
The bureau bit. On May 12, Hoover’s aide Louis B. Nichols—the same man who had gone to Detroit the previous year to observe the bobby-soxer mob greeting the singer at the airport—wrote a lengthy memo to Clyde A. Tolson, Hoover’s