Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [148]
Even when those forces were benign, they were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Certainly one unconscious purpose for Frank’s Havana trip was to reclaim the power of his Italianness. On the other hand, even he wouldn’t have painted his trip to Havana as heroic. Rebellious and defiant, yes; but not heroic. One common theme uniting all his exploits that bad year was manliness. There was something boyish and wistful about his need to carry that gun, to be accepted by those mostly Italian men of honor, even to claim bragging rights for taking care of Lee Mortimer. Macrophallus and all, Frank was a little guy (not a single record exists of his ever having prevailed in a real fight), and secretly he knew he was an artist, with an exquisite sensibility. How could such a person be a man among men? Even grunting, illiterate Marty—boilermaker, athlete, fireman—was that.
As Sinatra’s fame grew and his hangers-on kowtowed and cowered, he came to believe in his own toughness. Yet there was always something artificial about it. He needed the bodyguards, needed not to risk his all-important life fighting somebody else’s battles overseas. He had to protect his image; even more, he needed the hard shell that guarded the exquisite flower within.
Sammy Cahn, the least sexually adventurous member of the Varsity, had happily fallen into the tender trap in 1945, tying the knot with the young and beautiful Gloria Delson, a Goldwyn Girl (and a Jewess). Sixty years later, Gloria Delson Franks, long since divorced from Cahn, recalled an early weekend she and Sammy spent in the Springs with the Sinatras, at the Lone Palm. “Frank taught me to swim,” she said. “He’s the one who got me over my fear of water. I said, ‘I don’t like putting my face in the water, Frank; it scares me.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll learn how to do it and you won’t be afraid. I’m telling you.’
“He’d sit with me in the pool and hold me up, and he’d say, ‘Okay, put your face in.’ Like I was a baby. He treated me so gently, and he was so patient with me.”
On Friday night, June 20, Benny Siegel ate a late dinner with friends at an Ocean Park seafood restaurant called Jack’s. On the way out, he took a toothpick and a free copy of the next morning’s Los Angeles Times stamped, “Good Night. Sleep Well. With the Compliments of Jack’s.” The party drove back to Beverly Hills, where Siegel let himself into the big Tudor at 810 North Linden Drive he was renting for Virginia Hill. (Hill herself was in Paris, perhaps on her way to or from Benny’s Swiss bank—or perhaps keeping away from Beverly Hills.)
It was a warm night, the windows were open, and the ethereal fragrance of night-blooming jasmine suffused the living room, where Siegel sat at one end of a flowered chintz couch, his Times on his lap. He wore a beautifully tailored gray silk suit and handmade English shoes polished to a high sheen. At the other end of the couch sat his pal and business partner, a handsome, prematurely white-haired man who called himself Allen Smiley. The two men talked about the Flamingo, which had just turned the corner into profitability.
In the bushes outside the front window a man in dark clothing squatted with a .30-caliber carbine, listening to the ratchet of the katydids and the singsong of Benny and Smiley’s conversation. When he was sure Benny was speaking, the man rose and rested the carbine’s muzzle in the V of a trellis and took careful aim at Siegel’s head. He squeezed the trigger. There was a blast, a flash, and Benny’s head exploded. His right eye was blown across the room onto the Spanish tiles of the dining-room floor. Smiley dove to the carpet. The man in the bushes fired eight more shots—all redundant—then dropped the rifle and fled into the soft night.
Pure hate. Lee Mortimer looks on as a Beverly Hills judge sets bail for Frank. April 1947. (photo credit 20.2)
Sinatra heard the news