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late the next morning as he suited up for a Saturday-afternoon Swooners softball game. The call came from Hank Sanicola, who had heard from a friend of a friend of Mickey Cohen’s. Frank was shocked but not surprised. He felt sad at the death of his beautiful and magnetic friend, and at its violence, but knew he must suppress the feeling. He would soon hear that the hit had been engineered by Frankie Carbo—the same Frankie Carbo who was rumored to have helped persuade Tommy Dorsey to release Sinatra from his contract, and ironically, the same Frankie Carbo who had been implicated along with Siegel in the 1939 murder of Harry Greenberg. But it barely mattered who had done the planning, or who had pulled the trigger: Frank knew the order had come straight from the summit in Havana, and the manager of the project had been Charlie Fischetti.

21

He didn’t want to put on a sailor suit anymore; MGM obliged. Frank wore fake sideburns and a properly embarrassed expression in The Kissing Bandit, 1948. (photo credit 21.1)

There is a weird light playing around Sinatra. Hitler affected many Germans much the same way and madness has been rife in the world.

—Westbrook Pegler, in his syndicated Hearst column of September 26, 1947

As U.S. relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated, paranoia over Communism mounted, particularly in Hollywood. The climate of fear surrounding the 1946 congressional elections had put a Republican majority in both houses for the first time since 1932, including a freshman senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy. The new majority swung into action in 1947, moving the House Un-American Activities Committee to step up its inquisitions and pressuring Harry Truman into signing Executive Order 9835, the so-called Loyalty Order, which gave the FBI broad latitude to investigate citizens and suspected Communist-front organizations.

It was in this climate, in June, that Americans began spotting flying saucers: over Mount Rainier in Washington State; over Idaho, surrounding a United Airlines DC-3; over Roswell, New Mexico. And then all over the place. Every week, Norman Rockwell–covered Saturday Evening Posts were plunking into American mailboxes; every night, citizens were checking under the bed.

In its own intense way, Hollywood reflected the national anxiety. On the face of it, nothing had changed: swimming pools glittered in the sun; heavy black cars glided beneath the palm trees; carpenters banged on sets. But there was big trouble in the easily spooked company town—J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of HUAC, was in Hollywood to brief studio executives on what the committee believed was Communist infiltration of movie content by the Screen Writers Guild.

At the same time, Frank Sinatra was reporting to Culver City every weekday morning to play Ricardo, the kissing bandit.

In his previous pictures, Frank had just had to put on a costume and a little Max Factor; his latest role required a more complex transformation. Every morning, the hair department glued a luxuriant toupee, complete with sideburns, over his already thinning locks; the makeup people spackled his mastoid and acne scars so that his left profile would photograph acceptably under the bright lights required for Technicolor. After the failure of the black-and-white It Happened in Brooklyn, MGM was reinvesting in the expensive film process, hoping The Kissing Bandit would duplicate the magic of Anchors Aweigh.

Once again, Sinatra’s pal and fellow Hollywood leftist Isobel Lennart wrote the script;1 once again, the haughty-faced coloratura Kathryn Grayson co-starred—and, once again, she and Frank enjoyed minimal affinity. “I couldn’t stand kissing him,” Grayson later confessed. “He was so skinny, so scrawny.”

But chemistry was just one of the picture’s problems. The story was a mixture common enough for the era: broad comedy, romance, and music. To write the songs, Metro (having jettisoned Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, perhaps as the whipping boys for It Happened in Brooklyn) hired the dependable if less interesting Nacio Herb Brown, writer