Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [151]
The ground was sliding beneath Frank’s feet. His singing was the one part of his life where he couldn’t dissemble. His belief in a song was part of what made him great; when he lost conviction, his vocal quality became two-dimensional. Metronome, which only two years earlier had crowned Frank Act of the Year, and with whose All-Stars he’d recently recorded the sublime “Sweet Lorraine,” was withering about the new edition of Your Hit Parade:
The show is alternately dull, pompous and raucous. Frank sings without relaxation and often at tempos that don’t suit him or the song. Axel plays murderous, rag-timey junk, that he, with his impeccable taste, must abhor. And poor Doris Day, making her first real start in commercial radio, is saddled with arrangements which sound as if they were written long before anybody ever thought of having a stylist like her on the show … Frank sounds worse on these Saturday nightmares than he ever has since he first became famous.
There may have been schadenfreude in this; even those who had been his biggest boosters probably weren’t averse to the pleasures of piling on. But to listen to the show proves Metronome right. Westbrook Pegler was another matter. The columnist, who had been otherwise engaged for a couple of years, now went at Sinatra with a fresh vengeance. Throughout September he hammered on Frank, trotting out all the sins for which the Hearst papers had lavishly been taking him to task, and now—his one new note—slamming Sinatra’s defenders. “A campaign of propaganda has been running in some areas of our press, including magazines, and on the radio to rehabilitate the reputation of Frank Sinatra,” his column of September 10 began, ominously. In this loaded time, such phraseology was guaranteed to raise a Red flag. In some papers this column ran side by side with one by Victor Riesel, which began:
I insist the “Communist Party” is more of a plot than a party, and I say that for too long the Communist propaganda machine, directed by many Broadway and Hollywood publicists, writers and “wise-crack” specialists, has bullied government officials so that they fear to disclose evidence of this plot.
The message, to any right-thinking reader, was clear: subversive elements were trying to undermine America, and Frank Sinatra—with his Mafia connections, his draft-dodging and sex-offending past (not to mention his oily hair and Italian surname)—was their standard-bearer.
Pegler was clearly building a case, but for what? Frank had acted badly: this was not in dispute. He had acted very badly. In the matter of his Havana adventure, depending on the contents of that heavy valise, he may even have broken the law. Had he dodged the draft? Probably. So had John Wayne. Had he been convicted on those two 1938 sex arrests? He had not. But rhetorically speaking, Pegler (he portentously called the complainant a “girl”) felt the arrests were worth mentioning again. As was the fact that somebody had been lying about Frank’s age.
The rock-jawed columnist (a photo of his unimpeachably Waspy countenance ran with every installment) was throwing everything he had at Sinatra, building up to a bombshell of some kind.
The propaganda campaign, Pegler said, consisted
of many writers, including night club, radio, and movie columnists of New York and Hollywood, who have minimized incidents of Sinatra’s career which other persons might have viewed with severity. Dozens of these “interpreters” and propagandists purport to be authorities on the personal histories of all such “celebrities.” Many of them draw outlandish salaries as “reporters.” But not one of them has ever reported this episode [the 1938 arrests], the most dramatic