Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [152]
So he was not only a crook, a bully, and a draft dodger; he was a pervert. And his apologists, Pegler said, were legion. Of all the supposed dozens, the columnist singled out two egregious offenders, the Daily News’s Ed Sullivan and the New Yorker’s E. J. Kahn Jr. Sullivan, still a year away from his television career, had, for whatever reason, early on adopted a Sinatra-right-or-wrong stance in his columns. The News columnist, Pegler thundered, had “impugned the professional integrity of legitimate journalists who had faithfully covered the ‘Sinatra story’ in the Havana and Hollywood [Mortimer] episodes. [Sullivan had insisted Mortimer’s] motive was to punish Sinatra because he gave of his spare time and energy ‘to persuade kids to be nice to minority groups.’ ”
Fair enough. Sullivan was more or less in the bag. (Maybe, as with Wilson, a gold cigarette case had sealed the deal.) But Kahn was scarcely another Broadway hack. On balance, the worst that can be said about his three-part New Yorker profile (subsequently expanded into the slight but charming book The Voice) is that it was written in the amused, breezy tone so common to that magazine in those days, the verbal equivalent of Eustace Tilley deigning to glance through his lorgnette at a butterfly. “Sinatra has several other friends who, while not precisely desperadoes, are fairly rough-and-tumble individuals,” reads a typical sentence in Kahn’s piece. The passage immediately following soft-pedals Sinatra’s acquaintance with Joe Fischetti and his meeting with Lucky Luciano.
For whatever reasons—surely artistic rather than political—Kahn minimizes Sinatra’s bad behavior. But the writer’s worst offense, according to Westbrook Pegler, was this: “Kahn writes also that some of Sinatra’s public earnestly believe that his birthday is second in importance to only that of Jesus Christ.”
Pegler, who would become an increasingly rabid anti-Semite (he liked to refer to Eastern European Jews as “geese”), didn’t have to state the obvious: Kahn was a Jew. And worse still, a Jew bowing down to an Antichrist. This is no exaggeration. In his column of September 26, Pegler wrote, “There is a weird light playing around Sinatra. Hitler affected many Germans much the same way and madness has been rife in the world.”
This was not just some California kook writing the FBI about the nefarious possibilities of swooning bobby-soxers. This was a Pulitzer-winning columnist, with the broadest possible platform, the five hundred newspapers of the Hearst Syndicate, comparing a popular entertainer to the worst mass murderer in history.
And Pegler wasn’t done yet.
On December 8, he went for the knockout punch, beginning with the magic triangulation: “From time to time, these dispatches have disclosed and commented on a strange liaison between our journalism and the underworld and Communist fronts of the amusement industry.”
Communism never came up again in that column—in those days you only had to say it once. After dropping the word, Pegler segued right back into the familiar theme of Frank’s nasty associations. First he took on the Varsity member Jimmy Tarantino, who had moved to California and started a scandal sheet called Hollywood Nite Life, a precursor of Confidential. Tarantino was a skanky character, one of the many who would stick a little too closely to Sinatra throughout the years.2 In this case the glue was Hank Sanicola, Tarantino’s partner on Hollywood Nite Life. (Mickey Cohen, quite the man about Tinseltown, might also have been involved.) Frank should have given Jimmy Tarantino—and a lot of other people throughout the years—a wide berth, but if a man was loyal and amusing, Frank never bothered to do a background check. He liked to laugh, and fun came first. If the price was the vitriol of Westbrook Pegler and Lee Mortimer, so be it. Yet there was another price to pay.
At the end of the column, Pegler returned to the reliable theme of sex: specifically, Sinatra’s role as seducer of the nation’s youth. But in a curious (and more than slightly kinky) twist,