Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [153]
There has been strident controversy as to Sinatra’s real opinion of the nasty little chits who used to loiter late into the night around night clubs, theaters, and other inappropriate haunts for children, where Sinatra was earning his living or taking his ease with the Fischetti freres of the Chicago underworld and Lucky Luciano, the exiled Sicilian prostitutioneer. Mortimer called them little morons. This was outlandish flattery in the reckless tabloid manner, and Sinatra caught him when his head was turned and slugged him …
In a study of this matter at the time I wrote that Mr. Evans, the manager and press-agent, had expressed the same opinion of these sinister little tramps … It was … Mr. Evans, Sinatra’s own manager and propagandist, the man who fomented the excitement over this exaggerated roadhouse moaner, who spoke to me of Frankie Boy’s following as sexually excited jailbait, a million of them, squealing like animals.
Pegler is finally showing his true colors. The real surprise is George Evans’s disaffection. No matter what he actually said to Westbrook Pegler—and the lack of a direct quotation is suspicious—the fact that he spoke to him at all (and in all likelihood really did say something derogatory about Sinatra’s fan base) hints at trouble in Frank’s professional life. At the end of the column Pegler, in high poetic mode, wrote, “Sinatra laid an egg at the Capitol theater and the amorous cult had vanished away like the insect clouds that madly swarm and dissolve.” There was certainly no love lost between Westbrook Pegler and Frank Sinatra, but where the Capitol Theater gig was concerned, the columnist was, for once, telling the straight story.
Sinatra’s stand at the Capitol, the site of his famous opening with the Hoboken Four, was meant to be a triumphant return. “FRANK SINATRA/M-G-M’s Singing Star/IN PERSON,” a poster trumpeted. But the tanking of It Happened in Brooklyn, along with the star’s current publicity, hinted that triumph might not be in the cards. (And then, for anyone who cared to pay attention, there was the title of the movie that accompanied the Capitol show: Her Husband’s Affairs, with Lucille Ball and Franchot Tone.) By the end of the second week of the three-week engagement, it was clear that something was very wrong. Lee Mortimer reported, gleefully but with the numbers to back him up: “The crooner, expected to pile up new highs, almost hits a new low. His second week … was a sickly $71,000, half of the advance estimate.” And in a subsequent column: “Broadway whispers this will be Sinatra’s last appearance here, and that didn’t kill my appetite for the family turkey dinner.”
It was no fluke: the wheel really had turned. The relentless bad publicity couldn’t have helped; still, the cold fact was that Frank’s core audience, those nasty little chits, that sexually excited jailbait, were growing up and moving on. Throughout the year, despite Sinatra’s unprecedented number of studio sessions, his record sales had slipped badly: his discs spent just twenty-six weeks on the Billboard charts in 1947, as compared with ninety-seven the year before. He was putting more in and getting less out. On Your Hit Parade, he was almost always singing other people’s songs: one of the first, in September, had been that old chestnut, “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” a big hit for Perry Como—who, by the way, now stood one notch above Frank on Billboard’s annual performance chart.
Sinatra had been singing professionally for a dozen years; he had had an amazing run. Maybe his time was passing. He might have been The Voice, but there were other voices the public found pleasing. That nice Perry Como had a very pleasant tone (and a nice face too), and you didn’t see him running around with gangsters or slugging people.
All but buried at the bottom of the poster for the Capitol Theater engagement, far beneath “SINATRA” and in significantly smaller type than the billings for Lorraine Rognan (Petite Comedienne) and Skitch Henderson (his Piano and his ORCH.), was the name