Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [200]
Eddie Fisher was writing his memoirs at the end of the 1990s, at a moment when the world had all but forgotten him. There is a poignant odor of insistence about his recollections: Remember me. I used to be huge.
Yet in February 1951, Frank Sinatra had no way of knowing that Eddie Fisher would be forgotten and he himself would be immortal.
One night Frank was walking through Times Square when he saw the giant crowds of girls beneath the Paramount marquee. The sight was like a vision at once of his past and his death. He hurried back to Manie Sacks’s suite at the Hampshire House, went into the kitchen, closed the door, laid his head on the stove, and turned on the gas. Manie happened to return not long afterward, smelled the odor, and went into the kitchen, where he found Frank lying on the floor, sobbing, a failure even at suicide.
In December 1950, the Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, a Democrat possessed of a crusading temperament and presidential aspirations, convened the Special Committee on Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. In reality, the committee’s investigations had less to do with commerce than with an organization of which few Americans were aware in that more innocent time: the Mafia. The country got a crash course. The hearings ran for ninety-two days in fourteen cities, including New York, Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans, with a cast of witnesses who became instantly infamous: the likes of Giuseppe Doto (Joe Adonis), Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, Jake Guzik, Virginia Hill, Willie Moretti, and Longy Zwillman. The committee’s sessions were televised, quickly becoming America’s most popular show. Appliance stores tuned the TV sets in their display windows to the Kefauver hearings as an inducement to buy. The nation was mesmerized by the raspy-voiced testimony of the Copacabana owner, Costello, who had refused to allow his face to be shown on camera. Instead, viewers saw a dramatic close-up of the gangster’s well-manicured hands, which he wrung constantly as he spoke.
At a committee meeting during the investigation, Kefauver handed one of his lawyers, Joseph Nellis, an envelope containing eight eight-by-ten glossy photographs. The pictures were all of Frank Sinatra. “I almost fell off my chair,” Nellis recalled many years later. “I opened the envelope and saw a picture of Sinatra with his arm around Lucky Luciano on the balcony of the Hotel Nacional in Havana; another picture showed Sinatra and Luciano sitting at a nightclub in the Nacional with lots of bottles having a hell of a time with some good-looking girls. One picture showed Frank getting off a plane carrying a suitcase, and then there were a couple pictures of him with the Fischetti brothers, Lucky Luciano … Kefauver wanted to know more about Sinatra’s relationship with Luciano, who was running an international narcotics cartel in exile. So I called Frank’s attorney and arranged a meeting.”
Nellis didn’t just want to talk to Frank’s attorney—he wanted Frank to testify, on camera. This, of course, would have been the final nail in Sinatra’s coffin: a TV show to end all TV shows, a big broadcast that would have blown the singer’s career right out of the water. Kefauver and Nellis were entirely serious about this: the senator had ordered his lawyer to bulldoze Sinatra with the full power of the U.S. Senate. What Nellis hadn’t reckoned on was his adversary.
Frank (or in all likelihood, Henry Jaffe) had chosen his attorney well. Sol Gelb was a former assistant to New York’s governor, Thomas Dewey, and the Manhattan district attorney Frank Hogan, now in private practice. Ironically—or appropriately, depending on your point of view—he had worked for Dewey when the crime-busting governor convicted Lucky Luciano of running a prostitution ring. He had also helped Hogan bring Lepke Buchalter of Murder Inc. to justice. Gelb was a tough lawyer who knew organized crime inside and out, and he