Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [204]
“No, of course not,” Frank said. “I heard about the Mafia.”
“Well, what did you hear about it?”
Frank shook his head, elaborately disingenuous. “That it’s some kind of shakedown operation,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Like the one you were involved with in the case of Tarantino?”
Finally, Sinatra allowed himself a half smile. It was almost six in the morning; the torment was almost over. Out over the East River, the sky was beginning to lighten. “I’m not sure that one was anybody’s idea but Jimmy’s,” he told Nellis.
What’s your attraction to these people? The question was by no means a simple one: no wonder Joseph Nellis asked it not just once but twice during the session. However much revulsion or incredulity the government lawyer may have felt at Sinatra’s associations, he also understood the Mafia’s mystique. His boss, after all, was scoring the biggest success in the brief history of television by putting these people on the air. Something about the Mob got—and still gets—to everyone. To a great degree the American fascination with gangsters stems from the pleasant fantasy that they have razored away the troublesome complexities of life by sheer, brutal acts of will. Sinatra sometimes fantasized that his celebrity had accomplished the same end. It was an illusion he would entertain until the end of his life, but the chickens always came home to roost. Life’s troubling messiness won out in the end. So it went, too, with gangsters: there was no escaping the condition of being a human being.
And yet every time Frank shook the hand of one of these powerful, magnetic men, the man on either end of the handshake enjoyed the same fantasy about the other: This fucker has got it knocked. The smiles broadened; the handclasp grew firmer as the warm thought took hold.
Gelb assured his client that it had gone reasonably well, but Nellis had handed Frank a subpoena before he left, and Frank didn’t see much assurance in his lawyer’s eyes. Sinatra thanked Gelb, dismissed Sanicola, went back to the Hampshire House. He took two Seconals, chased with three fingers of Jack Daniel’s, and paced. A fucking subpoena. If they called him in to testify, he was well and truly fucked. He got in the shower and ran the hot water for twenty minutes; he couldn’t stop yawning. He sat on the side of his bed, towel around his waist, and drank another glass of whiskey. Gelb had assured him he was unlikely to be recalled. How unlikely? The lawyer met his eyes with a hard gaze. Unlikely, he repeated. Frank swished the whiskey in the glass. A crazy thought intruded: He was standing on the bar at Marty O’Brien’s, naked, trying to sing, unable to make a sound. The old men stared at him; Dolly tapped her stick on her palm. When he opened his eyes again, it was after five thirty, and the sun was setting over the Hudson.
Later that morning Nellis reported to Kefauver. Sinatra had been lying, the lawyer said; he was certain of it. On the other hand, “He’s not going to admit any complicity concerning Luciano or the Fischettis in terms of being a ‘bagman’ or courier for them or anybody else,” Nellis said. “If we take him into public session, his career will really be jolted—possibly beyond repair. He may even balk at the TV cameras and raise a lot of hell without saying anything.”
Kefauver accepted Nellis’s recommendation not to call Sinatra to testify. The senator was less concerned about Frank’s career than his own: people were already calling the hearings a show; there was no sense turning them into a circus.
They were rowdy at Toots Shor’s that night, making pleasantly filthy jokes about Kefauver, and Frank felt braver. The next evening, trailed by Sanicola, Silvani, and Ben Barton, he strode into the Columbia studio at Third and Thirtieth to record two numbers from the new Rodgers and Hammerstein show, The King and I. It didn’t get any better than Rodgers and Hammerstein. Axel was there to conduct his arrangements of “Hello Young Lovers” and “We Kiss in a Shadow,” and it didn’t get any better than Sibelius. Frank joshed