Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [218]
Willie discovered later that day what it took the rest of the world decades to find out: The Giants had stationed a coach with a telescope and a buzzer in their centerfield clubhouse. With the telescope, the coach was able to pick up the Dodgers catcher Rube Walker’s signs to the pitcher Ralph Branca; with the buzzer, the spy sent a signal to the Giants dugout, whence a hand signal to Thomson told him to expect a fastball.
Willie Moretti decided that all bets were off.
The next day, Moretti went to lunch at his favorite restaurant, Joe’s Elbow Room, a block from the Hudson in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. He left his cream-colored Packard coupe at the curb, walked in, and found four friends waiting for him at a table. The men chatted amiably for a few minutes, and then, when the waitress on duty went into the kitchen, the man on Moretti’s right leaned over and in a low voice began to tell him a dirty story. As Willie smiled expectantly, the man on his left took out a .38 revolver and shot him twice in the head.
The four men departed in such haste that two of them left their hats on the table (and $2,000 in Moretti’s pants pocket). The image of Willie’s body on the white-tile floor in a widening pool of blood, snapped by a news photographer, quickly gained wide circulation. In death, Willie became as celebrated as he had recently been in life, the short, fat, jolly mobster who had wisecracked his way through the televised Kefauver hearings. “Everything is a racket today,” Moretti had told the amused senators. “Why not make everything legal?” When Kefauver himself asked Willie how he operated politically, Moretti said, “I don’t—if I did, I’d be sitting where you are now.”
It was funny to everyone except Moretti’s partners in crime, who hated Kefauver, hated loose talk under any circumstances, let alone on national television, and knew that Willie, in the grips of syphilis, couldn’t help himself. But blabbing was one thing; welshing on sports bets, another matter entirely. Though Moretti had been a marked man for months, he had fast-tracked his own elimination, and Sinatra lost yet another father figure at a time when he needed all the friends he could get.
The second-season premiere of The Frank Sinatra Show, on October 9, co-starred Perry Como, Frankie Laine, and the Andrews Sisters. The reviews were slightly better than they’d been the year before: Variety said the show was “spotty, taking full advantage of its all-star talent lineup to sparkle in some spots and settling down to a slow walk in others.” And the New York Times’s Jack Gould allowed that Frank had “a very real degree of stage presence and a certain likeable charm,” but also sounded an ominous note: “The evening’s honors were captured effortlessly and smoothly by another gentleman, Perry Como.”
Como was a perfect character for 1950s television: attractive, bland, comforting. Who knew who Perry Como really was? Who cared? He seemed to be a solid citizen with a good marriage; he was good-looking, friendly, with a sweet voice and a nice sense of humor about himself.
Sinatra, on the other hand, could sing wonderfully, but that miraculous audience connection he created in person was diminished by the TV camera’s cold eye. Though he could do comedy serviceably, his real skills were elsewhere, and his self-mockery was never entirely convincing: his ego was too palpably gigantic. He was also all too apt to wear his anger on his sleeve, in a not especially funny way.1 By 1951, audiences felt they knew all too well who Frank Sinatra was, and they weren’t buying.
Of course Uncle Miltie murdered him in the