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By Root 2430 0

In Newark in December, he was willing to take more time. Everything he said to Weintrob made perfect sense: He was neurotic, highly. Where crowds were concerned, the very real prospect of having his clothes ripped off or being choked by his own bow tie quite naturally made him afraid. He did suffer from claustrophobia, and elevators often terrified him (as they did Dean Martin). The somatic ideas and headaches would match up with Sinatra’s occasional sinking feeling that he wasn’t long for this world. Nervous for four or five years? Since the moment—just say—he’d first stepped on the bus with Harry James and His Music Makers … And anyone who had spent the previous day playing six shows at the Paramount, making public appearances, and doing three nightclub shows (the last beginning at 2:30 in the morning), with plenty of gallivanting before, between, and after, would tend to wake up tired in the a.m. Or the p.m.

Sinatra was not the only star not to serve. Dick Haymes and Perry Como had not been drafted. And Crosby, at forty, was too old to join up (but would go to heroic lengths throughout the war to entertain the troops). There were a lot of singers out there, and Frank wasn’t about to give those other guys a leg up by going away for the duration—or, God forbid, dying for his country.10 It wasn’t so much that he lacked physical courage; he simply had very legitimate fears about the fickleness of the American public.

And so he quashed his natural inclination to give a curt or rude answer to this square, this nosy medical officer, and instead sat back and responded at length: thoughtfully, feelingly. It could come in handy.

Frank’s triumphant arrival in Hollywood—or Pasadena, anyway. August 1943. (photo credit 12.2)

13

Frank signs his induction papers at local draft board No. 19–160 in Jersey City, October 1943. He was classified 1-A. Two months later he was reexamined and exempted from military service due to a perforated eardrum and emotional instability. (photo credit 13.1)

Frank Sinatra had a knack for stirring people up. His draft reclassification did not go down well with the newspaper columnists, nor with the hundreds of thousands of men who were fighting overseas, or even just pulling mind-numbing Stateside duty, marching in the hot sun and eating creamed chipped beef on toast at Fort Ord or Fort Monmouth or Fort Benning. “Draft dodger” was an ugly epithet that people—mostly men—were starting to hang on Sinatra, for all his protestations to the press and even to friends that he was dying to serve, that the 4-F had been a crushing disappointment.

Part of him really did feel that way. And then there was the part that remembered what had happened to Jack Leonard: he had vanished, become just another serial number among the millions of Sad Sacks … Frank knew this was not his fate. His destiny was here, being Frank Sinatra.

His female fans were thrilled that their Frankie would be staying close to them. As for the servicemen, one old acquaintance gave it to Sinatra straight from the shoulder: Tommy Dorsey’s former band manager Bobby Burns, the man who’d once slipped Sinatra a note telling him the Great Man himself would grant him an audience, was now a buck private at Camp Haan, in California. After Sinatra entertained at the base, Burns went up to him to say hi. “There’s a lot of griping over your 4-F status,” Burns told him. “The troops figure you’re home living it up with the babes while they’re away.”

Frank grinned.

What other conclusion were the troops to draw? He was living it up, with every available babe, and he was sufficiently indiscreet that the whole world knew: not only his wife, but also millions of homesick, love-starved, generally disgruntled servicemen.1 William Manchester wrote in The Glory and the Dream, his history of mid-twentieth-century America, “It is not too much to say that by the end of the war Sinatra had become the most hated man in the armed services.”

George Evans was fighting a heroic public-relations battle, but he was bucking overwhelming odds. And his client wasn’t