Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [90]
At the same time, George Evans was on his case: Frank was a family man, and a family man lived with his family. If his life was in California now, that’s where his family had to be.
So the hounds he’d been keeping a sweet three thousand miles away had caught up with him. As Frank looked around at the Sinatras and Garaventas and Barbatos (and little Chit-U, smiling at nobody) jammed into his living room for the christening party, he realized that Nancy and Evans were right. He was a family man. In the first flush of excitement at home ownership (it felt like a hundred years ago), he and Nancy had named the little Cape Cod at 220 Lawrence Avenue Warm Valley. (The sentimental Frank had even fashioned a plaque with the name on it, making the letters out of sticks he’d picked up in the park, gluing the sticks onto a varnished board. A fan stole the sign.) Now the house felt like a claustrophobe’s nightmare. He needed a big place to match his big new life, and he knew his family had to be there with him.
He took Nancy aside while her mother cooed over the baby. The look in his wife’s large expressive eyes was complex: full of love and distrust, anger and hope. He said he wanted them to live in a great big house in California. That was where the movies were, and that was where his family should be.
She stared at him. What about her family?
She could bring ’em out. Why not?
And what on earth was she going to do in California? She couldn’t even drive a car.
He’d buy her the biggest goddamn Cadillac she’d ever seen. And driving lessons to go with it. She’d be the queen of Hollywood.
She shook her head: he was full of shit. But she didn’t say no.
“Joe E. Lewis, the only comedian who doesn’t do an impression of Frank Sinatra [the handwritten invitation reads], invites you to be a guest at a farewell cocktail party for the Voice on the eve of his departure for Hollywood, Friday, May 12th, at 4 p.m. in the cocktail lounge at Monte Proser’s Copacabana, 10 East 60th Street.4 Being quite a man with the ladies himself, Joe has induced the lovely Conover cover girls (and they really are beautiful) to take care of the charm department. They’ll all be here, and Sinatra has promised to swoon for the girls just to confuse everybody. Drop in—but not without the card!”
Those Conover girls—they really were beautiful …
January 11, 1944: Franklin Wayne Emanuel Sinatra is one day old. Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital, Jersey City. Photographers dressed as doctors capture the blessed event. Frank is in Hollywood, otherwise engaged. (photo credit 13.2)
14
Rowdy sailors on shore leave throw tomatoes at Sinatra’s image on the Paramount marquee, October 15, 1944. “It is not too much to say,” historian William Manchester wrote, “that by the end of the war Sinatra had become the most hated man in the armed services.” (photo credit 14.1)
He was at once the most loved and the most reviled man in the country: the line seemed to fall squarely between the sexes. SINATRA 1-A WITH US GIRLS, RATED 4-F BY ARMY DOCTORS, ran a typical headline. And men ran the newspapers. In the spring of 1944, as the Fifth Army fought inland from Anzio to Rome, much of America’s civilian and military press mounted an offensive against Sinatra. And a columnist named Westbrook Pegler, flush from a 1941 Pulitzer for his exposés of racketeering in Hollywood’s labor unions, and recently signed up by the FDR-hating Hearst Syndicate, began to make a special project of laying into the FDR-loving, “bugle-deaf Frankie-boy Sinatra.”
Another newspaper writer named Lee Mortimer, the entertainment columnist for the Hearst-owned New York Daily Mirror, also got into the act. Mortimer, like his colleague Winchell a closeted Jew (né Mortimer Lieberman), was ambivalent about Sinatra at first—he’d apparently once tried, unsuccessfully, to sell Frank a song he’d written. His early columns about the singer accordingly seem strangely sycophantic. “Even I grow humble before the compelling force [of Sinatra’s impact],