Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [91]
Where his fans were concerned, Frank, who knew where his bread was buttered, didn’t mind the idolatry a bit. He let everyone in show business know exactly what he thought of Lee Mortimer, and word got back fast. Spurned, the columnist used his platform to stick it to the singer at every opportunity. Sinatra, Mortimer wrote soon afterward, “found safety and $30,000 a week behind a mike” while Real Men were overseas fighting Krauts and Japs. And as for those fans, they were worse than neurotic extremists: they were nothing but “imbecilic, moronic, screaming-meemie autograph kids.”
The columns weren’t just personal. Much of Mortimer’s and Pegler’s invective was politically motivated: right-wing and intolerant at its core. Even amid the patriotism of the war, America was a deeply divided country. Great numbers of people, many of them moneyed, detested Franklin Roosevelt for the equalizing policies of the New Deal. To many—William Randolph Hearst significantly included—FDR’s policies were leading the country straight toward Communism.
Sinatra had been a fervent Democrat since boyhood, when he’d helped ward boss Dolly stump for local Democratic candidates, and a Roosevelt lover since the early 1930s. The Democrats had established themselves at the beginning of the century as the defenders of America’s minorities, and FDR, transformed by crippling polio from a shallow playboy to an avatar of noblesse oblige, was every bit as charismatic as Frank himself.
The situation was not without its complexities. For one thing, Hearst and Louis B. Mayer were extremely close. For another: not long after the beginning of World War II, Roosevelt ordered the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, to compile a list of possible threats to national security, and one of the bureau’s first responses was to round up some fifteen hundred Italian aliens. Dolly put the blame for this unpleasant act squarely on FDR, and took her son to task for his ardent support of the president.
Some have contended that Sinatra’s crusade against racial and religious intolerance was opportunistic, a convenient publicity stunt. Some charged that the ardently pro-Roosevelt George Evans encouraged Frank’s enthusiasm for FDR. And while it’s true that it didn’t hurt his image to support the president, it’s also true that one of the singer’s proudest possessions was a large autographed photo of Franklin D., which he hung prominently in the foyers of his residences at least until his politics veered sharply right in the late 1960s.
In fact, Sinatra was a convenient lightning rod for all kinds of antipathies. It’s hard to imagine in this age of diversity what a strong hold white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males once had over America. Ethnics were an essential ingredient in the Great Melting Pot: they could be acknowledged sentimentally and smiled at condescendingly, but essentially were not to be trusted. (Of all the slurs against FDR, one of the strangest was that he was secretly a Jew named Rosenfeld.)
Frank Sinatra was definitely an ethnic; what’s more, he was a small, rich, cocky, sexually potent ethnic. This didn’t ingratiate him with much of the press. None of America’s editorial writers were getting on John Wayne’s case for not enlisting. But then Wayne wasn’t Italian or liberal.
In May 1944, the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, which had already waxed indignant about Sinatra’s draft status, ran an article on the singer by one Sergeant Jack Foisie. It is a fascinating document, written in wisecracking