Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [98]
Frank and Gene Kelly play a couple of sailors on shore leave in MGM’s Anchors Aweigh, 1945. (photo credit 14.2)
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Sinatramania. The Paramount, October 12, 1944. Frank’s publicist, George Evans, hired an ambulance to park outside the theater and issued the ushers bottles of ammonia “in case a patron feels like swooning.” (photo credit 15.1)
In Hollywood, Sinatra was just one star in a galaxy (not to mention an official pain in the ass); in New York he was king. And, after finishing Anchors Aweigh in September, he came east to reclaim his crown. He was about to begin a new stand at the Paramount, the first in over a year. On the long train ride east, while Sanicola and Al Levy and Stordahl and his bodyguard Al Silvani played gin rummy, drank, and stared out the window, Frank read.
It was a habit he had picked up on the Dorsey bus, during the long rides through the night from city to city. He’d begun with dime novels, but quickly grew bored with the cheesy writing and flimsy plots. He wanted more than diversion; he wanted to improve himself. Now and then on the road he had been introduced to witty people who wanted to do more than gossip—they wanted to talk about the Depression and the New Deal and the labor movement. And while Sinatra had strong, inchoate emotions about the things they were discussing, to his embarrassment he lacked both the words and the hard knowledge to participate fully.
He began to read newspapers—not just the news, but the editorials and reviews. He was hungry for knowledge and the tools to express it. (He even began doing crossword puzzles, was pleased to find he was good at them.) When Frank thought about what moved him, he kept coming back to the times he had been made to feel small for who he was.
Everywhere he went, he felt revolted by the casual way Negroes were belittled and excluded. It helped to be white, but as soon as people found out he was Italian, things changed. If you were Italian, in fact, by many people’s definition you weren’t quite white anyway. When you had a name that ended with a vowel, it was easy to feel you weren’t a full-fledged American.
Except that he knew he was. Just as he knew that Billie and Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson and Lester Young and all the other great musicians he met on Fifty-second Street and in Harlem were too.
Now Frank read to express these thoughts. He worked his way through thick books about prejudice: Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma, Gustavus Myers’s History of Bigotry in the United States, Howard Fast’s novel about Reconstruction, Freedom Road. When Sanicola and Levy saw him sitting in his train or plane seat with his nose in a tome, they’d shrug. “Frank,” they’d say with a sigh, meaning that was just the way he was. He also washed his hands twenty-five times a day, for Christ’s sake.
But when George Evans saw what his client was reading, he knew he had a gold mine on his hands. It wasn’t just that Evans, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal himself, agreed with Sinatra; it was that a right-minded, crusading Sinatra would make people forget all about the Sinatra who had dodged the draft.
This time when he reached the city, Dolly demanded to see him the second he got off the train. Frankie winced ever so slightly as his mother reached up to pinch his thin cheek.
Jesus Christ! Didn’t they fucking feed him anything out there?
After he saw his parents, he made another call, one that Dolly wouldn’t be very happy with.
A good