Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [99]
Tea at the White House! “Could I bring Sinatt?” Shor croaked, taking out his cigar and grinning. He pointed to the round table where Sinatra was holding court. “And could I bring Rags?”
Rags Ragland, a hulking former truck driver, boxer, and burlesque comic, was currently employed as a character actor in Hollywood. He had played a lovable cop in Anchors Aweigh and hit it off with Sinatra, who always liked having tough guys around. Now Rags was part of the entourage.
The motley little crew flew down from La Guardia the next day, and at 3:00 p.m. they were escorted into the White House’s Red Room, where FDR himself sat, laughing that famous laugh at something a pretty lady was saying to him. Despite his gallantry, he looked like death warmed over. The war, the presidency itself, the polio—it all had desiccated him. The circles under his eyes were almost as dark as his suit. In fact he would live six months and two weeks from that day.
But Sinatra couldn’t help himself: he had goose bumps just at the sight of the great man. Then Hannegan was introducing him, and FDR was staring up at Sinatra with those black-bagged eyes, grinning with his crooked gray teeth, shaking his hand. The two most famous men in America regarded each other.
The president turned to his secretary, Marvin McIntyre. “Mac, imagine this guy making them swoon. He would never have made them swoon in our day, right?”
Sinatra’s smile tightened just a fraction. Implicit in the pleasantry was an ethnic dismissal: this skinny little guinea … Roosevelt was a democrat as well as a Democrat, but he was also a patrician, with ingrained prejudices. And Sinatra, beneath all his bravado and arrogance, was still a little guinea. This was the old order of things: the Founding Fathers were square-jawed white men, with noble heads and noble accents. Frank decided to love his president anyway.
On the flight home that night, Sinatra delved deeper into his Gustavus Myers. The next day, on Evans’s recommendation, he made a substantial donation in his and Nancy’s name to the Democratic campaign fund. (This was a far rarer act in those pre-media-saturated days than now. Most entertainers then, fearful of the effects political alignment might have on their careers, stayed studiously neutral. And the size of Sinatra’s gift, $7,500—the equivalent of $90,000 today—was a surprise to Evans and especially to the purse-string-holding Nancy, who asked her husband on the telephone that night if he was out of his mind.)
With Evans’s and Keller’s encouragement, Sinatra accepted invitations to join the political action committee of the radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the Independent Voters Committee of the Arts and Sciences for Roosevelt (Fredric March, Bette Davis, and Eddie Cantor were all members, as were John Dewey, Van Wyck Brooks, and Albert Einstein). Frank made radio broadcasts for FDR and spoke at rallies at Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. But his largest audience by far would be in Times Square.
When he opened at the Paramount it was as though a dam had burst. Sinatra had gone to California to become a movie star, but while he returned regularly, it was generally not to perform. The teenage girls who made up the first critical mass of his success knew that he had changed his base of operations, that he had gone Hollywood. They had waited faithfully by their radios, dreaming … But now he was back, and they came out in force, thousands upon thousands of them,