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By Root 1772 0

model Cindy Hayes, and Judy Garland. After hearing Mel Tormé sing, the foursome sneaked out of the nightclub hiding drinks under their coats. As they walked into the foyer, Jim Byron yelled to Bob Neal. Byron, who was Mel Tormé’s publicist, was in a telephone booth calling his answering service for messages. Not recognizing Judy Garland, who was six months pregnant, he asked Neal who the woman was because he wanted to tell the Hollywood columnists that Frank Sinatra and his friends had stopped by to hear his client. Neal told him and returned to the group, telling Frank what Byron wanted.

In a rage, Frank lunged at the telephone booth, shouting, “Get out of there, you bastard. Get out of there. What business is it of yours who we’re with? You fucking parasite. You’re nothing but a leech. You’re a newspaperman, I hate cops and I hate reporters. Get out of there right now and take off your fucking glasses.”

Shaken by the outburst, Byron stumbled out of the telephone booth. Frank continued to berate him as he made his way to the parking lot.

“Why don’t you go out and make a decent living and not suck off other people?” Frank screamed. “You leech.”

“And who are you, Frank? You’re dependent on other people. You’re dependent on the press and the public.”

“I am not,” yelled Frank. “I have talent and I am dependent only on myself.”

Frank slammed his left fist into the side of Byron’s face, and the publicist retaliated with a few kicks and one flailing blow to the nose that caused Frank to yell, “He hit me, he hit me!” Parking lot attendants separated them.

The next day, despite eyewitness accounts, Frank gave another version of the events: “He was trying to make it seem an illicit date or something, and anybody who thinks that has got to be a pretty sick guy. Especially when Judy was six months pregnant. I told him I resented his calling Judy a ‘broad’ and I added if he didn’t know who Judy Garland was, he must have been living under a rock. I went back to Byron and told him to take his glasses off. Then suddenly two guys held my arms and Byron tried to knee me. He succeeded in denting my shin bone and clawing my hand. I couldn’t do anything because I was held by two men. I broke loose. It ended when I gave him a left hook and dumped him on his fanny. Then I got scared. It was obvious he didn’t know how to defend himself, and I didn’t want any trouble. It ended there.”

“I didn’t get really mad at him until an hour or so later, when I emerged from the daze to contemplate his I’ve got talent, ‘I’ve got talent,’ ” said Jim Byron. “If show business talent allows you to do this, then I suppose the talent of an atomic scientist who had perfected a new bomb would permit him to blow up the world.

“I never sued him even though the public and press were in sympathy with me. The police were sufficiently mad at Frank for his ‘I hate cops’ to call me and offer me protection if necessary. It wasn’t necessary. I wasn’t going ahead with anything.”

Frank’s behavior appalled journalists, many of whom recounted his fistfights with Lee Mortimer in 1947 and photographer Eddie Schisser in Houston in 1950, his threats to kill reporters in Mexico City, and the automobile incident with Bill Eccles at the Los Angeles airport. Some remembered that in 1949 at parking meter executive Donald Duncan’s Palm Springs home, Frank slugged the bartender, Jack Wintermeyer, for not giving him the extra dry martini he had requested. Wintermeyer was taken to a hospital and treated for a gash on his forehead but he, too, refused to press charges after holding a “peace meeting” with Frank.

Yet there was also the Frank Sinatra who rushed to the hospital bed of Lee J. Cobb after he nearly died from a heart attack in June 1955. He was felled by a massive coronary shortly after divorcing his wife. Having named people as Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Cobb had few friends left in Hollywood. There was no work for him and he was trying to support himself and his two children while on the edge of bankruptcy.

“I was in a low mental state