His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [148]
Sinatra supposedly looked at Rayburn coldly and said, “Take your hands off the suit, creep.” Speaker Rayburn sent a telegram denying the incident, but Davidson had an eyewitness source to the contrary.
The second article in Look appeared a week later, concentrating on Frank’s vendetta with newsmen and why he was so afraid of personal publicity. It dispelled the legend of him as a poor little kid from the slums who ran with street toughs in Hoboken. Instead, he was depicted as a spoiled Mama’s boy, who was dressed in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits as a baby, and fussed over by his grandmother, who raised him while his mother took care of political business. The article quoted neighbors who remembered him as the richest kid on the block and far too frail to have ever been in the many fights he later bragged about.
There was one major omission from the article. Davidson wrote that there had been an abortion mill in the Sinatra neighborhood and alluded to Dolly’s role as a midwife, but made no connection between her and the abortion business that Frank wanted to keep hidden from everyone, especially his children.
The third installment. “Blondes, Brunettes and the Blues,” detailed the women in his life, from Nancy Barbato and Ava Gardner to unknown secretaries and starlets like Joan Blackman who, when asked her identity, was introduced by Frank as “Ezzard Charles.” The next day the Los Angeles Mirror-News reported: “Ezzard was an eyeful in shocking-pink gown, shoes, coat, and lipstick.”
Seven months later Frank dropped the lawsuit and replaced it with a new one that charged Davidson and Look with invasion of privacy. He said that he wanted to directly challenge the right of the press to report the personal lives of celebrities.
“I have always maintained that any writer or publication has a right to discuss or criticize my professional activities as a singer and an actor. But I feel that an entertainer has a right to his privacy, and that his right should be just as inviolate as any other person’s right of privacy.”
Admitting that it was a test case to change existing law, Frank asked only for “damages proved in excess of three thousand dollars.”
Look magazine welcomed the challenge.
“The press has not only the right, but a duty, to publish facts pertaining to public figures and, in so doing, to examine them to see what makes them tick, how they stack up on analysis, and what they are, not simply as professional performers but also as persons,” said the magazine’s counsel.
The suit never went to trial because Frank dropped it, but not before sending a message to publishers, editors, and writers that anyone who dared to write about him in depth and without his permission could be subject to costly litigation.
“Mickey Rudin told me later that he had not wanted to file that lawsuit,” said Bill Davidson. “He said: ‘We all advised Frank to forget it, but he wouldn’t let go.’ Sammy Davis, Jr., said that Frank hated me because he thought I had called his mother an abortionist. Sammy tried to tell him that I’d simply reported an abortion mill in the neighborhood, but he wasn’t able to pacify Frank at all.
“Three or four years later, my wife and I were having dinner at Romanoff’s on the Rocks in Palm Springs, and Frank was in the back room at a private party. He must have been tipped off that I was there because he charged out of the back room and came barrelling towards our table, absolutely purple with rage. I thought he was going to kill me. Dean Martin ran out and bodily dragged him back, saying, ‘Get back in here, Frank. Don’t start anything.’ ”
Unable to accept the fact that his life was not off base to the press, Frank tried to control what was written about him by refusing interviews to reporters who asked personal questions.
“He was making Pal Joey at the time Bill’s articles were