His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [184]
His return to the United States was heralded as “Do-Gooder Frank Flies Back Home.” He was honored by the Variety Club of Southern California for “services in behalf of children everywhere” and was presented with a silver plate by the Columbian Foundation. He told reporters that as an overprivileged adult he wanted to help underprivileged children.
“I think we raised something like a million dollars for children’s institutions. I wish it was five million,” he said, noting that his most moving experience had occurred while visiting with a six-year-old blind child. “It was windy, and I brushed the hair out of her eyes and told her that the wind had been blowing up her hair. She stopped me cold when she said, ‘What color is the wind?’ ”
Chuck Moses designed new press kits with a biography of Frank that began: “Frank Sinatra’s life has moved into a new phase. …” Moses also arranged as many interviews as he could, believing that Frank would gain more by talking to reporters than by beating on them.
“Frank cared very much about the press and what they wrote about him,” said Moses. “He insisted that I take a nice big suite in every hotel we checked into so that I could have reporters up. I had to be very careful when I announced his engagement to Juliet Prowse because Frank was concerned about Nancy, Sr. He knew that she [still] expected him to come back to her, and he really didn’t want to hurt her. Six weeks later, I had to announce that the engagement was broken because of ‘a conflict of career interest.’ Juliet just refused to give up her dancing and be the kind of stay-at-home wife that Frank wanted, but I couldn’t go into that kind of detail with reporters. Because of the personal nature of those two announcements, they were probably the toughest I had to make.”
Frank’s image campaign suffered a slight setback a few months later when he fought with a photographer in a San Francisco nightclub because he had not asked for permission to take Sinatra’s picture. The photographer’s camera was smashed and the film ruined.
“It is true that Frank was unhappy with the way the picture was taken,” said Moses. “He likes photographers to ask his permission to take pictures and to address him as “Mr. Sinatra.’”
Joe Hyams of the Herald-Tribune approached Moses about doing a Playboy interview with Sinatra, which Moses instantly recognized as an ideal showcase for “the new Frank” to talk about his good works and philanthropy. But Frank refused to sit still for the in-depth tape-recorded interview that Playboy required for its question-and-answer format. Billy Woodfield, the photographer, who was working with Frank at the time, urged him to reconsider and take advantage of the forum, pointing out that the magazine reached millions of people each month, but Frank still declined. Woodfield persisted until Frank finally said, “Well, why don’t you put something together for me—something controversial—shake ’em up a little, and I’ll take a look at it.”
When Woodfield tried and was unable to develop anything, he called Mike Shore, who was in charge of advertising for Reprise Records. Frank admired Shore and frequently referred to him as a genius. Fascinated by the idea of creating such an interview, Shore sat down at a typewriter and wrote out the questions he imagined that Playboy would ask and then answered them as he thought Sinatra might, given a worldly and compassionate philosophy. Shore centered the interview on the fundamentals that move and shape men’s lives—God, religion, and the progress of civilization toward disarmament and against nuclear war. He showed Frank as a man with a great understanding of the human condition, making him sound as literate as Adlai Stevenson and as humane as Albert Schweitzer. Shore pitted him firmly against bigotry and nuclear testing, in favor of admitting mainland China into the United Nations, and resentful of organized religion. Throwing in a few Las Vegas idioms to make it sound like Frank, Mike Shore “asked him” if he believed in God, and answered eloquently for him.