His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [252]
“I hope you’re as pleased to see me as I am to see you out there,” he said in his opening remarks. “When you get out of show business, it’s a little dangerous because all of a sudden you’re out of touch.… Also, it was a little tough to wake up and find out that Rodney Allen Rippey [the black child actor who became famous for a hamburger commercial on television] had replaced me. … I only saw him once. He was in an alley giving Sammy Davis some of his old clothes.… Sammy gave me this jacket—a present for the opening and I said, ‘Gee, it’s so soft. What’s it made of?’ He said, ‘My Uncle Webb.’ ”
Frank gave his usual performance of exceptional vulgarity and exquisite taste, a swine one minute as he lashed out at female columnists, and particularly graceful the next as he sang his soft, sad ballads, playing the audience like a sweet harp. Applauding the old insouciance, Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times praised his astonishing gifts of phrasing, control, and feeling, which he said proved beyond doubt the still youthful tenderness of his voice. “The night was not an unmitigated triumph, though,” Champlin wrote. “Midway along, Sinatra paused to sip a glass of wine … and revive his animosities towards the ladies of the press.… Whatever the distant provocations, the savagery of the attacks invited sympathy for his victims and put gall in a winy evening.”
To trumpet his comeback, Frank launched an extensive ten-city concert tour, his first in six years, to benefit Variety Clubs International. Every performance sold out weeks in advance as he made his triumphant march across the country, leaving spellbound audiences in his wake. The only criticism arose when he stopped singing and started talking. Skewering the press, he criticized Edwin Newman of NBC-TV, sneered at Eric Sevareid of CBS-TV, and ridiculed Barbara Walters, calling her “the ugliest broad on television.”
His most searing remarks were directed at Rona Barrett, who had recently published her autobiography. In it she wrote that she felt Frank, Jr., had staged his own kidnapping to get his father’s attention. She also observed that anyone seeing Frank with his daughter, Nancy, “would quietly walk away with a funny, gnawing feeling: If they weren’t father and daughter, they could certainly pass for lovers. …”
Frank’s rage could not be contained: “Congress should give Rona Barrett’s husband a medal just for waking up beside her and having to look at her.… She’s so ugly that her mother had to tie a pork chop around her neck just to get the dog to play with her.… What can you say about her that hasn’t already been said about—(pause)—leprosy. … I promise not to say anything about Rona Barrett tonight. I really mean that. A lot of my friends were upset about the fact that I was even bothering about her, so I’m not going to mention her name. I’m also not going to mention Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Adolf Hitler, Bruno Hauptmann, or Use Koch—she’s the other two-dollar broad—the one who made the lampshades.”
The success of his U.S. tour led to a five-country tour through Europe, his first since 1962. But Frank canceled his appearance in West Germany because of what he called “scurrilous attacks” by its press, and then flew to London, where he lambasted the Germans from the British stage.
“What gives with these Germans anyway? I’ve done nothing to them,” he said. “I could have answered and told reporters to ‘look to the sins of your fathers.’ I could have mentioned Dachau, the concentration camp. … I don’t understand the German press. They call me a super-gangster. What’s that? Al Capone? He wasn’t one. It’s ridiculous, who the hell needs it anyway?”
The British audiences gave him standing ovations, while the British press wrote rave reviews, but Prince Charles, the future king of England who had met Frank twice, said he was distressed by the “creeps” and “Mafia types” Sinatra surrounded himself with.
“He’s a pretty strange person,” said the prince. “He could be terribly nice one minute and … well, not so nice the next.”
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