His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [265]
Frank’s rush to Catholicism startled people who remembered him as virulently anti-Catholic, especially those who had attended the party given by Billy and Audrey Wilder in Malibu when Frank was married to Mia Farrow. He had spent most of the evening in a corner with model Anita Colby disparaging the church while she, a devout Catholic, smiled tolerantly. “Don’t worry, Frank. We’ll get you in the end. We’ll get you in the end.” He laughed at her. “He thought I meant we’d poke him in the bottom,” she said many years later, “but what I really meant was that Catholicism is the toughest religion to live by but the greatest one to die by and that’s when Frank would come back.”
Frank had experienced what he regarded as the hypocrisy of the Catholic church in Hoboken, where the Italians had to go to St. Ann’s in Little Italy and were not allowed to go to Our Lady of Grace with the uptown Irish and Germans. And that uptown church had barred him from hiring the orchestra for its Friday night dances because his mother had been convicted of performing abortions.
“He wasn’t a churchgoer, and neither was I,” said Nick Sevano, his childhood friend. “We observed the religion as descendants from Italian immigrants that were Catholic, but it was something that we just observed. There were other Italians more observing than us.”
“His parents were devout Catholics and they worried about the consequences of his divorces, which in those days were considered anathema for a Catholic and synonymous with eternal damnation,” said Thomas F. X. Smith, former mayor of Jersey City. “In the 1960s, St. Peter’s College gave a dinner honoring the pope’s encyclical ‘Rerum Novarum,’ and Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston was the featured speaker. At a reception beforehand, Dolly and Marty, both in their sixties at the time, were dying to meet the cardinal, especially Dolly, who was overwhelmed by the prospect. I made the introduction, and Cardinal Cushing gave them a warm reception, but poor Dolly burst into tears because of the divorce business. The cardinal immediately put his arm around her and said, ‘Now, where is that skinny son of yours? He came up to Boston a while back, raised a ton of money for a children’s home, and then left before I could thank him for how well he’s doing the Lord’s work.’ That was the best thing he could’ve possibly said to Dolly at the time, because she was so worried about the state of her son’s soul.”
Eager to please his mother, especially after his marriage to Barbara, Frank had listened to a mobster who had come up with the scam of promising him membership in the exalted Knights of Malta in exchange for ten thousand dollars and a few songs. Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno knew that Frank had been trying to be accepted by the oldest and most exclusive social order of chivalry in the world. The Maltese Cross, which is awarded for outstanding accomplishment and service to humanity, had been given to only seven hundred people in a thousand years, and Frank longed to be among the American knights approved by the Vatican, who included Lee Iacocca, president of Chrysler Corporation; Barron Hilton, president of the Hilton Hotel Corporation; Robert Abplanalp, the aerosol magnate; former New York mayor Robert Wagner; and J. Peter Grace, chairman and chief executive officer of W. R. Grace & Company. Thus, when the Mafia murderer proposed to induct Frank into what Fratianno called the Red Knights and said it was a division of the Catholic organization that did not require Vatican approval for induction, Sinatra leaped.
“I’ve been trying to get into the Knights of Malta for fifteen years,” he said. “My mother’s a devout Catholic, and I know this would mean so much to her.”
Fratianno then introduced him to a Hungarian “Knight of Malta” named Ivan Markovics. Mickey Rudin judged Markovics to be a con man preparing to rip Frank off with