His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [290]
Schwartz got his job back six weeks later, but Liz Smith had made a powerful enemy. She took Rona Barrett’s place in Frank’s monologues, and he viciously described her from concert stages across the country as being “so ugly she has to lie on the analyst’s couch face down.”
When he was singing, Frank continued to captivate audiences with his immutable magic. His baritone sometimes cracked, but the gliding intonations still aroused the same raptures of delight as they had at the Paramount Theater. Older and more affluent now, his loyal middle-aged fans paid dearly to watch him recapture a piece of their youth. In his sixties he had become a legend, an institution, a wonder to behold onstage.
He was paid two million dollars for four concerts in Argentina, and two million dollars for nine concerts in Sun City (South Africa). For every show he did at Resorts International in Atlantic City he was paid fifty thousand dollars. Then in 1982 he signed a three-year contract with the Golden Nugget casino for sixteen million dollars. In addition, he made $1,300,000 for the Showtime television rights to his “Concert for the Americas” in the Dominican Republic and $1,600,000 for his 1982 concert series at Carnegie Hall. He also made $250,000 for one evening of song at the ChicagoFest in 1982; two years later, he returned to Chicago and made $450,000 in six days at the Arie Crown.
“With that kind of income, Frank needs a lot of deductions, and he figures it’s better to give to charity and get the good publicity, plus the tax write-offs, than to let the IRS have it,” said a friend. “So a couple of times a year, Sonny [Nathan Golden, Frank’s accountant] figures out how much he’s got to unload, and Frank starts doing his charity bit with the donations and everything.”
Frank’s trip to Sun City in Bophuthatswana, South Africa, in 1981 tarred him with the racist apartheid policies of South Africa and subjected him to criticism from around the world.
“He is trying to pretend that he’s going into a separate state, which it is not,” said an official of the National Congress of South Africa (ANC). “We don’t recognize Bophuthatswana as a separate state from South Africa, and our policy is the same as if he agreed to perform in South Africa. He is saying that the black people of South Africa should be living in thirteen percent of the land.”
The Reverend Jesse Jackson also criticized Frank for accepting the Sun City engagement. “Sinatra gained respect when he came with us to Alabama in the sixties by identifying with the right cause, and he simply shouldn’t be trading his birthright for a mess of money now,” he said.
Frank’s publicist, Lee Solters, tried to defend the trip by saying that Frank’s contract forbade any type of segregation. “We think that the establishment of Bophuthatswana as an independent country is the right step for their future development … [but] … I couldn’t give a shit about the African organizations’ opinions.” Mickey Rudin, who had traveled ahead to make sure that segregation was not practiced in Sun City, said that he found “more interracial harmony than can even be found in some of our American cities.”
Reassured by his publicist and his lawyer, Frank accepted the engagement despite appeals by the United Nations, the African states, and some black people of South Africa to boycott the apartheid country. “I play to all,” he said. “Any color, any creed, drunk or sober.”
But those who remembered the young liberal singer from Tommy Dorsey’s band were disheartened. They recalled the Frank Sinatra who flew into Gary, Indiana, in 1945 to preach racial tolerance to students who were objecting to Froebel High School’s “pro-Negro” policies. They remembered how Frank, always an advocate of civil rights, had helped give Sammy Davis, Jr., his start in show business and how he had paid tribute to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1961 by performing at a benefit in Carnegie Hall to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership