His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [42]
Afterward, everyone seemed satisfied with the arrangement. MCA had Frank as a new client, and GAC was well compensated for giving him up. Frank told the press that he was delighted to own himself once again, and Tommy told friends that he had made “a hell of a deal.”
“I saw Dorsey that afternoon, and he was in a great mood,” said Arthur Michaud, who had managed Dorsey and would soon manage him again. “ ‘I just turned Frank Sinatra over to MCA for sixty thousand dollars,’ he told me.
“ ‘You got the money?’ I asked him.
“ ‘Yeah.’
“ ‘Dope. You should’ve taken twenty thousand with two and a half percent for seven years or three and a third of his earnings. That’s the deal you should have made.’
“Tommy thought for a minute and said, ‘You’re right. Those bastards at MCA gave me bad advice.’ Dorsey and I were close, close friends and he would’ve told me if the buy-out had been anything else. That’s why I never believed that stupid Mafia story.”
Michaud was referring to the fact that as time passed, the story of MCA’s simple buy-out had changed to a far more ominous one, which held that Willie Moretti, the padrino of New Jersey who was to become Frank’s good friend and neighbor when Frank moved to Hasbrouck Heights, had gone to Dorsey’s dressing room and demanded that he release the singer—using as persuasive argument a revolver he rammed down Dorsey’s throat. Supposedly, Dorsey thereupon sold Sinatra for one dollar.
“That’s crap,” said Nick Sevano. “It was a simple buyout by MCA. Frank was involved with the racket boys later but not on the Dorsey deal.”
Tommy Dorsey’s attorney swore that his client had never been subjected to Mafia intimidation. “Oh, God, no,” N. Joseph Ross said. “Absolutely not. It’s not true. I remember after we got a settlement I called Tommy and woke him up. He was very happy with the outcome. No, there was no gun put down his throat. Ever.”
But Frank was never to forget the terms of the original break with Dorsey. And he was reminded of it all over again in 1951 when he read an article in American Mercury magazine about his associations with gangsters in which Dorsey talked of the contract dispute with Frank. The bandleader said that after a breakdown in negotiations he was visited by three businesslike men who told him out of the sides of their mouths to “sign or else.” Five years passed before Frank spoke to Dorsey again.
In August 1956, fourteen years after that agreement was signed, Frank accepted a week’s engagement with the Dorsey brothers at the Paramount, where his film Johnny Concho was the screen attraction. Three months later, Tommy Dorsey died suddenly after choking in his sleep. His widow never received any kind of condolence from Frank Sinatra. There was no letter, no telephone call, no flowers, no acknowledgment of any kind. Nor would Frank join Dorsey’s friends and former band members in the one-hour television show called A Tribute to Tommy Dorsey. Connie Haines sang “Will You Still Be Mine,” and Jo Stafford, with Paul Weston conducting, sang the first song she had ever recorded with the Dorsey band. Even Jack Leonard returned to sing “Marie,” but there was no song by Sinatra.
He had never forgiven the bandleader, especially after Tommy gave an interview to a newspaper reporter in which he characterized Frank as “brittle.” When asked what he thought of the singer, Dorsey had said, “He’s the most fascinating man in the world, but don’t stick your hand in the cage.”
Rancor continued to fester within Frank. More than three decades after the contract break with Dorsey, Frank’s grudge seemed even stronger than it had been. At a concert at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles on June 15, 1979, Frank introduced Harry James before an audience of sixty-two hundred people and said what a wonderful guy Harry was because when Sinatra was just starting out as a singer, James had let him out of his contract after only six months.
“And then there was Tommy