His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [54]
In October 1943, Frank auctioned off his clothes over WABC radio in New York City, raising more than twelve thousand dollars in war bond purchases by shedding everything from his shirt to his shoelaces. Days after he disrobed, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution dropping draft deferments for pre-Pearl Harbor fathers.
Frank’s success at home outraged soliders overseas. “I think Frank Sinatra was the most hated man of World War II, much more than Hitler,” said writer William Manchester, who served in the Marines and was wounded on Okinawa. “Because we in the Pacific had seen no women at all for two years, and there were photographs of Sinatra being surrounded by all of these enthusiastic girls.”
While Evans worried about his client’s contribution to the war effort, Frank worried about his opening at the Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf-Astoria. In 1943, the Waldorf was one of the most famous hotels in the world. The lofty towers of the Art Deco palace on Fiftieth Street and Park Avenue admitted only high society, and the boy from Hoboken was apprehensive about the reception he might receive from the haughty sophisticates who were accustomed to liveried doormen, chauffeured limousines, and debutante balls. He was especially afraid of society chronicler Elsa Maxwell, the columnist, who had already charged him with “musical illiteracy” and derided his fans as “emotionally unstable females who paraded naked and unashamed for the drooling, crooning, goonish syllables of a man who looked like a second-string basketball player.” She then recommended the girls be given “Sinatraceptives.”
On opening night, Frank paced up and down in his dressing room, chain-smoking.
“Frank goes in to take a shower and falls,” said Manie Sacks. “His ankle swells up. He says, ‘I can’t go on.’ George Evans … and I knew it was fright—that he was looking for an out. We called a doctor, and he bandaged up the ankle.
“George and I decided to applaud like mad, so Frank would at least hear a lot of noise from the first row. I was more frightened than Frank was. George didn’t even sit down. He stood in the door and shivered.
“Frank sang for an hour and a half, until the captain came over and told Evans to ask Frank to stop so he could serve drinks.”
After his last song, Frank thanked his audience profusely, saying, “I always dreamed of working at the Waldorf-Astoria—it’s sort of the top.”
Later that evening at a party given by Waldorf owner George Boomer, Frank, who had been coached by Evans, approached Elsa Maxwell. “You disapprove of me,” he said, “and my mother agrees with you. She said, ‘You tell that Miss Maxwell she is right!’ ”
“I disapprove of you, Frankie, only because I think it a pity for anyone with your naturally lovely voice to resort to such cheap tactics.”
“My press agent, George Evans, thought up the squealing girls and the way I hold the mike,” said Frank. “I do not like any part of it. But it all has made the headlines. And the headlines have made me, I guess.”
Miss Maxwell mellowed. The next day she wrote up Frank’s opening night, telling her readers, “He has found a setting to show off the sweetness of his voice.”
A few weeks later, eager to please the society columnist, Frank agreed to sing at a benefit at the Hotel Pierre for a child-adoption center. The night of the benefit, he won the door prize.
“Driving home in my car, he held on his lap the little white fur jacket he had won and, again and again, picked it up to examine it, to admire it,” said Elsa Maxwell, who had introduced Frank at the benefit. “ ‘Nancy’s never had a fur,’ he said. ‘Is this real ermine?’ ” Elsa Maxwell laughed and said that rabbit paws were a reasonable facsimile. (He gave the jacket to Nancy, and for Christmas he gave her a white mink coat, which he considered the height of sophistication. When she said that she wanted to dye it brown, he blew up.)
Now that Frank was a high-society success in