His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [60]
Frank didn’t care. He donated five thousand dollars to the FDR election campaign, made a series of radio recordings for the Democratic National Committee, and spoke at Carnegie Hall.
“I’d just like to tell you what a great guy Roosevelt is,” he said. “I was a little stunned when I stood alongside him. I thought, here’s the greatest guy alive today and here’s a little guy from Hoboken shaking his hand. He knows about everything—even my racket.”
Many years later, Frank recalled his speech at a political rally at Madison Square Garden. “I said I was for Roosevelt because he was good for me. He was good for me and for my kids and my country, so he must be good for all the other ordinary guys and their kids. When I was through, I felt like a football player coming off the field—weak and dizzy and excited and everybody coming over to shake hands or pat me on the back. I’m not ashamed to say it—I felt proud.”
He appealed to his fans, saying that they as the youth of America were entitled to the peace of tomorrow. “This peace will depend on your parents’ votes on November seventh,” he said, sending legions of screeching girls home to beg their parents to vote for Roosevelt.
On the morning of Columbus Day—October 12, 1944—thirty thousand frenzied bobby-soxers jammed Times Square, blocking traffic, stampeding bystanders, and crashing into store windows to get to the Paramount to see Frank, who was opening a three-week engagement of five shows a day. His last performance at the Paramount had been in May 1943, and his fans seemed to have proliferated like spores in those seventeen months.
“This is the worst mob scene in New York since nylons went on sale,” said the police chief, surveying the human wall engulfing his patrolmen outside the theater.
The city went on emergency alert. Two hundred detectives, seventy patrolmen, fifty traffic cops, four hundred twenty-one police reserves, twelve mounted police, twenty radio cars, two emergency trucks, and twenty policewomen were dispatched to subdue the rioters.
The first thirty-six hundred girls admitted to the theater refused to give up their seats after the first show. Their pockets bulged with bananas and sandwiches as they settled in for the entire day. “Our folks would rather have us following Sinatra than chasing sailors and soldiers,” said one seventeen-year-old fan. “And, besides, I always call mine twice a day to let them know I’m still here.”
The minute Frank stuck his head through the stage curtain the girls stamped their feet and shouted and moaned in ecstasy. He blew them a kiss, and the uproar was so piercing and prolonged that he couldn’t start singing. After five minutes of their nonstop screaming, he begged them to be quiet. “Please, please, please,” he said. “Do you want me to leave the stage?”
“No, no, no!” they cried.
“Then let’s see if we can’t be quiet enough to hear a complete arrangement,” Frank said.
Most of the teenage boys in the audience laughed at the swooners and enjoyed their hysterics, but one finally got fed up with all the adulation showered on the twenty-nine-year-old singer. Just as Frank reached the final bars of “I Don’t Know Why I Love You Like I Do,” Alexander J. Dorogokupetz took aim from the third row center and threw a raw egg that splattered in Frank’s face. It slopped down the singer’s chest onto his light gray jacket. Frank tried to keep singing, but Alexander fired again with another egg, which landed in his eye, and a third that grazed his bow tie. Before Dorogokupetz could fling his fourth missile, irate Sinatratics pounced on him, threatening to scratch his eyes out and pull his arms out of their sockets. One smashed him over the head with her umbrella. As the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Frank ran offstage.
A dozen uniformed police rushed to the battered culprit’s rescue. They dragged