His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [63]
Understandably, Jack Keller was delighted when Frank returned to the East Coast and the capable hands of George Evans. Unfortunately, Evans was not with his client the night Sinatra attacked one of the most powerful newspaper columnists in the country.
It happened late that election night of 1944. Frank was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he was to begin his second singing engagement at the Wedgwood Room the next day. He had been told that Westbrook Pegler, the staunchly Republican columnist, was also staying at the hotel, and Frank decided to taunt Pegler with President Roosevelt’s stunning victory over New York Governor Thomas Dewey. As Sinatra told writer Dan Fowler: “We’d had a few drinks, and when it looked for sure like Roosevelt was in for his fourth term, somebody mentioned that Pegler was in the same hotel. We got to kidding about how he was probably taking Roosevelt’s victory, and I said, ‘Let’s go down and see if he’s as tough as he writes.’ So we went down and knocked on his door. When nobody answered, we went away. Nobody broke in and busted up his furniture like it’s been said.”
A Pegler aide remembered the incident differently. “Peg was inside,” he said, “and kept needling Sinatra through the door with things like, ‘Are you that little Italian boy from Hoboken who sings on the radio?’ Sinatra became so frustrated that he went back to his rooms and busted up his own furniture, throwing a chair out the window.”
The columnist amplified his aide’s version. “In the company of Orson Welles and others, Sinatra toured the circuit of expensive New York saloons known as the milk route and spent some time at the political headquarters of Sidney Hill-man, which were the Communist headquarters too. He got shrieking drunk and kicked up such a row in the Waldorf that a house policeman was sent up to subdue him, and did.”
The vendetta between the columnist and the crooner continued. A few nights later, Westbrook Pegler appeared in the Wedgwood Room for the late show. Frank saw him and told the management to get him out or he would not perform. Hank Sanicola pleaded with him to go easy. “Pegler is too powerful to mess around with,” he said. Frank would not listen. Knowing he could not force the manager to evict him, Frank took advantage of the rule that once the show had started, no one could be seated. He sent one of his aides to fake a long distance phone call for the columnist, and two minutes before the show was to start, Pegler was paged. Seconds after he left the room to take the phone call, Frank stepped up to the microphone and started singing, apparently unmindful of the old Sicilian saying: “Keep your friends close to you; keep your enemies even closer.”
Pegler retaliated by writing about Frank’s arrest, six years before, on a morals charge. “It was in Bergen County that Sinatra was arrested in 1938 on a charge of seduction and causing the pregnancy of an unmarried young woman.”
George Evans called him immediately, saying that the complainant had seduced Frank and was arrested for annoying him. He added that the incident happened years ago, when Frank was young and poor and unknown, pointed out that the charges had been dropped, and he appealed to Pegler to do the same.
The columnist responded by printing Evans’s comment and adding a few of his own. “No indictment was found, and Sinatra was discharged. The incident would indicate a certain precocity, however, for it will be observed that the facts of the case never were tried and that this experience of the youth so soon to become the idol of American girlhood was by no means common to decent young American males, however poor.”
George Evans was nearly apoplectic. He made Frank promise to do nothing further to antagonize Pegler, and Frank grudgingly gave him his word of honor that he would not incite the columnist to resume his attack. It was a promise he kept for almost two years.