His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [66]
“Shoemakers in uniform run the entertainment division,” he said. “Most of them had no experience in show business. They didn’t know what time it was. They might just as well be out selling vacuum cleaners.”
With those words he demolished the good public image that he had established over the past few weeks. The backlash was immediate. The Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, leaped to the defense of its men.
“Mice make women faint, too,” said the newspaper. “He is doing an injustice to a group of people who are for the most part talented, hardworking, and sincere. There have been, of course, the usual prima donnas who have flown over, had their pictures taken with GIs, and got the hell home.”
Defenders of the USO noted that Frank had made one of the shortest tours ever made by a big-name performer and asked why he had not been abroad before. Marlene Dietrich, who had spent months entertaining the troops, said, “You could hardly expect the European Theater to be like the Paramount.”
Hearst columnist Lee Mortimer excoriated Frank and praised Stars and Stripes for answering “Sinatra’s shrill solo by defending the brave, intelligent, and hardworking people who provided entertainment for troops under fire, while the crooner found safety and $30,000 a week behind a mike.”
Mortimer disparaged “the 4-F from Hasbrouck Heights” for waiting until the hostilities were over in the Mediterranean “to take his seven weeks’ joy ride, while fragile dolls like Carole Landis and aging, ailing men like Joe E. Brown and Al Jolson subjected themselves to enemy action, jungle disease, and the dangers of traveling through hostile skies from the beginning of the war.”
Frank plaintively tried to defend himself. “I talked to thousands of guys over there.… They asked me to beef about the shows.”
Once again, George Evans snapped into action, and soon the bad publicity was diluted by good reviews for Frank’s campaign against racial injustice, the tolerance crusade that Evans had promoted after the singer had skipped the inter-faith rally in Boston. Since then, Frank had made a speaking tour of American youth centers. He had lectured high school editors and student council presidents in Philadelphia. He had talked in schools, auditoriums, and churches. He had written an article on juvenile delinquency and he had been applauded by the people he most admired, people who were educated and politically committed.
As an Italian-American, Frank had always resented being cast outside of the mainstream. He saw how his paisans, with their flailing gestures and exaggerated accents, were ridiculed as “eyetalians” and portrayed as illiterates and boors. He hated the discrimination.
“I’ll never forget how it hurt when the kids called me a ‘dago’ when I was a boy,” he said. “It’s a scar that lasted a long time and which I have never quite forgotten. It isn’t the kids’ fault—it’s their parents’. They would never learn to make racial and religious discriminations if they didn’t hear that junk at home.”
Evans encouraged in Frank a commitment to racial tolerance that was basic and emotional. “I’m not the kind of guy who does a lot of brain work about why or how I happened to get into something,” said Frank. “I get an idea—maybe I get sore about something. And when I get sore enough, I do something about it.”
As a liberal Democrat, Evans talked politics with Frank and introduced the singer to his politically active friends like the sculptor Jo Davidson. Soon Frank was quoting socialist philosophy to reporters. “Poverty. That’s the biggest thorn,” he said. “It comes down to what Henry Wallace said, to what he meant when he said every kid in the world should have his quart of milk a day.”
He vowed to take his campaign for racial justice to the students of America, but with only an eighth-grade education