His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [77]
“Any report that I fraternized with goons and racketeers is a vicious lie,” he said. “I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him without first investigating his past.”
But Sinatra and Hank Sanicola later visited Luciano in Naples, where Frank gave the Mafia boss a solid gold cigarette case inscribed “To my dear pal, Charlie, from his friend Frank Sinatra.”
Sinatra’s response did not satisfy anyone, least of all Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer executives, who dispatched a representative to talk to Robert Ruark to “see if we can’t straighten this whole thing out.” In an effort to contain the damage, Frank’s agents also sent a man to see the Scripps-Howard columnist to find out how many more columns he was going to do on Sinatra.
George Evans tried to salvage what he could of Frank’s besmirched image by announcing that in his next film, The Miracle of the Bells, the singer was going to be cast as a Catholic priest and that he would donate his $100,000 wages to the church.
Ruark wrote another column, saying that he was not mollified.
I was told a week earlier that some such effort would be made to remove the muck that Sinatra’s association with hoodlums had left on his sinewy frame. As I say, it is elegant press relations—the best, because Sinatra, the mock clergyman, hurriedly wipes out the picture of Sinatra, the thug’s chum.
Lee Mortimer, the entertainment editor of the New York Daily Mirror, berated Frank for befriending “cheap hoodlums,” adding that his fans were morons to worship a man who wanted to socialize with gangsters.
A few weeks later, It Happened in Brooklyn was released to generally good reviews for Frank, except from Lee Mortimer.
“This excellent and well-produced picture … bogs down under the miscast Frank (Lucky) Sinatra, smirking and trying to play a leading man,” wrote the columnist.
Frank had seethed over Mortimer’s assaults in the past and more than once had threatened to get even. He told Joe Candullo, a friend who was a musician, to give the columnist a message: “If you don’t quit knockin’ me and my fans, I’m gonna knock your brains out.”
“Every time Frank read one of Mortimer’s columns, he went into a towering rage,” said Jack Keller, “and threatened that the next time he saw this guy he was going to wallop him.”
On April 8, 1947, Frank and Jack Keller were in Palm Springs relaxing with friends. Jack returned to Los Angeles in the afternoon and asked Frank to come with him, but Sinatra said he wanted to stay for the afternoon sun.
That night, Frank went to Ciro’s, a Hollywood nightclub, and sat with several friends, including Sam Weiss, a two hundred-pound music publisher, and his date, Luanne Hogan, a nightclub singer.
Around midnight, Frank saw Lee Mortimer leave with singer Kay Kino. With Sam Weiss behind him and three other men at his side, Frank jumped up and followed the couple to the front door. While Frank’s men moved forward to hold Mortimer, who weighed barely one hundred twenty pounds, Frank lunged at the columnist. He called him a “fucking homosexual”—a “degenerate”—and slugged him behind the left ear. Mortimer fell, and Sinatra’s friends pinned him to the ground while Frank continued slugging at him and screamed in his face, “I’ll kill you the next time I see you. I’ll kill you.”
Nat Dallinger, a photographer for King Features Syndicate, who had been standing at the bar, saw the fight and ran to the columnist’s rescue. “I rushed out and saw Mortimer go down and several men grab hold of him. I tried to pull them off, and somebody said, ‘Are you going to get tough too?’ I said, ‘No, but four men against one are too many.’ ”
Frank and his friends finally backed off while Dallinger called the press and took the columnist to West Hollywood Emergency Hospital.
Before leaving, Frank told a reporter: “For two years he has been needling me. He has referred to my bobby-soxer fans as morons. I don’t care if they do try to