Why Sinatra Matters

5 I’M A FOOL TO WANT YOU

ONE OF SINATRA’S most mysterious achievements was also the one that allowed him to endure for more than half a century after Harry James heard him in the Rustic Cabin. It was the nature of his audience. Sinatra started out with far more female than male fans. He ended up with more male fans. This happens to very few pop singers.

On the simplest level it was connected to the times themselves. For millions of women during the war, Sinatra was the romantic voice of the American homefront. He was singing to Rosie the Riveter, the symbolic woman who had walked into a war plant and found employment that was ordinarily reserved for men. She was more than a self-reliant patriot or an earner of a day’s pay for a day’s work. She was something new, and her newness began to transcend the work itself; Rosie the Riveter was soon asserting some of the prerogatives of men — smoking cigarettes, drinking when she wanted to drink, right up against the bar, sleeping around if she wanted to sleep around, or choosing her own erotic fantasies. The music of Frank Sinatra wasn’t used only by men to seduce women; during the conflict that Studs Terkel called “the good war,” some women used that music, with its expression of sheer need, to seduce the available men. Yes, Sinatra was singing to all those girls whose boyfriends were fighting in Anzio or Guadalcanal; some maintained a patriotic virginity; others went their own ways. At the same time, he was singing to those women, of whatever age, who had never managed to find a boyfriend at all and for whom Saturday night truly was the loneliest night of the week.

In his life Sinatra’s sudden, immense fame worked as a kind of aphrodisiac. There were then, as there would be during the long reign of rock and roll, groupies who would sleep with famous men to add them to scoreboards; the names were like the downed Messerschmitts or Zeroes painted by pilots on the sides of P-51s during the war. But there were also many less calculating females suddenly knocking on Frank Sinatra’s door. He certainly wasn’t so perfectly handsome that he seemed unattainable; he looked to some young women that he’d be as happy to meet them as they would be to meet him.

But the Sinatra fantasy was also safe because its consummation seemed so unlikely. The big reason was that he was also married, was living after June 1944 in Toluca Lake, California, with his wife, Nancy, his daughter, Nancy, and after September 28, 1944, his son. The boy was named Franklin (for President Roosevelt) Emanuel (for his agent, Manie Sachs) Sinatra. He wasn’t really a “junior” but would be cursed with the label of Frank Jr. for his entire life. In the wartime years Sinatra played by the rules of the publicity game; if that was what was required to become a gigantic star, then that was what he would do. And so he allowed fan magazines to photograph him with his family, first in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey (wearing a Crosby-style yacht cap, smoking a pipe, posing in the bar of his finished basement), and then in the grander circumstances of Los Angeles. His wife, Nancy, was always there, smiling in an amused way; in public she played the part of the older, wiser woman who was the guarantor of the innocence of the girls who wanted her husband.

This bow to the conventional pieties became part of the double image that Sinatra was conjuring: the traditionalist, with house and family, and the potential lover, consumed by loneliness and unrequited love. As a singer, he was almost always the lover. In American music of the time, Bing Crosby was the reigning husband.

He and Crosby met in 1943, liked each other, worked together on radio shows and patriotic rallies. But Crosby successfully presented a reassuring, almost paternal image to the audience, one whose wild oats had long ago been sown, and kept his personal life — and whatever private demons he might have had — safely behind his own walls. With Sinatra, public and private seemed to merge, and the result was a disturbing ambiguity. Yes, he had a wife and children and a house; but in the music he professed a corrosive emptiness, an almost grieving personal unhappiness. The risk attached to his kind of singing was that it promised authenticity of emotion instead of its blithe dismissal or the empty technique of the virtuoso. His singing demanded to be felt, not admired. It always revealed more than it concealed. Unlike the Crosby persona, Sinatra could not laugh off his losses. That transparency was essential to his music. But it didn’t make real life easier for him.

While Sinatra’s career was taking off after 1943, with hit records, radio shows, and movie contracts, rumors about his private life started finding their way into gossip columns. He was spotted with this starlet or that woman; on the road he seldom slept alone. Or so the rumors said. Some were certainly true. “You’re a young guy,” he said once, in another context. “You don’t say three Hail Marys and pray for sleep.” Sex, of course, was also about power. Young women could use sex to impose fleeting power over the famous young man; Sinatra, the new kid in town, could sleep with Hollywood movie stars to prove to himself that he had true power and would never end up back in Hoboken. But he also was learning that even after the most casual feasts, someone presents you with the bill.

Very early he came up against the terrible scrutiny that comes with fame — and he didn’t like it at all. It was one thing for an unknown Sinatra to live in Hoboken and have a fling in Englewood; nobody would ever know, except the principals. It was different for a star. Someone was always watching. Years later Sinatra was still struggling with the velvet prison of fame.

“It just changes everything,” he said. “You can’t go to a beach. You can’t walk into a movie. You can’t stand on a corner and eat a hot dog. You want the fame but, baby, you pay a price.”

During the war, rumors of Sinatra’s carousing didn’t matter to the young women in the audience. If Sinatra was indeed doing what he was accused of, the female audience wasn’t surprised. The subtext of his music suggested that he didn’t feel complete in his personal life; in a complicated way, these young fans also wanted the same chance that the other women seemed to be having. Most didn’t identify with Nancy; they envied her, even honored her, but they were more like the other women, desiring a night with Frank Sinatra with no illusions about living happily ever after. Everywhere on earth, wartime is a bad time for traditional values. When Sinatra did go home to Nancy, there were often angry confrontations, abrupt denials or dismissals, slammed doors. Sinatra didn’t handle any of this well. It was one thing to create romantic fantasies for strangers; it was quite another to deal directly with a humiliated wife. The emerging truth was quite unremarkable: like many other young men, Frank Sinatra was a good father and a poor husband.

In many ways he was a very lucky American. Timing is everything, in music and life. His career timing had been perfect. He was also lucky to have been declared 4-F. But his good fortune during the war hurt him when it was over. Absorbed with his expanding career, and perhaps fearful of his reception among the GIs, Sinatra didn’t make a USO tour until after the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. He was accompanied on the six-week tour by comedian Phil Silvers (with whom he had written “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)” as a birthday present for his daughter on her fourth birthday). On the long transatlantic journey to Europe, Sinatra was anxious. There had been predictions that the soldiers might be hostile, might throw eggs or tomatoes at the man who was making their girlfriends and sisters swoon while GIs were fighting the war. That didn’t happen. With shrewd advice from Silvers, Sinatra cast himself as a skinny underdog, an ordinary guy much like GI Joe. He made fun of himself and his image. He charmed the grizzled young veterans, expressed his gratitude to them, identified with them, and soon had them identifying with him. The press agents sighed in relief; so did Sinatra. Everything had gone smoothly. He’d even visited Italy and had met the Pope.

But when the veterans started coming home that fall, after the atom bombs ended the war with Japan, the smooth ride of Frank Sinatra started getting bumpier. The return of actors like Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart reminded Americans that many show business figures had gone off to war. The ballplayers came home too, including Pee Wee Reese and Pete Reiser from the Brooklyn Dodgers, Hank Greenberg from the Detroit Tigers, Ted Williams from the Boston Red Sox, and, of course, the great DiMaggio. All were among the 9 million Americans who had served their country. More than half a million had been Italian Americans, thirteen of whom received the Congressional Medal of Honor while ten were awarded the Navy Cross. More than 300,000 Americans didn’t come home at all, including 13,712 from the state of New Jersey. And in every state in the Union, those who had been wounded and maimed tried to adjust to the changed country. Some have speculated about the effect military service might have had on Sinatra’s personality and career; that leads nowhere. For reasons that were honorable, he didn’t go to his generation’s war and had to settle for playing servicemen in eleven of his sixty movies. One thing is certain: for many of those who came back from World War II, the music of Frank Sinatra was no consolation for their losses. Some had lost friends. Some had lost wives and lovers. All had lost portions of their youth.

More important to the Sinatra career, the girls from the Paramount, and all their sisters around the country, started marrying the men who came home. Bobby socks vanished from many closets. The girls who once wore them had no need anymore for imaginary lovers; they had husbands. Nothing is more embarrassing to grownups than the passions of adolescence, and for many, Frank Sinatra was the teenage passion. Children were soon being born in unprecedented numbers, all those kids who a generation later would be known as the baby boomers. At the same time, the children of all those turn-of-the-century immigrants, now toughened by war, equipped with the benefits of the GI Bill, began leaving city ghettos for the expanding new suburbs; some became the first people in the histories of their families to go to universities.

Swing music was rapidly dying, for complicated reasons. Most important was a two-year strike by the American Federation of Musicians, which, among other things, forced Sinatra to make his first sides for Columbia Records singing a cappella with a choral group. The strike kept the big bands out of the studios, unable to reach the mass audience with new material. Goodman, Dorsey, and others sounded stale; Glenn Miller was dead, having disappeared over the English Channel. The economics of the bands also changed. Postwar inflation drove up the cost of transportation. Sidemen who gladly worked for $40 a week during the Depression were now asking for $200, with soloists demanding more. Musically, the big band sound was exhausted. From Fifty-second Street to Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, the hippest fans were now listening to bebop, to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Max Roach, and others — all of them playing in small groups that were formed during the musicians’ strike. Jazz had become a freer, more democratic form of chamber music, an ongoing jam session liberated from the dictates of rigid big band arrangements. Younger fans, with only vague memories of the Depression, were listening to mush or to novelty tunes. For many other people, the music of the swing bands reminded them of the war, a time they wanted to forget. It would be a long time before nostalgia would work its magic, transforming that music into a symbol of a more innocent America.

Musically, Sinatra reacted to the postwar climate in several ways. Even before leaving for his USO tour, he had experimented with other sounds, recording four sides with a black gospel-style group called the Charioteers and two others in a rumba rhythm with the orchestra of Xavier Cugat. He conducted an instrumental album of Alec Wilder songs. He wrote the lyrics to an aching ballad called “This Love of Mine.” But basically, he stayed with variations on his own traditional taste in ballads and jump tunes, most of them arranged by Stordahl. Many were very well done, enriched by strings and woodwinds, but the mysterious currents of public taste were shifting. The fans were groping for something new, sounds that would express the exuberance, optimism, and, in certain ways, mindlessness of the years after the war. Some would find it in singers as varied as Billy Eckstine, Frankie Laine, and Guy Mitchell. Perry Como had a string of hits. Doris Day became a star, along with Peggy Lee, Vaughn Monroe, Vic Damone, and the Four Aces. Even Gene Autry had a hit in 1949 with “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” There were no signs of panic in Frank Sinatra, but he must have been uneasy.

He put much of his energy into the movies. In 1945 he won a special Academy Award for a ten-minute short called The House I Live In. He played himself, leaving a radio studio and running into some kids who are beating up another “because we don’t like his religion.” Sinatra tries to straighten them out and sings the title song. At the time, Sinatra’s liberal politics were widely known. Most performers of that era kept their politics to themselves; let Democrats in the audience believe they were Democrats, Republicans think they were Republicans. But Sinatra was a new breed in Hollywood. He publicly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt and visited him in the White House. This was more than familial loyalty to his mother, Dolly; Sinatra was one of the first big stars to use his fame to promote his politics, and those politics were, by all accounts, deeply felt. He made an effort to visit schools and talk to teenagers about bigotry, always citing the hurtful words that had been hurled at him as a boy in Hoboken. He signed petitions. He sent money to candidates. The short, directed by Mervyn LeRoy from a script by Albert Maltz (later to become one of the Hollywood Ten during the anticommunist crusade), impressed the critics.

“Mr. Sinatra takes his popularity seriously,” said the reviewer for Cue. “More, he attempts to do something constructive with it. Millions, young and old, who will not or cannot read between the lines of their daily newspapers and are blind to the weed-like growth of bigotry and intolerance planted by hate-ridden fanatics, will listen carefully to what Mr. Sinatra has to say in this short film.”

He followed the short with Anchors Aweigh (1945), a bright, good-natured musical about sailors on shore leave. Sinatra was superb. He worked with Gene Kelly — worked very hard indeed, and his dance number with Kelly shows it; the routine is full of high spirits, self-kidding, and good dancing. “I never worked so goddamned hard in my life,” he said later, laughing in a fond way. “Kelly was a brute.” But those were the days of the major studios; at MGM, where Sinatra had a five-year contract, he often couldn’t choose his vehicles. The films that followed were mediocre (It Happened in Brooklyn, RKO’s The Miracle of the Bells), and one, The Kissing Bandit (1948), was dreadful. Set in the nineteenth century, this semimusical stars Sinatra as a young Mexican fresh out of an Eastern college who goes back to Old California to run the family rancho. He even sings one song while riding a white horse. Sinatra’s love interest is Kathryn Grayson, and the movie also features J. Carrol Naish, the Irish actor from Life with Luigi, who plays Sinatra’s Mexican foreman, Chico. “I hated reading the script,” Sinatra later said, “hated doing it, and, most of all, hated seeing it. So did everyone else.”

He wasn’t truly good again as a movie actor until 1949, when he teamed up once more with Kelly in an MGM musical called Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and quickly followed it with a movie masterpiece, On the Town. Another story of sailors on shore leave, this time in New York, the film was codirected by Kelly (who also stars) and Stanley Donen. It was written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Music for a ballet was composed by Leonard Bernstein. The reviews were raves. Sinatra’s star should have been ascending.

Instead, he was heading for the Fall.

II. The Fall was essential to the Sinatra myth. Most of it was a combination of bad timing, dreadful luck, and self-inflicted wounds. It didn’t happen all at once; instead, the Fall started small and gathered strength, like a landslide.

First, Sinatra alienated the Hollywood press corps. He would have one too many drinks in some public place and curse them all for whores and pimps. He started firing off thin-skinned telegrams to various columnists, including Louella Parsons, then the most famous paid yenta in Hollywood. In 1946 the Hollywood Women’s Press Club gave Sinatra the “Least Cooperative Actor” award. He was not contrite. Then, on April 8, 1947, in Ciro’s nightclub in Hollywood, Sinatra punched out Hearst columnist Lee Mortimer, who had been needling him in print for many months. The cops were called. Charges were filed. Sinatra was arrested. To be sure, it was not as if he had punched out Mother Cabrini. In almost four decades in the newspaper business, I have never met anybody who liked or respected Lee Mortimer; he was a nasty, mean man, a poor reporter, a worse writer, and the king of the “blind item.” But it was a critical mistake for Sinatra to belt him. Newspaper people who despised Mortimer suddenly started getting much tougher about Frank Sinatra; as contemptible as Mortimer was, he was part of their guild, not Sinatra’s. The singer had to pay Mortimer $9,000 to settle out of court. But there were more lasting consequences. The Hearst chain was then a powerful national force and had already been sniping at Sinatra over his liberal politics. Now the attacks intensified. He was Red-baited by the chain’s star columnists, Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky, and subjected to a campaign that dripped with innuendo. Sinatra was presented as naive or gullible at best, an agent of the Red conspiracy at worst. Sinatra, of course, wasn’t close to being a communist; he was, like millions of other Americans, a committed New Deal liberal. But the Hearstlings didn’t care about the facts. They wanted to destroy Sinatra, and in the growing postwar anticommunist hysteria, they had many allies. Hollywood was becoming a major target of the anticommunist crusaders; the cynical among them knew that hauling a Hollywood figure before a committee would bring bigger headlines than would interrogating some high school math teacher who had been a communist for three weeks in 1934. The true believers among the crusaders were convinced that Moscow was smuggling anti-American propaganda into the most brainless Hollywood productions. Most of this was absurd. But studio bosses were never profiles in courage, and because of their fear and trembling, the blacklist soon became a fact of Hollywood life. Sinatra was marginal to that story but never completely immune. In the placid postwar years he was starting to look like a whole lot of trouble.

Early in 1947 Sinatra did another job on himself, providing a context for the Mortimer affair and building a crucial element in his life that would stay around until he died. At some point in January he accepted an invitation to go to Havana from Joe Fischetti, the youngest of the three Fischetti brothers, who were among the second-generation hoodlums then running the Chicago rackets established during Prohibition by Al Capone. Sinatra had known the Fischetti brothers from before the war, when he had played a joint they ran in Chicago. Sinatra said, Why not? In those days a trip to Havana was as routine as one to Miami.

But there are several ways to interpret this journey. One is dark. According to this version, Frank Sinatra had been connected to the Mob for at least five years. In particular, he was obligated to them for one big favor. Back in 1943, when he was at the peak of the first stage of his fame, he was also being ruined financially by the terms of the release he had signed with Tommy Dorsey. The bandleader insisted on taking almost 55 percent of Sinatra’s earnings; expenses and taxes consumed the rest. Dorsey refused to negotiate; a deal was a deal, and fuck you, kid. So Sinatra reached out to the Mob. In some versions of the tale, Dolly Sinatra went personally to see Longie Zwillman at his mansion in New Jersey; in others, Sinatra made the visit himself. Zwillman was outraged at the injustice of it all and put Willie Moretti on the case. In the spirit of conciliation and compromise, Moretti walked into Dorsey’s dressing room, shoved a pistol into the bandleader’s mouth, and told him to give Frank Sinatra a release. Dorsey instantly agreed.

Most Sinatra biographers, including those who are not soft on Sinatra’s personal history, dismiss this story as pure invention. The research indicates that Sinatra obtained his release after a year of tough bargaining by his powerful agents from the Music Corporation of America (MCA) and some equally tough lawyers. Dorsey was persuaded that he could not afford the publicity that would come his way if the contract became the center of a court case; Sinatra, after all, was among the most popular entertainers in the United States. Dorsey settled for $60,000, and he and Sinatra went their separate, if unhappy ways. The myth has a certain logic and great durability. I heard it as a teenager from the apprentice hoodlums I knew in Brooklyn; it was repeated to me by cops and old reporters when I was a young newspaperman.

For whatever reason, in February 1947 Sinatra flew to Havana, promising to meet Nancy later in Mexico City. Alas, he was photographed getting off a plane with Joe Fischetti. Both men were wearing sunglasses and carrying attaché cases; they definitely looked like a pair of gangsters. They went to the Hotel Nacional, then the grandest hotel in the Cuban capital, and checked into separate rooms. Sinatra immediately found himself at the largest Mob convention since the late 1920s. The most honored guest was Charles (Lucky) Luciano himself.

It remains unclear whether Sinatra knew that Luciano would be in Havana; if he did, it should be no surprise that he would want to meet him. Charlie Lucky was a legendary figure during Sinatra’s youth and was still one of the most famous gangsters in the world. The romantic aura of the bootlegger was still attached to such men; they were not yet committed to the wholesale peddling of heroin. Luciano was then living in exile in Naples as the result of a deal worked out during the war whereby the imprisoned Mob boss agreed to do what he could to help the war effort. Or so we were told by purveyors of the myth. Luciano bragged later that he had made this deal while serving a thirty-to-fifty-year sentence for white slavery in Dannemora prison. (That sentence, by the way, was almost certainly the result of a frame-up.) Luciano claimed that he had helped secure the New York waterfront against sabotage and then set up intelligence networks for the Allies before the invasion of Sicily. The grateful Americans then cut his sentence, released him in 1946, and deported him to Naples. He couldn’t return to the United States but was, of course, free to go to Cuba. The Mob bosses — including Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Carlos Marcello, Joe Adonis, and dozens of others — had assembled to honor Charlie Lucky, pledge loyalty, deliver him some cash, discuss business (including a plan to kill Bugsy Siegel, who was not in Havana but preparing to invent modern Las Vegas). They would also have fun.

Luciano claimed later, in a posthumous “autobiography,” that one of the purposes of the Havana assembly was to congratulate young Frank Sinatra for his great accomplishments and to allow Sinatra to thank them for all their help. This seems preposterous; why risk calling attention to their own clandestine congress by bringing a man so famous to a public place? It’s more likely that young Fischetti was running his own game: trying to impress his elders by producing Frank Sinatra and to impress Sinatra by displaying his own intimate connections to some legendary mobsters. Fischetti seems to have introduced Sinatra to all of them. There was one report that Sinatra got up to sing in the nightclub of the Hotel Nacional. A few days later he left to meet his wife on St. Valentine’s Day in Mexico City.

That should have been that; as Sinatra was learning, that is almost never that. Scripps Howard columnist Robert Ruark, who was in Havana, learned about Luciano’s presence from Narcotics Bureau boss Harry J. Anslinger, a bumbling fanatic who was engaged in a turf war with J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. Anslinger (or one of his agents) underlined Sinatra’s part in the “convention.” Ruark, a macho right-winger who despised Sinatra’s politics, opened up with all his rhetorical guns. He wrote a column that said, in part:

“Mr. Sinatra, the self-confessed savior of the country’s small fry, by virtue of his lectures on clean living and love-thy-neighbor, his movie shorts on tolerance, and his frequent dabblings into the do-good department of politics, seems to be setting a most peculiar example for his hordes of pimply, shrieking slaves, who are alleged to regard him with the same awe as a practicing Mohammedan for the Prophet.”

There was an immense scandal. Lucky Luciano! Frank Sinatra! The sin city of Havana! It was a splendid opportunity to attack Sinatra’s politics as more than naive, as probably devious. All the old anti-Italian prejudices rose again, clothed, as always, in virtue. Sinatra said, “I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when I am introduced to him without first investigating his past.” But the damage was done. The Mob image would be part of the rest of his life. Thirty years later he admitted to me about the Havana trip: “It was one of the dumbest things I ever did.” But he did not elaborate.

There would be other Mob stories over the years: his long friendship with Sam (Momo) Giancana of Chicago, his ease with West Coast hoodlum Mickey Cohen, his connections with some members of the Patriarca family of Rhode Island. He certainly played Las Vegas in the heyday of the hoodlums and helped make it one of the nation’s most lucrative adult playgrounds. He played Mob joints in other parts of the country, sometimes without a fee. At every Sinatra concert I attended over the years, I would see known wise guys, smoking cigars, their diamond pinkie rings glittering in the light. At concerts in New York they brought their wives; in Vegas they brought their girlfriends. As late as 1976 Sinatra posed for a photograph in his dressing room at the Westchester Premier Theater with Brooklyn Mob boss Carlo Gambino and a group of other hoodlums. It didn’t matter that they wanted the photograph to impress their friends and children, it didn’t matter that they were among Sinatra’s most awestruck fans; they had access.

It’s absurd to believe that the Mob had made Sinatra a star; if that was possible, they’d have made two hundred other stars, and they made absolutely none. But Sinatra certainly knew Mob guys, was often amused by them, and knew that they could be dangerous. When we were talking about doing his book in the mid-1970s, I told him I’d have to discuss three subjects with him: his politics, his women, and the Mob. He shrugged and said that the first two were no problem. “But if I talk about those other guys, someone might come knocking at my fucking door.” A few days later he called and said, “Hey, what the hell. All the guys I knew are dead anyway.” On another occasion he elaborated about his friendships with hoodlums:

“Did I know those guys? Sure, I knew some of those guys. I spent a lot of time working in saloons. And saloons are not run by the Christian Brothers. There were a lot of guys around, and they came out of Prohibition, and they ran pretty good saloons. I was a kid. I worked in the places that were open. They paid you, and the checks didn’t bounce. I didn’t meet any Nobel Prize winners in saloons. But if Francis of Assisi was a singer and worked in saloons, he would’ve met the same guys. That doesn’t make him part of something. They said hello, you said hello. They came backstage. They thanked you. You offered them a drink. That was it.” He paused. “And it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Most of the guys I knew, or met, are dead.”

But in 1948–49, as he moved inexorably toward the Fall, the Mob was becoming a heavier piece of his baggage. There were more severe, if less melodramatic, problems. His marriage was in constant turmoil; Nancy was holding on, hoping to wait him out as he dallied elsewhere; Sinatra wanted his total freedom. The move to California had put a continent between him and his parents, but the city of New York would serve Sinatra for another half-century as his personal version of the Old Country. It would always be as full of magic as it had been when he stood alone on the piers of Hoboken. If he felt the urge, he wanted the freedom to go back — alone. To move through the New York night. Without a wife. Without his children. The marriage was Hoboken, and Hoboken was not magic.

Later, most people who were sympathetic to both parties said that Sinatra had grown and Nancy had not, that he was out in the big world, adding sophistication and social ease to his style, while Nancy remained imprisoned by the parochial codes of New Jersey. Sinatra once told a close friend about the night he realized the marriage was over. He had to go to a business meeting in a Los Angeles restaurant. It was raining hard. When he reached the door, Nancy called after him, “Frank, don’t forget your galoshes.”

That story might be apocryphal; it too neatly fits the story of Sinatra’s flight from the middle-class values of Hoboken. But many of the others were not. There were constant arguments over money, houses, the children, relatives, other women. He and Nancy separated at least once, in 1948, but reconciled after a few weeks. With very little discretion, Sinatra romanced a variety of women, including Marilyn Maxwell and Lana Turner; and then in 1949 he met Ava Gardner.

III. The tale of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner has been told many times, most effectively and honestly by Ava herself in her autobiography (Ava). At one point, the whole world seemed to know the story of the romance, Sinatra’s divorce, the marriage to Ava, the mutual jealousies, the drunken quarrels, the snarling fights with photographers and reporters. At one point, Sinatra even tried to kill himself. In the sorry narrative that constitutes the Fall, he would lose his movie contract, his radio show, his recording contract, and his agents. Desperate for money as the various contracts began running out, needing the validation of an audience, he began taking as many live engagements as possible. And then he lost his voice. That was the most terrifying event of all. It happened in the spring of 1950, near the end of an eight-week engagement at the Copacabana nightclub in New York, and he described the night to Arlene Francis many years later:

“I was doing three shows a night, five radio shows a week, benefit performances, and recording at the same time. And then I opened at the Capitol Theater toward the end of the engagement. I went out to do the third show [at the Copa] at about half past two or quarter to three in the morning, and I went for a note, and nothing came out. Not a sound came out. And I merely said to the audience, as best I could, ‘Good night.’”

Sinatra would get his voice back and continue to work; in that same year of 1950 he still had several years left on his Columbia Records contract. But as a singer he was confused, often torn, capable of fine work on “Hello, Young Lovers,” “Birth of the Blues,” and “Why Try to Change Me Now?” while recording such second-rate tunes as “Tennessee Newsboy” and the infamous “Mama Will Bark,” a duet with a bosomy TV star named Dagmar. The hit-driven Mitch Miller, boss of Columbia Records, was often blamed for the erratic quality of Sinatra’s work. But he insisted later that Sinatra could never be forced to make any record and that he had agreed to even the Dagmar duet. Certainly, Sinatra was desperate for a hit. He hated the new music, songs like Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” or “Come On-a My House,” performed by Rosemary Clooney (a singer he otherwise admired); but while his singles were selling 25,000 copies, others’ were soaring over a million, and Mitch Miller had produced them.

At the heart of Sinatra’s anxiety was his fading relationship with the audience. Men had never been a major part of that audience; the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 reminded many of them that Sinatra had never taken part in World War II. Some veterans of that war (including baseball great Ted Williams) were now being called back to active duty while Sinatra had never served a day (neither had John Wayne, but right-wing actors were never criticized in the way that liberal actors were attacked). The Cold War was now hot; communist troops were killing America’s young men in the Korean peninsula. The great hunt for domestic subversives, for pinkos, com-symps, the enemy within, became even more intense. Joe McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, emerged as the major voice sniffing into past associations with communists, suggesting evidence of wide conspiracies, and he was not alone. From California the crusade was driven by an ambitious young politician named Richard Nixon. Liberalism itself was soon reeling, with some Republicans describing the long reign of Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, as “twenty years of treason.” It did not help Sinatra’s reputation that he had supported Henry Wallace for president in 1948.

In 1950 another kind of inquiry into domestic enemies began. The Kefauver hearings into organized crime became a television extravaganza, helping to establish the new medium. Elaborate organizational charts were presented, showing the way territory was divvied up by the Mob. The word Mafia was shouted from headlines. Connections between Mob guys and big-city political machines were explored. Among many others, the names of Longie Zwillman and Willie Moretti were tossed around, the refrain of “I refuse to answer on grounds that I will tend to incriminate myself” was heard in the land, and there were more rehashed stories about the famous summit conference in Havana. Mobology became a staple of the newspapers, and many reprinted the photograph of Sinatra and Joe Fischetti getting off that plane. Some of the more creative journalists even claimed to know that each attaché case contained a million dollars, in spite of that being a physical impossibility.

If Sinatra’s triumphs were, in part, a result of the times of World War II, his defeats would be part of the times of the early 1950s. His politics were suddenly a bit musty to some, un-American to others; as the exodus of blacks from the South got under way, the contempt for liberalism also acquired an element of racism. Sinatra’s urban, freewheeling style, with its reminders of immigrant origins, was suspect in white Middle America and its expanding suburbs, where the demand for conformity was growing more powerful. His connections to the Mob, real or illusory, outraged more and more city people as the heroin plague spread and the crime rate soared. The bootlegger might have been a romantic figure; there was nothing romantic about a dope peddler. In some ways, Sinatra was a public figure who fed two paranoid visions: the secret society of the Mob and the agenda of the liberal left. On the crudest level, this did not help him sell records. It certainly did not help him sell records to men. Older men sneered at Sinatra. Younger men were listening to Frankie Laine and Guy Mitchell.

Much more dangerous to Sinatra was his abandonment by female fans. This almost certainly was the result of his brutal public humiliation of his wife. It was one thing to have discreet affairs, but flaunting Ava Gardner during a January 1950 gig at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, while still married to Nancy — that was cruel. His third child, daughter Tina, was only a year and a half old. The boy, Frank Jr., was five. But little Nancy was eight. She was going to school. She could hear the taunts. Her mother, a beautiful, normal woman, was being tossed aside for an actress who was once married to Mickey Rooney! This was outrageous. Or so believed many of the women who in 1944 and 1945 had bought millions of Sinatra’s records or had waited in the rain to see him at the Paramount. So they left. Many never came back. They identified too strongly with Nancy Barbato Sinatra, who soon settled into the role she would play for the rest of Sinatra’s life: the Woman Who Would Wait. Asked once why she had never remarried, she answered, “After Sinatra?”

The loss of that core audience was a source of pervasive, contaminating anguish for Sinatra. He was only ten years removed from the Rustic Cabin; now his nights were haunted by the dread of losing everything, of a forced return to the maiming obscurity of his youth. More than many other performers, he needed the audience. He needed to feel a connection with all those strangers, needed them to ratify his existence and his value, needed to feed on their emotions, as they sometimes were nourished by his. And now they were gone. Or so it seemed. And without the audience, he was just the boy who was applauded for knowing the words. Or worse: an older man singing to an empty room.

It was the aftermath of the Fall that changed the audience and changed Sinatra. Right out there in public, Sinatra had been flattened. And men often saw the world in sports terms. One thing they knew about prizefighters, for example, was that you never knew what a fighter was made of until he had been knocked down. Second-raters stayed down and took the count. The great ones always got up.

Sinatra got up.