He never worked harder than he did for two months arranging President Kennedy’s inaugural ball. He wanted Ethel Merman and Sir Laurence Olivier for the show, but they were playing on Broadway in Gypsy and Becket, respectively. So Frank closed the two theaters for a night and refunded the price of the tickets to every disappointed theater-goer. After the inauguration Frank and most of his co-workers—including Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, Roger Edens, and Jimmy Van Heusen—went to Joe Kennedy’s Palm Beach home for a weekend’s rest. I don’t think the President has fully repaid Frank for that memorable evening.
Sinatra swears his private life is his own. Until the recent era of peace with the press dawned, he’d let fly with his fists to prove his point with some reporters. He once told me: “If a movie-goer spends $2.00 to see me in a motion picture, or $10 to watch me perform in a night club, then he has the right to see me at my best. I do not feel, however, that I have any responsibility to that movie-goer or that night-club-goer to tell him anything about my private life.”
He likes to quote something said by Humphrey Bogart, one of his good friends: “The only thing you owe the public is a good performance.” He must have remembered that when Bogey’s widow, Betty Bacall, announced that she was going to marry Frank. A pal with him at the time—he was staying in Miami Beach—told me: “He was so angry he blew the roof off the hotel.” That marked the end of that romance.
Frank has let his temper and temperament explode too often for his relations with many newspapermen and women to be anything but spotty. Believe it or not, that has him chewing his fingernails sometimes. “There are a handful of people who won’t let go of me and won’t try to be fair,” he said, defending himself one day. “And after a thing is over and I fly off the handle, I feel twice as bad as when I was angry. You get to think, ‘Jeez, I’m sorry that had to happen!’”
He isn’t the man he’s usually painted to be. The brandy drinker who shrugs off advice? He was a guest of mine at a small dinner party for Noël Coward, along with the Bill Holdens, Clifton Webb, and one or two others. Over the liqueurs Noël, who’d spent the previous weekend with Sinatra at Palm Springs, said: “I’m very worried about you, Frank. You’re the finest singer since Al Jolson. But unless you cut down on drinking, your career won’t keep going up—it’s going to start running downhill.”
Frank listened as attentively as a new boy getting the business from his headmaster. “I think you’re right, Noël,” he said quietly. And for a long time his drinking tapered off.
Is he the headstrong egomaniac who thinks he owes nothing to anybody? “You know, there’s one thing I wanted to say when I accepted the Oscar for From Here to Eternity,” he said on another day. “I wanted to thank Monty Clift personally. I learned more about acting from Clift—well, it was equal to what I learned about musicals from Gene Kelly.”
He sits up to take notice of his children, too, if they criticize him. There are three of them, Nancy, Jr., Frankie, Jr., and Tina. He drove up to see me once in a new fish-tail Cadillac that, he said, his son despised. “Frankie wondered what I wanted with all that tin on the back.” Father Frank dragged me out to take a look. I knew he couldn’t live with the car after his boy’s jeers. He sold it one month later.
Can he be at heart the willful, adult version of Peck’s Bad Boy that millions of women have adored since those days when he had them swooning by their radios? Bet your boots he can. As for example ...
Earl Warren was still governor of California when Frank was working at Metro on Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The studio boss was Louis B. Mayer, a big Republican with ambitions to be bigger. Louis was thrilled to bits when a spokesman for Warren asked if Frank could go to Sacramento to attend a convention of governors of all the states which was meeting there. They were eager to have him sing for them as the sole representative of the motion-picture industry. Warren would have his own private plane fly Frank there and back if he’d agree to the trip.