No more than four hundred people had filtered into their places in the 25,000-seat auditorium when Mr. Rayburn, fortified by bourbon, started banging away with his gavel. Frank had no choice but sing to a virtually empty hall, while his fine old Sicilian temper flamed.
During the anthem somebody alerted Sam Rayburn to his error. He went over to Frank as soon as he’d finished singing and put his hand on Sinatra’s sleeve to apologize. Frank brushed him aside. “Keep your arm off my suit,” he snapped, and stormed away.
When Bill Davidson wrote the story, Frank had his attorney, Martin Gang, file suit for $2,300,000. He was armed with a telegram from Rayburn asserting that the incident was undiluted imagination. All Davidson had was the word of Mitch Miller, who’d been close enough on the platform to overhear what had gone on there. There didn’t seem to be any other witnesses.
But on a visit to New York soon after, a Hollywood press agent who was close to Davidson bumped into a Madison Avenue advertising man whom he hadn’t seen for years. The old friend happened to tell the press agent about a funny thing he’d seen on the platform at the Democratic convention, which he’d attended on agency business: He’d watched Sinatra giving Rayburn the brush-off. Needless to say, the suit was dropped.
Politics are serious business to Frank—they used to be to me until I got tired of the game and decided to give the young ones a chance. I was doing a bit in a picture at Las Vegas while he was there making Oceans 11, and I wanted to talk to him. But he was always too busy. After the 1960 conventions came and went, he was off on the island of Maui doing Devil at 4 O’Clock before he could keep a promise to come over to my house.
From Maui he sent me a letter “giving you all the answers to the questions you would have asked me if we actually did an interview.” He’s a John F. Kennedy man and I was a Robert Taft woman; what better subject for a letter than politics, Sinatra version?
“Every four years,” he wrote, “the same question arises: Should show-business personalities become involved in politics? Should they use their popularity with the public to try to influence votes?
“My answer has always been ‘yes.’ If the head of a big corporation can try to use his influence with his employees, if a union head can try to use his influence with his members, if a newspaper editor can try to use his influence with his readers, if a columnist can try to use his influence, then an actor has a perfect right to try to use his influence.
“My own feeling is that those actors who do not agree with my point of view are those who are afraid to stand up and be counted. They want everybody to love them and want everybody to agree with them on everything.
“I am not sure whether they are right or whether I am right. I only know what is right for me....”