In television, Sinatra is about to star in a spectacular-type musical version of Our Town, and last week NBC was chasing him hard with a five-year contract to do seven shows a year. The proposed nut: about $3,000,000.
On the nightclub and variety circuit, Frank has a rating that stands second to none in pull or payoff (he can make up to $50,000 a week at Las Vegas).
Said Frank Sinatra last week, as he sat cockily in his ebony-furnished, "agency modern" offices in Los Angeles' William Morris Agency and tilted a white-banded black panama off his forehead: "Man, I'm buoyant. I feel about eight feet tall." Said a friend: "He's got it made. He's come all the way back and he's gone still further. He's made the transition from the bobby-sox to the Serutan set, and if he keeps on going like he's going, he'll step right in when Bing steps out as the greatest all-around entertainer in the business."
Clean Hands, Empty Ashtrays. Can Frank Sinatra keep on going? If it were only a question of public appeal, there would be no question. But it is also a matter of character, and Frank Sinatra is one of the most delightful, violent, dramatic, sad and sometimes downright terrifying personalities now on public view. The key to comprehension, if comprehension is possible, lies perhaps in one of
the rare remarks that Baritone Sinatra has made about himself. "If it hadn't been for my interest in music, he once wrote, "I'd probably have ended in a life of crime."
The man looks, in fact, like the popular conception of a gangster, model 1929. He has bright, wild eyes, and his movements suggest spring steel; he talks out of the corner of his mouth. He dresses with a glaring, George Raft kind of snazziness--rich, dark shirts and white figured ties, with ring and cuff links that almost always match. He had, at last count, roughly $30,000-worth of cuff links. "He has the Polo Grounds for a closet," says a friend. In one compartment hang more than 100 suits. In another there are 50 pairs of shoes, each shoe set on a separate tree that sprouts out of the wall. In another, 20 hats. Frank is almost obsessively clean. He washes his hands with great frequency, takes two, or three showers a day, and often gets apparently uncontrollable impulses to empty ashtrays. He hates to be photgraphed or seen in public without a hat or hairpiece to cover his retreating hairline.
Frankie has his gang. He is rarely seen without a few, and sometimes as many as ten of "the boys" around him, and some look indeed like unfortunate passport photographs. A few of the Sinatra staff--Manager Hank Sanicola, Writer Don McGuire, Makeup-man "Beans" Ponedel--have established and important functions, but most of the others are classified as "beards and hunkers," and as they march in bristling phalanx along Sunset Strip, Frank walks lordly at the head of them.
