"I hate cops and reporters," Frank was once heard to say. He is an admitted friend of Joe Fischetti, who is prominent in what is left of the Capone mob, and he once made himself a lot of trouble by buddying up to Lucky Luciano in Havana--all of which is not to say that he mixes his pleasure with their business; Frankie is too smart for that. On occasion Sinatra, who was trained as a flyweight by his fighter father, has also gone in for slapping people around. He throws pretty frequent crying fits and temper tantrums too, and has even been seen to weep in his secretary's lap. His prodigality with the big green is legend from Hoboken to Hollywood. "Perhaps," says one friend, "Frank is the wildest spender of modern times. He throws it around like a drunken admiral." A member of his family reports that he usually carries nothing smaller
than $100 bill and "peels them off like toilet paper." He once financed a $5,000 wedding for a friend. Another got a Cadillac just because Sinatra like him. To a
third, Frank flung a grand piano one Christmas. In 1948 alone he spent more than $30,000 on last-minute Christmas presents.
Scratch, Bite, Claw. The penny has its obverse, and the other side of Frankie can be a shining thing. He has a Janizary's loyalty for his few-close friends. Says one: "It's sort of wonderful but frightening, like having a pet cheetah." Says Don Maguire: "You can call him any hour of the night and tell him you've got the flu, and he will bring you minestrone." When Judy Garland was in a Boston sanitarium, Sinatra sent her flowers every day for a year, and once sent a chartered plane full of her friends from Hollywood to Boston for a visit.
Says Actor Robert Mitchum, cinema's No. I problem child: "Frank is a tiger--afraid of nothing, ready for anything. He'll fight anything. Here's a frail, undersized little fellow with a scarred-up face who isn't afraid of the whole world."
Sinatra's courage, even his enemies agree, is the courage of burning convictions, however crudely they may be expressed. Many of his worst passages of public hooliganism have proceeded from instances of racial discrimination. He once slugged a waiter who refused to serve a Negro, another time went haywire at an anti-Semitic remark. Baritone Sinatra, riding the wave of success, is no underdog. "But he bleeds for the underdog," says one of his friends, "because he feels like one. Don't ask me why."
By a similar token, Sinatra is doggedly independent. "Don't tell me!" he often tells friends, eyes blazing, as he jabs them with a forefinger. "Suggest. But don't tell me." "Why, he might even vote Republican," one friend surmised, "if I told him to vote Democrat." A friend tells: how Frankie walked out on the christening of his son because, the priest would not let him have the godfather Frankie wanted who happened to be a Jew.
Is there an essential Sinatra hidden somewhere in this bony bundle of contradictions? One of his best friends thinks not. "There isn't any 'real' Sinatra. There's only what you see. You might as well try to analyze electricity. It is what it does. There's nothing inside him. He puts out so terrifically that nothing can accumulate inside. Frank is the absolutely genuine article, the diamond in the rough. If you want to understand a diamond, you ask about the pressures that made it. And if you want to understand Frank, you ask about Hoboken."
