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Frankie has his gang. He is rarely to be 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.
"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 bills and "peels them off like toilet paper.'' He once financed a $5,000 wedding for a friend. Another got a Cadillac, just because Sinatra liked 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. 1 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."