UNLIKE CLARK GABLE, who flew bombing missions, or bandleader Glenn Miller, who lost his life on a trip to entertain the troops in Europe, Sinatra stayed out of uniform; he went abroad for his first USO tour only after Germany had surrendered. To irate right-wing columnists Westbrook Pegler and Lee Mortimer, Sinatra’s 4-F status (on the grounds of a punctured eardrum, possibly a consequence of a boyhood fight) was just one in a series of reasons for righteous resentment. Here was this skinny, arrogant non-soldier making the lonely girls swoon while the real heroes were risking their lives battling formidable foes in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific. A young man at a Sinatra concert had thrown eggs at the singer, several of which hit their target in the face. (Tabloid headline: “Hen Fruit Hits Heartthrob.”) The historian William Manchester famously speculated that “Sinatra was the most hated man of World War II, much more than Hitler,” and Frank anticipated a cool reception from the GIs in Italy. Luckily Frank counted the comedian Phil Silvers among his friends, and when they did their act, Silvers turned his jokes about the singer’s weight (“I know there’s a food shortage, but this is ridiculous”) to the singer’s advantage. The strategy worked. “He had those boys in the palm of his skinny hand.”
On the same trip Sinatra got to meet Pope Pius XII in the Vatican. Incensed about Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic radio rants, broadcast nationally out of Detroit, Sinatra was determined to confront the pontiff on the matter. “Wait till I tell off that Pope,” Sinatra told Silvers. When he entered the papal presence he thought better of it, however, and when the pope asked him what he sang he replied earnestly with a list of song titles starting with “Ol’ Man River.” Pope Pius looked puzzled; he had merely been wondering whether Frank was a tenor, a baritone, or a bass.*
Back in the States, Frank came out strongly in favor of religious and racial tolerance. You can’t fake the sincerity in his voice when he sang about what America meant to him. The House I Live In includes grocers and butchers, “the worker by my side” of whatever race, religion, or national origin. It’s like a thirty-two-bar version of Whitman’s vision of America in “Song of Myself.” In the movie, a short, for which he would win an honorary Oscar in 1946, Frank stops a gang of urban youngsters from beating up a Jewish boy. How does he do it? By saying that bigotry makes sense only to “a Nazi or somebody as stupid”—and by singing the title song, an ode to American democracy written by a couple of leftist visionaries, Earl Robinson (music) and Lewis Allan (lyrics): “The ‘howdy’ and the handshake, the air of feeling free / And the right to speak my mind out, that’s America to me.”†
Sinatra tried doing the same thing real time in autumn 1945 when the white students of Froebel High School in Gary, Indiana, went on strike to protest their principal’s “pro-Negro” policies. The new principal had declared that the school’s 270 black kids were entitled to participate in student government and could use the school’s swimming pool one day a week. Frank went out to Gary to give the assembled high school kids a lesson in tolerance. Reporting on the event, Life magazine deplored the “childish grievances” of the white protesters and implicated their parents, “who feared competition for their steel-mill jobs from Gary’s increasing Negro population.” But the magazine could hardly restrain its glee at the outcome. “When it was all over, Frankie had failed. The strike was still on.” Well, fuck you, scumbag. I don’t see what you’re doing to improve the relations of white and black, Jew and gentile. Goddamn press always did get under his skin.