HEARST COLUMNIST LEE Mortimer never tired of disparaging Sinatra and his fans. The singer was a shirker and a “leftwinger.” According to Mortimer, Sinatra managed the difficult feat of being both a Commie and a hood: “The Communists and the gangsters both have the same motive, acquiring respectability by association with prestige names.” (On the ideological incompatibility of the groups in question, consider the joke that the mobster Barzini makes to appreciative laughter when the heads of the crime families meet at Don Corleone’s behest in The Godfather: “Certainly, he can present a bill for [his] services. After all, we are not Communists.”) To Mortimer, the screaming girls were “squealing, shouting neurotic extremists.” Sinatra didn’t entertain the troops until after hostilities had ceased. The House I Live In was merely propaganda for “class struggle or foreign isms posing as entertainment.” And furthermore, he got where he did because of Willie Moretti in New Jersey and the Fischetti brothers, who got him off the hook with Dorsey, and didn’t he deliver a couple of million bucks to Lucky Luciano in Havana? When Sinatra punched out Mortimer at Ciro’s on April 8, 1947—allegedly because “he called me a dirty dago son of a bitch, and I wouldn’t take that from anyone”—he was striking a blow for artists everywhere who are misunderstood by malignant critics. Unfortunately for him, it was a nail in the coffin of his image as the shy fellow and good family man with the wife from the old neighborhood. The second and third nails were provided by (a) the circulation of a photo of Sinatra, allegedly a bag man for Lucky Luciano, arriving in Havana, and (b) his affair with Ava Gardner. (And what an affair it was.)
But the Lee Mortimer episode is a fascinating, even horrifying, footnote, if only for something that happened years later. When he heard that Mortimer was dead, Sinatra found out where the columnist was buried. Then, after a few drinks, he got Brad Dexter and some other buddies to accompany him to the cemetery, where they could witness him pissing on the late cocksucker’s grave.