En masse, the Varsity hit all the swell spots—nightclubs, saloons, showbiz eateries, and, especially, the Friday night fights at Madison Square Garden, where they mingled with mobsters, Times Square sharpies, and other supernumeraries of the fight game. Grown men actually vied to be admitted to their numbers, but that privilege was rarely granted, and the resultant loyalty of its members was embarrassingly high: When Mauriello was inducted into the service and sent overseas to fight, he gave Frank his golden ID bracelet, which the singer wore with puppy-dog pride.
After the war, the Varsity evolved, with some members resuming their lives without Frank (not always peaceably or voluntarily) and others accompanying him out West, where he had joined the extended family of MGM studios. There was a Softball team—Sinatra’s Swooners, with uniforms and cheerleaders (and Ava Gardner as, ahem, honorary bat girl); there were card games, pub crawls, the works.
But then the spiral that demolished his career began: Divorced, his voice uncertain, his name connected with reds, hoods, and a dozen drunken little fistfights, without a record company, film contract, or agent to call his own, he suddenly didn’t seem like a Sun King anymore. A few steadfast partisans held on; the larger crowd vaporized.
It was a subtle thing: People didn’t so much snub Frank as stop courting him. He couldn’t get tables in the same restaurants, or not the same tables, anyway. He couldn’t round up a poker game or gang of drunks to obliterate a night with him. Early one morning at the dawn of the fifties, Sammy was walking through Times Square, overjoyed with just having been allowed to break the color barrier long enough to schmooze with the big stars at Lindy’s. He passed the Capitol Theater—the place where Frank had once hired him and his dad and uncle when they were still unknown—and lo, there Frank was, walking along with a wounded air.
“Not a soul was paying attention to him,” Sammy recalled later. “This was the man who only a few years ago had tied up traffic all over Times Square. Thousands of people had been stepping all over each other trying to get a look at him. Now the same man was walking down the same street and nobody gave a damn.”
For Sammy, to whom the clubbiness and fame of showbiz were brass rings worth one’s very soul, it was a stunning sight. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him, walking the streets alone, an ordinary Joe who’d been a giant. He was fighting to make it back again but he was doing that by himself, too. The ‘friends’ were gone with all the presents and the money he’d given them. Nobody was helping him.”
There were others who sensed Sinatra’s pain and tried to help. L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen, an admirer of the singer’s (“If you call Frank’s hole card,” he said approvingly, “he’s gonna answer”), tried to rally his spirits by hosting a testimonial dinner for him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Instead, the sparsely attended event simply underscored Sinatra’s dilemma. As Cohen recalled in his hilarious autobiography, “A lot of people that were invited to that Sinatra testimonial, that should have attended but didn’t, would bust their nuts in this day to attend a Sinatra testimonial. A lot of them would now kiss Frank’s ass after he made the comeback, but they didn’t show up when he really needed them. I don’t know the names of a lot of them bastards in that ilk of life, but I remember the people that I had running the affair at the time telling me, Jesus, this and that dirty son of a bitch should have been here.”
At the time, Frank wasn’t really keeping up with all the snubs—he was far too bewildered by life with Ava and the prospect of resuscitating his career. But he was still Dolly’s boy, and he had to have noticed the slights. And if he’d ever shown himself to be curt and exclusive before bottoming out and being left behind, when he recovered he became more demanding than ever of the loyalty of those he allowed around him. Only the surest would be abided.
Such a one was Humphrey Bogart, the movie god whose blessing upon Frank was one of the lifelines that kept him hopeful that he might someday emerge from the straits in which fate had left him foundering.
In all Hollywood, nobody had a flintier or more enviable reputation than Bogart. An Upper West Side sissy boy who went from playing juvenile walk-ons to psychotic killers, paranoid adventurers, and cynics with soft hearts, he danced just within the boundaries of the game. His drinking, womanizing, and bellicosity never quite made the front pages, his bad-mouthing of bosses never quite stooped to insubordination, and his liberal political beliefs and headstrong independence never quite severed him from the basis of his wealth, fame, and popularity. The one potential faux pas of his life—his affair with starlet Lauren Bacall—was easily cast by studio flacks and gossip mavens as a great May – December romance, especially after the couple wed and started a family.
For a large part of the movie colony, Bogie was a cult hero—a Knight of the True Way. He did his work best by being something that no one else could be: himself. Off-camera, he drank away afternoons in restaurants, went out of his way to upset prigs at parties, cruised the Pacific on his sailboat, and made, with his young wife, a home that offered haven to those very select few in his business who, like him, weren’t fooled for a minute by their own press.
Nothing, but nothing, rattled Bogart more than the sight of Hollywood kissing its own behind, especially over unproven new talent, and especially unproven male talent that was rooted in alleged sex appeal. So in 1945, when the jug-eared boy singer who made the bobby-soxers wet their pants showed up in town to great foofaraw, Bogart was ready to dismiss him out of hand. They ran into one another for the first time at the Players, the Sunset Boulevard restaurant, bar, and theater owned by Preston Sturges.
“They tell me you have a voice that makes girls faint,” said Bogart, an expert needler. “Make me faint.”
Sinatra stood right up to him: “I’m taking the week off.”
Bogart liked the response, liked the kid. And Frank, of course, saw in Bogart all the things he always wanted to be: aloof, profound, world-weary, slightly drunk, slightly sentimental, romantic, tender, tough, loyal, and proud. (He could take his hero worship too far. Once, when a date of Frank’s declared, in Bogart’s presence, “You sound like Bogie sometimes,” the actor laughed and said, “Don’t remind him, sweetheart, the poor bastard’s trying to kick it!”) He tried to cajole producers into casting him in Knock on Any Door as a tough street kid opposite Bogart’s impassioned lawyer; such was Sinatra’s stock as an actor that the role went to John Derek.
Nevertheless, the two men got into the habit of spending time together whenever the occasion arose, which, given Frank’s hectic schedule of filmmaking, recording, and touring, wasn’t often. In 1949, though, Frank moved his family from Toluca Lake to Holmby Hills, just blocks from Bogart’s house. This new proximity allowed the two stars more frequent contact; soon after moving into the neighborhood, Sinatra organized a guys-only baby shower for Bogart when Lauren Bacall was pregnant with their first child.
The relationship got a little strange. After Frank had left Nancy and the kids, he was still welcome in their house; he would frequently crash on his estranged wife’s couch after nights of bingeing with Bogart, shuttling between the two homes as if, in his mind, they constituted one. “He’s always here,” Bogart told a reporter. “I think we’re parent substitutes for him, or something.” Bacall empathized with Frank’s need for companionship, but Bogart warned her against getting wrapped up in it. “He chose to live the way he’s living—alone,” he admonished his wife. “It’s too bad if he’s lonely, but that’s his choice. We have our own road to travel, never forget that—we can’t live his life.”
In fact, Bogart was one of the few people who were willing to tell Frank exactly what they thought of some of the things he did. There was the time he hosted Sinatra, David Niven, and Richard Burton for a night of drinking on his beloved yacht, Santana. Frank was at a career ebb, and he passed part of the night on deck, serenading yachters on the other boats moored nearby; Bogie grew so irate with Sinatra’s preening performance, recalled Burton, that he and Frank “nearly came to blows.”
There was the time when Frank, riding high on the early reviews for From Here to Eternity, visited his hero