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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (March 8, 1959)
.r ; ' w - ' t v. - : i - il i I -V' shifty -in "Stir until boiling" the favorite recipe of many newsmen upon meeting peppery Frank Sinatra. The result: such distasteful exhibitions as this. fraction of his previous salary. His sensitive por trayal won an Academy Award and sent Sinatra to the top of the entertainment world. Since that 1953 triumph, Sinatra has won honors in almost a dozen films, returned to the top ranks of singers, and at tracted standing-room-only crowds in New York and Las Vegas night clubs. As i interviewed Frankie Mr. Sinatra, I mean 'I paid more attention to the man than to what he had to say about his profession and his future. Had his comeback, spectacular even by Hollywood stand ards, mellowed him, given him the confidence to take the bad with the good? I didn't have to goad him, as some reporters have, to know the answer. He sat before me tensely, not like a conqueror on top of the world but like a little guy who finds himself on a smoldering volcano. Be sides, outside the hotel, newspapers were relating the latest evidence of Frankie's bad-boyishness. Shortly before, a New York newspaper photogra pher publicly charged that Sinatra had ordered his chauffeur to run the cameraman down. The charge apparently was a phoney, but Miami newsmen, know ing Sinatra, took it at face value at first. When Frank arrived in Florida for "A Hole in the Head," one reporter was dressed in a baseball catcher's mask and protectors, and the welcome was rough. Sinatra had a right, in this case, to lash out at un fair treatment, but with characteristic rashness, he attacked all newspapermen, even those who sensed a hoax in New York and defended the actor. Frank's fracas with the Miami press was only one incident; he allegedly left behind a trail of insults, as well as at least one broken public engagement. When Sinatra departed from Miami, newsmen were conceding that while their fraternity may not be 100 ' percent perfect, they had no reason to apologize to a man of Frank's "colossal rudeness." Knowing all this, it would be pretty hard to inter view Mr. Sinatra without feeling resentment if you didn't also know another side of him, as I do. Before our interview, for example, I had talked to his co workers, checking stories that he sometimes treated them highhandedly. Just stories, they agreed. Sure, Frank has a habit of "blowing his top," but so do many of those "lovable" Hollywood stars you read about. And Frankie annoys his fellow workers by insisting on working from noon to 8 p.m. But they like and respect him because they know he'll back anybody, regardless of importance, who knows his job. An extra recalls the time an assistant director handled her roughly on a set. Frank stepped in, flushed with anger. "When you want this young lady to do something," he told the strawboss menac ingly, "you say please.'" (Continued) Family Weekly, March 8, J9S9 13
