I got him to come over to our table, and thus we met him. I've become well acquainted with him since, and if you wish to do so, you may touch me. Frank has proved to be a fine fellow, with fewer weaknesses than most celebrities I know. I'll even stick my neck out and say that he's not a force for evil, luring teen-age girls away from their homes, but is rather a force for good.

When the horselaughs have subsided, you may look over this excerpt from a letter written to Frankie recently by a woman living at the Hotel Ambassador in New York.

"My pretty, intelligent, thirteen-year-old niece is indolent and lazy," wrote the woman, "but she has been trying to do some war work since you mentioned that you hoped the girls would. I told her I was confident you would want them to put their school work first, and, to my surprise, my niece, who has never studied or taken school seriously, told me, 'If Frank Sinatra asked us to study, I'd be the first in my class. I wish he would ask us to be good students, because for him I would cheerfully do it.'"

Since that, Frank has made such appeals. He has asked his fans to hew to the good old childhood virtues—regular school attendance, diligent study, and proper conduct. And it now seems pretty likely that there are hundreds of girls applying themselves to their books, as the result of his appeal, to every misguided one who runs away from home to follow him to another city.

The "Pied Piper Sinatra" gag that's brought out every time a girl is reported missing seems to have been overdone a little, like much else that is written and said about Frank.

That's one reason I like Sinatra. Another is that I admire the way he stands up under the adulation he receives.

Just before Frank went to Hollywood to make another movie, he closed one of the most successful engagements any performer ever had at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. The night he closed, I squeezed among the crowd of young girls who waited there for him. When he stepped out of the Wedgwood Room, looking clean and neat in his tailored tuxedo, he was preceded by a flying wedge of friends and waiters who merely desired to keep him from being torn limb from limb. The hotel had printed 38,000 menus with his picture on the cover to simplify the job of taking care of the autograph fans. Now the mob of girls pressed toward him with those menus for him to sign. He could have torn away from them and let the flying wedge take him straight to his room, but he tore away from the flying wedge instead.

He signed each one with a flourish, although It was already about 2 A. M. Girls stood on tiptoe and pushed menus and their own pictures over one another's heads. I tried to get close to him, but in that mob I could make no headway.

After he'd finished and gone to his room, one little seventeen-year-old girl, Marion DePlasco of the Bronx, was discovered proudly waving Frank's pocket handkerchief about her head.

She'd taken it from his pocket. "I asked him if I could, and he didn't say no," she said. She announced that it had some cologne on it.

"Aw, I wants smell it," cried several girls all at once.

"Let me smell it, too," said numerous others.

"I'm going to frame it and I'm going to keep it close to me all the time," declared the owner.

A Brooklyn girl named Gloria Shaw was rushing ecstatically about with an autograph that read, "To Gloria, Frank Sinatra, No. 35." She explained that it was the thirty-fifth time he'd signed her autograph, and that somewhere in his head he carried the number of her next autograph and always remembered it without her prompting him.

Some of those who have been Sinatra fans for a couple of years were protesting about the conduct of the new Sinatra fans. "They think it's smart to pull his hair and ties and follow him in cabs," one girl said. "They paw him and scream. They spilled ink on his new camel's-hair coat. I mean he spilled it on himself when they crowded him. They're rotten to Frank."

Another reason I like this boy is that he has continued pretty unswellheaded throughout his spectacular success.

It's not easy to digest such terrific success. Not many years ago he was getting seventy cents a week carfare for eighteen sustaining radio appearances, and nothing else. Now that he's been rejected for military service because of a punctured eardrum, Frank should earn something like $1,000,000 in 1944.

These figures are big enough not to be monotonous. He should pull down $400,000 from his Hit Parade, at $2,000 a night, and his Vim [sp] radio programs. He should get $300,000 for three Hollywood pictures. He should get $200,000 from theaters. He should get $150,000 to $200,000 on recording royalties.

And of that $1,000,000 he'll have left anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000. Frank has the usual office expenses and agents' fees and, unlike most, he employs three girls full time just to answer fan mail.

These figures are big enough to make anybody believe he's important. But around Broadway and Tin-Pan Alley they say a nice thing about Frank:

"He doesn't believe his publicity." In other words, he is unimpressed by all the clippings telling how wonderful he is.

So he goes out quietly to sing for nothing, if it'll help. There was the time he slipped down to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital and sang for four hours, going into every corner of the hospital and singing something like 165 songs. Frequently girls who are sick get the idea that a song from Frank will make them well. When he was in Hollywood making

Her mother rapturously reported later, "She's been so excited since, she hasn't slept, but at least she has no fever now." There were no cameramen there.

A little lame girl in a Mulberry Street tenement in New York was ill with pneumonia. She was twelve, too. She'd merely asked whether Sinatra would drop her a note.

"If I did, she wouldn't believe I wrote it," Frank said. "I'd better go down there." And he did, breaking a dinner engagement with a distinguished war correspondent and a party of six.

Frank sang to her that night, and the next day he sent her a bunch of recordings and a machine to play them. A few days later the girl was up and around.

Always, when discussing Sinatra, you must get around eventually to the question, "But does the Voice have a voice?" As one who boasts of having no ear for music and who is, in fact, tone-deaf, I can say that I don't care—I love to hear him sing. I suspect this is the attitude of millions of other morons like me. We know what we like, and we don't care whether it's done with appoggiaturas or spaghetti—we are crazy about it. We wouldn't know whether it's good or bad; we know we like it. You can't argue with us that Frank doesn't have a voice. We don't know or care.

But, curiously, about 90 per cent of the serious music critics around the country have come to the conclusion that he is a terrific singer and not just a flash-in-the-pan. The "long-hairs," or serious critics, in New York didn't take to him, partly because they resented it when his following of kids ganged with him when he went to sing with the Symphony. The kids screamed and wouldn't listen to the Symphony. In other parts of the country the serious critics have been kinder. They have mostly said, in effect, "We went to scoff, but remained to cheer. Make room for another Sinatra fan."

Frank, lean, frail-looking boy that he is, has been pictured as the rope in a tug of war between girls who adore him and men who hate him. This so-called controversy hasn't been entirely uninspired. Controversies make for good publicity, and Frank has an able publicity man, George B. Evans, who may have stirred up a little of the male criticism of Frank. In my capacity as a New York columnist I helped stir up a little of it myself, because that sort of thing makes lively reading.

But it's true that a lot of men do resent the way women sort of lose their heads when Frank sings. In Boston, where Frank drew 17,000 fans to the Keith Theater in a single day, a girl reporter went around in the crowd hoping to get stinging criticisms of the kids. Finally she came to an aged woman who was hobbling about on a cane.

The reporter asked the woman if she had come to observe this new phenomenon, this new lunacy, the Sinatra worship.

"Listen, you young thick-head," snapped the lady with the cane. "He's all that I got to live for. I love that man."

It's always happening that way—Frank is always winning new converts. In Pittsburgh it was discovered that two Brooklyn girls, Irene Kamerousky and Myrna Nudelman, were waiting in line to see Frank, after having made the trip from New York on money they'd saved. They looked famished, so they were taken to the Travelers Aid Society. Sinatratics, as they've been called, are very eloquent about Frank, and thirteen-year-old Irene persuaded the dignified welfare worker in charge to take her to the theater to hear Frank. The welfare worker, according to Irene, insisted upon staying for two shows.

A part of the attention Frank gets now is police protection. Boston assigned two Irish plain-clothes men to watch over him, and although it seemed pretty silly to him, they insisted on being with him constantly. Being he-men not overly fond of crooners, they made it plain that they didn't relish such an assignment, but by the end of the week they had Sinatra recordings. The Voice had presented each of them with a solid gold St. Christopher medal and had gone with them to a nine-o'clock mass.

Frank's not the weakling he's been pictured by all the comedians. Actually, he weighs between 136 and 138, stands 5 feet 10, and seems perfect physically, except for the punctured eardrum. He eats four meals a day, and is especially fond of spaghetti, Italian bread, and banana splits. He takes an occasional drink, but is no lush. He's as sentimental at times as his songs, and noticeably choked up when 3,700 kids sang Happy Birthday to him in Pittsburgh. It's been figured out that this was the first time any performer had been sung to in a theater.

Frank's publicity has been "natural" for months. In the beginning, George Evans gave Paramount Theater ushers bottles of spirits of ammonia, "in case a patron feels like swooning," but Frank's wildfire rise to fame made that sort of thing seem insignificant. There are many legends about Frank—one being that he has a secret claque of thirteen girls who go along with him to radio broadcasts and elsewhere, and sigh. Well, there are girls who go along, but there's no secret about it, and they're not paid. They're not even given passes. Evans has offered a $1,000 reward to anybody who can prove that he ever paid a fan to put on a demonstration of sighing or swooning—and the money has not been claimed.

"I didn't have to do anything like that," Evans says. "There were plenty of enthusiastic girls who would do it without being paid."

At twenty-six, Frank seems merely to have started. Curiously, the fact that he is married and has a daughter (he should have another child by the time this appears) has not reduced his popularity. His wife, Nancy, gets a heavy fan mail herself, and the fans like to flock around Frank's home at Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, and take her picture if he's not home.

To me the best Sinatra story is this one: Frank had just finished having his hair cut in his favorite barbershop in midtown New York. As he got up from the chair, the porter started sweeping up the trimmings that had fallen on the floor. A gang of Sinatra fans had been waiting for just this opportunity. They rushed the porter, and he gave them the trimmings from a Frank Sinatra haircut-right out of the dustpan.

THE END