Benny Goodman And Frank Sinatra

Benny Goodman And Frank Sinatra

More great stuff from Tom Sutpen.

Comments

[Mitch]

You do find the neatest stuff, though I'm betting most people today have no idea that those roles aren't quite what they seem to be. :-)

[Tom McMahon]

Just so long as we get a chuckle out of it . . .

[Woody]

Well, it would have been even more interesting if you had a picture of Sinatra with Tommy Dorsey.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1579142/posts

Sinatra’s first wife Nancy Barbato is described as a cousin of a key member of the Moretti family.

Moretti helped Sinatra get started in his career, as Morettti admitted to FBI agents on February 6, 1948 and as Sinatra admitted in private testimony to the Kefauver Committee on March 1,1951. Sinatra sang at the wedding of Moretti’s daughter, an incident memorialized in the scene with the singing actor Johnny Fontane in The Godfather.

Godfather author Mario Puzo reports that he had several unpleasant encounters with Sinatra over the Fontane character. The references to the character in the “horse’s head” scene in Godfather were evidently a dramatization combining a pair of less colorful alleged incidents involving Sinatra’s dealings with big band star Tommy Dorsey and Columbia Pictures President Harry Cohn.

Mortimer’s 1951 article reported Dorsey told him that when Sinatra wanted to get out of a contract with him, “he was visited by three businesslike men, who told him out of the sides of their mouths to ‘sign or else.’”