The Kid from Hoboken
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In Hoboken, a Jersey waterfront town that does not shrink from comparison with Port Said, the old folks on the front steps tell the tale of a pretty little boy with rosy cheeks and light brown ringlets who went skipping along the sidewalk in one of the nation's hairiest neighborhoods --all dressed up in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. "Hey!" said one little denizen of the neighborhood. "Lookit momma's dolling!" It was the work of a moment for the roughneck and his pal to redecorate the object of their interest with a barrage of rotten fruit. Then they opened their mouths to laugh, but no sound came. When last seen, the two boys were disappearing rapidly in the direction of the Erie Railroad tracks, followed hard by Little Lord Fauntleroy himself, who was spouting profanity in a highly experienced manner and carving the breeze with a jagged chunk of broken bottle.
Thirty-odd years have passed over Hoboken since that day, but what was true then still holds true. Francis Albert Sinatra, long grown out of his Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, is one of the most charming children in everyman's neighborhood; yet it is well to remember the jagged weapon. The one he carries nowadays is of the mind, and called ambition, but it takes an ever more exciting edge. With charm and sharp edges and a snake-slick gift of song, he has dazzled and slashed and coiled his way through a career unparalleled in extravagance by any other entertainer of his generation. And last week, still four months shy of 40, he was well away on a second career that promises to be if anything more brilliant than the first.
Out of the Boudoir. "Frank Sinatra," says an agent who wishes he had Frank's account, "is just about the hottest item in show business today." Sinatra, who in Who's Who lists himself as "baritone" by occupation, has offers of more work than he could do in 20 years, and seems pleasantly certain to pay income tax for 1955 on something close to $1,000,000. Moreover, his new success spreads like a Hoboken cargo net across almost every area of show business.
P: In the movies. Frank Sinatra is currently in more demand than any other performer. His portrayal of Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity, which won him an Academy Award last year, burst on the public a new and fiercely burning star. To the amazement of millions, the boudoir johnny with the lotion tones stood revealed as a naturalistic actor of narrow but deep-cutting talents. He played what he is, The Kid from Hoboken, but he played him with rage and tenderness and grace, and he glinted in the barrel of human trash as poetically as an empty tin can in the light of a hobo's match.
Last week Sinatra was on public view in a musical, Young at Heart, and in a retread of a bestseller, Not As a Stranger, that was cashing in big. He also had two major movies in the can (The Tender Trap, a comedy, and Guys and Dolls, a musical in which he portrays Nathan Detroit, proprietor of "The world's oldest permanent floating crap game"), and had signed contracts for Carousel and three more. Probable total: five movies in twelve months. Probable personal in come from pictures in that period: $800,000.
P: In records, according to his worst enemy in show business, Frankie is "the biggest thing ... so far this year." Whereas three years ago his best record (Good Night Irene) sold only 150,000 pressings, he has one on the market now (Learnin' the Blues) that is pushing 800,000 and another (Young at Heart) that is over the million mark. Furthermore, he is "the only pop singer who is a smash success in the album market." His three recent albums (Songs for Young Lovers, Swing Easy, and In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning) have reportedly sold 250,000 copies at $4.98 apiece.
P: In television, Sinatra is about to star in a Spectacular-type musical version of Our Town, and last week NBC was chasing him hard with a five-year contract to do seven shows a year. The proposed nut: about $3,000,000.
P: On the nightclub and variety circuit, Frank has a rating that stands second to none in pull or payoff (he can make up to $50,000 a week at Las Vegas).
Said Frank Sinatra last week, as he sat cockily in his ebony-furnished, "agency modern" offices in Los Angeles' William Morris Agency and tilted a white-banded black panama off his forehead: "Man, I'm buoyant. I feel about eight feet tall." Said a friend: "He's got it made. He's come all the way back and he's gone still further. He's made the transition from the bobby-sox to the Serutan set and if he keeps on going like he's going, he'll step right in when Bing steps out as the greatest all-around entertainer in the business."
Clean Hands, Empty Ashtrays. Can Frank Sinatra keep on going? If it were only a question of public appeal, there would be no question. But it is also a matter of character, and Frank Sinatra is one of the most delightful, violent, dramatic, sad and sometimes downright terrifying personalities now on public view. The key to comprehension, if comprehension is possible, lies perhaps in one of the rare remarks that Baritone Sinatra has made about himself. "If it hadn't been for my interest in music," he once wrote, "I'd probably have ended in a life of crime."
The man looks, in fact, like the popular conception of a gangster, model 1929. He has bright, wild eyes, and his movements suggest spring steel; he talks out of the corner of his mouth. He dresses with a glaring, George Raft kind of snazziness--rich, dark shirts and white figured ties, with ring and cuff links that almost always match. He had, at last count, roughly $30,000 worth of cuff links. "He has the Polo Grounds for a closet," says a friend. In one compartment hang more than too suits. In another there are 50 pairs of shoes, each shoe set on a separate tree that sprouts out of the wall. In another, 20 hats. Frank is almost obsessively clean. He washes his hands with great frequency, takes two or three showers a day, and often gets apparently uncontrollable impulses to empty ashtrays. He hates to be photographed or seen in public without a hat or hairpiece to cover his retreating hairline.
Frankie has his gang. He is rarely to be seen without a few. and sometimes as many as ten of "the boys" around him, and some look indeed like unfortunate passport photographs. A few of the Sinatra staff--Manager Hank Sanicola, Writer Don McGuire, Makeup-man "Beans" Ponedel--have established and important functions, but most of the others are classified as "beards and hunkers,"* and as they march in bristling phalanx along Sunset Strip, Frank walks lordly at the head of them.
"I hate cops and reporters," Frank was once heard to say. He is an admitted friend of Joe Fischetti, who is prominent in what is left of the Capone mob, and he once made himself a lot of trouble by buddying up to Lucky Luciano in Havana --all of which is not to say that he mixes his pleasure with their business; Frankie is too smart for that. On occasion Sinatra, who was trained as a flyweight by his fighter father, has also gone in for slapping people around. He throws pretty frequent crying fits and temper tantrums too, and has even been seen to weep in his secretary's lap. His prodigality with the big green is legend from Hoboken to Hollywood. "Perhaps," says one friend, "Frank is the wildest spender of modern times. He throws it around like a drunken admiral." A member of his family reports that he usually carries nothing smaller than $100 bills and "peels them off like toilet paper.'' He once financed a $5,000 wedding for a friend. Another got a Cadillac, just because Sinatra liked him. To a third, Frank flung a grand piano one Christmas. In 1948 alone he spent more than $30,000 on last-minute Christmas presents.
Scratch, Bite, Claw. The penny has its obverse, and the other side of Frankie can be a shining thing. He has a Janizary's loyalty for his few close friends. Says one: "It's sort of wonderful but frightening, like having a pet cheetah." Says Don Maguire: "You"can call him any hour of the night and tell him you've got the flu, and he will bring you minestrone." When Judy Garland was in a Boston sanitarium, Sinatra sent her flowers every day for a year, and once sent a chartered plane full of her friends from Hollywood to Boston for a visit.
Says Actor Robert Mitchum, cinema's No. 1 problem child: "Frank is a tiger--afraid of nothing, ready for anything. He'll fight anything. Here's a frail, undersized little fellow with a scarred-up face who isn't afraid of the whole world."
Sinatra's courage, even his enemies agree, is the courage of burning convictions, however crudely they may be expressed. Many of his worst passages of public hooliganism have proceeded from instances of racial discrimination. He once slugged a waiter who refused to serve a Negro, another time went haywire at an anti-Semitic remark. Baritone Sinatra, riding the wave of success, is no underdog. "But he bleeds for the underdog," says one of his friends, "because he feels like one. Don't ask me why."
By a similar token. Sinatra is doggedly independent. "Don't tell me!" he often tells friends, eyes blazing, as he jabs them with a forefinger. "Suggest. But don't tell me." "Why, he might even vote Republican," one friend surmised, "if I told him to vote Democrat." A friend tells how Frankie walked out on the christening of his son because the priest would not let him have the godfather Frankie wanted, who happened to be a Jew.
Is there an essential Sinatra hidden somewhere in this bony bundle of contradictions? One of his best friends thinks not. "There isn't any 'real' Sinatra. There's only what you see. You might as well try to analyze electricity. It is what it does. There's nothing inside him. He puts out so terrifically that nothing can accumulate inside. Frank is the absolutely genuine article, the diamond in the rough. If you want to understand a diamond, you ask about the pressures that made it. And if you want to understand Frank, you ask about Hoboken."
Another Slice of Pizza. In Hoboken, in a coldwater flat ("one can to four families"). Frank was born on Dec. 12, 1915. He weighed 13 1/2 lbs. at birth, and in the delivery his head was badly ripped by the forceps, and one of his ear lobes was torn away; he carries the scars to this day. The doctor laid the unbreathing baby on the bed. thinking him stillborn, and turned to save the mother. Frank survived because his grandmother snatched him up and put him under the cold-water faucet.
Frankie's father, Martin Sinatra, was a run-of-the-gym boxer who fought under the name of "Marty O'Brien," a quiet little man who could stand up to a beer and mind his own business. Frankie's mother, "Dolly" Sinatra, was another slice of pizza altogether. That sturdy little woman could stand up to anything, come Hague or firewater, and minded everybody else's business along with plenty of her own. Dolly, who says she started out as a practical nurse, was soon helping Marty run a little barroom at the corner of Jefferson and Fourth. She sang at church socials ("Dolly was a barrel of fun"), faithfully turned up at the Democratic political meetings, and assisted at a lot of neighborhood births. In a few years she was a power in her part of town, and in 1909 Mayor Griffin made her district leader. In 1926 Mayor Bernard L. McFeeley, the political boss of Hoboken for 30 years, appointed her husband to a captaincy in the fire department.
When Frankie came along, mother Dolly had little time to be a mother. She was off, day and night, in the political swim, and if sometimes the water was polluted, Dolly always insisted that she kept her chin above it. Frank was sent to live with his grandmother, Dolly's mother. He also spent a lot of his time with his Aunt Josie, and with a motherly Jewish lady named Mrs. Golden.
Bikes, Cars. If Dolly could not spend time on Frankie, she could and she did spend money. So did his uncles, two ex-fighters engaged vaguely in "the promotion business." All agree: "We spoiled the kid." In a street where all the other kids had nothing, Frankie had plenty. Almost every day he wore a different suit; by the time he got to high school, he had 14 sport coats, and when he was married, says his mother, there were no fewer than 30 suits in his closets. As a kid, he ran through more than half a dozen bikes before he was twelve. During his teens, he owned five cars.
Being a well-fixed boy in a poor neighborhood had its disadvantages, but Frankie made the least of them. When the green-eyed little monsters mobbed him, Frankie fought foot and fang, and won their respect. Moreover, those he could not beat he could buy. In short, Frankie soon found himself with a gang at his back, and a gang in Hoboken had to be kept busy.
"We started hooking candy from the corner store," Frankie recalls. "Then little things from the five-and-dime, then change from cash registers, and finally, we were up to stealing bicycles." Pretty soon Frank was involved in some rough gang wars. He got so good at planning jobs that his awe-struck henchmen called him "Angles," and he had plenty of bad examples to follow, pretty close to home. The streets he played in were full of bootleggers and triggermen; there were even a couple of neighborhood gang killings.
At length Dolly saw what was happening, and decided to put an end to it. ("I wanted Frank to have it better than I did." she says.) She moved to a house on Park Street, in a nicer neighborhood. After that, Frank's errancy consisted mostly of pranks--he released a couple of pigeons in the school auditorium during assembly, sometimes took a cat into a movie house and shot it in the hindquarters with a BB pistol to make a commotion. "School was very uninteresting," he remembers. "Homework . . . we never bothered with . . ." In his last year in high school he was expelled, he says, on grounds of general rowdiness.
Frankie could not have cared less. He had already decided what he wanted to do with his life, and it didn't require a high-school diploma. At the age of 16, he had seen Bing Crosby on the stage. Cried Sinatra, in a voice that broke in his mouth like raw spaghetti: "I can do that!" Dolly and Marty had a good laugh. "G'wan, ya bum." his father used to twit him. "Why'n't ya go to work?" Frankie would burst into tears of rage and frustration, but his ambition held firm and sure. The next thing Dolly and Marty knew, he had won an amateur contest at the State The ater in Jersey City.
Boy Gets Break. Dolly gave it to him straight. "Listen, Frank, you're going to be something nice, like an engineer, and I don't want no more argument." But Frankie talked her out of $65 for a public-address system with a rhinestone-studded case, and started hiring out as a single at lodge dances for $3 a night. He worked over his technique meticulously, tirelessly. "My theory was to learn by trial and error," says Sinatra. "Not sing in the shower, but really operate. Execute!"
Pretty soon he won a Major Bowes contest and landed a 39-week contract as lead singer in a quartet called "The Hoboken Four." Six months later, Sinatra was back in Hoboken, airing his talents on 18 local sustaining programs every week for only 70-c- a week carfare. He also sang in the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse not far from Hoboken, where he waited table too, and "practically swept the floor," for $15 a week. And there it was, in 1939, that Frank Sinatra got his break.
Bandleader Harry James heard Frank sing, and took him on as a featured vocalist. Six months later the great Tommy Dorsey himself bought Frank away from Harry at the princely price of $110 a week. Two years with the Dorsey band smoothed a lot of rough edges off the kid from Hoboken, and raised at the same time some alarmingly sensual yet sensationally effective bumps on his singing style.
Sinatra would appear onstage, looking, as one contemporary described him, "like a terrified boy of 15 in the presence of his first major opportunity." He would hang for a moment on the microphone, holding it itchily, as if it were a snake. "His face was like a wet rag." His chest caved in, as if from the weight of the enormous zoot shoulders it bore, and a huge, floppy bow tie hung down like the ears of a spaniel. For a moment he would look among his audience, pleadingly, as if searching for his mother, and then he would begin, timidly and with trembling lips, to sing.
Worn Velveteen. The Voice was worth all the buildup. It sang slowly, more slowly than most popular singers dared to sing, but it kept a heavy, heartbeat rhythm. Says one critic: "He never let go of that old Balaban & Katz beat.'' Other critics compared the sound of his voice to "worn velveteen," or said it was "like being stroked by a hand covered with cold cream." One listener wondered if Frank tucked his voice under his armpit between numbers, and another said he sounded as if he had musk glands where his tonsils ought to be.
Whatever the sound was, it was most consciously contrived. From Bing, of course, Frank borrowed the intense care for the lyrics, and a few of those bathtub sonorities the microphone takes so well. From Tommy Dorsey's trombone he learned to bend and smear his notes a little, and to slush-pump his rhythms in the long dull level places. From Billie Holliday he caught the trick of scooping his attacks, braking the orchestra, and of working the "hot acciaccatura"--the "N'awlins" grace note that most white singers flub.
Yet through all these carefully acquired characteristics ran a vital streak of Sinatra. He was the first popular singer to use breathing for dramatic effect. He actually learned to breathe in the middle of a note without breaking it (an old trick of the American Indian singers), and so was able "to tie one phrase to another and sound like I never took a breath." He carried diction to a point of passionate perfection. But what made Sinatra Sinatra, when all came to all, was his naive urgency and belief in what he was saying. As one bandleader put it: "Why, that dear little jerk. He really believes those silly words!"
Scrawny Piper. He believed them, and suddenly large numbers of young girls began to believe Sinatra. They began to make little ecstatic moans when Frankie sang. The boys in the band laughed, and moaned right back, but Frankie took it all in ferocious earnest. He knew his hour had struck, and he asked Dorsey for a release of contract. Tommy refused, but in the end, in return for a fat piece of Frankie's future, let him go, and Frank was booked into the Paramount.
S-day, Dec. 31, 1942, dawned bright. After Frank's first performance, the stage door was congested by some squealing young things who wanted his autograph. The crowds grew until, after some weeks, traffic in Times Square was stopped cold by the massed oblation of thousands of wriggling female children. Out came the riot squad, up went the headlines: FIVE THOUSAND GIRLS FIGHT TO GET VIEW OF FRANK SINATRA. A scrawny, wistful little piper had come to town, and the younger generation was following him in far greater numbers and enthusiasm than ever it had shown for the Hamelin original--or for Rudolph Valentino himself. Wherever he went, fans mobbed him. Even at home, Sinatra was not safe. His house in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J. was ringed all day and half the night by gazing girldom. Originally white, its sides were soon smeared with lipstick. Sometimes the girls made human ladders and peered into his bedroom, and when he got a haircut the clippings were claimed. When Sumatra was bombed bobby-soxers panicked.
Worse still, they started to swoon. It began at the Paramount when a teen-aged girl, who had stood all night outside the theater and then sat through seven shows without food, quite naturally passed out in her seat. The tabloids screamlined the story. After that they were dropping in the aisles like flies. At the height of the swoon syndrome, Frankie Boy got around 250,000 letters a year.
He Reached the Body. What was the cause of it all? Nobody is sure. "Frank was the first great bedroom singer of modern times," says a nightclub columnist. "He was the first singer to reach the--er--great body of American women." Frank disagrees. "I don't really think it was sex," he says, and many psychiatrists agree. "Mammary hyperesthesia," muttered one. Sinatra's voice, said another doctor, was in the early days "an authentic cry of starvation." Far from least, there was the late George Evans, Sinatra's pressagent, who more than any man helped to pull Frank up by his bobby-sox. He organized all the excitement into the pigtail platoon that pushed Frank over the top.
The whole world was at war, but there in the headlines was The Voice, The Verce, The Larynx, The Tonsil, The Bony Baritone, The Sultan of Swoon--"none other" (as Jimmy Durante expressed it) "than Moonlight Sinatra." Radio comics gnawed ecstatically on the famous skinnybones. "The pipestem Caruso." "He has to pass a place twice before he casts a shadow." "I know the food here is lousy," cracked Phil Silvers as Frank walked onstage in their Army show, "but this is ridiculous!"
Frank's income whooshed up from $750 to $3,500 a week, and kept on going. In 1943 he made more than $1,500,000. In 1944, while Governor Dewey, the Republican candidate for the presidency, was greeting a crowd gathered in front of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Democrat Sinatra made a point of passing by. Two minutes later the governor was facing a handful of hard-core Republicans, while almost everybody else was following Frankie Boy down Park Avenue.
And what did Frankie do while the wine of fame was flowing free? He bought a $250,000 home in Holmsby Hills, then a place in Palm Springs, for $162,000. He gave away gold Dunhill lighters ($250 apiece) by the gross. He threw champagne parties day after day. And night after night, there were the women. When Frankie came back to his hotel he almost always found some mixed-up youngster hiding under his bed or in the closet; sometimes it was not a girl but a grown-up woman. One night a well-known society belle walked up and asked him for his autograph--on her brassiere. On another occasion a woman walked into his room wearing a mink coat--and nothing underneath. Frank Sinatra coped with each situation as best he could.
What Did He Have? Frankie's name was linked with a succession of famous women: Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Marilyn Maxwell, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anita Ekberg. One movie queen was said to have flown thousands of miles on several occasions, just to spend a couple of hours with Frankie. On another actress he is said to have rained at least $100,000 worth of gifts in only six months.
All these goings-on were naturally not calculated to please Mrs. Nancy Sinatra, the pretty girl from Hoboken whom Frank had married back in the Rustic Cabin days, and with whom he has three children--Nancy, 15, Frankie, 11, and Christina, 7. But somehow the Sinatras managed to keep the home fires sputtering along--until Frank one day met up with Ava Gardner.
Below the Salt. The barefoot Venus of Smithfield, N.C. was in some respects an excellent match for the Little Lord Fauntleroy of Hoboken. They had come from well below the salt, and they loved the high life at the head of the table. Ava, who had been chastened in two marriages and on the analytic couch as well, saw through her martini glass more darkly than did Frank. "If I were a man," she told him, "I wouldn't like me." But Frank liked her very much indeed, left home to keep her stormy, full-time company, finally persuaded Nancy, a steadfast Roman Catholic, to give him a divorce, and married Ava on Nov. 7, 1951.
Even before the wedding, Frank was worn down pretty fine. One night, in Reno, he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. And after two years of Ava he was admitted to a New York hospital one night with several scratches on his lower arm. The decisive moment, however, came one night in 1952 when Frank threw her out of his house in Palm Springs. Since then, Ava has flirted with both Frankie and a divorce, but gotten together with neither of them.
Angles Again. After the Avalanche, there wasn't much left of Frank Sinatra. He was down from 132 to 118 lbs., his voice was shot, his record sales had practically stopped. His relations with the press were in shreds. Church groups were fighting him because of all the scandal. The Government was after him for $110,000 in back taxes. "Anyone know of a bigger bore just now," the Daily News inquired, "than Frank Sinatra?" Frankie, said the boys in Toots Shor's and in Chasen's, was done.
They underestimated Angles. Frankie loosened his ties to MGM. "Then," says he, "I started all over again with a clean slate." He changed his agent, from M.C.A. to William Morris; he changed his record company, from Columbia to Capitol. His voice came back, better than ever; record sales began to climb. He started to freelance in TV on a larger scale, and to look around for roles he really liked in the movies. Along came Eternity. "That's me!" said Frank Sinatra when he read about the roistering, ill-starred little Italian named Maggio. He wanted the part so badly that he offered to play it for only $1,000 a week, made only $8,000 on the picture.
Almost magically, humpty-dumpty was together again. What was he like after his great fall, and his miraculous bounce back to the high wall of fame? In recent months, Frank Sinatra has managed to irritate a crowd of 10,000 in Australia, sue a well-known producer for breach of contract and make it widely known that he "would rather punch him in the face," display scorn in public for Marlon Brando, alienate the affections of Sam Goldwyn, mount a wide-open attack on another entertainer in a prominent newspaper ad ("Ed Sullivan, You're sick . . . P.S. Sick! Sick! Sick!").
But many of Frank's friends insist that he has matured of late. He shows intense devotion to his children, visiting them almost every day and taking them with him wherever he can. He has buttressed the flimsy walls of present success with long-range business enterprises--five music companies, an independent film outfit, a 2% chunk of the enormous Sands gambling hotel in Las Vegas, and eleven shares "of the Atlantic City Racetrack. In movies, he picks his parts as carefully as he has always picked songs that suit both his talent and his taste. He works as fiercely as he plays.
Box Lunches & Cadillacs. The Sinatra day usually begins about 10 a.m. with a mug of hot coffee and a grandiose scattering of transcontinental telephone calls. A dozen people crowd around him as the makeup-man goes to work, all trying to outshout each other and a blaring radio. Off to the set in a bevy of Cadillacs, where the mob grows to 50 or 100 until Frank suddenly stands alone against a sky-blue set and moves his mouth expressively, while his voice drifts out of a distant amplifier. At the first break he piles into a box lunch, then takes a catnap. There are some dialogue loops to make, and then across town in his colossal Cad ("I like lots of armor around me"), with brooding on the way about "them Giants," happy cackling about "Rocky" Marciano or the fun he will have with the boys at Toots Shor's on a scheduled trip to New York.
At the recording studio everything is ready: bare walls, hard chairs and rattling music racks, all neuter in a thin fluorescent light. But as Sinatra stands up to the mike, tie loose and blue palmetto hat stuck on awry, his cigarette hung slackly from his lips, a mood curls out into the room like smoke. He begins to sing, hips down and shoulders hunched, hands shaping the big rhythms and eyes rolling with each low-down line. The musicians come to life, the wallbirds start to smile and weave with the very special sound that is Sinatra. Instead of the old adolescent moo, the Sinatra voice now has a jazzy undertone of roostering confidence, and a kind of jewel hardness that can take on blue and give off fire with subtlety and fascination.
"That does it," a technician says, and Frank handshakes his way to the door, purrs off into the California night with his waiting date. They may drop in on some of Sinatra's current set of friends--the Bogarts, Judy (Garland) and Sid Luft--or munch a steak with Montgomery Clift & Co. Frankie loves the clink of ice in well-filled glasses, and the click of Hollywood's oddballs in a well-filled room. But everybody has to go home, sooner or later, and the moment comes sometimes when Frankie is left alone--the thing he seems to hate the most in life. If that should happen, he may ring up a girl he has known for many years. When she arrives, they sit and talk and talk until the sun comes up or she falls asleep, and then Frank may wander next door to have breakfast with Jimmy van Heusen, the songwriter and Sinatra friend. So begins another day in the Arabian Nights of Frank Sinatra.
Sometimes somebody tries to tell him that his way is no way to live, but when they do, Frank has an answer as simple and as emphatic as a punch in the mouth: "I'm going to do as I please. I don't need anybody in the world. I did it all myself."
A "beard," in Hollywood parlance, is a man employed by a male star to accompany him when he appears in public with a woman not his wife. Sometimes female stars use them too. The custom is usually successful in averting trouble with the wife or husband, the gossip columnists and the public. "If Hollywood ever took off its beard," a comedian once remarked, "the public would not recognize it." A "hunker" is somebody kept on the payroll to know baseball scores, send out for coffee, and strike matches on.
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