It was not a punitive number, it was a businessman’s assessment of what he was giving up. Sinatra’s lawyers negotiated. Sinatra appealed directly. Sinatra’s business manager appealed. Nothing moved the number, $60,000. Tommy Dorsey was not a man who gave things away, and he was not a man who could be argued out of a position he had arrived at through arithmetic.
For most of 1942 and into 1943, the stalemate held. Sinatra continued to perform with the Dorsey band. The royalties continued to flow in the contractually specified directions, and Sinatra continued to watch a third of his professional future accumulate in someone else’s account. And then, in the fall of 1943, it ended.
The settlement that terminated the contract specified a payment of $1 from Frank Sinatra to Tommy Dorsey, a full release of all future claims, and signatures from both parties indicating that the matter was concluded. There were lawyers present. There was paperwork. Everything that a legitimate business transaction requires was present.
Forbearance not present in any document, in any contemporaneous account, in any statement made by anyone who was in the room, was an explanation for why Tommy Dorsey had changed his position by $59,999. The explanation that was not in any document was the explanation that began circulating almost immediately among the people who knew both men.
Willie Moretti had gone to see Tommy Dorsey. Willie Moretti was a capo in the Genovese crime family, one of the most powerful organized crime organizations on the Eastern Seaboard, and he had been a presence in Frank Sinatra’s life since Frank was a teenager growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey. The nature of that relationship is something that neither Sinatra nor anyone close to him ever fully articulated publicly.
What is documented, Moretti attended Sinatra’s wedding in 1939. Their names appear in proximity in multiple FBI surveillance reports beginning in the late 1930s. The FBI file on Sinatra, which eventually ran to more than 1,300 pages, treated the Moretti connection as significant enough to monitor across decades.
What the rumor held, what has been passed from person to person in the music industry and in the world that overlapped with it for 80 years, was that Moretti, or someone acting with his authority, visited Tommy Dorsey in the fall of 1943. That the visit was not purely social. That the conversation that took place during the visit concerned the contract and the terms under which it might be resolved.
And that by the end of the conversation Tommy Dorsey had a clearer understanding of his options than he had possessed at the beginning. The specific detail that appears in the most persistent version of this account, the detail that Mario Puzo, by his own partial admission, had somewhere in the back of his mind when he wrote a scene that would be watched by 60 million people, is that a gun was present during the conversation, not fired. Present.
Held in a way that communicated the specific thing it was meant to communicate. That the conversation was not one in which Tommy Dorsey retained the full range of options he was accustomed to retaining. The next morning, or within days, Tommy Dorsey accepted $1. Frank Sinatra was asked about this, directly and indirectly, many times across the 55 years of public life that followed.
His answers took two forms. Sometimes he said his lawyer had negotiated the settlement. Sometimes he said nothing, which in a man who had opinions about everything and expressed them with considerable force, is its own kind of statement. He never confirmed the Moretti version. He never denied it in terms specific enough to constitute a real denial.
He occupied on this subject a silence that was different in quality from his other silences, more deliberate, more maintained, more obviously constructed. When Sinatra called Mario Puzo a pimp in a Las Vegas casino in 1970, before The Godfather film was released, when only the novel existed, he was reacting to the character of Johnny Fontane, the singer whose mob-connected patron helps revive his failing career.
Puzo said, clearly and repeatedly, that Johnny Fontane was not Frank Sinatra. He also said, in a 1972 interview, something that he clearly intended to be both a denial and something other than a denial. He said he was a novelist and he made things up. Then he paused. Then he said, “But novelists make things up from something.
” The something in this case was a story about a contract that ended for $1 when it should have cost $60,000. Tommy Dorsey was asked about it once in 1952 by a journalist who had heard the account and wanted to see if it produced a reaction. Dorsey said, “I like Frank. We had a business arrangement. Business arrangements end.
” He did not explain why this one had ended the way it had. He changed the subject with the practiced ease of a man who has decided what he is and is not going to say about something and has been consistent about that decision for nine years. He died in 1956 at 51 in his sleep. He never elaborated. Willie Moretti was shot and killed in a restaurant in Cliffside Park, New Jersey in October 1951. He was 57 years old.
The killing was attributed to internal Genovese family politics. His deteriorating mental state, the result of advanced syphilis, had made him unreliable and the organization had concluded that his silence was worth more than his continued existence. He had been talking too freely to too many people for too long.
He had, in the years before his death, given several interviews to law enforcement and journalists that had made people nervous. He never gave an interview about Frank Sinatra’s contract with Tommy Dorsey. What was established without any of these people saying so is a sequence a contract existed that gave one man a third of another man’s professional life.
The man who owned the contract wanted $60,000 to release it. He received $1. He never explained why. The man who benefited from this outcome spent the rest of his life not explaining it either. The man who in the most persistent version of the account was the instrument by which the outcome was achieved was shot before he could say anything further about anything.
And a novelist hearing a version of this story in the 1960s wrote a scene in which a producer woke up to find something in his bed that made him give a singer a role he had previously refused to give. Puzo changed the details. The horse’s head is not a gun. A film contract is not a recording contract. Hollywood is not New Jersey.
