"That footloose and fancy-free young gentleman..."

For a single season (1953 - 1954), the greatest singer of the twentieth century headlined a radio detective show.  Hard as it may be to believe that the Chairman of the Board would slum it on a weekly series, Frank Sinatra starred as Rocky Fortune for a one year run.  The series came to the air during a rare slump in Sinatra’s storied career, finding the singer and actor in a transition period from his days as a crooner and bobbysoxer idol to his establishment as one of the most popular entertainers of all time. In 1953, Sinatra was divorced and hurting publicly after leaving his wife Nancy for actress Ava Gardner.  He’d been dropped from his contract at Columbia Records, and his big screen career was floundering.  After commanding six figure salaries for films just a few years before, he had to beg for an audition for a supporting role in From Here to Eternity.  That film opened in August 1953, and just a few months later Sinatra hit NBC in the premiere episode of Rocky Fortune. The series was created by George Lefferts (who would later create and develop NBC’s sci-fi revival X Minus One) at Sinatra’s request.  Lefferts recalled his first meeting with Sinatra at the singer’s home, where the crooner was clad in only a towel.  Lefferts was an in-house writer at NBC, and he was tapped by Sinatra to develop a mystery series in which Sinatra could star.  It wasn’t completely unheard of for major stars to head to radio.  Alan Ladd produced and starred in Box 13, and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall lent their voices each week to Bold Venture, but both of those series were syndicated and had a schedule that was more star-friendly.  Sinatra would be appearing on network radio, perhaps a sign that his star had faded and not quite ascended again in late 1953. Rocky was not a cop or a private eye.  Rather he was a “footloose and frequently unemployed young gentleman” who bounced from job to job lined up for him by the Grindley Employment Agency.  Later episodes revised the description to “footloose and fancy free,” which conjures up less images of Rocky as a hobo.  Each week, no matter where he ended up, Rocky would usually find trouble on his quest for a paycheck.  He could be shucking oysters, barking at a carnival, or leading a bus tour of New York, odds were he would stumble over a dead body, interrupt a robbery in progress, or get strong-armed into playing unwilling accomplice for a criminal enterprise.  Often, he’d run up against the aptly named Sgt. Hamilton J. Finger (played by several actors but most frequently by Barney Phillips), who was always ready to point one assigning blame at Rocky for whatever he’d happened into that week.  Lefferts and his fellow writer Ernest Kinoy wrote up adventures that took Rocky Fortune across town, across the country, and even on the high seas.  (In the episode we’ll hear on this week’s podcast, Rocky is hired as a babysitter for a vindictive drunk of a theater critic who has trouble staying awake during the shows he’s assigned to review.  Unfortunately, under Rocky’s watchful eye the man ends up dead in an aisle seat during an intermission!) The show suffered from poor reviews when it premiered (though Sinatra’s performance was praised by Variety, among others), and today it is dismissed by some as a lesser effort from both Sinatra and the Golden Age of Radio.  This writer respectfully disagrees with these harsh assessments.  Rocky Fortune is a lot of fun, and it’s an opportunity to hear Sinatra in his only regular dramatic role on radio.  He was a frequent guest of Jack Benny and other radio comedians, and he made a memorable turn on Suspense, but Rocky Fortune stands as the best showcase of Sinatra’s dramatic vocal range in the radio era.  He finds the right amount of humor and dramatic tension in each show, and he could have continued in the series had his own fortunes grown less rocky in 1954.  Just days before the final episode of Rocky Fortune aired, Sinatra won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in From Here to Eternity, and he was off and running with a new recording contract at Capitol Records.  Bouncing from job to job as Rocky Fortune wasn’t in the cards anymore and the series left NBC on March 30, 1954.  Today, it’s an interesting footnote in Sinatra’s career, and another fine detective show that brought a big screen star to weekly radio.