Sinatra to Royko: I punch you in the mouth

It’s off-topic Tuesday, sez me, because it enables me to offer you this gem of local color. A Rockford, Ill., woman is auctioning off a 1976 letter from Frank Sinatra to Mike Royko in which the blue-eyed singer takes umbrage to some charges penned by the Chicago columnist. Royko wrote five columns per week in the city of Slats Grobnik, but Sinatra more than holds his own as a sharp-tongued tough guy.
Royko was tipped off that Sinatra had a Chicago Police officer stationed outside his penthouse suite at the Ambassador East Hotel while in Chicago for a series of concerts. In his Daily News column Royko questions why Sinatra rates a 24-hour armed guard when ordinary Chicagoans barely rate getting “scraped off the sidewalk when someone has bashed them in the head.”
Royko also accuses Sinatra of punching an elderly drunk outside a bar, and of wearing a hairpiece.
Sinatra tells Royko he didn’t request police protection, and “if you have any beefs with the Chicago Police Force, why not take it out on them instead of me, or is that too big a job for you?” Sinatra equates “female gossip columnists” to hookers and calls Royko a pimp. Then he makes Royko an offer:
Lastly, certainly not the least, if you are a gambling man:
a) you prove, without a doubt, that I have ever punched an elderly drunk or elderly anybody, you can pick up $100,000.
b) I will allow you to pull my “hairpiece”; if it moves, I will give you another $100,000; if it does not, I punch you in the mouth. How about it?
Time Out Chicago has the pdf of Sinatra’s letter and the scoop by Veronika Hinke. And I owe a tip of the cap to Chicago lore hound Pete Anderson for bringing this fecund feud to my attention.
A couple of interesting asides to the story:
1. Sinatra put a copyright notice on the bottom of his letter that specified the letter could only be reproduced in full. I wonder if that’s why both Time Out and the Chicago Reader avoided quoting Sinatra’s letter at all in 2009. But 1976 was also the year that Congress passed the copyright act that created the fair-use exception, which frees journalists, and others, to quote works in part for certain uses. The 1976 copyright act also extended the term of copyright protection. Without it, Sinatra’s copyright would have expired in 2004. And since Sinatra didn’t publish his letter, it wouldn’t have been covered under the old 1909 copyright act anyway. On the other hand, if he doesn’t want to be quoted and you quote him, he might punch you in the mouth.
2. The current owner of the letter, Vie Carlson, 84, is the mother of Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos, according to Time Out. Vie Carlson bought the letter from Royko for $400 when he auctioned it off in 1976, with the proceeds going to the Salvation Army. She and the letter will appear on a January episode of Antiques Roadshow. But Cheap Trick and the Sinatra-Royko letter are not Carlson’s only claims to fame. She has a museum in her front yard, Hinke writes, a replica of the studio for the “Gunsmoke” television series called Carlson’s Western Town. Local color.