July 1974, Frank Sinatra opened his mouth on a Melbourne stage and said something he should not have said. By the next morning, he could not leave the country. Not because of the government, not because of the police, because of the people who pumped fuel into airplanes, and they had decided Frank Sinatra’s plane could wait.
What he said, and why he said it, and why an entire country decided that those words had a price, that’s what this story is about. But there’s something that almost never gets mentioned when this story gets told. The man who grounded Frank Sinatra’s jet was not a politician, he was not a judge, he was a 34-year-old union president who had never appeared on a stage in his life.
And 9 years after he told the most famous entertainer in the world that he was not permitted to leave Australia, that same man was elected prime minister. Frank Sinatra sent him a congratulations note through a lawyer. In language so carefully constructed it could mean several things at once, but he sent it. That detail, what it means that Frank Sinatra sent that note, is the thing this story is actually about.
Frank Sinatra arrived in Melbourne on July 1974 on his first Australian tour in 13 years. The anticipation had been building for months. Tickets at $20 a seat at a time when Lou Reed would play the same venue the following month for 5.50. Nobody complained about the price. The shows sold out in hours.
Hawken Bishtwy, he had been in Australia for 3 days before he reached Melbourne, and those 3 days had not been good ones. The Australian press had been following him since the moment his plane touched down in Sydney. Photographers, television crews, reporters camped outside his hotel, pursuing his car through traffic, materializing at every entrance and exit.
Sinatra’s relationship with the press was not warm under the best circumstances. By the time he walked on stage at Festival Hall on the night of July 9th, he had accumulated three days of what he experienced as systematic harassment, and the accumulated weight of it was sitting on him when he took the microphone. He did not sing first, he talked.
He talked about the journalists who had been following him. He called them the lowest form of human being, and then he said something specific about the women, the female journalists, the photographers, the reporters, something that stripped them of professional standing, that reduced them in a single sentence from the work they had spent their careers building to something he considered beneath contempt.
He said it into a microphone, in a sold-out concert hall, in front of thousands of people who laughed because Frank Sinatra was saying it, and because the room produced laughter when Frank Sinatra said anything. The women in the press corps did not laugh. The following morning, July 10, the Australian Journalists Association issued a formal demand.
Frank Sinatra would apologize publicly, specifically to the women he had insulted, or the union would act. This was not an idle threat. Australia in 1974 had one of the most organized and most powerful union movements in the Western world. When Australian unions made demands in 1974, those demands had teeth.
Sinatra’s response came through his lawyer, Mickey Rudin. It was in substance no. More than no, Sinatra turned the demand around. He wanted an apology from the press for 15 years of what he called harassment and misrepresentation. If that apology was not forthcoming, he would leave Australia immediately. He would cancel the remaining shows.
He would go home. It was a bluff. It was also the worst strategic decision Frank Sinatra made in 1974 because it assumed something that was not true, that the leverage ran in one direction, that a country which had waited 13 years for him, which had paid $20 a seat, which had sold out five concerts in hours, would not be willing to pay the cost of calling his bluff.
He had not accounted for Bob Hawke. Robert James Lee Hawke was 34 years old and was the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the ACTU, the peak body of the entire Australian labor movement. He was by every account of everyone who dealt with him, one of the most formidable negotiators of his generation.
He understood leverage, he understood the psychology of power. He had an instinct for the exact moment when an opponent’s position was weaker than it appeared, and he had the willingness to act on that instinct without hesitation. He saw what Sinatra’s lawyer had missed, that Sinatra needed Australia more than Australia needed Sinatra, that the shows could be cancelled, that the tickets could be refunded, that the country would recover from the disappointment, and that if the unions retreated in the face of a celebrity’s refusal to acknowledge that he had wronged people,
the cost of the labor movement’s authority would outlast Frank Sinatra’s Australian tour by years. Hawke mobilized. The Theatrical and Amusement Employees Association canceled Sinatra’s second Melbourne show. The stagehands would not work. The lights would not be operated. Then the Transport Workers Union made the announcement that changed the arithmetic entirely.
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Its members, the airport workers, the ground crews, the fuel handlers, would not refuel any aircraft carrying Frank Sinatra. Not his private jet, not any commercial aircraft that might transport him. The hotel union announced that its members would not service the Sinatra party’s rooms, would not carry their luggage, would not bring them food.
Frank Sinatra, the most famous entertainer in the world, was in a hotel room in Melbourne with no room service, no luggage assistance, and a private jet sitting on the tarmac at Melbourne Airport without fuel. He could not leave. He had threatened to leave. Now he could not. The threat that was supposed to compel the unions to back down had become the union’s most effective tool because a man who cannot leave has lost the only leverage he started with.
And Frank Sinatra, who had spent 60 years in the belief that the world arranged itself around his requirements, was now learning what happens when it doesn’t. Hawke made it explicit. He told the press in language that left no room for misinterpretation, if Sinatra did not apologize to the female journalists, the refueling ban would stay. There was no timeline.
There was no negotiation on offer. There was only the ban and the condition for lifting it. For several days, the standoff held. The American consul in Melbourne was in contact with Washington. The diplomatic cables, classified at the time, declassified in 2005 under the heading The Frank Sinatra Brouhaha, showed genuine concern about the optics of an American celebrity being effectively detained in a foreign country by its labor movement.
Pressure was being applied at multiple levels. The concert promoter was losing money. The hotels were losing revenue. The Sydney venues were watching their shows evaporate. The resolution came through an unlikely chain. The public relations manager of Sinatra’s hotel knew Tony Whitlam, the son of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. A call was made.
Tony Whitlam agreed to speak to his father, Gough Whitlam, who led a Labor government and had his own complicated relationship with the union movement, called back with a message that was itself a precise measure of how completely the situation had inverted. Only Bob Hawke had the authority to lift the ban. The Prime Minister of Australia was telling Frank Sinatra’s people that the man they needed was a union president.
Mickey Rodent called Hawke directly. The meeting happened after midnight on July 14. A journalist named Robert Raymond was present. There was, by his account, a bottle of Courvoisier brandy and a significant quantity of it was consumed. And at the end of the meeting, there was a joint statement. It said, “Frank Sinatra did not intend any general reflection upon the moral character of the working members of the Australian media.
Frank Sinatra also expresses his regret for any physical injury suffered by persons as a result of attempts to ensure his personal safety.” Read that again carefully. Did not intend any general reflection. Not, “Frank Sinatra apologizes.” Not, “Frank Sinatra was wrong.” The statement was built with the specific care of a document designed to satisfy the minimum requirement for lifting the ban, while conceding as little as possible.
It was not an apology. It was a lawyer’s reconstruction of one, close enough to function as one without requiring the man it was issued on behalf of to have actually performed one. The unions accepted it. The refueling ban was lifted. The three Sydney shows went ahead. One was televised nationally. The audiences were large and enthusiastic.
And Frank Sinatra sang brilliantly because Frank Sinatra always sang brilliantly, regardless of what was happening around him. And the people who had paid $20 got what they had come for. He left Australia on July 26th, 1974. He did not speak publicly about what had happened. He did not acknowledge the loss.
He resumed his tour and his life with the forward momentum of a man who has learned that the best response to a reversal is to continue moving. The female journalists who were insulted at Festival Hall on July 9 never received a direct apology. The The joint statement expressed regret for physical injuries sustained during crowd management.
It did not name the women. It did not address what had been said about them. It was the least possible thing that could be called an apology and still allow a plane to be refueled. Frank Sinatra never returned to Australia. In March 1983, 9 years after the standoff, Bob Hawke was elected Prime Minister of Australia.
Shortly after his election, Mickey Rudin, Frank Sinatra’s lawyer, sent him a note. It said, “My client, Frank Sinatra, and I wish to congratulate you on your election.” It did not come as a surprise to either of us, since after our meeting in July 1974, we were convinced of your ability to go all the way. Frank Sinatra sent his congratulations to the man who had grounded his jet.
He sent it through a lawyer in language carefully constructed to mean several things at once. But, he sent it unprompted 9 years later, which means that sometime in those 9 years, Frank Sinatra had decided that what Bob Hawke had done in Melbourne deserved acknowledgement, not the acknowledgement of approval, but the recognition that one powerful man gives another when the outcome of a confrontation is no longer in dispute.
There was a member of Sinatra’s personal staff who traveled with him throughout this period and who gave one interview in 1998, the year Sinatra died, to a music journalist. He asked not to be named. He said, “Frank never talked about Australia, not on the plane home, not in the weeks after, not in the years after.
The one time someone tried to bring it up, Frank looked at them for about 3 seconds and said, very quietly, ‘Some rooms you don’t go back into. Some rooms you don’t go back into.'” Frank Sinatra was not, in this story, the version of himself that gets told most often, the man in the corner who sees what needs to be done and does it quietly without credit, without anyone watching.
He was the man who said the wrong thing and then spent two weeks refusing to admit it until a union president in Melbourne made the cost of refusing too high to sustain. He was capable of this, too. He was capable of the cruelty and the pride and the specific blindness of a man so accustomed to consequences bending around him that he had stopped preparing for the possibility that they might not.
That is what made him a complicated man and complicated men are the only kind worth paying attention to. There is one more story from 1974. A room he did go back into, not in Australia, somewhere else, two years later, under circumstances that required something from him that Melbourne had not.
Not the absence of an apology, but the presence of one, a real one, given in private to a single person that the person has described only once in 40 years. That story we haven’t told yet. Subscribe if you want it when it comes.
