Frank Sinatra Throws "Two-Bit Hooker" Insult

Historically, this incident is often looked at as a sure sign of Australia's backward nature. It is often talked about as something that could never happen again. And pigs might fly.

History never repeats. I tell myself before I go to sleep

This is from a press release for the ABC TV series 'The Way We Were' in 2002:

"The media had a big part to play in many of Sinatra's tours, and much is made of his "bums and hookers" jibe in 1974.

Sinatra's insult came after a series of mishaps no doubt deeply wounding to his ego. At Tullamarine no one met his plane, he was driven into town in the wrong car, and at Festival Hall the singer had to push his way through the media throng to bash on the stage door before he was allowed inside.

It is hard to imagine today the outrage that followed Sinatra's so called attack on the press. Film from the time details what became a national incident with a union blackban on Sinatra's plane, and phone calls from then prime minister Gough Whitlam."
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This is from a press release for the film 'The night we called it a day' in 2003:
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"He may have been rude, sexist and stuck in his ways on his bumpy tour of Australia in 1974 but, film-maker Paul Goldman tells Tom Ryan, that doesn't mean Frank Sinatra was all to blame.

Paul Goldman's new film is about a pig-headed man who refuses to say sorry. The time is 1974, the man is Frank Sinatra (played by old easy rider himself, Dennis Hopper), and he's made himself a tad unpopular on his tour of Australia with a throwaway remark that's likened a pushy female journalist (Portia De Rossi) to a hooker. The newspapers are all over the story, the unions have turned bolshie and he's stuck in his hotel suite with his entourage , including wife-to-be Barbara Marx (Melanie Griffith), but with no room service and no way out.

But he (Paul Goldman) is also struck by the irony that he was being offered such a story after the controversy surrounding his previous film, 'Australian Rules'. An adaptation of 'Deadly, Unna?' - the novel by his friend Phillip Gwyne about football and racism in a small Australian township - it created a storm of protest that left him emotionally bruised.

"I'd just spent three months saying sorry myself," Goldman explains. "Australian Rules was a very traumatic experience for me and a lot of other people associated with it. Quite a few of us were scarred by that film. I spent so much time in front of the press and at Q&As being attacked by the indigenous community and by the white community for making that film that I felt I was being hounded.

"One minute I was being accused of being racist; the next minute I was being accused of being assimilationist. I found myself genuinely wanting to say sorry but I was also wanting to say, 'I'm sorry you misunderstood me'. So there was also some resonance for me personally in what was happening. I thought to myself, 'I know how Frank feels'."