Mr. S (21 page)

We met the Prowses, nice, middle-class people, lacking Juliet’s upper-crust accent. They lived in a modest suburban house, with no servants. I sensed Mr. S was disappointed. He may have been expecting a South African version of the Kennedys. The most memorable part of the trip was Mrs. Prowse’s gift to me. She gave Mr. S a lion-skin rug. She gave me a
spear.
Ungawa! I wanted to shout and do a rain dance, but I bit my tongue. I did show Mrs. Prowse the switchblade I carried, just to make her a little nervous about this “savage” she had in her home. Mr. S almost lost it, he was so cracked up. The minute we left, he was crying, he was laughing so hard. This was Mrs. Prowse’s culture, so I couldn’t hold it against her, but talk about being put in your place. A spear!

I showed the spear to Marilyn, who missed the joke. If Mr. S wanted to hurt Marilyn, he succeeded. The Sinatra-Prowse “engagement,” which lasted about a month, drove Marilyn up the wall and out of the Sinatra Arms to her own place in Brentwood on Fifth Helena Drive. It also drove her to the mirror. That Juliet was a decade younger than Marilyn was bad; that her legs were perfect was worse. Both Marilyn and Ava were ridiculously insecure about their legs. Too short, too fat, was the whine. Marilyn must have stayed in front of the mirror for days, trying on a hundred pairs of high heels, asking me and whoever else she could grab which ones made her legs look the best. That she was usually naked in the heels made it hard to focus on the legs, but that was Marilyn. Even after Frank and Juliet called the whole thing off on the grounds that she wanted a career and he didn’t want any wife of his to have one, Marilyn remained in pain, even though Mr. S was seeing her once again. No one took rejection harder than Marilyn. She would see rejection where someone else would see acceptance, she was that sensitive. Because Jack
Kennedy was a better bullshitter than Mr. S (after all, JFK was the ultimate politician), he got Marilyn to believe, as she frequently said to me, that she had a better chance to marry him than she had with Sinatra. One more reason why Mr. S came to hate “TP,” the guy he once loved.

I never saw Marilyn alone with Bobby Kennedy. Our neighbors at 882 North Doheny did tell me that Bobby had come to the apartment and that he and Marilyn were having some kind of sexual thing. The Weasel definitely wasn’t her type, which ran to Italian macho-Dago types like Mr. S and Joe DiMaggio, who never stopped seeing her, though his paranoia about showbiz and its toxic shock to her kept them from settling in again. But type never stopped Marilyn from fucking someone who was nice to her. It’s hard to imagine Bobby being nice to
anybody,
and it’s hard to imagine Jack
not
being nice. Yet at some point, Marilyn may have gotten too needy with Jack, and because of her fame, Jack got worried that if she went public about their romance, the world would have complete sympathy for her as the woman scorned. So he may have sent Bobby as his reverse Cupid, to get Marilyn off his aching back. Bobby always did Jack’s dirty work. Once Bobby showed up, his own weakness and weaselness may have lured him into Marilyn’s bed. Or Marilyn may have lured him herself. Just to show “TP.” Or just for the fuck of it. With Marilyn, anything sexual was possible, and usually probable.

The bottom line on August 5, 1962, was that Marilyn was dead, and Mr. S was devastated. When the cops said it was an overdose, he had no doubt about it, nor did I. We had both seen her pop pills galore, and mix them with booze, cursing the life that the rest of the world would have done anything to have. She was a walking pharmacy, an overdose waiting to happen. It was only later when the autopsy revealed no residue of pills in her system that we got curious. Mr. S began to suspect Lawford and his brothers-in-law of possible
foul play, but since at that point he would get suspicious of them for a rainstorm, I didn’t put much stock in it. What was very sad about the whole thing was that Joe DiMaggio wouldn’t allow Mr. S (or me) to come to the funeral. The two Dagos both loved her in good ways and could have been so helpful and supportive to each other. But DiMaggio held a grudge the way he held a bat, as tightly and viciously as Mr. S. Their friendship was never again to be.

The day Marilyn died was a horrible, and horribly sad, moment not only for me and Mr. S, who both felt we had failed in our efforts to protect her from herself, but also for Hollywood and the country, who had lost one of the prime symbols of what makes America great. Here was this poor, abandoned girl with nothing but liabilities, who becomes the biggest star of the big screen. If that isn’t an American Dream Come True success story, what is? Her death was a bigger blow to the image of Hollywood than James Dean’s. It was one thing to crash a Porsche, quite another to die of an overdose with the president and attorney general of the United States standing in the shadows. If Hollywood had an innocence to lose, it lost it on that August 5.

Marilyn gave the whole world hope. I certainly identified with her, another poor person from nowhere who had made it in Hollywood. If Marilyn could be a star, if I could be the right hand of Frank Sinatra, this was indeed the land of opportunity. Marilyn was one of Mr. S’s favorite people. He loved how much she loved him. Without that love and admiration she constantly showered onto him, he was deeply wounded. The healing of that wound made him harder and colder than ever before. Aside from all the symbolism, I personally grieved for, and missed, Marilyn the woman. Nobody could be as miserable as she was in such a loving, good-natured way. No matter how sad she may have been, she was never mean, never lashed out at me. Instead she just wanted to hug me and have me hug her and tell her it was all going to work out. That it didn’t broke my heart.

Given Mr. S’s turn of attitude toward the Kennedys, I can see
The Manchurian Candidate,
which went into production in early 1962, just after Joe Kennedy’s stroke and in the midst of Bobby’s anti-Frank rampage, as less than a love letter to the family. “I hope it pisses the shit out of them,” Mr. S said. The Kennedys were anything but closet Communists, as the villains in the movie were, but a lot of the country, particularly the South,
thought
they were. So Mr. S took pleasure in sticking it to them, the whole hypocrisy bit, the idea of this rich political dynasty controlling their hero son, using him as a charming puppet. Sinatra had absolutely no idea, however, how hideously prophetic the whole assassination theme would be.

My main job during the filming was avoiding the advances of the dashing British star Laurence Harvey, who was such a sensation in
Room at the Top
in 1959. Women adored him, but he adored men, even though, as a career move, he married the beautiful young widow of Columbia mogul Harry Cohn, whose insane temper finally gave him a fatal heart attack. Echoing the future
Forrest Gump,
Larry would say to me, “You’re like a box of chocolates, George. I’m
dying
to take a bite.” It made my skin crawl, but after dodging the likes of Noël Coward and Cole Porter with Swifty Lazar, I knew all the right moves to keep Larry at bay without insulting him. Even though Mr. S was a dyed-in-the-wool homophobe, he was crazy about Larry, as well as in awe of Noël Coward, who had become a great fan of Sinatra. He couldn’t understand why such brilliant men could be “assfuckers,” as he derided them, yet “as long as they don’t try to play drop the soap with me,” he relished having them around. They were superb conversationalists, and he needed people “for the ladies to talk to” while he and his Dagos debated boxing and set off cherry bombs.

The subtle jibes of
The Manchurian Candidate
went right over the heads of Sam Giancana and his mobster friends. Even though Mr. S
was being trashed by the Kennedys the same as they were, Mr. Sam didn’t think Mr. S had shown the proper respect to him, and the proper disrespect to the Kennedys, for fooling the dumb Dagos into betting on the wrong horse. Mr. Sam would have liked the head of that horse to wind up in Bobby Kennedy’s bed. Short of that, Giancana leaned on Sinatra to make a declaration of independence from the Kennedys. To that end, Frank enlisted Dean and Sammy to go on the road and perform, for free and very publicly, for the very gangsters Bobby Kennedy was denouncing to America and the world. In your face, Weasel, was the idea. The Clan, delightedly rid of the dead weight of Peter Lawford, did a week of shows at Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City, which was dying at the time because gambling was illegal and everyone was flying to Vegas. I was there, and there was
more
gambling in Skinny’s back room than on the floor of the Sands. It was as if Mr. S was daring the law to try and bust him. They didn’t.

There was even more illegal gambling, and whoring, a few months later in November when the boys, plus Eddie Fisher and Jimmy Durante, played Giancana’s own club, the Villa Venice, in the Chicago suburbs. It was flashier than a Hollywood premiere, with the guests here being a Who’s Who of Illinois mob royalty. Foreshadowing the Bellagio and the Venetian by four decades, Mr. Sam had gondolas ferrying the guests to the entrance, with gondoliers singing “O Sole Mio.” There was also an adjacent den of iniquity called the Quonset Hut where huge amounts of money were won and lost at Vegas-style and-level games of chance. The “Summit,” as the Rat Pack engagement was called, was said to have grossed many tax-free millions for the Giancana outfit. Shortly after the summit, the Villa Venice, for all its elaborate new trappings all set up for Mr. S’s appearance, burned mysteriously to the ground and was never rebuilt. “Dago lightning,” Jimmy Van Heusen explained the conflagration.

The biggest red flag to the FBI bulls of Bobby Kennedy was the Cal-Neva Lodge, which, ironically, his now-speechless father had put into the mob/Sinatra’s possession. To Bobby every song Sinatra sang hit the sourest of notes. To keep sticking it to Bobby, Sam Giancana loved going to see Sinatra perform at Cal-Neva, despite the fact he was on the Nevada state blacklist, forbidding the gangster’s supposedly dangerous presence. It was hard to exclude the guy who secretly owned the place, especially when his girlfriend Phyllis McGuire and her sisters were on the bill. The idea of Nevada enforcing such laws against the gangsters who built the place seemed particularly ridiculous to the two Misters, S and Sam. Mr. Sam was there the weekend before Marilyn’s death and spent her pre-overdose evening at her lakeside bungalow. Because Johnny Rosselli was also there that weekend, there was talk of an S&M Mafia orgy to teach Marilyn a lesson for bestowing her famous favors on the Kennedys. She was
their
girl, not those Micks’. But I was the one who drove Marilyn to the plane that would take her back to L.A. In the car, the thing that bothered her most was that her drugged-out behavior had offended the straitlaced Mr. Sam, who was united with Mr. S in a hatred of drugs (this despite the mob’s supposedly making a fortune in the narcotics trade). Marilyn had total respect for Sam, and he always treated her like a lady. That was his Old World style. To her Sam was no fearsome killer figure but a statesman of his own peculiar country. She liked him a lot.

Even though on stage at Cal-Neva, Mr. S looked great, everything else about the place, and his fronting ownership of it, seemed terrible. In addition to Marilyn’s overdose and Giancana’s illegal visits, there was a big investigation of a prostitution ring being run out of the front desk, and there was the mysterious death of a Nevada sheriff who had taken a punch at Frank for fooling around with his wife, who worked as a cocktail hostess at the lodge. The sheriff was driven
off the road one night by a speeding convertible that caused a fatal crash. The convertible was never identified. Of course, the connection between the mob and Sinatra caught the imagination of the yellow press. It was too much for Hank Sanicola, who had been inseparable from Mr. S since the thirties. Hank was a nominal coowner of the lodge. Now it was getting too hot, even for a tough old Dago like him. He wanted to sell his share of Cal-Neva. Mr. S went ballistic at Hank. For him it was “All or Nothing at All.” How, he railed to me, could Hank be such a Judas, especially now that the homeboys were being besieged by the Kennedy Gestapo? This was the time to rally round, not break ranks. But there was to be no dialogue with Hank, no debate. The second Hank expressed doubt, he was Out. If you don’t fit, you must quit. Mr. S bought out Hank’s share in Cal-Neva. From thirty years of brotherhood to zeroness in one split second. As with Lawford, he never spoke to Hank again. That was the Sinatra Silent Treatment. As I said, I never thought it would happen to me, but that’s what we all said.

I
N
the face of his humiliating public rejection by the Kennedys and his equally public association with gangland, there were basically two things Frank Sinatra could do in 1962. One was to rehabilitate his tarnished image. The other was to get out of town. Mr. S took full control of the situation by doing both. Instead of being ridiculed as a political bag man or a mob puppet, Mr. S decided to become a
philanthropist.
The singing philanthropist, Rockefeller with a tune. He spent a lot of time with Hollywood public relations people and with his lawyer Mickey Rudin, and this was the best they could come up with, a three-month around-the-world concert tour that would benefit underprivileged kids. He had just wrapped
The Manchurian Candidate
, he had just broken up with Juliet Prowse, Marilyn was
obsessed with “TP,” Bobby was obsessed with Sinatra. There was absolutely nothing to keep Mr. S in Hollywood.

The only problem with this proposed Great Escape was that Mr. S had no interest in travel. To him travel was work. He had a plane now, the El Dago, which was like an airborne bachelor pad, but he was always nervous about flying. He would triple-check the weather along his route before taking off. If there was the slightest storm, or even possible turbulence in the forecast, we wouldn’t go. Mr. S had lots of Sicilian superstitions, one of which was that flying was tempting fate. It was for the birds, and for that nutcase daredevil Chester, his name for Jimmy Van Heusen. Mr. S was supposed to have gone on the plane with flamboyant Broadway and Hollywood impresario Mike Todd that crashed in 1958. The plane,
The Lucky Liz,
named after Todd’s wife, Elizabeth Taylor, was bound for a Friars Club affair at the Waldorf-Astoria to honor Todd, the Oscar-winning producer of
Around the World in 80 Days
(with a script by Mia Farrow’s father), in which Sinatra had a cameo as a Wild West saloon piano player.
The Lucky Liz
went down in an icy New Mexico cornfield. Mr. S had backed out at the last second on account of some music crisis. He talked about it for years. Now he was on borrowed time. If he had to fly, it had to be essential to be worth the risk. He didn’t trust commercial flights. That was his control factor. He would be more careful than TWA or Pan Am. And he was.

The other problem with traveling for Mr. S was his total lack of curiosity about the outside world. For all his shelves of biographies, for all his hours in the dictionary, geography, history, and culture left him totally cold. He was a homebody, not an explorer. He had done other tours, and they had felt like onerous tours of duty. He vastly preferred Little Italy to the Big One, Hoboken to Hong Kong, Las Vegas to Monte Carlo, Palm Springs to Marrakech. Again it was the control fac
tor, more than being an Ugly American. Here he was the Chairman, there he was just another rich tourist. Not even the most imperial suite at the Ritz or the Savoy could compare with his Bowmont Drive digs. Besides, where would he get the Campbell’s Franks and Beans?

This time, kicking and screaming, Mr. S agreed to go. It was an essential career move. This time, however, he would bring his friends to insulate himself from the local traditions. They could take the boy out of Palm Springs, but he wasn’t about to let them take Palm Springs out of the boy. I was thrilled to be included. I loved traveling from my Navy days, and this would be for me a sentimental journey to a lot of old haunts. It was also a good time for me to get out of town. Sally had left me and taken the kids, and I was feeling down. There’s nothing like a trip to change your outlook, and there would be nothing like
this
trip in the annals of travel.

In addition to me, the Sinatra entourage included his banker Al Hart, his restaurateur Mike Romanoff, his sports guru Leo Durocher, and his whoremeister Jimmy Van Heusen. Van Heusen came along as a total civilian. He didn’t play piano, write music, nothing. He was simply there for the ride, for the inspiration, for the girls. Romanoff’s purpose in being aboard was twofold. The old con was, for all his lies, the most worldly man in Hollywood. He had fleeced aristocrats around the globe, and they loved him for it. His address book was unequaled. Also, he was tight with all the other great restaurant men. He would secure the red carpet and best tables at places like Tour d’Argent and Maxim’s. Because Mr. S was very insecure about status matters, Mike was the perfect guy to play his traveling concierge. The second reason Mr. S took Mike was that he liked being around Mike’s beautiful, clever, and much, much younger wife, Gloria, who ran the restaurant for him. Sinatra was often asking me if I thought Gloria had eyes for him. He thought she did, and he certainly had them for her. I wasn’t sure, though I suggested he invite her on the journey so
he could find out. What could be more romantic than being in all these exotic locales? Mr. S thought this was a brilliant idea. He relished the challenge of an intrigue along the long way.

Mr. S’s other potential conquest was fifty-eight-year-old Leo Durocher’s gorgeous twenty-something blond date, by far the most beautiful woman on the tour, or whom we even
saw
on the trip. The only catch, and it was a big one, was that she was a devout Jehovah’s Witness and a committed virgin. Durocher had met her, I think, as a shopgirl in some Beverly Hills boutique. She certainly appeared to be the picture of sophistication. Was
that
look ever deceiving! The goddess carried a large Bible with her and read it constantly. Poor Leo was in an agony that became a three-month running joke. Durocher was a totally cool guy. I could see why Sinatra loved him. Not only had he been a great shortstop, but he was an even greater manager, cultivating Willie Mays and leading the Giants to their 1954 World Series championship. He was also a famous wit. “The Lip,” as he was known, was more often quoted than Yogi Berra. His most famous saying was, “Nice guys finish last.” He also had such immortal lines as “God looks after drunks and third basemen,” and “As long as I’ve got a chance to beat you, I’m gonna take it.” Leo loved Hollywood. He had been married to the beautiful actress Laraine Day, who starred in
Mr. Lucky
with Cary Grant and in Hitchcock’s
Foreign Correspondent
(Leo had an eye as well as a lip), and liked ladies of pleasure almost as much as Jimmy Van Heusen. This hypersexed Wizard of the Polo Grounds couldn’t have picked a more inappropriate companion. “Maybe if I steal the Bible, you can get a blow job,” Mr. S teased Leo. It never happened.

Al Hart was there to talk business, which at this point had eclipsed sex and sports as Sinatra’s favorite topic. Mr. S had broken with Capitol, over the one-sided (their side) deals he called artistic slavery, and had started his own record label, Reprise, in 1961. He was insulted
that Capitol wouldn’t finance his own company in return for a 50 percent ownership stake. Capitol argued that if they did this for Sinatra, they’d have to do the same thing for their other great, Nat King Cole. As much as Mr. S admired Nat, he insisted on being “special” and regarded Capitol’s refusal as a sign of deep disrespect. “I’m gonna tear that fucking tower down,” he said of the landmark circular Capitol Records Building in Hollywood, which had been built “on my back,” he insisted, in 1956.

Mr. S also didn’t like the technological direction in which the record business, and Capitol, were heading, with too many overproducing, meddling technicians. This was shorthand for not wanting to be forced to stay in the studio for days instead of hours. Mr. S was a great believer in spontaneity and not beating a horse, or a song, or a movie line, to death. Because Sinatra was Reprise’s own cash cow, he could use the label to discover other singers, like Trini Lopez, whom he met in the men’s room at P.J.’s, a club on Sunset, where Trini was struggling; or to give his less fortunate friends, like comedian Joe E. Lewis (on whom
Joker Is Wild
was based) and singer Jimmy Witherspoon, the fair deals the big record companies would not. The revolutionary hallmark of the Reprise contract was that rights to the master recording reverted to the performer, who could “reprise” them. There was also another meaning. Sinatra purposely mispronounced the name of his company “re-prize,” as in reprisal, against the now-hated Capitol, which itself had rescued his career in 1953.

Despite being unable to bring Nelson Riddle with him at the start (Nelson was under an unbreakable contract to Capitol until 1963), Mr. S worked with other top arrangers—Billy May, Sy Oliver, Neal Hefti—and Reprise was big out of the gate, just by recording Sinatra as well as Sammy and Dean, who had left their previous labels for him. But Mr. S wanted it to get a lot bigger. His goal was to become an entertainment mogul on a par with Harry Cohn and Jules Stein,
and Al Hart was his numbers man. His first Reprise album,
Ring-a-Ding-Ding,
sold huge numbers, and the two men had endless financial discussions on upcoming albums and films, as well as casino interests, that kept them away from most of the tourist highlights, like Mount Fuji or the Eiffel Tower. “Who gives a shit?” was the way Mr. S saw it. Since he had given me a chunk of stock in the new company, I was perfectly happy that the boss was taking care of business, keeping his blue eyes on the bottom line. (By the way, ring-a-ding-ding, which became Sinatra’s swinging watchword, was taken straight from the prologue to Cole Porter’s sly ode to sex, “Let’s Do It”: “When the little bluebell, in the bottom of the dell, Starts to ring: ’Ding, ding!” Such are the roots of cool.)

Our first stop was Tokyo, where we stayed at the New Japan Hotel. The whole city was so alien and confusing to Mr. S that he didn’t want to leave the hotel, not even to see the nearby Imperial Palace and the famous cherry blossoms that were just starting to bloom. “The only cherries I want to see are the geisha girls,” he decreed and Van Heusen rounded up some in-suite entertainment. When the girls refused to kiss him, Mr. S threw a tantrum. “You eat sushi but you won’t kiss my lips?” He felt seriously insulted until our translator explained that kissing was not popular in Japanese culture. “You call that culture?” he snickered. We played a huge, packed arena at the Mikado Theatre, and Mr. S was given a solid-gold key to the city, which softened him up a bit to a country that he continued to distrust as a World War II enemy. “How the fuck can you trust
anyone
who eats raw fish?” he defended his position. Still, his generosity toward any needy soul was immune to any tinge of chauvinism or racism.

One thing Mr. S did religiously was read the local English-language newspaper. On our first day in Japan, he saw a story about a group of struggling, nearly starving Buddhist priests in a remote mountain monastery near Mount Fuji. He decided he would help them. He
chartered a helicopter to fly up to see them. When the fog was too heavy to reach them, he gave the helicopter to me and some others to tour Tokyo. Even though I had no idea what the signs said or what anyone was saying, my ignorance was bliss. I loved Japan. Tokyo was vast, but very serene, with lovely temples and gardens to punctuate the urban sprawl. There seemed to be no noise, no honking horns, no sirens. It was clean, polite, civilized. In New York the people were pushing one another off subway platforms to get on a train, and here they were bowing to each other. Mr. S barely saw the city, but he did bring the priests down by train, hosted them at the hotel for a week, and made a major donation to the order. It was weird, priests by day, geishas by night. He didn’t go so far as to mix these two constituencies, though he did proudly play his records for the priests and had the translators explain the lyrics to them. The religious guys seemed to dig the songs, as did everyone else in Japan. Probably the biggest kick Mr. S got in Japan was learning about a school that gave a course in English to corporate executives that consisted of playing his records and having them sing along. Sinatra was their model of perfect enunciation. What better compliment could a singer have?

We then flew to Korea, which was run-down compared to Japan (its economic miracle was yet to happen), then to Okinawa to entertain the troops at our military bases there. Mr. S were worried that the GIs were all “Elvis guys,” and that they wouldn’t dig him. He was completely wrong. Sinatra had made peace with Elvis by putting the King on his 1960 ABC television special when he got out of the service in Germany. The show got monster ratings, because of the King, better than any the Chairman had ever gotten on his own. Hence it was a bittersweet triumph, but a hit was a hit and Mr. S just accepted it. He had even let Little Nancy go on some dates with Elvis, who was reputed to be a tad twisted with the ladies, the white cotton panty
fetish, hangups from his Memphis boyhood. He turned out to be a perfect Southern gentleman. “I didn’t want to get killed,” the King told his friends. Now Nancy had married another, Elvis-like Deep Southern rock singer, Tommy Sands, who had had a gold record with “Teenage Crush” and was total crush material himself. Their romance was a version of
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
with a rocker instead of a black man. Like Spencer Tracy in the movie, Mr. S got over it. There was simply no getting away from the new pop sounds. The one “pop” he couldn’t bear, however, was being Nancy’s “pop.” Her growing up, wanting to be a star herself, a rock star, made him feel old for the first time. Thus when the GIs in Okinawa went as wild for him as those Paramount teens in the forties, it gave him back his youth and a lot of the confidence the Kennedys had recently cost him.

Next stop was Hong Kong, where we stayed at the legendary Peninsula Hotel, where the uniformed bellmen pad around the colonial lobby with signs paging
MR. SINATRA
. He stayed out of the lobby, but loved the opportunities it provided for practical jokes. He’d page guys like Durocher, have him go back to the room, where a cherry bomb would explode when he opened the door. He had a guy page Van Heusen saying he was some big pimp and he had this incredible brothel in the Walled City of Kowloon, which was so dangerous that it was off-limits to the cops. But there were no risks Van Heusen would not take for the sake of sex, and he went on a wild-goose chase that nearly got him mugged by pickpockets. Mr. S thought this was hilarious. “Some guys have an Achilles’ heel. You’ve got an Achilles’ dick,” Sinatra roared at him. “Chester” didn’t get pissed off. It wasn’t in his nature. He could take the pranks as well as he could dish them out.