Mr. S (22 page)

The other thing Mr. S liked about Hong Kong was the overnight custom tailors. He had a dozen orange blazers made, and custom elevator shoes in alligator and snakeskin. Why so many coats? Mr. S
wasn’t like Jerry Lewis, who would throw a jacket away after wearing it once. He just liked to travel light, and he could afford it. He wanted one blazer for L.A., one for Palm Springs, one for New York, one for Vegas, one for the road, and some backup. That was all. Who was to argue that people were freezing in Siberia? Mr. S was nice enough to let me get a bunch of outfits made for myself.

In addition to his jackets, Mr. S had at least two dozen pairs of fine wool slacks made up. As far as he was concerned, he couldn’t have too many trousers. He was embarrassed by any creases, thought they looked slovenly. He would often change pants if he sat down once. That’s why he was forever pacing. He may have seemed wired and edgy, but the reality was that this vain fashion plate didn’t want to wrinkle his trousers and spoil the perfection. Mr. S did love clothes, and the richer he got, the more clothes he would buy. Despite living in Palm Springs, he abhorred the notion of casual, both for men and women. Casual was for golf courses, and swimming pools, and that was it. One of the reasons Marilyn Monroe drove him so around the bend was that she didn’t like to dress at all, much less dress up. To Mr. S, the more elegantly, more formally, a woman dressed, the better. Expensive jewelry was a fetish item for him. He would have liked living in the court of Louis XIV, when women spent hours making themselves out of this world. As for ladies’ dress colors, for Mr. S black was most beautiful. He hated orange on women. Orange was for him, and him alone.

Mr. S couldn’t resist a prank with the Hong Kong tailors. He bribed Mike Romanoff’s shirtmaker to sew on the sleeves so that one would quickly fall off. By the time we got to Paris, all of Mike’s lovely new shirts had fallen apart. He was completely mystified, which gave Mr. S a bigger kick than a screaming crowd. I do think he would have been content being the host of
Candid Camera.
The tailors were meticulous craftsmen, and they had an appreciative customer in Mr. S, who
had no patience for shoddy work or less than a 100 percent effort. “I dig these coolies, George,” he said. “I may have to replace you.”

That was typical of his sense of humor, always a little nasty, always containing a threat that would make you slightly insecure, then the laugh that said it was all a joke, that Sinatra really loves you, baby. You hoped and prayed. I never answered him back. I would just wait for the punch line, which was the laugh that always came. If it hadn’t come, I’m sure I could have gotten an A-list Hollywood job if I had wanted one. There was a lot of status attached to having worked for both Lazar and Sinatra, and status was all the A-list was about. However, I had no desire to work for anyone else, even the Bill Goetzes or the Jules Steins. The Sinatra job was unique, and because there would be nothing to replace it, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of anxiety whenever he threatened me, even in jest, with losing it.

The only time Mr. S lost his temper on the trip was at his concert in the Hong Kong City Hall. On his closing number, “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road),” the spotlight was supposed to keep getting smaller and smaller until it went black and Sinatra would disappear. The Chinese camera operator forgot to turn off the light, ruining the dramatic fadeout. Mr. S went crazy, smashing up not only his dressing rooms, but also his Peninsula suite. He didn’t need Jack Daniel’s to stoke his incompetence rages, though the Jack did add fuel to the fire. They said rock bands were hard on hotels, but Mr. S was worse, both foreign and domestic, wherever mistakes were made, whether on the stage, as in Hong Kong, or overcooking a room-service steak in Chicago. “Fucking slant-eye Chink bastards,” he’d shout and rip up a priceless antique screen or shatter a Ming vase. The guy got off on breaking things, as if it were sex. The only good part for me was that I stopped worrying about being replaced by a coolie. I’d just stand back with my mouth shut, watch this private version of Demolition Derby, and help the chambermaids pick
up the pieces when it was over. Telling Mr. S to calm down would only make things worse, like showing a red flag to a bull.

After our week in Hong Kong we flew on to Israel. Mr. S adored Israel, and Israel adored him right back. Here was a whole country of underdogs and survivors, the people Sinatra respected most, people like himself who had beaten the odds. He was so awed by the place, so respectful, that he didn’t tell a single one of his beloved “Uncle Scrooge Cheap Jew” jokes the whole time we were there. These weren’t the Beverly Hills fat cats who had treated him so badly, hence his bitter humor. These were battling pioneers. He was genuinely ashamed to have put them all in the same category. Oddly enough, the two cheapest people Sinatra knew were the Anglo Peter Lawford and the Russian/Mongol Yul Brynner, hardly Bev Hills Jews. The King of Siam was such a penny pincher that he actually made the Thin Man seem like a big spender. Peter could be shamed into paying but not Yul, whom I never saw pick up a check.

We were in Israel in early May for their Independence Day celebrations, and Mr. S was welcomed to the reviewing stand with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Gen. Moshe Dayan as if he were secretary of state. We stayed at the King David Hotel, which had been blown up in 1946 when it was British military headquarters in Palestine. The violence drove the British out of Palestine and led to the creation of the State of Israel. We also went to the Wailing Wall, the Via Dolorosa, and other shrines—most movingly for both Mr. S and me, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on the Hill of Memory, where all the trees had been planted in memory of the victims. This was a stunning and solemn place. The external beauty of the land of milk and honey contrasted with the horrors shown within, particularly the underground Children’s Museum, where each of the more than one million tiny lights represented the life of a child that had been snuffed out. Afterward Mr. S said the visit had made him feel
rotten about not fighting in World War II and that Israel was a wonderful country “worth dying for.”

Israel was the only place on the whole tour where Mr. S took a real interest in the country as anything other than a concert stop. He wanted to see
everything,
and Israel rolled out the red carpet. When he wanted to cross the Sea of Galilee and see the Golan Heights, the Israelis contacted the Syrians to tell them that our long convoy was not a troop movement and to hold fire. The sundown on the Sea of Galilee was beautiful. “Another few days and I could become a believer,” Mr. S half-joked.

After dedicating a youth center he endowed in honor of his friend Jack Entratter’s late wife, we chartered a yacht and cruised the Mediterranean to Athens. There he performed in an ancient Greek theatre, one of the oldest in antiquity, in the shadow of the Parthenon. Mr. S couldn’t have cared less about the history. He couldn’t wait to get back to his suite at the Grande Bretagne Hotel and see what brothels Van Heusen had excavated. The whores Chester found were even better than the one Melina Mercouri had played in
Never on Sunday
, and treated Mr. S like Zeus on Mount Olympus. Two of them even came back with a giant moussaka they had made in his honor. When the trip was over, he pronounced the Greek hookers his favorite of all the international damsels he had sampled, not necessarily for their looks but for their warmth and hospitality. Sinatra had no need to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Nor did he beware of social diseases. He never once asked me to buy him condoms, on this trip or any other. He hated the idea of condoms, though this was way before AIDS or even herpes had become scourges. He was so fastidious about cleanliness, body odors, excess perfume, dirty nails, smudged makeup, any hint of less than immaculate grooming, that he prided himself on his personal radar detector of potential contagion, which would call for the instant dismissal
of a dangerous candidate. “If I have any doubt, I’ll let
you
test them for me first, George,” he’d tease me. It never happened, nor did I ever know him to get a dose of anything.

Wherever we went Mr. S kept reading the papers. In Greece he found a story about a poor kid who needed open-heart surgery. He paid to have the boy brought to Athens for the operation, and he insisted on no publicity. He was like the benefactor on the TV show
The Millionaire,
which, not surprisingly, had supplanted
Amos ’n’ Andy
as his favorite program. From Greece, we sailed back to Israel, then flew to Rome. Until then we had been flying on chartered planes. The
El Dago,
a DC-6 prop, with a classic Sinatra orange interior, wouldn’t have made the long distance ocean routes. But the plane was waiting in Rome for the rest of our European hops. Except now it had a new name, the
Tina.
The purpose of the trip was to rehab Mr. S’s image. Somehow his handlers figured out that the name
El Dago
might not play in Italy. Mr. S was glad to see the plane. He was getting homesick, and the
El Dago
was a slice of home. It had a terrific sound system and all his records, a projector for most of his films, as well as the latest studio offerings, a great bar, of which I was the barman of the skies. I was also chef of the skies, but because the galley was so small, I mostly made sandwiches of the best bread, prosciutto, cheeses, and salmon I could find in whatever city we were in. I served lots of caviar, too. The flights were great, a true movable feast. It was a flying cocktail party. There was a bedroom in the back of the plane, but, to my knowledge, Mr. S never joined the Mile-High Club. He was too superstitious about flying in sin, worried that going down on
El Dago
might might make
El Dago
go down.

Mr. S didn’t play particularly well in the land of his ancestors. To begin with, he had no interest in visiting the Sicilian village where his father was from, or even his mother’s legendary Genoa. The people in the street loved him, every guy trying to get close to him and claim
to be his long-lost cousin. On the other hand, the richer people who could afford the tickets to his shows in Rome were rude, shouting “Ava, Ava.” It could have been that some of the Italians felt Sinatra wasn’t excited by his homecoming as they thought he should be. I attended all the concerts on the trip, and for whatever reason the Rome shows were the least inspired. Mr. S threw a minor fit when the people at the Perugina chocolate company, for whom he was filming a commercial, asked him to do a second take. We were at the RCA studios, and the ad people requested that Mr. S say the three words, “Buy Perugina Chocolates.” It didn’t seem like much, but he turned beet red, went over to the camera, and had the operator remove the film and destroy it. “It’s not in the contract,” Mr. S seethed and left. The spot never was redone. Even the food in Italy turned him off. At the Principe di Savoia in Milan, we had a kitchen in the suite, where he had me cooking night and day, Hoboken style. Talk about carrying coals to Newcastle, but that was His Way, and you just didn’t argue. You would only lose.

His only joyous moment in Italy that I ever saw was, on a brief tour a few years before, returning to his suite at the Excelsior in Rome and finding Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who was living outside of Rome, sitting in the pitch-black room waiting for him. At first I thought it was going to be a mob hit, especially when Luciano got up and kissed Sinatra. I assumed that was the kiss of death. But it was the kiss of friendship. Sinatra had met the head of Murder, Inc., in the forties in New York, before Luciano was deported to Italy. The Rome reunion was old-home week. They sat up until morning talking about the glory days. It was sheer nostalgic bliss for Mr. S.

Italy was so bad that England seemed like a homecoming for Mr. S. We took over several floors of the Savoy Hotel, where the waiters and bellmen, all Italians, treated Mr. S far more reverently than the people in Italy. At the Royal Festival Hall, we had a terrific concert, with
young kid performers singing with Mr. S, who had dinner afterward with Princess Margaret, who was extremely good-looking and flirtatiously sexy, especially for a member of the famously unsexy female half of the British Royal Family. Mr. S said he loved her ass. The princess had admitted to her American best friend, Sharman Douglas, the daughter of Harry Truman’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, that she had held a crush on Sinatra for years. Mr. S in turn had learned this from Sharman’s boyfriend, Peter Lawford, when he and Mr. S were still MGM buddies. The princess’s supposed obsession had stuck in Mr. S’s mind for over a decade. Late at night after the concert, Sinatra and “the guys” all speculated on how hard it would be to fuck her, how he could get into Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle and get into the royal bed. If Mr. S had really been serious about the exercise, he would have never discussed it with anyone.

On the tour Mr. S took special care of his voice. He only drank tea with honey the day before concerts, and the glass he carried on stage that everyone thought was his trademark Jack Daniel’s was actually Lipton’s. He also swore off milk and cream. He believed that all dairy products caused phlegm, the bane of any singer. Nor did he ever touch soft drinks. The carbonation caused gas and bloating, and Mr. S was horrified by anyone who belched, especially himself. I never ceased to be amazed at how polite Mr. S was to strangers, and not only royal ones. At a cocktail reception, he would put out his hand and say, “Frank Sinatra. Nice to meet you,” even though he knew he needed no introduction. He didn’t like the way Hollywood stars took their fame for granted. He had almost lost his once, and his downplaying his fame was one more superstition that he hung on to.

We had our most fun in Paris. There were hordes of waving Frenchwomen as we tooled around the City of Light in a caravan of Chrysler convertibles. The most beautiful of these were the Blue
belles, the chorus girls of the Lido on the Champs Élysées, where Mr. S performed. A lot of them came for a big after-party in our suites at the Georges V, which was the Hollywood headquarters in Paris. We saw Darryl Zanuck in the lobby, but Mr. S made a point of ducking him. The idea was to get away. Mike Romanoff took us to all the famous restaurants. He knew Claude Terrail of Tour d’Argent, who had been married to Jack Warner’s daughter Barbara. The restaurant, maybe the most elegant in the world, overlooking Notre Dame, was renowned for its wine cellar and its pressed duck. However, Mr. S was uncomfortable around Terrail, a dashing world-class polo player and playboy, who had had affairs with
everyone,
including Ava and Marilyn. Mr. S drank tea, ate a steak, and left early. I had found him some Campbell’s Franks and Beans at Fauchon, a luxury grocery store that stocked American treats. I’ll never forget his opening a can at five
A.M
. and feeding it, forkful by forkful to two visiting Bluebelles. He didn’t get any action from the showgirls, however, prompting Mr. S to complain how the Bluebelles had given him blue balls.