Mr. S (23 page)

Through Romanoff, we also saw another superstud, Porfirio Rubirosa, the polo-playing Dominican Republic diplomat whose first wife was the daughter of the dictator Trujillo, who had just been assassinated in 1961. Rubirosa had gone on to become the ex of superheiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton. Because of this high-stakes conjugal double play, Rubirosa had developed a reputation as the greatest playboy since Casanova. He was famous for having the biggest cock in the world. French waiters called their peppermills “Rubirosas.” Mr. S wasn’t interested in the competition. He was polite to “Rubi,” but kept his distance. Surprised that Sinatra wasn’t interested in his hospitality, Rubi, who was then fifty-three, took me under his wing. He took me back to his art-filled apartment and cooked me rice and beans. He was from the Dominican Republic and part black. I think he was sick of all the polo-playing aristos
and liked the idea of having a black buddy. He also took me to meet Madame Claude, the world’s most famous madam, who lived in a fancy apartment near the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t a bordello. It was more like a salon. Madame Claude was a tiny birdlike woman who resembled a banker more than a madam. She spoke no English, but welcomed me as if I were royalty. If I was Rubi’s friend, I had to be okay. When he told her I was Sinatra’s right-hand man, she lit up and begged me to bring him over. It would be her honor to service him, she told Rubi, who said she serviced everyone from the Rothschilds to Lord Mountbatten to the shah of Iran to Picasso. There were five girls there when we arrived, two tall American cover girls, the others diamonds-and-pearls European upper-crust types. That was Madame Claude’s specialty, arranging for her clients to have affairs with “normal” girls who would never turn a trick except for huge money. A lot of her girls had married Wall Streeet and Hollywood tycoons. She was very tight with Zanuck. When I told Jimmy Van Heusen I had met her, he told me he preferred the street girls of Pigalle, the Irma la Douce-types. Madame Claude, to him, was a rip-off, “You’re paying for class, not ass,” he said.

At that point it was class that Mr. S was really looking for. He found the embodiment of class at our next stop, Monte Carlo, in the person of his Dream Girl, the princess of Monaco. Or as he called her, “Gracie.” She called him “Francis.” He and the fake prince Romanoff visited the real prince and princess at the royal palace, and got the grand tour. Francis had been crazy about Gracie since he’d first gotten to know her on the set of
Mogambo
and later as her costar in
High Society.
But because first Ava Gardner and then Bing Crosby were looming heavily over Mr. S in those two productions, he had been too self-conscious about making a play for the actress he viewed as the screen’s most elegant. Now that Gracie had retired from the
screen, and now that Francis had no powerful presence to inhibit him, he was ready to make his big move. But what about the powerful presence of the prince of Monaco? That’s where I came in.

To achieve his goal of spending some “quality time” alone with Grace, Mr. S concocted a plan worthy of his Italian forebear Machiavelli. To begin with, he sent me back to the palace with a case of special bonded Jack Daniel’s for Prince Rainier. The prince received it, and me, personally. The prince had a funny little moustache that made him remind me of a stocky version of the actor Vincent Price, who was so “Euro” in his demeanor. Although the prince was a bit portly, the minute he started moving he could have been Fred Astaire. He handled himself with total aplomb, effortlessly switching between five fluent languages. He was the nicest guy, much less “princely” than the pompous Mike Romanoff. He loved jazz, and he loved cars. He took me down to the royal garage and showed me his collection, which included Bugattis and old Daimlers, and grand prix Ferraris. He took me for a spin in the hills in his Facel Vega, which reminded me of Sinatra’s Dual Ghia, but was even more expensive.

Mr. S was so happy that the prince and I had bonded, he sent me back with more gifts. He was also using me as a decoy, I believe, just as Sam Giancana had used me with the FBI. When they were alone on the balcony of the palace after a reception there, I had overheard him and Gracie make elaborate plans to meet at some villa near the David Nivenses at Cap Ferrat. When I went to the palace and was served a fabulous lunch in the state dining room, the prince said that the princess was at the flower market. I was told by Mr. S to say that he was rehearsing. I knew he wasn’t. But he never did tell me what went on. All the hypothetical arrangements he talked about for Operation Princess Margaret may have been put to work with Princess Grace, while the prince and I were listening to his Count Basie and Duke Ellington col
lections and talking about how seeing Josephine Baker dance had changed his life. I felt bad being part of any plan to deceive this good guy, but they say the French are “sophisticated” about things like this.

All I know is that Mr. S had such a grand time, he began returning to Monaco every summer to be the star of Gracie’s Red Cross Ball, and to do God knows what else. On this and later trips, we stayed at the Hotel de Paris across from the casino, which Mr. S declared “a joke” compared to those of his beloved Las Vegas. He got a special kick hiding on his balcony and lobbing cherry bombs and eggs at the snooty black-tie couples going in to gamble. He even got dressed up himself, went in and won thousands of dollars without breaking a sweat. At the roulette wheels, he would bet either on red or on black, and he would win. Afterward, we would all drive in a caravan down the coast to a restaurant called Le Pirate, which was a simple outdoor grill place, but for billionaires. Even though it was totally French, it had adopted the Greek tradition of smashing plates after dinner, maybe because the place was a favorite of Aristotle Onassis, who had bailed out Prince Rainier when his kingdom was in financial trouble. Mr. S and his party immediately got into the Greek swing of things, breaking every piece of china and glass in the house before the dawn rose over the Mediterranean. He paid for the damage with his casino winnings. “That’s what all this play money’s for,” he said.

After Monaco we returned to England to record an album of British love songs, such as “A Nightingale Sang at Berkeley Square,” and then we all flew home. I hadn’t seen Mr. S so exhilarated and positive since “TP” won the election two years before. He immediately began talking about going back, especially to Monaco. This world tour had finally made him worldly. It had cured him of his reluctance to trot the globe. Like many glamorous people with the advent of the 707 jet plane, Mr. S began to look at Europe as another playground with infinite possibilities. He was now forty-seven, and
he wasn’t feeling his age one bit. If Rubirosa could swing the way he did at fifty-three, Sinatra was, relatively speaking, a mere kid. There was nothing unseemly to Mr. S for “a man his age” to live it up globally. The best was yet to come. It was too bad that he had to return to the midst of all Marilyn Monroe’s troubles, as well as new ones of his own. Being squeezed at one end by Bobby Kennedy and at the other by Sam Giancana, Mr. S had nowhere to hide except in his music and in the enormously successful business that his music had become. Between 1962 and 1963 Sinatra released at least six new Reprise albums, all great:
Sinatra and Strings, Sinatra-Basie, The Concert Sinatra, Sinatra’s Sinatra,
a collection of Broadway hits, and more. He also starred in the movie version of the Neil Simon Broadway smash
Come Blow Your Horn,
in which he played a playboy, but the role was getting tired, just as it was in real life. It wasn’t age so much as sheer repetition.

The truth of the matter was that Mr. S had been seriously looking for love, thus far in all the wrong places, such places being anywhere in the glare of the Hollywood spotlights. He said he didn’t want a woman with a career, so why was he dating the likes of Dorothy Provine and Juliet Prowse? Quietly, secretly, or at least as secretly as Frank Sinatra could be, he began throwing a wider net. As I have said, he was looking for “class.” His first serious nonshowbiz candidate was a woman he met at George Raft’s Colony Club, a gambling den in Mayfair, on an English concert tour in 1958. Her name was Lady Adele Beatty, and while she sounded terribly English and had been married to, and divorced from, a Lord of the Admiralty or something, she was in fact a country girl from Oklahoma. She had climbed up the social ladder, first rung in Dallas, where she modeled at Neiman-Marcus. Next stop Beverly Hills, where she married a prominent lawyer, whom she dumped for Lord Beatty, whom she met while he was visiting Southern California and moved with him to England.

Lady Beatty’s goal had been to reinvent herself in Europe as a full-scale aristocrat. She had done it well. Tall, skinny, chic, sporty, a real Jackie Kennedy-type, Lady Beatty was considered one of the top partygivers in all London. When the party king arrived in town, she descended on him, and, well, ring-a-ding-ding. But there was more Hollywood in Lady Beatty than met the eye. She missed a lot of what she had left behind in Beverly Hills. She ultimately left Mr. S and married the director Stanley Donen, whom Sinatra resented for giving him second billing to Gene Kelly in
On the Town.
Ava couldn’t stand Lady Beatty, whom she saw as a phony social climber. Of course, even while courting the lady, Sinatra was trying, as usual, to get Ava back. He had given her an expensive ten-carat “reengagement” ring from Bulgari in Rome, where Mr. S was pursuing Ava while Ava was pursuing the comedian Walter Chiari, known as the Danny Kaye of Italy. In addition to being funny, Chiari was incredibly handsome in a chiseled, muscular way, as perfect a man as Ava was a woman. Understandably, Chiari was the rare male who made Sinatra insecure. When Ava found out about Lady Beatty, she left Sinatra’s ring with the concierge at the Hassler Hotel, where he was staying, with instructions to give the ring to Lady Beatty. By then, however, the lady had chosen Donen over Mr. S.

The next socialite on Mr. S’s marriage prospect list was a Southern belle from Kentucky named Josephine Abercrombie, who was no relation to the store Abercrombie & Fitch but equally posh. Blond, voluptuous, an accomplished equestrienne, Josephine was a horse-breeding heiress who had been married five times when she met Sinatra in her midthirties. Her father, “Big Jim” Abercrombie, who made his fortune inventing oil-drilling equipment, was one of the richest men of the Bluegrass State. Mr. S had met Josephine on a jet-set blind date in Jamaica and had pursued her from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to supper at Saks. I’ve never seen him give a woman so
many gifts, diamonds, furs, a Cadillac convertible. She gave him just as much in return, things such as the finest crystal, china, porcelain, linens, and somehow turned on this boxing fan to the nuances of domestic luxury. “She’s going to turn you into an interior decorator if you don’t watch out,” I warned him. “Who’s the fag, now?” I had been with him long enough to feel at ease ribbing him about any personal subject, except his hairpieces and his makeup.

“If fags could get ladies like that, they wouldn’t be fags,” Mr. S closed the subject. The catch with Josephine was that she was so far out of show business, she wasn’t sufficiently impressed with Mr. S’s accomplishments. Her father was even less impressed. Big Jim saw Little Frank as another greasy Yankee Dago. Mr. S’s pursuit lasted over a year. He never took me with him to Lexington, Kentucky, where she lived on a plantation/horse farm. “I don’t want to get you lynched,” he teased me. Apparently Josephine had an army of “slaves,” as Mr. S called them, and he didn’t want me to feel like one of them. I doubt that Josephine would have let that happen. I had met her when she came to Los Angeles and Palm Springs. She was a real lady, a Dixie belle. Josephine was no breathless fan who wanted to meet the Rat Pack. She genuinely liked Mr. S for himself and preferred being alone together with him, taking long walks or, better yet, getting Frank up on a horse, which I told her was not going to happen.

I think Mr. S was more intimidated than he needed to be by Josephine’s grand lifestyle and was overly nervous about how bringing me might play in Kentucky. This was one relationship where he couldn’t run the show, and that was ultimately no good for him. They broke up on her last visit to Palm Springs. They had a big fight over Sinatra’s level of commitment. Josephine wanted to be the One, not one of many. Sinatra seemed as though he was making up by treating Josephine to a complete hairdo and beauty treatment at the town’s top coiffeur. After the beautification, however, Mr. S handed
her a first-class ticket back to Kentucky, saying she was too demanding for him. A limo he had called for her was waiting outside. Josephine totally shocked Sinatra by throwing the ticket back in his face. She was one step ahead of him. Her own private jet was already waiting at the airport. She had wanted out before he did.

Mr. S wasn’t very good at breaking up with women. Just look at his split with his once-beloved Betty Bacall, whom he dumped over the phone. He hated face-to-face partings. Normally, he would disappear and stop calling the girlfriend. She would call, and either Gloria Lovell or I would make up something about Sinatra being in the studio, traveling, whatever. A few of those responses and the lady got the message. If she didn’t, and kept trying to reach Sinatra, Mickey Rudin would step in and send out one of his scary cease-and-desist legal letters. “Hit the road, Jack!” was his attitude, over and out. The message was clear. None of his exes stalked him. The only breakup he was sentimental about was Ava.

After Josephine Abercrombie, Mr. S made a try for Merle Oberon, who had a house near his in Acapulco. The elegant Indian-born actresss had been married to Bruno Pagliai, one of the richest industrialists in Mexico. Like Princess Grace, she had left cinema for high society,
real
high society. Now she looked down on Sinatra as someone she’d hire to entertain her guests at a party, like a flamenco dancer. His good-neighbor policy approach couldn’t even get him a Margarita. Mr. S had nowhere to go at the moment but back to the starlets. He spent some time with a beautiful, WASPy actress named Nita Talbot, who looked more aristocratic than Grace Kelly. In real life her name had been Anita Sokol and she was a nice Russian girl from the Bronx, sort of like Betty Bacall. After Betty Mr. S had rarely dated Jewish girls, except for Jill St. John, whom he might have been even wilder about had she not been so ambitious about her career at the time. Having cut her teeth on her neighbor George Raft, she
could be fluent in the underworld lingo Mr. S loved to speak. He did all he could for her, casting her in two films,
Come Blow Your Horn
and
Tony Rome,
but he always assumed he couldn’t compete with the powerful Jewish father figures like Sid Korshak whom she was attracted to. Imagine his surprise when she wed his acolyte, singer Jack Jones, who won Grammys in the early sixties for “Lollipops and Roses” and “Wives and Lovers.”