Mr. S (3 page)

Neither was Palm Springs, which was at its ghost-town worst in the summer. The place was in the process of being trashed with cheap motels and bad restaurants. When Frank Sinatra had first
come out, in the early fifties, Palm Springs was a secret Hollywood hideaway. I used to come down to the Racquet Club, which was super clubby then, with my old boss Swifty Lazar, and meet people like Cole Porter and Moss Hart, and the real Polo Lounge social crowd that actually played polo at the Zanuck estate, Ric-Su-Dar, named after the mogul’s kids. Frank Sinatra, even with Ava Gardner, was considered a second-class citizen, a
nouveau
New Jersey outsider, by this entertainment royalty. Maybe he never got over it and that was why he was toadying up to the Goetzes the way he was. But he didn’t have to. At that point, as far as Palm Springs was concerned, no one was bigger royalty than Frank Sinatra. He was the emperor of the desert. Even though President Eisenhower was still alive here, Frank Sinatra owned this town, and the world knew it.

But Palm Springs was on the downhill slope. Even Mike Romanoff, Frank’s dear friend and the ultimate restaurateur to the stars, couldn’t make his magic work. He had tried to open a branch here called Romanoff’s on the Rocks, a black-tie supper club in this wild concrete bunker on the side of a mountain, and, despite Frank’s help, he had to go out of business, which broke his heart. There were still stars around, but the spirit was drained. I would see Elvis Presley driving around aimlessly in his pink Cadillac convertible, looking for action that he was never going to find.

Palm Springs had lost its glamour, just as Mr. S was beginning to be losing his. His movies were duds, his last hit, “Somethin’ Stupid,” was more than a year before and vastly further from Cole Porter, and his child bride was making him look silly. Still, I believed Mr. S would come back. He was too fierce a survivor. This was no quitter. He had resurrected himself from show business purgatory in 1953, just when I went to work for him, and I knew he would do it again now. The times had indeed changed, but wasn’t Mr. S timeless? I was devout in my belief that I had the greatest job a man could have. At thirty-seven
I was earning $1,500 a week, plus endless fringe benefits. Wall Street lawyers and bankers my age weren’t making anything like that. Nor were most movie executives. I wasn’t a rich man, but I
might
be, and I sure was living like a prince, the fresh prince of Bel Air, long before Will Smith.

So it was the greatest shock I’d ever experienced when I found that my key to the Sinatra compound didn’t fit the lock. It had been changed. I rang and rang the bell. What was wrong? Finally one of the Filipino houseboys came to the gate, but refused to open it. “Mr. Sinatra very crazy,” he warned me. “No good to come in. You must go. Before it be too late.” Too late for
what
? I pressed him, but he wouldn’t elaborate. And what about all my stuff? “Movers pack up.” And he disappeared into the house. I stood in a daze in the baking desert sun. In one split second, my life had been turned upside down, inside out, and I didn’t have a clue why. Then one of the black maids came out. She had been there for a year, and I knew her well, but she was clearly too terrified to show me any sympathy. Instead, she handed me a letter, cut her eyes downward, and scurried away. It was from Mickey Rudin’s law office. I read it. It was short and anything but sweet. I had been dismissed, as of this instant, from Mr. Sinatra’s service. I was not to reenter the premises, nor telephone, nor in any way approach or try to contact Mr. Sinatra. My belongings would be delivered to me in three days. There was no explanation, no apology, no severance pay. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not darken this door as long as you live.

Frank had done it to Peter Lawford, to his original manager Hank Sanicola, and to Jack Entratter, the Copa and Sands boss, who stood up for Frank when few others would. No one could bear a grudge like Frank Sinatra. He did it to these great friends, and he did it to others, but for all the tantrums I witnessed, all the fury, all the venom, I never imagined he would do it to me. It turned out that nothing trav
eled faster than gossip, and as much as Frank scorned and attacked the press, he believed the gossip before he would his best friend. He was a one-man Spanish Inquisition, and, at his worst, just as cruel.

And so it went, the job of a lifetime destroyed by a spin on the dance floor. I was devastated. I had lost my best friend, my idol, my boss. I loved the guy, and I assumed he loved me, too. I had no idea what to do. I had the greatest life in the world. But now I realized that it was
his
life, and now I had to figure out how to get one of my own. It was amazing how things changed, literally overnight. From being the toast of the town, or two towns, Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, I became the
ghost
of those towns. It was as if I didn’t exist. Even Mia, whom I saw on Beverly Drive a few days later, crossed to the other side of the street to avoid me. She never spoke to me again, not to say she was sorry, not to share old times, not to offer to set the record straight. Not that Mr. S would have listened to her. Unlike Yogi Berra, who said it ain’t over till it’s over, when Mr. S said something was over, it
was
over.

Word had gotten out that Frank Sinatra had fired me, and people, even people I thought were friends, didn’t dare even to speak to me for fear of incurring the wrath of the Chairman. The folks in show business feared Sinatra the same way the folks in Communist Russia had feared Stalin. There a party leader who had fallen from grace was known as a “nonperson.” Now that’s what I was, frozen out Moscow-style right here in sunny California. In those first cruel weeks of alienation and isolation, my only solace was in my memories. For nearly two decades I, too, had been a party leader, at one of the greatest parties the world had ever known. I had partied with the kings and queens of the planet, movie stars, record stars, sports stars, princes, presidents, gangsters, goddesses. It was an amazing trip, and even more amazing that a poor black kid from Louisiana like me got to take it. Although Mr. S had turned my world upside down, he
couldn’t destroy what he had helped me become. The incredible experiences we shared had made me one interesting man. That was the armor I would wear out into the world, and the shield of confidence I had to deal with whatever came up, good or bad. I could honestly say, without an ounce of boast, that I had seen it all. As I pulled myself together and tried to figure out the next chapter of my life, I looked back at the past twenty years and couldn’t help but smile. If I could pull all
that
off, I could handle anything. As Mr. S loved to sing, “…the memory of all that, oh, no, they can’t take that away from me.”

T
HE
only thing the superphobic superagent Swifty Lazar feared more than germs was failure. “It smells worse than shit,” he would say, “and you can smell it from even farther away.” By that token, Swifty was very uncomfortable with Frank Sinatra, his apartment house next-door neighbor. “He’s a dead man,” Swifty would say of the fabled crooner whose career had taken a southerly turn. “Once you lose it in Hollywood, you don’t come back. Even Jesus couldn’t get resurrected in this town.” Although Swifty was always smiling and polite to Mr. S, he never invited him into the apartment and almost had to take one of his multiple showers whenever he ran into him. “I wished he’d get so broke that he’d have to move out,” Swifty often said, because Swifty felt that having a loser in the complex somehow made him look less like a winner to his famous friends and clients.
“He makes them uncomfortable,” he’d say, but the one who was most uncomfortable was Swifty, who judged everything and everyone by appearances and how they ranked in
Variety.
To Swifty, Frank was one more Hollywood has-been who was particularly inconvenient because the shadow of his decline happened to be darkening Swifty’s door. So here I was, George Jacobs, Swifty Lazar’s Man Friday, pitying Frank Sinatra, feeling awful for the biggest star in the world. What a totally weird state of affairs that
I
could be feeling sorry for
him.
I guess for a black man in his early twenties, I was riding pretty high at the time.

I was born in New Orleans in 1927 with show business in my blood. Actually, the blood was on the show business. My father had a nightclub called the Joy Tavern, near the old red-light district of Storyville. He and my mother were divorced when I was three. She became a cook and housekeeper for a rich white family in the Garden District. I had a split-personality childhood, living with these plantation aristocrats by day, visiting my daddy and his hepcat jazzmen at night. My uncle was a cornet player. He introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved the life I saw these guys leading, with the music, the booze, the girls. It was bad, and it looked good. But my mother warned me that bad was bad and to stay away from it and anything to do with my father. Because my mother was half Jewish and half Creole, and my father also had a Jewish grandfather, hence our last name (New Orleans, being a port city, was one big gumbo pot), ethnically I wasn’t quite sure what I was. These were the days of
Plessy
v.
Ferguson,
the “separate but equal” Supreme Court case that kept blacks in the back of streetcars. Even if you were an octaroon (one-eighth black) and had blond hair and blue eyes, in the eyes of the law, you were as black as tar. I didn’t have blond hair, and while a lot of people thought I was Italian, I never tried to “pass.” I was what I was. Whatever that was.

One thing I was for certain was patriotic. In 1945, as soon as I was old enough to enlist, I joined the Navy, and sure enough, I saw the world. I enrolled in the Cooks and Bakers School in Bayonne, New Jersey, where I was the valedictorian of my class. If you learn anything in New Orleans, it’s how to eat and drink, and my mother’s Creole recipes put me in good stead. From Bayonne I went to Portland, Maine, where I saw snow for the first time, and then to Naples, where I became aide to Adm. Charles Beatty of the Mediterranean Fleet. I traveled throughout Italy, Greece, Spain and France and learned how to cook the entire range of the Mediterranean Diet, even though few of us realized how healthy it was at the time. I also had no idea that my acquired skills with Italian food were going to be my passport into the stomach, and hence the heart, of a skinny
paesano
from Hoboken whose music I wrote off as white-boy stuff for silly screaming white girls. My favorites at the time were Herb Jeffries and Billy Eckstine. Everyone said I resembled the latter, which I took as the ultimate compliment, so much so that I developed delusions of becoming a singer just like Billy once I got home. By 1947, I was one sophisticated gentleman. I had seen the Colosseum, the Parthenon, the Eiffel Tower. I could say courtly things in three foreign languages. I thought I was some kind of
boulevardier,
a black Maurice Chevalier. It took coming home to New Orleans after learning that my father had been shot to death to bring me back to earth.

I was on a tour of duty on an aircraft carrier in Korea when I found out. My commanding officer called me in, offered me a cigarette, and told me to sit down. What did I do wrong, I asked. Your father’s been murdered, he told me, and I fell apart. It got worse when I arrived in New Orleans. I went to police headquarters, where I was told that Dad had been putting out Coke bottles one morning after closing time at his Joy Tavern when two robbers riddled him with bullets. “Why?” I asked. “Your father acted like a white man,”
one officer said. “My father
is
a white man!” I shot back, as if Dad were still alive. I was lucky they didn’t book me. I did some sleuthing and found out Dad had been killed, not in a robbery as the police had put down, but for not having paid protection money to a racket of which the police were a key part. Dad had been ambushed in a back alley by two contract killers the cops had sprung from Angola Prison. He ran away down an alley, trying to get to safety inside a neighbor’s house, but the neighbor refused to open his back door. My father was executed, gangland style. I was so furious at the police, the neighbors, the whole rotten system that I decided never to set foot in New Orleans again. I was too upset, too angry, even to visit Dad’s grave.

I married my high school sweetheart Dorothy Pasley, who had lived across the railroad tracks from us in our mixed black and Italian neighborhood called Girt Town, on the edge of the French Quarter. Dad had liked Dorothy, and that had meant a lot to me. Luckily, given the way I had come to hate New Orleans, Dorothy had a father in Los Angeles, which was where my mother and stepfather, a Pullman porter who was one of the most elegant men I had ever met, were just moving. After the war, the West was seen as the Promised Land, with the prospect of good jobs and fresh starts. There was a big Louisiana contingent in Watts, which was supposed to be the Los Angeles ghetto. But it was a ghetto with palm trees and night-blooming jasmine and perfect weather; it wasn’t Harlem by any means.

Dorothy had only seen her father once every few years and had never visited him in California before we arrived there. We were both surprised by what we encountered. Chick Pasley had left Dorothy’s mother and come to L.A. in the midthirties. He had prospered there. Like my stepfather, he was an elegant guy, with gorgeous clothes and diamond stickpins. He was also a big-time pimp, sending his beautiful mulatto girls to see white movie stars at the Beverly Hills Hotel
and the Beverly Wilshire. Chick lived in high style in a huge house at the corner of Western and Jefferson. He had three Cadillacs. For all the luxury around us, Chick’s mansion didn’t seem to be the best place to start a family. I quickly found us a little apartment in Watts. Chick was delighted that I was getting Dorothy out of the house, and he never suggested I join him and his brothers in the “family business.” In fairly short order we had three kids, two boys, George Jr. and Rene, and a girl, Brenda, whom I had to figure out how to support, by legal means, which proved not to be so easy in the Promised Land.

For all my naval spit and polish, the best first job I could get was as a gardener in Beverly Hills, which made the Garden District back home look like Harlem. I had never seen mansions like these. Beverly Hills was a small town then, the nicest small town in the world, where people rode their horses down Rodeo Drive, your neighbors were people like Clark Gable and Gary Cooper, and the pink palace that was the Beverly Hills Hotel was the town clubhouse. Still, I was a lowly servant. None of whatever skills I had were being utilized, nor did I have a particularly green thumb. Luckily, the garden belonged to a powerful lawyer named David Tannenbaum, who quickly upgraded me to a process server in his firm, Pacht, Tannenbaum, and Ross, at the corner of Roxbury and Wilshire. I was the only black guy in the office, or in the entire office building, for that matter.

The patriarch of the firm, Judge Isaac Pacht, was a true pillar of the Jewish community, and he represented a large number of the stars of the day. One of my first assignments was to serve some papers on Ingrid Bergman, who was scandalizing the world by leaving her Swedish husband for the Italian director Roberto Rossellini. I caught her at the airport just before she was to get on a plane. I never saw so much icy venom in anyone’s eyes. That was my first lesson that stars were real people and not perfect, happy gods and goddesses, though Ingrid Bergman resembled one until you got up close. I also met Aly
Khan and Rita Hayworth, who were renting one of the several houses the Tannenbaums owned in the hills. Khan was not only Hollywood royalty, but world royalty, my first genuine prince. His father, the Aga Khan, was the ruler of a vast Muslim sect, though his son, who was a world-famous playboy, didn’t seem spiritual at all. There were champagne bottles all over the house, and he and Rita Hayworth were constantly screaming at each other and smashing furniture, which Mr. Tanenbaum would send me up to replace.

My wife Dorothy was much less impressed by, or even interested in, this world of fame and fortune than I was. She had a job at a Brother Sewing Machine store on Crenshaw Boulevard and couldn’t understand why I didn’t get a “normal” job in Watts, too. Aside from our childhoods in Louisiana, we didn’t have much in common, and our interests grew further apart the longer we stayed in L.A., a place I loved, because of how different it was from where we came from, and she didn’t, because, to her, there was no place like home. And that’s exactly where she went in 1953, taking our kids with her and remarrying with disastrous results for her and our children. But that came later.

Meanwhile I began taking singing lessons, courtesy of the GI Bill, at the Westlake College of Music above a shady place called the Bimini Bathhouse on Vermont Avenue in Hollywood. My teacher had taught Scatman Crothers, so I figured the place must be all right. At nights I would hang out at the jazz clubs on Central Avenue, places like the Club Alabam, the Downbeat, the Jungle Room and the Bird in the Basket, where I’d hear people like Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, and Miles Davis, whose lady worked at a hamburger stand I went to near Beverly Hills that served blacks, mostly servants to the stars. The Central Avenue scene was a hot one, kind of seedy, with lots of pimps, whores, and dealers, but it reminded me of New Orleans. Stars would come slumming here with their Cadillacs
parked outside. I saw Cesar Romero, and Alan Ladd, and one night at the Jungle Room there were Aly and Rita, drinking and fighting. I worried for a second about losing my job if I spoke to them, then I said, what the hell, and came up and said hello, and Aly bought me two rounds of drinks.

I was so starstruck from being in Los Angeles (who wasn’t, except for my wife?) that I also began auditioning to be an extra in the movies. I did get a few parts; unfortunately, they were all nearly identical. I was cast as a restless African native in some cheesy MGM
Tarzan
knockoffs. We all had the same one line: “Ungawa!” Whatever, I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Here I was, George Jacobs, a prince, if not the king, of the jungle. I was in pictures! I was on the MGM lot! I was going places! Thus bitten by the Hollywood bug, I looked for other ways to get inside the business. One way I found was to work for a caterer who did the Hollywood party circuit. As it turned out, I was just the man for the job. I’m not sure whether it was inspired by
Gone With the Wind
or by Eddie “Rochester” Anderson on
The Jack Benny Show
, but Southern black manservants were highly in vogue in Beverly Hills. They had far more cachet than an English butler or a French maid. The bottom line was that I immediately got a lot of work as a waiter at all the best parties.

The best of the best were those of Bill and Edie Goetz, whom Frank Sinatra came to idolize. In the early 1950s, the Goetzes would have been unlikely to have Frank Sinatra in their house, even as entertainment. Even when they were young (they were barely around forty then), they were that grand. “Whatever Edie wants, Edie Goetz,” was the line on her. Propelled by his father-in-law, Bill Goetz had run 20th Century-Fox during the war and now was the kingpin at Universal. Their mansion in Holmby Hills was filled with more French Impressionist paintings, Renoirs, Monets, Cézannes, than the Louvre. The décor was all original furniture by Billy Haines, the preemi
nent decorator to the stars. There was a staircase grander than the one in Tara. A Toulouse-Lautrec covered the projector in the living room; a Gauguin covered what became the screen, on which would be shown movies months before they were released. The food was by a French chef they were said to have hired away from Maxim’s in Paris, and every menu at every place setting was written by hand. Edie, followed by Doris Warner, had been the most eligible girl in Hollywood (Frank Sinatra would hold on to an awful crush on her for years), and I wondered how Bill Goetz, who was a sweet guy who cracked awful vaudeville jokes that he learned from his idol Al Jolson, had beaten out every other ambitious Jewish suitor in the business for the hand of the ultimate princess. The answer, I observed, is that he paid an inhuman amount of attention to her, and she ate up every iota of it. In contrast to Aly and Rita, Bill and Edie were always hugging, kissing, stroking each other’s hands and back. For the two decades I knew them, they stayed like lovestruck kids. The staff called them “the Snoogies,” because “Snoogie” was each one’s pet name for the other. “I love you, Snoogie. I love you even more, Snoogie. Oh, no, Snoogie, you can’t love me more than I love you.” And on and on. Anyone who says that Hollywood romance is a big fake obviously never saw the Goetzes in action. Theirs was the genuine article.

I saw every big star at the Goetzes, Fred Astaire, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, old legends like Marion Davies and Gloria Swanson, directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, Broadway icons Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin, and a weird dwarfish man with huge eyeglasses and very dapper English-cut clothes who kept staring at me as if I looked equally as weird as he did. I was kind of self-conscious about the livery I was forced to wear, and I tried to get out of the dwarf’s line of vision, but he kept stalking me around the Goetz palace, out into the formal gardens, wherever I was serving drinks. And then he disap
peared. I thought nothing more of it until, a few weeks later, I was browsing at a record store in Beverly Hills at the corner of Charleville and Beverly Drive, when the dwarf reappeared, looking at me through the window. This time he came into the shop, and without asking my name, he introduced himself as Irving Paul Lazar and said, without the slightest possibility that I might have an opinion in the matter, “You’re coming to work for me.” The time was late 1950.