Mr. S (6 page)

O
NE
of the nicest things about Swifty Lazar was that he didn’t hold a grudge, at least not if the person who had done him wrong was more powerful than he was. I thought I’d never be able to face Lazar at the apartment house, but the next time I saw him he was all smiles. He took Frank’s “stealing” me with the same good humor he took Frank’s walling up his closet. Not one snide remark, like “I hope you’re satisfied.” Or “I hope you’re enjoying these Jersey
goombahs
as much as you did Noël Coward.” Or “I’m leaving for Switzerland tomorrow and Irwin Shaw is so disappointed you won’t be making it to the slopes with us.” He could have, but he didn’t. He put on a great face, though he did seem a little lost for a long time, going through a lot of new help. The main reason he didn’t complain was that Frank Sinatra, with the huge success of
Eternity,
was quickly getting just as
hot as he had been cold, and I’m sure Lazar wanted to work this former “loser” into one of his big deals.

My first day working for Frank was very exciting. When I opened his apartment door, I was surprised he needed a valet at all, the place was so immaculately neat. I knew he had tried a Filipino houseboy a few months before, but the fellow hadn’t lasted a week. Sinatra wanted someone who spoke his language. The five-room, two-bedroom unit was a shrine to Ava Gardner. There were pictures of her everywhere, in the bathrooms, in the closet, on the refrigerator. There were a couple of framed photographs of his children and of his parents but none of his ex-wife Nancy. Aside from one bookcase, almost all biographies (Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Booker T. Washington, and a lot of Italians—Columbus, da Vinci, Machiavelli, Garibaldi, Mussolini), most of his possessions were records and clothes. There was a whole wall of sound, though it wasn’t all jazz as I would have guessed, but albums and albums of classical music.

The closets were in perfect order, with all the clothes organized by color, fabric, and style. Most of the colors were orange (his favorite) or black. I figured the guy wanted to come off like a tiger. There were more sweaters than I’d ever seen, cashmere, mohair, lamb’s wool, alpaca, you name it. And as for shoes, Imelda Marcos had nothing on Frank Sinatra. He had a whole closet just for shoes, dozens of wingtips predominating, with a good number of elevators. No wonder he seemed taller than his given five seven. There were also a lot of hats, which seemed odd for casual Los Angeles, but because of a receding hairline, hats had become his thing, just as they were Humphrey Bogart’s. It was clear from his wardrobe that he had been keeping his eye on Bogart, because a lot of Sinatra’s clothes were identical to Bogart’s. The biggest surprise in the apartment was the
industrial supply of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. I had no idea the man was a gum chewer, like his original teenage fans, but he was.

What I did, waiting for my new boss to arrive, was to go shopping and prepare him a great dinner. I figured, with him being Italian, I should cook Italian, so I made baked clams, spaghetti marinara, veal marsala, zabaglione, the works that I had learned in my travels. After working for hours, I had everything ready at seven o’clock. Everything, that is, except Frank Sinatra. Eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten, the hours went by without an appearance, without a call. I thought about calling Gloria Lovell and asking her where he was, but I didn’t want to be a pest, not on my first day. By one in the morning I gave up. I cleared off the table, wrapped up everything that was wrappable, put it in the empty refrigerator and went home at two in the morning. I was really depressed. I felt like I had been stood up on the date of a lifetime.

I reported to work the next day at one
P.M
. Gloria Lovell told me that Mr. Sinatra never woke up before two except when he was shooting a movie, and that coming in any earlier would disturb him. Imagine my surprise when I found him fully dressed, drinking coffee, smoking a Lucky Strike, and listening to what I learned was his favorite composer, Puccini. I was embarrassed that I was late. One more strike and I would be out. But he was as nice as could be. He apologized, without further explanation, for being “tied up” the night before.

There with him was a motherly black woman named Hazel Washington, who had been his regular maid for the year or so he had lived in the apartment and came twice a week. Hazel’s husband was a Los Angeles police department officer who would rise to be a commander on the force, while Hazel herself would go on to work for Marilyn Monroe. Hazel showed me the ropes concerning the apartment, where everything was, which sheets and towels to use, all the
housekeeping stuff. She told me which markets to use, where to get the right kind of Italian bread, the right coffee, the right milk, and where to stock up on Campbell’s Franks and Beans, which was Mr. S’s favorite snack, one that he ate cold right out of the can. That was so disgusting, I thought, no wonder the guy was going downhill. I made him a beautiful steak for lunch, which he asked me to cook some more until it was medium, not rare. He thanked me for how delicious it was, though he only ate a few bites. Hazel told me not to take it personally. Mr. S was not a big eater. How did I think he stayed so skinny?

That night he took me over to Carolwood Drive near Sunset to meet his family. He drove us in his Cadillac Brougham Coupe, black body, silver top. He also had a Chevy station wagon, a woody like the surfers all drove. It was odd, after driving Swifty Lazar for years, to be driven by Mr. S. He insisted on driving, loved to drive. It was also odd being introduced to his ex-wife Nancy, who didn’t seem ex at all. The house was a typical Beverly Hills five-bedroom sprawling fifties ranch-style affair, though a lot of the furnishings were of the more rococo New Jersey style. In fact, the house looked as if Mr. S still lived there. There was a predominant bright orange and black color scheme, and countless family pictures everywhere, with Mr. S in all of them. A big meal had been laid out for us, and Mr. S was like a little boy who had just gotten out of camp coming home for a home-cooked dinner.

Nancy, Big Nancy as she was called, as opposed to Little Nancy, who was just turning thirteen, wasn’t Hollywood at all. I couldn’t imagine her in the same room as Swifty Lazar, or even the same town. She was warm and down home, and took an hour in the kitchen after dinner while Frank played with the kids telling me exactly how he liked everything. The correct way to prepare the paper-thin steaks and pork chops, the scrambled-egg sandwiches, the
bread to be sautéed in Italian, never Spanish, olive oil, the soft, never crisp, bacon he wanted for breakfast. She emphasized his disinterest in most vegetables, except for eggplant parmigiana and roasted peppers, and precisely which brands of pasta were acceptable, how many minutes to cook each, and how much salt to put in the water. Finally, of course, that marinara sauce, with the Italian plum tomatoes, crushed just so, and the prescribed balance of garlic, parsley, and oil. It was food chemistry a la Nancy.

Big Nancy was so maternal to Frank, she seemed like his mother rather than his wife, and I could see how the bull-in-a-china-shop boy in him could get tempted by the sirens of the movie business. There was nothing “bad” about Big Nancy, and, alas, that wasn’t good. Something about her even made
me
feel guilty about being with her husband, as if I were at work destroying their happy home. And I had not even begun to party with the guy. It was what the Catholics call a Madonna/whore thing. Big Nancy was like the Virgin Mary, and the whores, well, I had no idea at the time. I sensed absolutely no resentment on Big Nancy’s part over having lost her husband to the sleazy lure of showbiz, only resignation to the reality of the situation.

The whole scene was sad, because it was such an adorable family. There was a fat old black woman who had been with the family for years as a nanny to the kids, though Nancy rarely left them alone. She was an old-fashioned, lovingly hands-on mom. Little Nancy, Frank Jr., who was ten and the spitting image of his dad but so, so shy, and Tina, a doll at five, all seemed thrilled to see their father, who usually came by once a week. Yet there was something “special event” about these occasions, like papal visits. Mr. S was very touchy and huggy with the kids. He truly loved them, and always arrived with either toys, gifts, or, as they got older, money. But at the same time the situation was awkward, especially the goodbye part. The kids never
begged him to stay, but their longing expressions conveyed the powerful message, and it hurt. Driving back to the apartment, Mr. S looked down. I told him how much I liked his family, and all he could say was, “I know, I know.” He would call them every single day, wherever he might be, at six o’clock just before their dinner, and be the best telephone father there ever was.

I often went over to the Carolwood house on my own, to do errands, deliver presents, drive the kids somewhere. They seemed so excited to see me, as if I were a surrogate dad, bombarding me with questions about what their real dad was up to. The kids rarely came over to the apartment, which was Mr. S’s “bachelor pad” and which he didn’t want them to see. When they came down to Palm Springs, he made me get rid of all evidence of whatever women visitors had been around. Dates were off-limits whenever the kids were there. Mr. S was very prudish and old-fashioned in thinking he could shield his children from his reputation and reality as the world’s biggest playboy.

I also got to know and like Big Nancy, who was in reality more prudish than her ex-husband pretended to be. There was no way she would ever get remarried, or even go on a date. The closest was Cesar Romero, who looked like the handsomest Latin lover in the movies, but in reality was totally gay. In what
Confidential
magazine might have tried to sensationalize as a
ménage à trois
, Cesar would take Big Nancy and her best friend Barbara Stanwyck out to Chasen’s once a week, though the reality was about as naughty as a bridge club. The friendship with Stanwyck was pretty ironic. The main thing the women had in common was that each had lost her husband to Ava Gardner. Stanwyck had been married to Robert Taylor when he succumbed to Ava’s charms in 1948. The Taylor-Gardner affair, which was consummated at the house of Taylor’s mother, never approached the mad passion of the union with Sinatra, but for the ex-wives, the result was the same. Still, I never heard Nancy utter one unkind word
about Ava. She was a very classy lady, some might say a saint, and her sacrificial goodness instilled in Mr. S a nagging guilt he was deeply uncomfortable talking about. One thing, however, he would never say was that he regretted having married Nancy.

I realized that Frank and I had a lot in common, a divorce and three kids, though my Dorothy wasn’t anything like the sweetheart that Big Nancy was. With any other boss, I might have felt it was presumptuous to compare my situation with his. But something about Mr. S was so vulnerable, so real, at least at that stage of his life, that it wasn’t long before I let him know how much my own situation allowed me to relate to his. He could have easily said, George, don’t you go dumping your real world onto mine, but he didn’t. I struck a chord in him that made him open up about the deep frustrations he was feeling, loving his family, loving Ava Gardner, and loving his career all at the same time—none of them were giving him an easy time of it.

But at the beginning of my job with him, the thing he would most talk about with me was work. That was almost always in the forefront of his mind. In what would become a continual aspect of my working for Sinatra, we’d sit and play cards late into the night, and he’d drink “Jack” (Daniel’s) and obsess about his career. He was on the comeback trail, though he didn’t feel he was home free again by any means. As far as he was concerned, his career was still up in the air. Although
Eternity
was doing big box office, Oscar nominations had not been tallied, and Mr. S still did not have his next film job. He thought he had, but he had been screwed, which had made him as insecure as ever, teetering on the brink of celluloid oblivion.

The first (of many) people I would see Frank Sinatra hate was the man who went on to be considered one of the grandest of all Hollywood producers, Sam Spiegel. One day I arrived to see the living room half destroyed. Two lamps had been knocked over, broken glass was covering the floor. At first I thought there had been a burglary,
until I began cleaning up and found the remnants of several drafts of a script entitled
On the Waterfront
by Budd Schulberg, who I knew had written the nastiest novel about Hollywood sleazebags,
What Makes Sammy Run?
I found Mr. S in bed nursing several bad paper cuts on his hands, which he got ripping up the script. He apologized for flipping out and told me he had just lost the role of a lifetime and that he had been fucked over by the worst real Sammy Glick in the business, Sammy Spiegel. I said, hey, you just had the role of a lifetime in
From Here to Eternity,
and he said, very dejectedly, this one’s a role for
two
lifetimes. Then he went into a tirade against Sam Spiegel that lasted for the next couple of weeks.

Sam Spiegel was the Mike Romanoff of producers, a European con man and ex-jailbird who went on to fool all of the people all of the time. He was the total caricature of the fat cat movie mogul, gold chains, big cigar, pinky rings, “Frankie baby” this and “Frankie baby” that. He was always surrouded with beautiful women, whom he graciously dispatched to his friends, or whomever he wanted to sell something to. He seemed like a joke. Yet he was the real deal. He had made, and would continue to make, some of the greatest classic movies,
The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia.

One of the many people Spiegel fooled was Mr. Doubting Thomas himself, Frank Sinatra. Spiegel had promised Sinatra the part of the tormented, poetic hoodlum Terry Malloy in his upcoming production of
On the Waterfront.
Spiegel had hyped Sinatra to kingdom come, promising that Maggio might get him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but that Malloy was guaranteed to garner him the Best Actor statuette, ensuring Sinatra’s career literally from here to eternity. Spiegel had brought home the Oscar bacon for Sinatra’s idol Bogart in
The African Queen.
Now Sinatra was trusting Spiegel to do it for him. Sinatra naturally wanted to believe Spiegel, who assured him time and again what a great, natural, earthy, and real thespian he was,
how he was the symbol of the working man, the voice of the people, and that there was no other actor in the world who could do justice to this part of parts. The film was going to be shot in Hoboken. “For Chrissakes,” Spiegel said, “you
are
Hoboken!”