Mr. S (14 page)

He did, nevertheless, have a close call with Lauren Bacall. He called her Betty and she called him Francis, and they were virtually brother and sister. The Bogarts, almost alone in Hollywood, had taken Mr. S in when he was an orphan of the storm. Since they were the dream couple of the silver screen, their acceptance of Frank was not only rebellious, in the snotty, superficial Hollywood social scene; it also validated Mr. S, who, strange as it may seem, was desperate to be
accepted by this snotty, superficial, largely Jewish world. He was the kid with his nose pressed against the glass of this candy store of fame. Once they let him in, he may have smashed all that glass, but he wanted in, nonetheless, in the worst way. Because he worshipped everything about Humphrey Bogart, Mr. S wasn’t going to stop with his wife, but I think he worshipped Bogart enough to keep his impulsive lust in check. I say I
think,
because as Mr. S himself often said, “a hard dick has no conscience,” and, whenever he and Betty would be alone together at the house for some innocent reason, like picking up a script or showing her a painting, he would usually send me away. But I’d bet he was loyal to Bogart, if no one else.

When Bogart got sick in 1956, Mr. S was devastated. It wasn’t just sick, it was a death sentence. It started with a simple smoker’s cough, and turned out to be esophageal cancer. That really hit Mr. S where he lived. Like Bogart, Mr. S smoked and drank as if there would be no tomorrow. Now for his idol, there wouldn’t be. They hadn’t established the connection between smoking, alcohol, and cancer back then. The health experts who sounded the alarm were regarded by lay people as crackpots, almost un-American. Smoking was as American as apple pie. Drinking was the dream of the leisure class. Mr. S thought Bogart was indestructible, and now that he saw his idol was mortal, it made him realize so was he, that maybe the health nuts were onto something. But instead of sobering up and stubbing out, Mr. S went on a multiyear binge that never stopped. I guess you call it denial.

Bogart suffered for over a year, slowly wasting away. It started as indigestion, heartburn, but what bon vivant didn’t have that? Eventually, they did exploratory surgery and discovered the malignancy. Betty broke the news to Frank, who was shocked but confident the doctors would cure his friend. Bogie, the ultimate tough guy, was too tough for the Big C. The night before the first big operation to cut
out the cancer, Mr. S gave a party for some of the old Rat Pack at the new Bowmont house, Swifty, Romanoff, the Nivens. Everybody drank and smoked like crazy, including Bogie, all laughing at death. Alas, death got the last laugh, though Mr. S’s way of cheering Bogie up was to sit and smoke and drink with him until the bitter end.

Mr. S was badly shaken up watching Bogie waste away, despite the catered meals from Romanoff’s and Chasen’s, which the poor guy couldn’t swallow, despite Bogie’s “fuck it” courage. He dressed in his cashmere jackets and ascots until the end. It was so sad how shrunken he became. He was like a little marionette, whom they would roll out to say goodbye to his legion of pals. He was only fifty-eight when he died in early 1957. Like Swifty Lazar, Mr. S had a thing about germs and hospitals, though not so far as to put towels on the floor. He was obsessively clean, hated when people sneezed and coughed around him, avoided hospitals like, well, hospitals. Like Lazar, Sinatra also would shower at least four times a day, always after a girl, always before meeting someone, sometimes just for the cleanliness of it. But Swifty was much more neurotic than Mr. S. Swifty never went to the hospital when Bogie was dying, but Mr. S bravely showed up, just as he did with Sammy Davis Jr. after his car wreck. He loved the guys, and friendship came before any phobias. Nevertheless, Mr. S never concealed his problems with the institutional part of illness. “I much prefer visiting prisons,” he said. “Not even close.” One of the main reasons Betty kept Bogie at home until the bitter end was so that he could see his adored Swifty and Francis.

After Bogart died, it was only natural that Betty, who was thirty-three at the time, would spend a lot of time with Mr. S, who was forty-two, picking up the pieces. And it was only natural, knowing Mr. S and his libido, that he would try to sleep with her. It was like night following day, the most natural thing in the world, to make love to a beautiful woman. But because he loved Bogie so much, there was
always that heavy guilt number, both for Mr. S and for Betty. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” took on ominous meaning. Bogie was up in heaven, or wherever, looking at his two “kids.” He may not have been thrilled at what he saw. Talk about Catholic shame. Poor Mr. S was totally conflicted. I remember how nervous he was the first time he took Betty out in public, to a closed-circuit showing of a Sugar Ray Robinson championship fight. With his father being an ex-boxer, Mr. S loved the fights. I’m not sure about Betty, who was more a theatre girl. Afterward, the press was all over them, and he was sorry he had “gone public” with Betty. But he kept going, to the gala openings of his new movies
The Joker Is Wild,
and
Pal Joey,
to his concerts at the Sands.

Like Mia Farrow, Lauren Bacall was Hollywood “class,” and Mr. S craved class like a junkie craves a needle. And Betty seemed to crave Mr. S’s Life, after having to deal with death for such a long time. Still, Betty Bacall may have confused sex and love. Mr. S was confused, too. Maybe he
did
love her. Then again, maybe he didn’t. Aside from the ghost of Bogie, she had baggage, two kids, her own career. Mr. S hated careers, if they conflicted with his happiness. Ava’s was bad enough. Moreover, Betty was jealous of Ava and the continuing trance she had put Frank in. Even for Lauren Bacall, Ava Gardner was a tough act to follow. Who wouldn’t be jealous, given Frank still called Ava every week, had his bedrooms festooned with her photos. But logic didn’t matter. Betty was supposed to suppress these troublesome emotions. Mr. S wanted his women to be hassle-free, which, of course, would never be possible.

Betty came over to the Bowmont house far more often than Frank went over there. The idea of his sleeping in Bogie’s bed was probably too much for either of them. He did stay over on occasion. He’d call me in the morning to bring him a new set of clothes. Mr. S didn’t even want to make the ten-minute drive between the two houses in old clothes. He was that meticulous. Even though Betty had seen me around for years,
and she knew that
I
knew what was going on, she never confided in me as did so many of Mr. S’s other ladies. Maybe she was embarrassed to have to deal with me. In fact she rarely spent an entire night on Bowmont, always leaving before dawn. The whole affair didn’t even seem like an affair, it was conducted so discreetly. “Just friends,” was how both Frank and Betty described it to their friends.

Whatever it was, the Sinatra-Bacall romance was played out on a tightrope, without a net. It took Swifty Lazar to push them off. When Mr. S wasn’t around, Swifty was Betty’s other constant companion. He may have had his own lustful thoughts, but his own self-esteem, where females were concerned, was so low that he couldn’t act on them. If he couldn’t pay, he couldn’t play. At one point, Mr. S had said, to hell with it, let’s get married, to Betty over dinner at the Imperial Gardens on Sunset, a sliding-screen, very private Japanese restaurant that had replaced Preston Sturges’s Players Club on the site. The first person she told was best friend Swifty, who was so jealous the first person
he
told was gossip queen Louella Parsons, who put it in her column and told the world. I’m not sure how seriously Mr. S even meant his proposal. He might have just said it in an offhand way. He didn’t give Betty the big ring, or anything like it. That would have been a characteristic grand Sinatra gesture on such a momentous occasion. But he didn’t make it. He hadn’t told anyone else, certainly not Big Nancy, who was deeply hurt, for both herself and the kids, when she read about it in the papers.

Whether it was a real proposal or not, Mr. S flipped out. He had enough guilt from Bogie up above. He couldn’t take any more from Big Nancy down here. He took the firestorm as an omen that he was doing the Wrong Thing. When in doubt, get out, was his credo. He blamed Betty much more than he blamed Swifty, arguing that she was using Swifty to create publicity to shame him into going to the altar. If we’re engaged, we have to go through with it, right? Wrong.
From
fait accompli
to party’s over in one phone call. They had been dating nearly a year, and he dumped her over the phone. That was as ruthless as I had seen Frank Sinatra at that point in our relationship. I was taken aback at the cold way he cut Betty, whom he had truly cared about, completely dead. I had no idea that one day he would treat me the exact same way.

I felt awful for Betty, who had enjoyed such a classic romance with Bogie. Perhaps only one of these in a lifetime was all anyone could expect. By the same token, Mr. S could only have one grand passion in his life, and that was Ava. Betty, who had gotten spoiled by Bogie, simply wanted more than Frank could give her. Mr. S desperately tried to copy Bogart in every way, but when it came to loving Betty, the mold had been broken.

Not only did Mr. S now turn against Betty Bacall, he turned
on
her. He called her “the Jew bitch.” He complained to his buddies how spoiled she was, how cold, how badly she kissed, and, worst of all among his friends, that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t, give a blow job. “All she does is whistle,” Mr. S said, nastily referring to Bacall’s famous suggestive line in her first film,
To Have and Have Not.
Cocksucking, in this group, was considered the highest feminine art. To fail here was to be less than a woman. Curiously, Mr. S did
not
turn on Swifty Lazar for dropping the marriage bomb to Louella. They had a “guy thing” going that transcended the slings and arrows of romance. Lazar remained Sinatra’s friend, though Sinatra never ceased loving to play nasty practical jokes on him.
Nobody
in the Sinatra circle seemed to stand up for poor Betty. I guess if they had, they’d have been excommunicated from the group. The party line was that pushy Betty tried to pressure a harried Frank into a marriage he didn’t want.

I had never seen the famously courtly Mr. S be so vicious about any woman, not even the whores he would pay off and ship out because they were wearing too much makeup or cheap perfume. He was turning
on his dear friend, his idol’s widow. Even if they weren’t really engaged, she was his girlfriend. It wasn’t as if she was some publicity hound, or some nutty fan trying to get knocked up. But for some reason, he treated her as one, and it was ugly. He must have fallen harder for her than he cared to admit, so he reacted violently in the other direction. He wouldn’t even speak to her again for many years. That was the first time that Mr. S showed a side that frightened me. It proved to be an early warning sign of the volcanic eruptions that were on the way.

M
R.
S had entertained so many gangster types in his Palm Springs compound that I assumed the wiry, freckly bespectacled man who spoke in long A’s was another pillar of the underworld. I had met Italian gangsters and Jewish gangsters. Why not an Irish gangster? Mr. S certainly rolled out the red carpet for him, five fantastic hookers flown down from Vegas, and a whole staff of waiters and maids in starched gray uniforms, some from Watts, others he had me round up from the Indian reservation in the Coachella Valley. We had a lot of bedrooms, though if we ever got too crowded the hookers would double up and bunk together. They’d see the guests in the guests’ bedrooms, so space was never a problem. When they weren’t “in session,” the girls would swim in the pool, work on their tans, eat and drink like any other guests. Mr. S wouldn’t stand for orgies on his
property. He was too much of a neat freak. The orgies he left to Jimmy Van Heusen. Let the girls destroy
his
place, that was Sinatra’s attitude. We treated them as honored guests, not hookers. They just got paid when they went home.

The hospitality that was laid out on that weekend was truly extraordinary. Even Sam Giancana didn’t get this kind of treatment. Nor did Mr. Sam
give
the abuse this seventy-year-old guy, whom Sinatra called Mr. Ambassador, heaped on all of us. He not only told nigger jokes throughout the meals, he’d call the Indians “savages” and the blacks “Sambos” and curse the hell out of anyone who served him from the wrong side or put one ice cube too many in his Jack Daniel’s. “Can’t you get any
white
help?” he’d needle Mr. S. “Aren’t they
paying
you enough?” After one day, only the hookers remained, except for one the abusive bastard tried to brand with his Cohiba. Mr. S had me give her five hundred dollars for her trouble and let her go. The blacks went back to Watts, the Indians to the reservation. Leaving me to be the sole whipping boy of the man who may have held a Harvard degree, but was a disgrace to it, cruder and meaner and, alas, proving crime
does
pay, more successful than any of the street mobsters that Mr. S ever hosted. Such was the father of our country’s most captivating president. Mr. Ambassador, if anyone had the guts to spit in his face, a bravery that my boss sadly lacked, should have been called Mr. Asshole.

Joseph Kennedy was, if anything, crueler about Jews than he was about blacks. As a guy who once owned a Hollywood studio (RKO), he must have had a tough time with his competition. To him they were “Sheenie rag traders.” He referred to the august Louis B. Mayer as a “kike junkman.” The Jewish jokes didn’t stop. The worst one I can recall: “What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza doesn’t cry on its way to the oven.” Poor Mr. S, having to sit through this, having to force a smile when he should have thrown the
guy out to the coyotes. The antisemitism was shocking, yet it was nothing new. I was too young to remember Joseph Kennedy’s craven appeasement of Adolf Hitler when he was Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, a position, like every other, he was said to have bought. I was even younger when he had made his illegal fortune as a bootlegger in Prohibition and as an insider trader on Wall Street before it was illegal and, ironically, before Roosevelt made him head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Because everybody loved JFK, we have mythologized his family into our American aristocracy and our image of Joe Kennedy is that of a Boston Brahmin patriarch. That’s about as far off the mark as saying JFK was faithful to Jackie. Joe was mobbed up to his fancy collar pins, with Sam Giancana at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, the world’s biggest building that he owned; with Meyer Lansky at the Hialeah racetrack in Miami; with the one-armed bandit Wingy Grober at the Cal-Neva Lodge in Tahoe. If anyone’s fortune was tainted, it was that of Mr. Ambassador, whose name was a joke, in that his term in London had made him the disgrace of the diplomatic corps. His bet on Hitler was the wrong horse of his lifetime, derailing and making a mockery of his ambitions to succeed his money beneficiary Roosevelt as president. But Joe Kennedy knew Americans had short memories. He still wanted that top office. If he couldn’t buy it for himself, he would buy it for one of his sons. And, in Mr. Ambassador’s octopus-like master plan, that’s where Mr. Sinatra came in. In view of Kennedy’s Midas touch in business, in view of his endless triumphs, Mr. S worshipped Joe Kennedy’s brute force. He could be a shitheel, because, as Mr. S said, he’d “earned the right.” His money was fuck-you money. Old Joe said fuck you to everyone. Sinatra respected his arrogance. Here was a poor Mick, a street guy who had “passed” for class, getting into Harvard, buying his way into government, laundering his entire image. He was the embodiment of the
Great American Success Story. Kennedy was a drug dealer of the high known as success, and Frank Sinatra was a hardcore addict.

By 1958 Frank Sinatra was so successful in movies and music, that even taking control of the business side of show business looked as if it might be too limiting to the juggernaut he was on. What else could there be for the Man Who Had Everything? The answer was power, political power, and crafty old Joe Kennedy knew just how to play to Mr. S’s vanity, as well as to his massive insecurity. The road to power would be his road to respect, and that road was the road to the White House in 1960. He dangled ambassador to Italy, he threw out the idea of senator from Nevada. These were the days when the only song-and-dance man to hold major office was Gentleman Jimmy Walker, the mayor of New York (who was forced to resign in a massive corruption scandal). This was before George Murphy, before Ronald Reagan. But to his credit, Joe Kennedy saw it coming. And even if he didn’t he was a brilliant enough salesman to put a restless and ravenous Frank Sinatra under his Harvard-cloaked snake-oil sell.

The seeds of Mr. S’s interest in politics that Joe Kennedy so cleverly cultivated had been planted in him as a boy by his mother, Dolly. “If you serve your country, you serve yourself,” Dolly said while explaining to me why she got involved in local government in Hoboken. Right after she married Marty and before Frank was born in 1915, she became a ward heeler in Hoboken’s Third Ward, rounding up Democratic votes from new Italian immigrants in return for Dolly’s help with papers, welfare, whatever the government could do for them. Dolly was a natural for this because of her great language skills. In addition to her perfect English, she spoke numerous Italian dialects, from her own Genoese to Marty’s Sicilian. She also spoke good old Jersey “fuck-ese.” I’ve never heard a woman curse like Dolly. “Fuck you, you fucking asshole son of a bitch fucking bastard moth
erfucker,” was a typical Dolly sentence. It probably came in handy when she needed to muscle up votes or favors.

Quickly Dolly became indispensable to the Irish politicians who ran the town. They even got her a job as the official court interpreter for the off-the-boat Italians, whom she would then convince to vote the Democratic ticket. Dolly loved her political work so much that, even after Frank was born, she continued to do it full-time, not to mention her after-hours midwifery, which she also translated into still more Democratic votes. Little Frank would be left in the day care of Dolly’s Old World mother. He often spoke to Dolly fondly of Grandma, which might explain his own Old World courtliness to the fairer sex. His mother’s absence on behalf of the Democratic Party had made a big impression on little Mr. S. He would not forget it, hence his near-religious admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose signed photo held a place of honor in the Bowmont house. There was thus an actual tradition of the Sinatras and the Irish working together for the Democratic cause. What Mr. S would now do was to elevate this tradition from the slums of Hoboken to the White House.

By 1958 Mr. S had pretty much played out his hand in movies. After winning his Supporting Oscar for
Eternity,
he hoped to go all the way and get the Big One, but it didn’t happen. His best effort and best shot was playing the junkie gambler Frankie Machine in
The Man with the Golden Arm.
He got a 1955 Best Actor nomination but lost to Ernest Borgnine in
Marty.
He couldn’t hold it against Borgnine, Borgnine had played Fatso, who had killed Maggio in
Eternity,
and by doing so won Sinatra’s character the sympathy that resulted in the Oscar. “He won me one, he lost me one.” Mr. S tried to be nonchalant, but it hurt. His major cinematic satisfaction was his showdown with Marlon Brando in the big-budget extravaganza
Guys and Dolls,
whose Damon Runyon dialogue about heat and lettuce and
markers and action and broads was the inspiration for the future gangsterese Rat Pack-speak. Sinatra loved the idea of being in the movie, based on one of the best shows ever to hit Broadway. It was an honor, a prestige production all the way, starring not one but two Oscar winners, and directed by the great Joe Mankiewicz, who made
All About Eve.
The only problem was that Sinatra wanted Brando’s role, which was bigger and required more singing. The producer, the all-powerful Sam Goldwyn himself, leaned on Mr. S to roll with the punches. After all, Brando’s
Waterfront
Oscar was for Best Actor, not Best Supporting Actor, Goldwyn reminded Mr. S, as if he needed to be reminded. Bottom line was that even Frank Sinatra didn’t say No to Sam Goldwyn.

The shoot was a horror show. I would come to the set frequently, to do errands for Mr. S, and the tension was as thick as poisoned molasses. Everyone was just waiting for things to blow up, and they often did. Sinatra called Brando “Mumbles.” Brando called Sinatra “Baldie.” (A word Brando would come to eat.) Although Brando had the romantic lead of Sky Masterson, Sinatra relished Brando making a singing fool of himself, totally unable to carry the tune of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” As Nathan Detroit, Sinatra sang the wonderful title song and felt he had blown the great Brando off the screen. “He and his Actors Studio can fuck themselves,” Mr. S gloated. While Goldwyn bribed Brando with a new black Thunderbird to do publicity, and gave nothing to Sinatra, Mr. S was so competitive that he carefully calculated that he had bedded more of the spectacular chorus line known as the Goldwyn Girls than had the despised Mumbles. Mr. S’s revenge came in many forms.

He had great expectations for his tribute biopic of his friend Joe E. Lewis.
The Joker Is Wild
was wall-to-wall with references to mob brutality in the music business, which proved to be a turn-off to a Pollyanna public. It flopped, despite “All the Way” winning the Oscar
for Best Song. So did
Johnny Concho,
a Western that was the first film Mr. S produced himself. He had his dream, costarring with two of his idols, Bing Crosby in
High Society
and Cary Grant in
The Pride and the Passion,
which Mr. S called “the cannon movie,” and was embarrassed by. He was more embarrassed that he had used the film as an excuse to be in Spain (I stayed at home for this one) and chase Ava Gardner one more time, and had failed dismally in the process. He couldn’t compete with Spanish matadors, Italian film studs (Walter Chiari), unknown black jazz musicians, or, most difficult of all, his own shattered past with Ava. He was so distracted romantically that he spent no time at all with Cary Grant, who under normal circumstances he would have loved getting to know. He was also ashamed to face Cary after his endless tantrums on the set, taking out on the film the frustration he felt toward Ava, made him seem like a prima donna. If anyone had the right to be the prima donna it was Cary, and Mr. S knew it. Yet Cary was a total pro, and Frank a total brat. A few years later, Cary came up to the house for some dinners, and
Pride
never once was mentioned.

On the record front, his 1958 Nelson Riddle-arranged
Only the Lonely
album was one of his best, the pinnacle of a prodigiously productive relationship with Riddle. The immaculate, Dutch Reformed-reared Riddle may have resembled a square accountant, but he was a musical genius whom Frank treasured every bit as much as Dean Martin or Jimmy Van Heusen. Sinatra
worshipped
Riddle, who added his swinging strings to Sinatra’s emotional ballads, making them wonderful to listen to without sacrificing their romantic intensity. Their new sound together at Capitol Records, beginning in 1954, helped recharge Mr. S’s singing career. Yet, for all their affection, Frank and Nelson rarely hung out on the Toots Shor carousing circuit. Nelson had too many problems at home. That’s why he always seemed sad. His wife, a devout Catholic, had flipped out on a guilt
trip over an abortion Nelson pushed her into early in their marriage. She became an alcoholic, and an even worse one when their little girl died of asthma when she was six months old. The only person Nelson was more devoted to than Mr. S was his poor wife, though even that got so much for him that he broke down into a drunken, guilt-filled affair with Rosemary Clooney in the early sixties. If Sinatra had a lot of romantic pain to draw from in his music, so did Nelson.

Mr. S couldn’t read a note of music, but he knew greatness when he heard it. He was truly the Man with the Golden Ear. For the technical side of music, and it is extremely technical, he relied entirely on Nelson, whom he often called “Maestro.” He never misbehaved around Nelson. Even though I would come to many of their recording sessions at the studio on Franklin and Vine as the designated bartender, Mr. S laid down a law, which applied to himself as well, that no one could take a drink until after the session was completed. It was strictly tea with honey, followed by an endless supply of Luden’s Cough Drops. Once, when we were doing a session with the all-black Count Basie Orchestra, we ran out of Luden’s. I gave Mr. S some licorice breath drops that turned his tongue black. “What is this shit?” he barked. “If you’re gonna work with spooks, this’ll help you sound like them,” I joked. Liquor or none, we had fun.

If Nelson Riddle seemed on the surface too square for Mr. S, Mr. S himself may have been getting too square for America. He was beginning to feel the greasy shadow of Elvis Presley. Elvis outsold Mr. S, and that bugged him. He denounced the King of Rock n’ Roll as degenerate and vicious. In fact, Sinatra was treating Elvis the way Washington was treating another rebellious upstart from the south, Fidel Castro. To Mr. S Elvis was another “Mumbles,” the Marlon Brando of music, and what could be worse? “If I want a nigger I’ll get a
real
nigger,” he said to anyone who’d listen, including me and Sammy. It didn’t offend either of us, because it was Mr. S’s attempt at
Don Rickles-type humor, and we all knew that comedy was not Sinatra’s strong suit. Sinatra did, too. His idea of a great comic was Danny Thomas, who was perhaps the top laugh draw in Vegas. Mr. S would like to sit in on Danny’s shows, incognito at a back table, trying to analyze what made a joke work.