Mr. S (15 page)

By the same token, he wanted to analyze what made Elvis work. Mr. S hated Elvis so much that he’d sit in the den all by himself at the music console and listen to every new track over and over, “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” “Teddy Bear.” He was trying to figure out just what the hell this new stuff
was,
both artistically (though he’d never concede it was art) and culturally (though he’d never concede it was culture). Why was the public digging this stuff? What did it have? What was the hook? These questions got the better of Mr. S. I knew he was in trouble when he said he preferred Pat Boone. I secretly loved Elvis. I bought all his records. My wife dug him as well. But I didn’t dare tell Mr. S. It was like reading heretical books during the Spanish Inquisition. He would have burned me at the stake, or at least fired me as some pervert. So I just lied to keep the peace. Sometimes all you can do is lie.

I never lied about how I felt about Joe Kennedy. Mr. S felt the same way about the old man, but he did like the boy. He believed in the “product” the old hustler was pushing Mr. S to not only promote but also take a piece of. It was the best investment, the ambassador hyped, that Sinatra could ever make. Mr. S had a lot to overcome. He had an instinctive hatred of the Irish from Hoboken, when the Shanty gangs were the Dago gangs’ worst enemies, never to be trusted. Mr. S had an immediate mistrust of Joe’s son Bobby, though he hadn’t met him in person. How could he trust a nasty kid, a street-fighter type, forget the Harvard sheepskin, who could be working for Joseph McCarthy one day chasing Commies in Hollywood among Mr. S’s friends, then the next day be working for another kind of
witch-hunter, Sen. John McClellan, the phony devout Southern Baptist, chasing Teamsters in Chicago, again among Mr. S’s friends. What was worse was Bobby’s efforts to humiliate Sinatra’s most sacred cow, Sam Giancana. When Bobby subpoenaed Mr. Sam before him, the polite don took the Fifth, and always with a smile. “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana,” Bobby insulted the owner of Chicago on national television. “Can you believe this little weasel?” Mr. S shouted when he saw it. “Can you believe how crazy this goddamn Mick is!”

If Mr. S didn’t naturally cotton to the Irish, he had even more reservations about the English. Poor English, Cockney English, East Enders, they were fine with Mr. S, who had always been wonderfully received in Britain and, besides, was a born champion of underdogs, wherever he found them. But English aristocrats, whom he had not exactly encountered in the Hoboken gang wars, he feared as much as Sam Giancana on a deadly rampage. “Never trust that fancy accent,” he warned me. “They’re the most treacherous bastards you’ll ever meet.” I don’t know on what these attitudes were based. The only high-toned Englishmen he saw often were David Niven and Cary Grant, who only were acting the part. There was Mike Romanoff, who spoke with a plummy fake British accent. There was the hated Sam Spiegel, who used London as home base but was beyond borders. And then there was Peter Lawford, who was the fanciest Englishman in Hollywood, as close to an aristocrat as we had, who just happened to be the showbiz link to the Kennedys. Making things harder for Joe Kennedy to enlist Mr. S into his crusade was the fact that Peter Lawford embodied every treachery and bad trait Mr. S ascribed to the lords of that Sceptered Isle. Maybe it was the Slimey Limey himself who brought Mr. S so down on his people to begin with.

Cheap, weak, sneak, and freak were the words Mr. S most often used to describe Peter Lawford. The two had met in their early days
in Hollywood on the MGM lot in 1946, when they costarred with Jimmy Durante in
It Happened in Brooklyn,
a musical about a sailor played by Mr. S who tries to get into show business. As far as movie stardom went at that point, both young men might as well have been in Brooklyn, the brass ring seemed that far away. To Mr. S, however, Peter Lawford, with his British accent and worldly upbringing as the son of Sir Sidney Lawford, a British general who traversed the empire from Europe to South Africa to India to Australia, was one of the “classiest” guys he had met. Peter had the added polish of having been a child star in England, but he also had the added pressure of having to support Sir Sidney and his pushy stage mother, Lady Lawford, who had pushed her husband into some shady investments that had fizzled. Young Peter was the cash cow, or calf, and he would always be under the gun, whether from his family or from the Kennedys.

Because Lawford was an eligible bachelor in the swinging late forties, Mr. S, still married to look-away Nancy, brought him into his circle of musical swingers, including Jimmy Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn, and Jule Styne, who wrote the score for Sinatra’s
Anchors Aweigh
and later for Marilyn’s
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Peter Lawford, like these other guys, preferred hookers. Peter was whips-and-chains kinky, and not the slightest bit ashamed of it, at least around me. He told me how his mother used to dress him up as a girl, then beat him with a hairbrush if he became a mischievous boy while in little lady drag. His remembrance of things past would get him going. “Let’s go buy some puss, old boy,” was his call to action. Alas, his expensive tastes were not matched by his struggling thespian pocketbook, and he got a reputation for stiffing working girls. That was a real no-no among the Mr. S group, which had deep respect for hookers, and treated them with gallantry. Sinatra often said to me he preferred an honest hooker to a conniving starlet. Honesty was a key
virtue to Mr. S. Although he was one of the last romantics, sometimes Mr. S just wanted it His Way, and fast, and he valued the service and fair exchange the best call girls provided. As he said, “a pro is a pro.”

Lawford became a self-parody of the high-class tightwad by never once picking up a check, for anyone else, or his own. Lawford’s cardinal sin, however, was that of disloyalty. Sinatra had confided to him, and to anyone else who might listen, about his heartbreak over Ava. At the depths of Mr. S’s miseries, in 1953, Ava had returned to L.A. from Rome from filming
The Barefoot Contessa
with Bogart. There she had spurned Mr. S’s attempts at reconciliation for the gossip columns of the world to read. Aware of all this, Lawford still took Ava on a date to an Italian place called Frascati in Beverly Hills the first night she was back in town. Having died by the swords of the gossips myself, I am fully aware how mistaken they can be, and even more aware of how unforgivingly judgmental Mr. S could be. It’s entirely possible, probable in fact, that nothing happened. Lawford was sneaky, while not suicidal, and while Ava had many types, she had told me Peter was not one of them. She preferred Latins and blacks, she liked strong men, and she detested cheapness, though not poverty. That all left Peter out. Furthermore, Sinatra’s temper was already world-famous for his punching out (rather having his bodyguards punch out) columnists, parking attendants, whoever done him wrong or rubbed him wrong, although I had not at this point seen him or his crew hit anyone. But he certainly had a fear-inducing aura. Whatever did or didn’t happen, the Ava-Peter date was itself a fact, and Hedda, Louella, Sheilah Graham, the whole lot, went wild with it. Just as he would later dump Lauren Bacall for getting his name in the papers, Mr. S dumped Peter Lawford. I never once heard his name until Joe Kennedy began putting the arm on Mr. S around 1958.

Mr. S was so down on the guy that he might have shunned Lawford forever had Old Joe not put his daughter Pat on the case. After
highly publicized romances with a number of other heiresses, fortune hunter (by necessity, as the movie parts weren’t doing it) Peter had married Pat Kennedy in 1954, in one of the society weddings of the year. Now, propelled by this front-page marriage, he was the star of
The Thin Man,
a sophisticated detective comedy that had made him the Cary Grant of the small screen, the smoothest, slickest guy in America, debonair, English, a Kennedy, a star. He had it all. Except the acknowledgment of Frank Sinatra, which at this point was in Hollywood what a “By Appointment to Her Majesty” tag was in Britain.

It was at an A-list party at the Gary Coopers’ in Holmby Hills where Pat, who had had an admitted crush on Frank since his crooner days, accomplished a feat of social engineering. She got Rocky Cooper, the tall blond patrician and sporty, totally
Town and Country,
wife of Coop, who preferred working on cars in overalls to black tie, to invite her and Peter under the same roof as Mr. S. Of course, the way to Mr. S’s heart was through his libido. Pat turned on the charm. Although she was obviously pregnant at the time, Mr. S smelled a potential seduction of one of the most high-profile “super-broads” in America. Sinatra had few scruples regarding a gentleman’s honor toward some English snob who had already tried to stab him in the back. The prospect of Pat Kennedy opened Mr. S’s eyes to the even more exciting prospect of John Kennedy. Presto, the grudge against Peter Lawford disappeared.

Soon Pat gave birth to a daughter, Victoria Francis, whom the Lawfords said they were naming after their dear friend, Francis Albert. Talk about flattery, and Mr. S ate it up. With Mr. S’s eyes trained on Pat, Peter became his new best friend. It was as if the old times had never existed. Lawford overnight became one of the “Clan.” Sinatra cast him in his new war movie with Gina Lollobrigida (Gettalittlebitofher, Sinatra droolingly renamed her),
Never So Few.
They drove twin Dual Ghias, a supercool Euro-style roadster produced by Chrysler on a Dodge frame. I think they got them free, for the publicity. Mr. S even partnered with Lawford on an Italian restaurant, called Puccini, after Mr. S’s favorite composer. Naturally cheapskate Peter didn’t put up a cent. He was getting the free ride of all time, his tightwad dream come true. What did the ultimate Italian restaurant guy need an
English
partner for, anyway? Why not Dean? Why not Vic Damone? Because they weren’t married to Kennedys, that’s why. Another deal they had together was the production of the Vegas heist movie
Ocean’s 11,
a script Peter and Pat paid their own money to option, ostensibly for Peter to star in, but it also brought them closer to Frank. I don’t know why Pat’s name never showed up on the credits as producer, but she deserved it.

Even after the rapprochement with Lawford, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. Some time after they had made up and Pat had given birth, Mr. S took them out for dinner. For the first time since they had met, plain Pat was all dolled up and looking foxy in a black low-cut dress, you could see she had a body. Suddenly Mr. S could not only be snowed by her status as an American Princess, he could also lust for her. After dinner, around midnight, he suggested they all drive down to Palm Springs together, which was not at all unusual. Peter couldn’t, because he had a
Thin Man
or something to shoot, which Mr. S may have known. It may have been part of his strategy. In any case, Mr. S suggested he just take Pat. She could use the sun and fresh air. He said I could drive her back the next day. There was a lot of discussion, back and forth, should she or shouldn’t she. She seemed as if she wanted to. But somehow she didn’t go, and Mr. S blamed Peter for spoiling his party.

The Lawfords were so at home with us in the new house on Wonder Palms Drive that they left lots of golf and swimming clothes in the closet of the bedroom they used. When a clearly frustrated Mr. S
and I got to Palm Springs that morning, about five
A.M
., after driving for hours without saying a word, he went right into that closet, tore the clothes off the hangers, threw them outside, and tried to set them on fire with his cigarette lighter. The flames went up, but when the cushions of the pool chairs caught fire, we risked burning the whole house down. So Mr. S and I pushed everything into the pool to stop the blaze. You see, Mr. S didn’t like to be frustrated in any way. It interfered with his “art.” He always liked to get laid the night before a recording session. Unlike boxers, who like to conserve their precious bodily fluids before a fight, Sinatra believed that sex made him sing better. It made him looser, more confident. Actually, come to think of it, he liked to get laid
every
night, recording session or not. The next day after his failure with Pat, he had a new hooker sent over to take the edge off.

Somehow, the Lawfords didn’t get mad about their clothes. We told them there was an accident. Actually, I felt Mr. S could have burned down Pat’s
house,
and she wouldn’t have cared. At the Sands, when he was singing something like “I’ve Got the World on a String,” and she was sitting at the front table, and he’d come up and train his blues right on her, as if he were serenading her, she was
gone.
I could just feel it. I don’t know exactly what went on between Pat and Mr. S, but they spent a huge amount of time together, both in L.A. and in Palm Springs, and Peter, who never lost his penchant for hookers and walks on the wild side, often was missing in action. However, if anything happened between Pat and Mr. S, I never saw a trace of it. In Palm Springs, she always went to bed alone, in her own guest room, and always woke up alone, bright and early and cheerful, but not the-earth-moved ecstatic.

One arena where Lawford was clearly ahead of the curve was drug use. Drug-hater that he was, Mr. S would have cut Peter dead if he had known about his enormous ingestion of cocaine, not to mention
a level of pot smoking that would have impressed the hippies in Berkeley nearly a decade later. I feel bad about it because I was something of what the folks in AA now call an “enabler.” I would go with Peter on coke runs to Watts in a nondescript Chevy that he owned for his maids to use. It was the only time I ever saw him spend his own money on anything. No wonder he was so cheap; he had an expensive habit to support. He figured that, being a “brother,” I would run interference for him if his deal went bad. It was funny, watching this English fop doing business in rat-infested slum cottages with ghetto boys. He was, however, just as smooth as he was on
The Thin Man,
so I suppose Peter wasn’t as bad an actor as everyone said.