Mr. S (9 page)

In the next five years, Mr. S would make sixteen or so major Hollywood movies and nearly a dozen huge albums, not to mention television, Las Vegas, world, and national tours. And that was all before he got involved in politics as the ambassador from the State of Show Biz to Washington and the world. Forget James Brown. The hardest-working man in Hollywood was, and will forever be, Frank Sinatra, no contest. He was also the hardest-playing man in the game as well. And his love life, if that’s what you would call it, went off the charts. He became the Casanova of Modern Times.

For every new movie, there was a new affair, and not merely for the benefit of the studio publicity apparatus. No man has ever slept with so many famous women. Pre-Oscar, the only celebrity I knew to have
slept over was Dinah Shore, who was a long-running affair of Sinatra’s. He knew the fine and difficult art of casual sex, keeping his girlfriends as friends, through lots and lots of attention. Yes, gifts and lingerie, but more valuable was the telephone and face time he would put in listening to their endless problems. “Get me a goddamn hooker,” he’d often say, rolling his eyes at the end of a marathon phone session. “George, Romans, countrymen, somebody, lend me your ears.” I got to know all of Mr. S’s ladies, stars and nonstars. I’d pick them up, drive them home, pay them if they were pros, make the candlelit seduction dinner and buy the flowers and chocolates for them if they weren’t, then listen to their laments when Mr. S let them down, which was inevitable. Sinatra never staged a conquest at the woman’s place. He understood the home court advantage, plus he preferred sleeping in his own bed, usually by himself once the fireworks were over and I’d escort Miss Right for the Night back to her place.

Post-Oscar, Sinatra was always swinging with some star. The first big one was Kim Novak in
The Man with the Golden Arm,
and their on-and-off fling continued through
Pal Joey.
He complained to me that her legs were too heavy for him, but her face more than made up for it. Mr. S ultimately lost Kim to Sammy Davis Jr., who almost lost his career to the evil Columbia kingpin Harry Cohn, who did not want his platinum goddess tarred, as it were, with Sammy’s brush. Frank did not begrudge Kim to Sammy; however, he did almost “Lawfordize” him for encouraging
Confidential
magazine to do a spread on him and Ava Gardner that created the illusion that they were a number, after Ava showed up at one of Sammy’s shows at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem and then appeared with him in an
Ebony
photo shoot. Sammy begged forgiveness on career grounds, that it was merely an innocent publicity stunt. Ava backed him up, and that saved his ass. For Frank, that woman was sacred ground. If you
messed with her, it would be scorched earth. Also, Sammy was a special case. Sinatra had just nursed him back to health and to performing again after the 1954 automobile wreck on the desert highway between Palm Springs and L.A. that cost him his eye.

I have never seen anyone more caring and generous than Mr. S in this crisis. He was the ultimate stand-up guy. Despite his hatred for hospitals, he visited Sammy constantly in the San Bernardino Community Hospital and made sure he had the finest specialists brought in from L.A. to treat him. On a psychic level, he used his own comeback as the example that gave Sammy the strength to return to performing, bucking him up every day and making one-eye jokes that somehow took the curse off Sammy’s disability. Mr. S also used all his power to arrange Sammy’s famous comeback engagement at Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip, and making sure that every big name in Hollywood was there on opening night to cheer Sammy on.

Meanwhile he had installed Sammy in the Palm Springs house to recuperate and prepare for this fateful return engagement. Mr. S had me stay at the house to be at Sammy’s service for the three weeks he was there, cooking whatever he dreamed of, rounding up the broads he dreamed of. I’d help him light his endless cigarettes until he could practice enough with his one eye to get his field of vision straight. Sometimes when he’d end up lighting the tip of his nose instead of the cigarette, he’d break down crying in frustration that he’d never get it all back again. “Shit, Sam,” I’d console him. “You get to see more out of one eye than a thousand guys see outta two. You’re gonna make it. Don’t waste that good eye on fucking tears.” And he’d stop, and try again, and soon he was striking up matches like old times.

Whatever Sammy wanted, Mr. S was going to be his fairy godfather, and all his caring worked wonders for Sammy, who ended up a greater entertainer than ever. Thus in the
Ebony
incident Mr. S had a lot of himself invested in Sammy and found it hard to hold a grudge,
even a Sinatra grudge, against someone he treated as a son. Lawford, on the other hand was never “family,” just an “English sharpie,” as Frank called him, who just happened to have the best connections in the world.

One affair that, unlike the others, was conducted in top secret was with Natalie Wood, because she was a minor at the time, either fifteen or sixteen, though she didn’t act like it. She wore skintight dresses, pushup bras, all the makeup that Saks could sell. She smoked and spoke like a world-weary New York sophisticate in a
Thin Man
movie. Then again, she was an actress, just a precocious one. Sinatra adored this tiny beauty, but he didn’t want to go the way of Charlie Chaplin or Errol Flynn or, later, Roman Polanski. He had been taken with Natalie ever since she became a child star in
Miracle on 34th Street
. Somehow he met her mother, Maria Gurdin, a Russian woman who was the pushiest stage mom in history. She made Brooke Shields’s mother look laid back. Mrs. Gurdin brought the teen Natalie over to the apartment for cocktails soon after Mr. S won his Oscar. She had her kid all dolled up, total jailbait, in a form-fitting black party dress, and Mr. S went for it in a big way. Nothing dirty-old-mannish, he was never like that. He played them cuts from his upcoming album, provided career suggestions, refused to let me serve Natalie an alcoholic drink until her mother allowed it. I made her a martini, which seemed to go with her outfit. She drank two and would have had a third had Mr. S not jokingly called a limit. I’ve never seen anyone so supportive as he was of Natalie’s and her mother’s ambitions. In the next week, after those cocktails, Natalie began coming over after her studio school, without her mom, for “singing lessons.” Mr. S would send me away when she was there. “I don’t want you to testify,” he joked. He wanted to be “In like Flynn,” but he didn’t want to be ruined for it.

Natalie was much more than a fling. Their secret affair went on for
several years, off and on, until she reached the age of consent, and even beyond that until she took up with Robert Wagner. Mr. S truly cherished her, and whatever went on in private, he was also a father to her more than her own father, very protective, advising her about all the many men who would come after her. In Frank’s world casting was the sincerest form of flattery. He liked Natalie so much he put her, at age nineteen, in his 1957 movie about racism,
Kings Go Forth,
in which she plays a
mulata
living in WWII France in a love triangle with two GIs played by Sinatra and Tony Curtis, whom Frank always called by his real name “Bernie.” Because of my own background from New Orleans, where half the city was of mixed race, I was Mr. S’s informal technical advisor on that film. For all her many charms, I hate to say that Natalie was the least convincing black girl I ever met. We’d joke about it, calling her the “Black Russian.”

Mr. S was also instrumental in encouraging Natalie’s marriage to Robert Wagner, one of the handsomest young actors in Hollywood. If anyone
looked
like the town’s dream couple, they were it. It was surprising that Mr. S liked Bob Wagner so much, he was such a pretty boy. I had met him as a young caddy at the Brentwood Country Club, carrying the clubs for Clifton Webb, the elegant British star of
Laura,
who was one of the reigning queens of Hollywood’s gay world. Webb got Bob the powerful gay agent Henry Willson, who had made stars out of Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, and Sal Mineo. Eventually, Willson also represented Natalie, who was one of his rare female clients.

Mr. S would bait even his straightest friends for the slightest “fag” mannerism, like the way they’d hold a cigarette or use a French word, or affectation, like ordering wine instead of hard liquor with dinner, real-men-don’t-eat-quiche stuff. Anything that smacked of worldliness, culture, or sophistication was a “fag thing.” Despite Bob’s association with Webb and Willson, and despite his urbane manner, Mr. S
gave him a pass on all that, and years later even gave him his blessing to get engaged to his daughter Tina, and when that didn’t work, he forgave him, and gave him another blessing to wed surrogate daughter Jill St. John.

“What do you think of Bob, George?” Mr. S asked me one day.

“He’s a nice guy,” I replied.

Mr. S shook his head. “George,” he said. “‘He’s a nice guy’ is not a valid answer to my question.”

I didn’t like being put on the spot like that. I didn’t want to insult anybody. Yet I knew Mr. S counted on me to be honest with him. Mr. S did most of his “serious” talking to his girlfriends. With the guys it mostly drunken insults and awful jokes and puns. Was he being serious with me? “Bob could be too pretty for his own good,” I blurted out. “What would people say if you looked like that?” I realized I had jammed my foot in my mouth.

There was a long, scary silence. I thought this was the end of a short and wonderful career. Then Mr. S broke out laughing. “George, I
do
look like that. I think we have to get you glasses.” As time went by, the more I got to know him, the more candid I would be. But one rule was: never, ever, make a negative comment about his appearance. Some jokes just didn’t play in Sinatraland.

Mr. S had a brief on-location flirtation with Sophia Loren on
The Pride and the Passion
in 1956. However, it went nowhere because his continuing passion for Ava Gardner was a fatal blow to Sophia’s pride. The main reason Sinatra took the part in the costume epic, aside from getting to work with another of his idols, Cary Grant, was that being in Spain gave him an extended opportunity to pursue Ava in Madrid. The pursuit didn’t work, nor did the film. He and the director Stanley Kramer went to war over Sinatra’s refusal to do more than one take of a scene, and Mr. S eventually stormed off the picture and out of the country.

More revealing than the costars and starlets who shared Sinatra’s bed were the ones who got away. On
Pal Joey
Rita Hayworth ignored him completely. She was close to forty at the time and still a knockout. Mr. S never cared about age anyhow, old or young. Somehow he was terribly impressed with her because of her romantic pedigree with Aly Khan and Orson Welles. Because I used to know her in my law firm days, he tried to use me as an opening wedge to try and get something going. It didn’t work. She didn’t remember me, or even Mr. Tannenbaum, from whom she rented her house. She often forgot her lines, and her general blankness and disinterest even in Frank Sinatra at the top of his game, singing “The Lady Is a Tramp” to her, may have been due to early symptoms of the terrible Alzheimer’s disease that would destroy her.

Another pedigree that got away, though not totally away, was Grace Kelly in
High Society.
Sinatra got a kick out of “Gracie,” as he called her, but he had felt humiliated pining around the set of
Mogambo
over Ava in front of Grace. He was certain she saw him as a major loser and he could not bring himself to make a play for her. But he had another problem on the set. He was deeply intimidated by his costar Bing Crosby, one of his childhood icons and one of the lords of the manor in Palm Springs. Crosby and Bob Hope were part of the Eisenhower elite, a WASPy Republican golfing aristocracy that would have nothing to do with Frank. I think this was why he worked so hard for John F. Kennedy, to gain acceptance and legitimacy. Crosby was particularly important to Mr. S because Crosby’s brilliant career was the precise blueprint for his own. Crosby had begun as a crooner, became a singing idol, then got into acting and won an Oscar for
Going My Way
, and then became a multimillionaire businessman to boot. Plus he was a wonderful sportsman. It was a scary act to follow, yet Mr. S desperately wanted to follow it, to a T. He would have also loved to be buddies with Bing, yet Bing, though
invariably friendly, kept his cool distance. Their relationship remained strictly professional, and it killed Mr. S to think that Bing considered him neither in his class nor in his league.

Everything about Mr. S had to do with paying debts and settling scores, all about the balance sheets of life. He would have treasured a Grace Kelly sexual credit, but he didn’t want to try and fail in front of the august Bing. There had been lots of rumors about Grace, for all her outward virginal blond purity being a real vixen, having affairs with all her leading men, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Ray Milland, and even Crosby himself on
The Country Girl,
for which Grace won her Oscar. So for all his fascination with Grace, Frank, as they would say today, didn’t want to go there.

Debbie Reynolds in
The Tender Trap
was off-limits because of her marriage to Sinatra buddy Eddie Fisher, though even if she were unattached, Sinatra found her too impossibly perky to be sexy. He thought Olivia de Havilland in
Not as a Stranger
was sheer class, but she was involved with director John Huston, who was Bogart’s dear friend, which made Olivia untouchable. Nevertheless, Sinatra’s frustrated attraction to her led him to perform some adolescent pranks to attract her attention. Robert Mitchum, their costar, was legendary for his imperturbability. Every day at lunch, he would engross himself in the newspaper and not speak to anyone. One day, when I was with Mr. S at the studio, in front of Olivia, Sinatra sneaked up on Mitchum and set the paper he was reading on fire. Mitchum barely noticed until his fingers were singed. Then he jumped halfway across the table. Mr. S thought this stunt was much more impressive than his role, and bragged to everyone how he had “gotten” Mitchum. He never “got” Olivia, though, who was amazed at how childish Sinatra could be.