What falls away : a memoir (11 page)

After Von Ryan's Express^ Frank rented a mansion on Sunset Boulevard. In the months that we had been together, except for those few people mentioned, we had seen only each other. Ours was an intimate, intense existence. A speculative line or two occasionally crept into the gossip columns, but Frank's publicist and Fox Studios effectively dispelled any rumors. I wondered whether his children knew, especially his daughters, whom he talked a lot about.

One day after work, when I arrived at his house as usual, Frank told me that his younger daughter, Tina, was outside playing tennis with a friend. Rattled, I asked if he wanted me to leave or hide or what, but he laughed and said. Sit down, he wanted Tina to meet me. I sat nervously until Tina Sinatra bounced into the room smiling. She hugged

me, and said it was nice to finally meet me, and I was immeasurably relieved and grateful. Not long after, I met her sister, Nancy, and she too was as welcoming as I could have hoped. The two soon became like sisters to me.

Once a year a group of influential Hollywood wives put on a charity show in which they themselves performed, Rockette-style, and their famous husbands, singers and comedians, participated. "The Share Show" was a good-natured event and a hot ticket that drew top Hollywood stars. It also attracted major press coverage. So it was a shock when Frank suddenly informed me that we were going. I thought we were supposed to lie low. We didn't even go to restaurants. Apart from Yul and Jack Entratter, I hadn't met any of his friends.

"Are you sure?" I asked. He was. Perhaps he thought he'd get it over in one dose^ give everybody plenty of pictures, and then they'd go away.

We dressed up in Western costumes and I met his buddies Shirley MacLaine and Sammy Davis, and from the stage Dean Martin toasted me, saying, "Hey, I've got a bottle of scotch that's older than you."

We all laughed, and the press took our pictures, but they didn't go away—not in the rest of our time together. It didn't help that on television I was playing a dreamy, introverted sixteen-year-old. The way people regarded Frank Sinatra was suddenly evident too: the fifty-year-old swinger, womanizer, and brawling saloon singer, together with the innocent teenage daughter of Hollywood. People couldn't seem to get a handle on it.

I kept thinkmg, They have it all wrong, they don't really know him. They can't see the wounding tenderness that even he can't bear to acknowledge—except when he sings. Maybe if they looked at the earliest photos of Frank, when he was a skinny kid singing in his big bow tie— if they really looked at that face, almost feminine in it^ beauty.

they'd see exactly who it was that Frank Sinatra the tough guy has spent his life trying to protect.

"I have a respect for life in any form," Frank said at that time. "I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don't believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice. I'm for anvthing that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers, or a bottle of Jack Daniel's."

Our life changed after "The Share Show." Now we went to parties and restaurants, and I was mtroduced to his friends in L.A., Las Vegas, and New York. I discovered that Frank could polish off a bottle of Jack Daniel's in one night, and that he had a million jokes and stories. I had no idea that his life could be so full of friends, houseguests, and hangers-on, or that hours alone together would be so hard to come by. I thought he was usually in bed by eleven.

Frank's existence was divided into three distinct worlds. The first, and most essential for me, was the time we shared alone. It was the part that made aU the rest bearable, if not comprehensible. Before long I found myself missing the exclusivity of those first secret months.

Second was the social world of the Beverly Hills/Manhattan establishment. In New York there were the Paleys and the Cerfs, the Guinnesses and the Gabels, the Haywards, the Hornblows, and Claudette Colbert. In Beverly Hills It was Rosalind Russell and Freddie Brisson, the Deutches and the Wilders, the Stewarts and the Bennys, the Mays, Leonard Gershe, the Douglases, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin—and especially Edie and Bill Goetz.

Edie Goetz, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, was an ambitious hostess who earned her title as queen of the A-group. The art collection in her home was legendary; it included works by Renoir, Gauguin, Picasso, Cezanne, Bon-nard, and Degas, and was eventually auctioned for more

than eighty million dollars. On Friday nights the biggest stars of the day trouped to the Goetzes. After dinner, prepared by a resident French chef, the Picassos rose, a screen descended, and the latest movie was projected in 35 mm, weeks before its public release. Most of the guests were friends of my parents who had known me since I was a child, which was strange in one way and nice in another. When Frank's friends came to stay with us in Palm Springs, they'd sometimes bring their offspring, some of whom had been in my school, all were older than me, and yet they would sit at "the kids' table," and I'd be at the "grown-ups' " table.

Apart from the Kanins, the only member of that exclusive crowd to whom I confided was lyricist and screenwriter Leonard Gershe. We spoke daily and in Frank's absence, and with his approval, we often went out for dinner.

Frank was adored by the A-group, and he was on his best behavior with them. They didn't know the Frank of the late-night world of Las Vegas or Miami, or Palm Springs, or that other New York of heavy drinking, tough talk, and "broads." As soon as he arrived at a hotel in Las Vegas or Miami, an assortment of guys materialized seemingly out of thin air. Women too. I didn't know how any of it was pulled together, or who anybody was. This was the setting for the third part of Frank's existence.

The very first night we visited Las Vegas, when I stood up to go to the bathroom, Frank handed me five dollars. "Here, baby," he said, and I didn't know what it was for. I thought maybe he wanted me to buy something, and the whole table laughed. "It's for the attendant in the ladies' room," he explained.

An average night in Vegas meant drinking and gambling and sitting around cocktail lounges telling stories until dawn. The climate was boisterous; Frank once offered a

waiter a hundred dollars to drop a tray full of glasses. The waiter just stared at him, miserably computmg all the possible consequences. (He didn't drop the tray; Frank gave him the money anyway.)

The women, who didn't seem to mind being referred to as "broads," sat up straight with their legs crossed and little expectant smiles on their carefully made-up faces. They sipped white wine, smoked, and eyed the men, and laughed at every joke. A long time would pass before any of the women dared to speak, then under the main male conversation they talked about their cats, or where they bought their clothes; but more than half an ear was always with the men, just in case. As hours passed, the women, neglected in their chairs, drooped; no longer listening, no longer laughing. Often I fell asleep, with my head on my arms folded on the table.

For weeks before he would begm any recording or singing engagement, Frank would stop smoking and drinking. When we arrived in Las Vegas or Miami, he would hang his tuxedo in the hotel bathroom to steam out the wrinkles, then he'd sit in his bathrobe doing crossword puzzles, trying not to talk to rest his voice. Near show time he would vocalize, then we would get dressed and go downstairs. His friend Jilly or bodyguards took me to my place in the audience.

Soon I knew every word of every song, and took each breath with him. I felt his emotion as it rose inside him and flowed into the dark theater. Part of it was mine. When Frank sang the love songs, he often looked at me, and that was an indescribable thing, to be acknowledged there, in that way, in the packed crowd where it seemed that every woman felt he was singing to her. Sometimes, I would focus on a detail: his hand, his mouth . . .

"I think I get an audience involved personally in a song because I'm involved," said Frank. "It's not something I do deliberately. I can't help myself. If a song is a lament at the

loss of love, I get an ache in my gut. I feel the loss myself and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt, and the pain . . . Being an eighteen-carat manic-depressive, and having lived a life of emotional contradictions, I have an acute capacity for sadness as well as elation."

After opening night, the weeks of discipline were over and he could resume smokmg and drinking. In Las Vegas he never went to bed before 5 A.M., and he slept until the late afternoon. Since I found it difficult to sleep in the daytime, sometimes I'd put on a wig and sit downstairs in the lobby to watch the people. I was glad when Nancy and Tina came to visit: then our hotel suite was like a dorm; we sat around m our pajamas chatting and snacking. As show time neared we got ready together, catching up on one another's news, trading clothes and makeup.

Occasionally my childhood friend Liza Mmnelli, with whom I'd gone to nursery school, came to Las Vegas too, to perform at another hotel. Liza's career had taken flight, and it was an exciting time for both of us. Before Peyton Place, when the two of us were living m New York, we got our first off-Broadway jobs at roughly the same time—she was in a musical, Best Foot Forward. After I moved to L.A., Liza stayed at my apartment whenever she came to town. I cut her long hair short. Now, here we were in Las Vegas. I would go to see her show, then we'd join Frank. Except in Las Vegas it was never just me and him, so Liza and I huddled at the far end of the long table.

I noticed that no matter who was in a room, when Frank entered it, he became the focus. And no one was ever really at ease with him, no matter who they were or how charming he was, because there was something about him that made people uncomfortable. He was absolutely without falseness, without artifice, in a world of pretenders. He had a child's sense of outrage at any perceived unfairness and an inability to compromise. He was tough in his judgments of others, and of himself.

Ava Gardner once said Frank was "so wild, so full of love and energy, that he is like three men rolled into one. But behind the front of a big drinker and party giver, he is highly sensitive and intelligent, and he has a heart of gold." What with Ava's relationships with my father and Frank, our history was an unusual one; but we got along so well together that once, in a jumble of warm emotions, she declared that I was the child she and Frank never had.

In August 1965, Frank decided that we were going on a boat trip. We would get some friends together and sail along the coast of Cape Cod. He studied maps and planned It all carefully. My television series at first seemed an obstacle, but we had the same bosses at Fox, so the Peyton Place writers obligingly put me in a coma.

We set sail from New York City on a ship 170 feet long. Claudette Colbert was onboard, and Roz Russell too. Yet with their combined lifetimes of movie stardom, they were unprepared for what came next. Even Frank, after all his experience with paparazzi and always expecting the worst from journalists, failed to anticipate the pandemonium that boat trip would trigger.

Within twenty-four hours you couldn't see the ocean for the flotilla of paparazzi, and you couldn't hear yourself think for the helicopters, and you couldn't watch television without seeing yourself and hearing about how ancient Frank Sinatra was, and how young I was, and how we were gomg to get married, and how many beautiful girlfriends he'd had, and famous fights, and the rumors about Mafia connections, and outrage at the size of the boat.

We read this, and we watched it on television, and even though It quickly reached the point where we didn't dare to step outside, the strangest thing was that Frank and I never said one word about what was going on. I didn't know if he was angry, or hurt, or embarrassed, or what he was feeling.

Each day the situation worsened, but Frank Sinatra is a stubborn man, and the consummate host, and he was absolutely determined that everyone would have a good time. He would never call it quits, and nobody was about to argue with him, so we kept right on sailing through a sea of cameras.

We visited the Kennedy family in Hyannis, where I met Rose, and Joe in his wheelchair, and Teddy. Things lightened up when the Kennedy sisters Jean, Eunice, and Pat (whom the press mistook for Jacqueline Kennedy, fanning the fire further) came aboard with their husbands for an evening. Behind closed curtains we played charades and drank our share. The Kennedy group seemed so young and exuberant; and they voen, compared to our crowd, who were at least fifteen years older than Frank, and he, as everyone knew by then, was fifty.

Claudette recalled to me that "the press was abominable, everywhere. You looked like a little girl, honestly, about thirteen or fourteen. I guess Frank just decided to try and tough it out. Every day we thought it might blow over. And actually, as long as we stayed inside, we had a good time." But I found it impossible to ignore the commotion and the confinement, and worst of all, Frank's remoteness.

When we reached Martha's Vineyard, Roz and Claudette tried to defuse the situation by talking to reporters, attempting to add a tone of respectability as "chaperones" and friends of my mother's, which indeed they were. They also insisted that no wedding was planned. This speculation was particularly embarrassing, since Frank and I had never even discussed marriage.

In the middle of the night, the phone awakened us. As he pulled on his clothes, Frank told me that one of our crew members was lost overboard after a dinghy had capsized m the choppy harbor.

For two days we heard the foghorns and watched them drag the harbor. Everybody felt terrible. Roz and Claudette

played backgammon. I don't remember what I did. Nobody said much. Then, to everyone's relief, Frank called it quits. "We stayed two days while they dragged the harbor," Claudette remembered. "Frank finally decided there was nothing that could be done. It served no purpose to stay there."

A few weeks later the crewman's body washed up onshore.