of this age. When he’s in good voice and a good mood, he’s ahead of
the field, and nobody can equal his charm. Like almost everybody, his
nature has many sides to it--more than most people, because he has
more talent than most. But on a host of subjects, we’re far apart, not
omitting politics. If I’d gone to his desert house and written about
it, we might have seen a beautiful friendship dented.
When Charles Morrison, owner of our best night club, the Mocambo,
died, he left a mourning wife, Mary, with a mountain of debt. Like
Sinatra, he’d spent it when he had it and also when he hadn’t. Frank
telephoned Mary and said he’d like to bring in an orchestra and sing
for her, free for a couple of weeks. On opening night he caught fire,
and his quips were as good as his singing.
He never worked harder than he did for two months arranging President
Kennedy’s inaugural ball. He wanted Ethel Merman and Sir Laurence
Olivier for the show, but they were playing on Broadway in _Gypsy_
and _Becket_, respectively. So Frank closed the two theaters for a
night and refunded the price of the tickets to every disappointed
theater-goer. After the inauguration Frank and most of his
co-workers--including Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, Roger Edens, and Jimmy
Van Heusen--went to Joe Kennedy’s Palm Beach home for a weekend’s rest.
I don’t think the President has fully repaid Frank for that memorable
evening.
Sinatra swears his private life is his own. Until the recent era of
peace with the press dawned, he’d let fly with his fists to prove his
point with some reporters. He once told me: “If a movie-goer spends
$2.00 to see me in a motion picture, or $10 to watch me perform in a
night club, then he has the right to see me at my best. I do not feel,
however, that I have any responsibility to that movie-goer or that
night-club-goer to tell him anything about my private life.”
He likes to quote something said by Humphrey Bogart, one of his good
friends: “The only thing you owe the public is a good performance.” He
must have remembered that when Bogey’s widow, Betty Bacall, announced
that she was going to marry Frank. A pal with him at the time--he was
staying in Miami Beach--told me: “He was so angry he blew the roof off
the hotel.” That marked the end of that romance.
Frank has let his temper and temperament explode too often for his
relations with many newspapermen and women to be anything but spotty.
Believe it or not, that has him chewing his fingernails sometimes.
“There are a handful of people who won’t let go of me and won’t try to
be fair,” he said, defending himself one day. “And after a thing is
over and I fly off the handle, I feel twice as bad as when I was angry.
You get to think, ‘Jeez, I’m sorry that had to happen!’”
He isn’t the man he’s usually painted to be. The brandy drinker who
shrugs off advice? He was a guest of mine at a small dinner party for
Noël Coward, along with the Bill Holdens, Clifton Webb, and one or two
others. Over the liqueurs Noël, who’d spent the previous weekend with
Sinatra at Palm Springs, said: “I’m very worried about you, Frank.
You’re the finest singer since Al Jolson. But unless you cut down on
drinking, your career won’t keep going up--it’s going to start running
downhill.”
Frank listened as attentively as a new boy getting the business from
his headmaster. “I think you’re right, Noël,” he said quietly. And for
a long time his drinking tapered off.
Is he the headstrong egomaniac who thinks he owes nothing to anybody?
“You know, there’s one thing I wanted to say when I accepted the
Oscar for _From Here to Eternity_,” he said on another day. “I wanted
to thank Monty Clift personally. I learned more about acting from
Clift--well, it was equal to what I learned about musicals from Gene
Kelly.”
He sits up to take notice of his children, too, if they criticize him.
There are three of them, Nancy, Jr., Frankie, Jr., and Tina. He drove
up to see me once in a new fish-tail Cadillac that, he said, his son
despised. “Frankie wondered what I wanted with all that tin on the
back.” Father Frank dragged me out to take a look. I knew he couldn’t
live with the car after his boy’s jeers. He sold it one month later.
Can he be at heart the willful, adult version of Peck’s Bad Boy that
millions of women have adored since those days when he had them
swooning by their radios? Bet your boots he can. As for example ...
Earl Warren was still governor of California when Frank was working
at Metro on _Take Me Out to the Ball Game_. The studio boss was Louis
B. Mayer, a big Republican with ambitions to be bigger. Louis was
thrilled to bits when a spokesman for Warren asked if Frank could go to
Sacramento to attend a convention of governors of all the states which
was meeting there. They were eager to have him sing for them as the
sole representative of the motion-picture industry. Warren would have
his own private plane fly Frank there and back if he’d agree to the
trip.
Louis went to work on everybody who was close to Frank, pressuring
them to persuade him that the honor of Metro--and the ambitions of
Louis--demanded his presence at Sacramento. Frank, for once, seemed
reasonable about it. Be glad to go, he said.
Louis was delighted. He gave orders that the picture was to be closed
down at two o’clock on the auspicious afternoon. That would give Frank
plenty of time to clean up and change out of his baseball suit to
catch the governor’s plane, which would be waiting for a three o’clock
take-off. “Get a picnic basket made up,” Frank told Jack Keller, his
press agent, “with cold chicken and wine, silver and napkins and
everything, so we can eat on the plane.”
Keller and Dick Jones, Frank’s accompanist, were ready early, waiting
with the basket in his dressing room. Two-thirty came, but no Frank.
Three o’clock; not a sign of him. A worried call to Dick Hanley,
Mayer’s secretary, established that work on the picture had stopped
punctually at 2 P.M. A check of all the gates showed that Frank hadn’t
left; his car was parked outside the dressing room.
“He’s probably up in some dame’s dressing room having a little party,”
somebody suggested. So a squad of security guards, standing on no
ceremony, went bursting in on the stars and starlets, searching for
him. Not a trace. By four-thirty Louis was having apoplexy. By five
o’clock all hope of delivering Frank to Sacramento had vanished.
An hour later Louis was swallowing his rage and his pride, to call
Governor Warren and explain that Frank had suddenly and inexplicably
taken sick.
The following morning the mystery was solved. Sinatra, in make-up and
uniform, had decided at two o’clock that Sacramento wasn’t for him. So
he hid in the back of a workman’s truck and rode unseen through the
studio gates, hopped off at a stop light, and flagged down a cab to
take him home.
After _The Miracle of the Bells_, which he made for RKO on loan from
Metro, he was ordered to San Francisco for a charity opening of that
hunk of religious baloney. Frank, who harbors an almost fanatical
resentment against being told what to do, went to Jesse Lasky, the
producer, whom he admired, and asked: “You won’t be paying the bills?”
“Not I. RKO.”
“That’s all I want to know. I’ll go for you.”
Frank hadn’t taken off his hat and coat after checking into his
four-bedroom suite at the Fairmont Hotel before he called room service.
“Bring up eighty-eight manhattans right away.” Jack Keller, manager
George Evans, and composer Jimmy Van Heusen, who’d all gone along
on the trip, were determined not to ask Frank why he’d ordered the
cocktails, and he never explained. Four days later, when they checked
out, the eighty-eight manhattans stood untouched on the waiter’s wagon.
Meantime, he’d taken the three of them on a shopping spree in the most
expensive men’s shop in San Francisco, to buy them alpaca sweaters,
$15 neckties, and socks by the box, while the cash register clicked up
a score of $2800 for one member of the party alone within forty-five
minutes. “Send the lot up to the Fairmont and have ’em put it on my
bill,” Frank said.
Fog covered the city the morning they were due to leave, and every air
liner was grounded. Mad as a caged bear, Frank tried to argue Jimmy,
who is a trained pilot, into chartering a private plane. “You think I’m
nuts? Take a look outside,” Jimmy said.
“Forget it then,” Frank snarled. “I know what to do.”
He had one of his favorite picnic baskets assembled by the Blue Fox
restaurant, then hired a car and chauffeur to drive Jimmy and himself
to Palm Springs, five hundred miles away. But the limousine got stuck
in the mountain snows and Frank and party were marooned in a farmhouse
for three days. Jack Keller and George Evans caught a noontime plane
when the fog lifted and were home in Los Angeles by mid-afternoon.
The car-hire bill by itself ran to $795. Like everything else in the
trip, it was charged to RKO.
* * * * *
When Frank originally moved out to California, he picked up his own
bills. They ran high. He had a weakness for showering his friends and
hangers-on with such trinkets as gold cigarette lighters lovingly
inscribed. He imagined that every thousand dollars of salary was worth
that much money in the bank, never realizing that in his tax bracket,
and with his agents’ cuts, a thousand dollars probably gave him no
more than ninety to spend. The more he made, the more he owed the
government, until the total tab ran to nearly $110,000. It took his
switch from Columbia to Capitol Records to settle the tax score. That
was part of the price Capitol paid out for him.
His first full-length picture, _Higher and Higher_ for RKO, brought him
out to live in the Sunset Towers apartments as a grass widower, leading
a life as respectable as a church warden’s. No girls, no drinking
except an occasional beer. When his wife, Nancy, arrived and they
bought the house at Toluca Lake that Mary Astor once owned, they kept
up the same, small-town ways. Their wildest parties were devoted to gin
rummy at half a cent a point. Frank was as happy with Nancy as he could
be with anybody for long.
Fireworks usually start to sizzle in a marriage when the husband pulls
himself ahead and the wife lags behind. But Nancy, the plasterer’s
daughter from Jersey City, kept pace with Frank’s growth as an
entertainer. She’s maintained her patience and her dignity over the
years, saying not a malicious word about any of the women who’ve
cluttered up Frank’s life.
The first feet of film in which he appeared were actually shot for
Columbia Pictures in a little low-budget item entitled _Reveille for
Beverly_. Harry Cohn, boss of Columbia, thought so poorly of him that
he let him escape without optioning him. Frank couldn’t let him forget
that.
At the Toluca Lake house, Frank, Nancy, and their friends used to stage
little Christmas Eve revues, running for an hour and more, complete
with scenery, costumes, props, original score by Sammy Cahn and Julie
Stein, sketches and performances by anybody with a mind to pitch in and
work. The jokes were all “inside” humor, drawing a bead on the members
of the group.
One sketch set its sights on Peter Lawford, a celebrated party-goer
from the day he arrived in Hollywood and an actor whose performances in
some pictures would scarcely show up under a microscope. On the stage
built in the Sinatra living room, he sat at a table entertaining a girl
while Frank, dressed as a waiter, served drinks to the pair. “Give me
the check,” said Peter as the skit ended. “I’ll take care of it.”
Frank’s eyeballs revolved. “You mean you’ll _pay_?” he gasped as he
dropped his tray on Peter’s head and staggered offstage.
When the bigwigs at Columbia heard about the shows, they asked Frank
to put on a similar affair at Harry Cohn’s house to celebrate his
birthday. It turned out to be quite a party. The guest list included
Rita Hayworth, José Iturbi, Al Jolson, and the Sinatra regulars. On the
temporary stage, Phil Silvers acted the part of Cohn. Al Levy, Frank’s
manager who went on to found Talent Associates, took the role of agent
and Frank played himself. “Mr. Cohn,” said Al, introducing Frank, “I
have a boy here I think has great talent.”
“Can’t use him,” growled Phil Silvers.
“But at least listen to him. Give him a chance.”
“No. Too Jewish.”
Al (bewildered): “He’s too _Jewish_?”
“No, you are. Get out of here.” Everybody had a wonderful time ...
except Harry Cohn, who didn’t crack a smile.
* * * * *
The woman who came within an ace of wrecking Frank Sinatra sat on my
patio fresh from Smithfield, North Carolina. “What do you do down
there?” I asked Ava Gardner, as beautiful then as she was frank about
how dirt-poor she’d been until Hollywood whistled at her.
“Oh, I just went around picking bugs off tobacco plants,” she said.
The earliest matrimonial picking she made was Mickey Rooney. She was
twenty and he was a year older when they married. He had what she
wanted, which included his limousine, the first she ever rode in.
Though they were separated some frantic years later, they remained
friends and he couldn’t break old habits. They were sitting side by
side and directly behind me at a premiere after their divorce. I heard
her whispering: “Don’t do that. Stop it. People will see.”
Turning around, I spotted that he had his hand down the low-cut neck of
her dress. “Aw, let him play,” I said. “It’ll keep him quiet.” He gave
a grin as broad as a barn door and left his hand where it was.
Frank’s passion for Ava dragged him halfway around the world: to
Mexico, Spain, Africa, England, France. It broke up his marriage to
Nancy in 1951; it plunged his spirits and his bank balance so low that
in December 1953 he had to borrow money to buy Ava a Christmas present.
Their jealousy of each other passed the raw edge of violence. At one
point in their teeth-and-claw romance Frank was hired to sing at the
Copacabana in New York, while the two of them stayed in Hampshire
House. While he worked nights, Ava got bored and started running around
town with her friends. She strayed one evening into Bop City, where
Artie Shaw, ex-husband number two, was starred with a jazz band.
The following afternoon, when Frank discovered where she’d been, the
fur began to fly in his hotel bedroom. When she screamed that she was
sick of his jealousy and was going to leave him, he pulled out the .38
he carried and threatened to blow his brains out. She stalked toward
the door. He fired twice--into the mattress of the bed. Ava didn’t turn
her head; she kept right on walking.
David Selznick, in the suite next door, heard the shots and called
the front desk. The clerk there telephoned the police. Mannie Sachs,
the king of talent scouts for RCA, who had a permanent suite down the
hall, had also been startled by the explosions, and came running. He
and Selznick hurried into Frank’s room, listened to what had happened.
Then they grabbed the mattress with the two holes in it and toted it
down the hall, to exchange it for one on Mannie’s bed. When the police
arrived to search Frank’s suite without finding a trace of bullets,
Frank was as cool as a cat. “You’re dreaming,” he told them. “You’re
crazy.”
He had already applied to Harry Cohn for the featured role of Maggio
in _From Here to Eternity_ when he flew to Africa in 1952 to be with
Ava while she made _Mogambo_ with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly. Cohn had
originally doused cold water on his ambition. “You’re nuts. You’re a
song-and-dance man. Maggio’s stage-actor kind of stuff.”
Frank had been in Africa five days--days of sitting around with nothing
to do but watch his wife work. He killed time by building an outside
shower in the woods for her. He rounded up fifty native singers and
dancers for a party for cast and crew. He worked harder than on any
sound stage to keep from going crazy. Then his agent, Bert Allenberg of
MCA, called him back to test for _Eternity_. Frank told me the whole
story later:
“I left Africa one Friday night. I had a copy of the scene and I sat up
all night on the plane. Didn’t sleep the whole trip. Monday morning I
made the test. I finished at 3 P.M. and that night flew back to Africa.
My adrenalin was bubbling. I waited five days, ten, then got a letter
they were testing five or six other guys, among them Eli Wallach.
“I’d seen him in _Rose Tattoo_ on Broadway, and I know he’s a fine
actor. So I thought: ‘I’m dead.’ Then I got a wire from Allenberg:
‘Looks bad.’ My chin was kicking my knees. But Ava was wonderful. She
said: ‘They haven’t cast the picture yet. All you get is a stinking
telegram, and you let it get you down.’
“Clark would say: ‘Skipper, relax. Drink a little booze. Everything
will be all right.’ I left Africa and went to Boston for a night-club
date. I got a call another Monday morning that they’d made the deal. I
told Allenberg: ‘If you have to pay Harry Cohn, sign the contract; I’ll
pay _him_.’”
For Maggio, Frank’s fee was $8000 instead of the usual $150,000. He
flew off to join Ava for a few days of fun and fury in Paris. “Then I
got a cable from Harry Cohn: ‘Clift already proficient in army drill.
Seeing as how you have same routine, suggest you get back a few days
early.’ I wired back: ‘Dear Harry--will comply with request. Drilling
with French Army over weekend. Everything all right. Maggio.’ I talked
to his secretary later, and she said when she opened the wire she
screamed. But Cohn didn’t crack a smile. He had a sense of humor like
an open grave.”
Unpredictable as always, Frank went with his family to the Academy
Awards show when he collected an Oscar for Maggio. “The minute my name
was read, I turned around and looked at the kids. Little Nancy had
tears in her eyes. For a second I didn’t know whether to go up on stage
and get it or stay there and comfort her. But I gave her a peck on the
cheek and reached for young Frankie’s hand.
“When I came back, it was late, so I got them home and sat with them
for a while. Then I took the Oscar back to my place, where a few
people dropped in. I got Nancy a little miniature thing for her charm
bracelet, a small Oscar medallion. The kids gave me a St. Genesius
medal before the Awards, engraved with, ‘Dad, we will love you from
here to eternity.’ Little Nancy gave me a medal and said, ‘This is from
me and St. Anthony.’ That’s her dear friend. She seems to get a lot
done with St. Anthony. I guess she has a direct wire to him.”
There’s a show-business legend that, abracadabra, Frank’s career
started going up like a skyrocket from that moment on. It’s a legend,
nothing more. Turning the corner was slow going for him. He still had
to play in such flops as _Suddenly_ and find he was turned down for
_Mr. Roberts_ because Leland Hayward thought he was too old. He still
had night-club tours to make under old agreements. And he still had to
work out the switch to Capitol which eventually made him a best seller
on records.
It took him a long time, too, to recover from Ava. She hasn’t yet
recovered from him. Holed up in Spain, she has been outcast to most
Spaniards, who don’t tolerate her flouting of their social rules.
Recently she went back to work again, talking a comeback, as so many
like her do. The proof, as always, lies in the performance they can
deliver before the cameras.
Frank came near the end of the road he’d traveled with her when he
returned unexpectedly early one day to his Palm Springs house and
overheard her talking with another woman star whom she’d invited
down there while he was away. The subject they were discussing, I
understand, was Frank’s love-making, which they were downgrading. Those
two would do just that. “Pack up your clothes and get out,” Frank
yelled. “I don’t want to see either of you again.”
I sat in his dressing room at Paramount in December 1956 when the Ava
era finally ended for him. A Hollywood reporter had taken her out
driving one night in the desert around Palm Springs, gotten her drunk,
and recorded what she told him over a microphone hidden in his car. The
magazine story that resulted had appeared that day. Frank sat with a
copy of it in his hand, cringing silently in his chair. Ava was quoted
as complaining: “Frank double-crossed me ... made me the heavy ... I
paid many of the bills.” Even the ashes were cold after that.
That was the year he waged a busy-beaver campaign for Adlai Stevenson,
just as he had worked for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and,
four years later, would slave for John F. Kennedy. He was in Spain,
filming _The Pride and the Passion_, when he was asked to assist the
Democratic convention in Chicago by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”
on opening night. Eager to oblige, he flew for thirty-three hours
through appalling transatlantic weather and reached the convention
platform at 8 P.M., a bare thirty minutes before Sam Rayburn, late
Speaker of the House of Representatives, was scheduled to gavel the
session to order.
No more than four hundred people had filtered into their places in
the 25,000-seat auditorium when Mr. Rayburn, fortified by bourbon,
started banging away with his gavel. Frank had no choice but sing to a
virtually empty hall, while his fine old Sicilian temper flamed.
During the anthem somebody alerted Sam Rayburn to his error. He went
over to Frank as soon as he’d finished singing and put his hand on
Sinatra’s sleeve to apologize. Frank brushed him aside. “Keep your arm
off my suit,” he snapped, and stormed away.
When Bill Davidson wrote the story, Frank had his attorney, Martin
Gang, file suit for $2,300,000. He was armed with a telegram from
Rayburn asserting that the incident was undiluted imagination. All
Davidson had was the word of Mitch Miller, who’d been close enough on
the platform to overhear what had gone on there. There didn’t seem to
be any other witnesses.
But on a visit to New York soon after, a Hollywood press agent who was
close to Davidson bumped into a Madison Avenue advertising man whom
he hadn’t seen for years. The old friend happened to tell the press
agent about a funny thing he’d seen on the platform at the Democratic
convention, which he’d attended on agency business: He’d watched
Sinatra giving Rayburn the brush-off. Needless to say, the suit was
dropped.
Politics are serious business to Frank--they used to be to me until I
got tired of the game and decided to give the young ones a chance. I
was doing a bit in a picture at Las Vegas while he was there making
_Oceans 11_, and I wanted to talk to him. But he was always too busy.
After the 1960 conventions came and went, he was off on the island of
Maui doing _Devil at 4 O’Clock_ before he could keep a promise to come
over to my house.
From Maui he sent me a letter “giving you all the answers to the
questions you would have asked me if we actually did an interview.”
He’s a John F. Kennedy man and I was a Robert Taft woman; what better
subject for a letter than politics, Sinatra version?
“Every four years,” he wrote, “the same question arises: Should
show-business personalities become involved in politics? Should they
use their popularity with the public to try to influence votes?
“My answer has always been ‘yes.’ If the head of a big corporation can
try to use his influence with his employees, if a union head can try
to use his influence with his members, if a newspaper editor can try
to use his influence with his readers, if a columnist can try to use
his influence, then an actor has a perfect right to try to use his
influence.
“My own feeling is that those actors who do not agree with my point
of view are those who are afraid to stand up and be counted. They
want everybody to love them and want everybody to agree with them on
everything.
“I am not sure whether they are right or whether I am right. I only
know what is right for me....”
I almost tore up the letter as soon as I’d read it because of its last
paragraph: “Maybe it will make a good Sunday piece for you. If you
think so, then please don’t start to edit it. These are my thoughts,
and if you want to pass them on to your readers, let them stand as is.”
I haven’t edited; I’ve quoted, but not all five pages. Life’s too short
for that, and you probably wouldn’t read them, anyway.
Though he’s proud to be a Democrat, he’s uneasy about being called a
“Clansman.” The Clan consists of the men with which this mixed-up,
lonely talent has surrounded himself--Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr.,
Joey Bishop, Peter Pentagon Lawford.
“I hate the name of Clan,” Frank once said.
“Did you ever look the word up in a dictionary?” I said. “It means a
family group that sticks together, like the Kennedys you’re so fond of.
They’re the most clannish family in America. I don’t like Rat Pack, but
there’s nothing wrong with the name of Clan.”