Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  “It was nightmare time after Ava,” said Norma Eberhardt, an actress who played in one of the Dracula movies. “We spent a lot of nights together in Palm Springs trying to chase those nightmares away.” The first seduction Jacobs observed involved “a pretty starlet from the studios.” The operation was carefully prepared, with roses supplied by Parisian Florist of Hollywood, prosciutto by Monaco’s Italian deli, champagne and chocolate from Jurgensen’s grocery, and an engraved notebook—the starlet had ambitions to write as well as act. There was also Dinah Shore, whom Frank had known since the 1930s, and with whom he quite often performed. Shore was married, to the actor George Montgomery, but Jacobs said she dallied with Frank over a long period.

  In late 1954, Frank made a play for Grace Kelly. Though involved with another man, and in spite of the lasting friendship she had forged with Ava on Mogambo, she agreed to see him. Their date reportedly went badly, in part because he was already drunk when he picked her up, in part because he spent a good deal of the evening weeping about Ava. “He held no attraction for her,” said Celeste Holm, who later worked with them both on the movie High Society. “Grace regarded Frank as a street kid. . . . She was on a different level. She was a princess long before she married Prince Rainier.”

  Ava, meanwhile, was compounding Frank’s emotional confusion. During filming, colleagues noted, her baggage always included a pile of Sinatra records. She had flung a jeweled cross to a toreador in homage, only to beg for its return because it had been a gift from Frank. In the heat of her affair with Dominguín, she returned to the United States to get a divorce—then failed to follow through. The shrine to Ava stayed in place in Frank’s apartment, and he kept a photograph of her on the dressing room mirror when filming in Hollywood. He was swinging in the emotional wind.

  GEORGE JACOBS thought Frank “craved class” in women. Socially, no one could have been classier than the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Thirty-one when she and Frank got together in late 1954, she had come into a fortune—some $27 million in today’s dollars—and had for years been married to a man forty-two years her senior, the conductor Leopold Stokowski. Before that marriage, she had had some chaotic adventures in Hollywood, including an engagement to the actor Van Heflin, an infatuation with Howard Hughes, and a miserable first marriage to a gold-digging agent, Pat De Cicco. She had dabbled in painting, writing poetry, and acting.

  When Frank got word to Vanderbilt that he wanted to meet her, she recalled in 1988 in a journal-style memoir, she wanted to tell herself “Stop!”—but didn’t. She remembered how years earlier, when they had met after one of her husband’s concerts, Frank kept glancing at her. At the time, in the first flush of the marriage to Stokowski, Vanderbilt had barely given it a thought. Now, the idea of being with Sinatra put her in a fever of excitement.

  “It was what I had been waiting for,” she wrote. “I’m seeing him again tonight. . . . I feel high, like I’m taking deep drafts of some kind of rare oxygen. . . . I am strong because a person of power loves me. . . . In three weeks when he is gone, by then it won’t matter, won’t matter if I never see him again. He is the bridge, the bridge to set me free.”

  Vanderbilt stepped out with Frank within days. Then she moved out of the sumptuous home she shared with Stokowski, taking their two small sons with her. After Christmas, having told the press her marriage was over, she arrived for a Broadway premiere on Frank’s arm. Interviewed late the same night at the Copacabana, where Frank was opening, she said there was “no romance” between them.

  The journalist St. Clair Pugh, who saw them together at Vanderbilt’s apartment, thought at once that this was untrue. Vanderbilt’s close friend Carol Matthau knew it was not true. Pugh thought the song “It Was a Very Good Year,” which Frank was to make famous, included a conscious reference to the fling the poor man’s son from Hoboken had enjoyed with a princess of the American aristocracy:

  It was a very good year for blue-blooded girls Of independent means. . . .

  Vanderbilt would recall midnight suppers with Frank “during which he talked about himself, confiding the split in his mind, like a balance scale, on one side Mafia-dark, on the other side Clark Kent–light, dark and light, up and down, a pull drawing him to the dark.” Clark Kent always triumphed in the end, she thought.

  She wrote in her journal, “I cannot imagine a long tomorrow with F. and me in it.” The doubt was well founded, for their affair lasted only a few weeks. So too did the notion, months later, that the millionairess would star in a movie with Frank. By one account, she had by then been driven to distraction by Frank’s obsession with Ava.

  The night Frank and Vanderbilt were at the Copacabana, Anita Ekberg, a former Miss Sweden, had been seated nearby. Frank had had a dalliance with the twenty-three-year-old in California, and had flown her to New York. In revenge for a recent slight, though, she turned up at the Copacabana with another man.

  Early in January, Jill Corey, a dark-haired nineteen-year-old at the Copacabana with a boyfriend, realized Frank was giving her the eye from the stage. “I noticed,” she recalled, “that he was singing love songs kind of in my direction. I remember that my cheeks felt hot. I didn’t know why he was doing it, and I kept looking over my shoulder to see if there was a pretty woman sitting behind me.”

  Corey, who had started life as Norma Jean Speranza, was a coalminer’s daughter from an Italian-American family in Pennsylvania, a friendly girl who had sung contralto in the church choir. Now, with a recording contract and a name change, she had been catapulted into a new and glitzy world. She appeared on television and was featured on the cover of Life as a “Small-Town Girl” made good. Then, soon after having been ogled by Frank at the Copacabana, Corey was amazed to get a call from him.

  It had been hard to track her down, Frank said. Would she join him at the Copa after his show the following night? In an interview nearly fifty years later, Corey quietly half-sang, half-talked the song she wrote about that first date:

  Tonight I’ve a date with Sinatra,

  Oh God, I’m experiencing angst!

  In my virginal state, should he kiss me I’d faint,

  And do I call him Frankie or Frank?

  . . . On a drive through the park with his chauffeur,

  Dinner, and wine, and a dance.

  In the back he holds my hand, sings in my ear,

  It’s the beginning of romance . . .

  Thus began an intermittent five-year liaison that would last until she met her future husband. There were dates in California, heady encounters with celebrities, and gestures of affection—telegrams, flowers, a teddy bear—when Frank was traveling.

  He took pains to hide his affairs from his growing children, not always successfully. The month of the affair with Gloria Vanderbilt, and just days after first romancing Corey, his fourteen-year-old daughter Nancy made an unsettling discovery when he took her along on a tour of Australia—a pair of women’s stockings in his hotel bedroom. It upset her a lot.

  As Frank ran through woman after woman, the one who ruled his heart remained a chimera. Ava, who for a while had spoken of him coldly as “Sinatra,” now spoke of him again as “my old man,” even as “the greatest of the great.” Her affair with Dominguín had cooled, and for the moment there was no more talk of divorcing Frank. Whenever the two of them got together, though, according to Jacobs, it was clear nothing had changed. “They’d be fighting a lot. He’d come tearing out of the room and she’d come out screaming and cursing.” Ava, meanwhile, was talking of moving permanently to Spain.

  ACCORDING TO GEORGE JACOBS, Frank would browse movie magazines looking for pictures of young women to “do.” Jimmy Van Heusen, who helped recruit them, also knew how to procure the best prostitutes. After a long conversation with a regular girlfriend, Jacobs said, Frank would often hang up the phone and sigh, “Get me a goddamn hooker.” Several Los Angeles area prostitutes gossiped about him with a well-known showgirl of the day, Liz Renay. They would giggle about how well endowed Frank wa
s, she said, and say he was a good client.

  Renay herself fondly recalled an entirely innocent encounter. One night, when she and her teenage daughter were stranded without transport, Frank told them they could stay with him in his suite. “We had been drinking,” she remembered. “Frank said, ‘I’m not interested in hanky-panky. Why don’t we just lie down like three tin soldiers? We won’t even undress.’

  “I was afraid he was just saying that, that he’d try to put the make on my daughter. But he just turned away from her towards me, and went to sleep. He joked in the morning, ‘Don’t tell anybody I slept between two beautiful women and all I did was sleep. . . . It’ll ruin my reputation.’ ”

  In the fall of 1955 Frank sought comfort with an old lover. “Sinatra was half in the bag one night,” Rosemary Clooney recalled, “and he whispered to me, ‘Isn’t it interesting that nobody knows about me and Dietrich?’ ” His return to Marlene Dietrich’s diary confirms the liaison. In the same year, at fifty-four, that extraordinary woman was passionately involved with Yul Brynner and “keeping happy”—her euphemism—Adlai Stevenson, the broadcaster Ed Murrow, the playwright William Saroyan, and a long-standing lover whose identity remains unknown.

  Dietrich and Frank met again in early September, according to the diary, at a Hollywood dinner party. Frank took her out two days later, followed up with phone calls, then flew with her to Las Vegas. “F drunk but nice,” reads the entry for September 9. “To bed at 9 a.m.” She stayed on with Frank in Nevada, defying telephoned pleas from Brynner, in Los Angeles, to join him there.

  The affair with Frank, Dietrich’s daughter Maria Riva thought, was “her private placebo against the loneliness of yearning for Yul.” Things soon soured, though. On September 11 Frank was “asleep in chair at 9:30 a.m. . . . Got up without kiss. Bad day . . . did not behave as usual . . . went to his room. He said ‘Go to bed’—I was thunderstruck. Left.”

  Two weeks later, when they met at a party, Dietrich realized Frank was hopelessly drunk, “like a stranger.” Then Brynner told her he knew what had been going on with Frank, and said she could do as she pleased. She got together with Frank again soon after, when both were working on Around the World in 80 Days. And again the following year, during another upset with Brynner:

  December 1st

  . . . Home with Frank. Finally, some love.

  December 2nd

  F called at 9:30 p.m.

  Finally some sweetness. Slept well and long.

  In two diary entries referring to nights with Frank, Dietrich wrote of him as having been “sweet and tender.” She told her daughter he was “the only really tender man I have ever known. He lets you sleep, he is so grateful—in a nice way, all cozy.”

  Other women had memories of Frank behaving callously. “He showers a girl with gifts, attention, compliments,” said Jacqueline Park, a former Miss Ceylon he dated. “Then all of a sudden he doesn’t phone and drops out of her life. . . . He’s easily bored.” In Vegas with Jill Corey, at a time she thought marriage was in the cards, Frank abruptly abandoned her to go off gambling.

  Anita Ekberg had gone home fuming, after a similar experience, only to have Frank come banging on the door at 3:00 A.M. “Open up!” she recalled him yelling. “A woman who goes to dinner with Frank Sinatra must go home with him, even if she has to wait all night.” Ekberg did not let him in.

  Zsa Zsa Gabor was thirty-eight in 1955, not long divorced—for the third time—and best known professionally for a decorative appearance in the movie Moulin Rouge. After a first date with Frank, according to Gabor, he pushed his way into her house and said he wouldn’t leave until she had sex with him. When she refused, he claimed he had a terrible headache and said he needed to lie down. Gabor had her maid show him to a guest bedroom and locked herself into her own. Frank then came knocking on her door, to no avail, before retreating to the guest room again. At first light, afraid that her eight-year-old daughter would see Frank, or his Cadillac parked in the driveway, Gabor went to the guest room to ask her unwanted guest to leave. “My begging took nearly an hour,” she recalled, “but Frank Sinatra wouldn’t leave unless I made love to him. So I did. I made love to Sinatra so that he would leave and from then on I hated him. And Frank knew it.”

  Other women had bad experiences with Frank. Sandra Giles, a glamour girl trying to break into movies, was in her twenties in 1958. Like Jill Corey, she had recently been the subject of a three-page story in Life. One night, while eating with a boyfriend at an Italian restaurant—a place that had phones for communication between tables, a fad at the time in fashionable nightspots—she was amazed to receive a call from a very familiar voice. “This is Frank Sinatra,” he told her. “I’d like you to come over to our table and have a drink.”

  Giles demurred, explaining that she was with a date. Frank persisted, urging her to join him later at a party. When she again declined, he said he might be able to get her work. She agreed to meet him at a television studio, and they began seeing each other. At first she thought Frank merely “nice and sweet . . . not overly romantic.” Then came a night after a Grammy Awards ceremony at which he failed to win an award, then proceeded to get drunk. Giles was drinking too and, along with others, wound up going back to his place.

  “I sat down on the couch,” she recalled, “and someone handed me a Drambuie. I think I’d had four already, and I had just one sip. When I woke up I was in bed—and nude. Frank was in bed with me, and he was nude too. I was shocked. He said, ‘Come on, you know we’ve done it already’—he meant had sex—and I said ‘We have? No we haven’t.’ We talked back and forth, and I got out of bed and went to the bathroom and locked the door. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ and I said I was calling the police. He said, ‘Sandra, come back out. I won’t try anything anymore.’ . . . He had his chauffeur take me home.”

  Giles was sure Frank had not had sex with her that night. Pretending that he had, she believed, had been a cynical ploy to have his way with her. She later found a $100 bill stuffed in her purse—a significant sum in those days—and Frank admitted he had put it there. “He said, ‘Yeah, that’s something for your daughter for a Christmas present.’ It was his way of apologizing. He never actually said he was sorry.”

  Another would-be actress, Shirley Van Dyke, had first become involved with Frank in the mid-1940s, when she was a roller-skating star and he the idol of the bobbysoxers. “She was one of his girls, sexual whatever,” said her former husband, Stan Levey, a drummer who worked with Frank, “and he would get her work. If he was doing a picture he would get her work as an extra. There was a bartering system— bartering sex for work.”

  Van Dyke’s son Bob, then a little boy, remembers his mother taking him to a showing of Frank’s movie The Man with the Golden Arm, which premiered in 1955. “He met us in the aisle and sat us down,” he recalled. “He was very nice. My mother had some strong feelings for him, that’s for sure. Frank could be generous, but he could also be very hard, from what I understand. I think when Frank called the shots, it was over. She went through a lot of pain about it, never quite got over him.”

  In early spring of 1957 Van Dyke was taken to the hospital after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Notes found in her apartment mentioned Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis—and Frank. “Frank Sinatra, you’ve done me wrong,” read one of them, “you’re so big and I’m so small.” She recovered, then told the press she had been “sick and tired of being in love with him. . . . I don’t know how I ever got so entangled.” Frank acknowledged only that he had helped Van Dyke get parts in movies.

  A FEW MONTHS LATER, in London, another actress, Eva Bartok, gave birth to a baby girl she named Deana. Bartok, then twenty-eight, was an up-and-coming star who had made films with Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin. The space on the birth certificate for “Father” had been left blank, but twenty years later she told the show business writer Peter Evans that the father was Frank Sinatra. Fearing a lawsuit—Frank was known to be litigious—the newspaper that ran E
vans’s story hinted at that without making a direct allegation.

  In her taped interview with Evans, Bartok told how she met Frank at a Hollywood party at the home of producer Charles Feldman. Rex Harrison, David Niven, and Judy Garland had been there too, but Frank stopped her in her tracks. “Sinatra had meant nothing to me,” she told Evans, “but it was like: ‘There he is!’—a kind of instant something happening . . . we found ourselves talking as if we had known each other for a very long time. Before I left somehow telephone numbers got exchanged and he asked me to give him a call a little bit later because he was going home.”

  When she got back to her place, Bartok wondered what in the world she was doing, but phoned Frank anyway. “He said, ‘I’m all alone and I can’t sleep.’ I could easily have thought, ‘What an old line!,’ but somehow I didn’t.” Soon, she remembered, “There we were alone in this very nice house at the top of a hill. We sat in front of a fire and talked about books—I remember being surprised by the kind of books I saw on his shelves, more serious than I would have expected. . . . We talked and talked. . . . I remember being surprised when it was suddenly dawn. And he got up and said, ‘Well, let’s go to bed!’

  “There had been none of the usual maneuvering and boudoir strategies. My reaction was astounding. It seemed the most natural thing in the world, the only thing he could really say. It was that simple.”

  They stayed in touch for a few months. Bartok dined with Frank at Italian restaurants, sat in on recording sessions, spent time with him at home, then returned to Europe. When she learned she was pregnant, she said, she was “1,000 percent” sure that Frank was the father, but did not tell him. “I knew or thought I knew,” she said, “that it probably wouldn’t have worked out.”