Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  Liquor fueled his rage against people he considered enemies. After years of gushing about Frank, Dorothy Kilgallen offended him in 1956 with a series of caustic articles that led off by calling him a “Jekyll and Hyde dressed in sharpie clothes.” Frank raged about her at first in private, among friends. One of them, Armand Deutsch, recalled him hurling darts at a board that featured “ghastly likenesses” of three female columnists, Kilgallen, Louella Parsons, and Hedda Hopper. He later resorted to abusing Kilgallen in public, and would still be inveighing against her on stage in Las Vegas, while obviously drunk, long after she was dead.

  Frank emerged from a Sunset Strip club one night in the mid-1950s, glass in hand, and got into a brawl with a waiting journalist, Bill Byron. Each accused the other of starting it, but Maxwell House heir Bob Neal, who was present, said later that Frank “pushed the journalist into a phone booth, then closed the booth.” When he emerged, Byron said, Frank “swung at me and kicked me in the shins.”

  When Bill Davidson of Look magazine reported this and other follies, Frank sued the publisher. Davidson’s widow said that later, during an encounter at a hotel, “Bill was sitting in the restaurant and Sinatra was a table or so away with his henchmen. . . . They got up and the guys came over and tried to work him over.” Davidson, a former athlete, gave as good as he got.

  The bully-boy bluster aside, Frank’s loneliness in the late 1950s showed as much in his work as in his private life. He recorded the album Only the Lonely, a collection of haunting ballads—saloon songs, he called them—about sadness and loss. It was so melancholic, Frank Jr. once said, that it “should be available in drugstores by prescription only.”

  Frank’s favorite track on the album was “Angel Eyes.” “Angel” had been his nickname for Ava, when things were going well between them. In the 1970s, he would close his “retirement” concert with the song:

  . . . have fun, you happy people The drink and the laugh’s on me.

  Not long before the divorce from Ava and the breakup with Peggy Connelly, Frank had moved into a new house high up in Coldwater Canyon, in Beverly Hills. It was deliberately isolated, at the end of a long driveway closed off by an electronically controlled gate. A sign at the entrance read: “If You Haven’t Been Invited You Better Have a Damn Good Reason for Ringing the Bell!”

  Many nights, those living further down the mountain heard classical music coming from the house, played hour after hour. The lights often burned all night and sometimes neighbors could see the silhouette of a solitary figure far above them hunched over a telescope, staring at the stars.

  At other times, Frank gathered glittering company around him. “I drove here this morning to stay with Frankie,” the English playwright Noël Coward wrote in his diary after spending New Year’s at the Palm Springs house. “People of all shapes and sizes swirling through this very small house like the relentless waves of the sea. . . . Bogie pushed Irving Lazar into the pool and Irving Lazar pushed Bogie into the pool. . . . The prevailing chaos is dominated by Frankie who contrives, apparently without effort, to be cheerful and unflagging. . . . His is a remarkable personality—tough, vulnerable and somehow touching.”

  As Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall left that night, Frank asked them to stay. He looked “forlorn,” Bacall thought and told her husband they should have stayed. “No,” said Bogart. “It’s too bad if he’s lonely, but that’s his choice. . . . He chose to live the way he’s living—alone.”

  21

  Betty

  FRANK HAD KNOWN THE BOGARTS since just after the war, when they had appeared on radio together. He had sailed on Bogart’s yacht, gone drinking with him and Henry Fonda. Lauren Bacall remembered that from 1954, when Frank was at a low ebb after separating from Ava, he “practically lived at our house . . . five or six days a week.”

  Bogart, Brad Dexter thought, was “the one guy Frank hero-worshipped”—like no other man at any point in his life. Bacall—“Betty” to intimates—thought he seemed “in awe of Bogie.” On the surface there were similarities between the two men. Both had reached the pinnacle of stardom at about the same time. Both had won Oscars—Bogart for Best Actor in The African Queen. Both were little men with receding hair—Bogart wore toupees too—yet legions of women found them attractive. Both had tough guy images, and both were drinkers. Both had opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee and were perceived as liberals.

  In reality they were very different. Bogart, the son of a prominent New York surgeon, had a privileged childhood. He had been sent to a private school in the expectation that he would go on to an Ivy League college, and had served briefly in the Navy at the end of World War I. He was fifty-four to Frank’s thirty-eight when their friendship began.

  Bogart had been happily married to Bacall for nine years. Like Sinatra he often got into angry confrontations, but avoided actual fighting. He had moderated his drinking. Though not a paragon of marital fidelity, he was not a casual womanizer. His self-control where women were concerned, Bacall thought, puzzled and fascinated Frank. “He just didn’t understand how a man could be not only talented but so intelligent, and also have a family and not fuck around. He just didn’t understand how anyone could do that, because all he did was fuck around.”

  Bogart was exceptionally well read, articulate on a vast range of subjects, and Frank saw him as a mentor. He rued his own lack of education more with each passing year, and often asked Bogart what books he should read. “I think we’re parent substitutes for him or something,” Bogart once told the writer Richard Gehman. He saw Frank as not being “adult emotionally,” as a man who should “stay away from broads” and concentrate on acting. Nevertheless, Bacall said, he liked Frank and “enjoyed his ‘fighting windmills.’ ”

  Being around the Bogarts brought Frank good cheer in a time of personal gloom. The couple’s home on Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills was described by a friend as “a kind of endless open house.” When the light over the front door was on, friends knew, they were welcome to come in for drinks.

  Frank had become part of a coterie that included Judy Garland, John Huston, David Niven, “Prince” Mike Romanoff of Romanoff’s restaurant, the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, and Swifty Lazar. Other friends included Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, the young Richard Burton, and Adlai Stevenson. A party at the Bogarts’, Rosemary Clooney recalled, was “a whirl of music and laughter.”

  There were also exotic weekends afloat, for Bogart was an avid sailor. “We dropped anchor in Cherry Cove,” Niven wrote of one such trip, “and Frank Sinatra moored alongside us in a chartered motor cruiser with several beautiful girls and a small piano. After dinner, with Jimmy Van Heusen accompanying him, Sinatra began to sing. He sang all night . . . his monumental talent and exquisite phrasing undimmed by a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on top of the piano. . . . He sang till the moon and the stars paled in the predawn sky.”

  Burton, who was also there, remembered it differently. “Frankie did sing all through the night,” he noted in his diary after reading the Niven account, “but Bogie and I went out lobster-potting and Frankie got really pissed off with Bogie . . . nobody could stop Francis from going on and on. . . . Bogie and Frank nearly came to blows next day about the singing the night before, and I drove Betty home because she was so angry about Bogie’s cracks about Frank’s singing. . . . Bogie was unnecessarily cruel.”

  Bogart could only take so much of Frank’s extravagant style, exemplified in June 1955 when he flew friends to celebrate Noël Coward’s debut in Las Vegas. Frank splurged on “four days and nights of concentrated self-indulgence,” Niven remembered, “individual apartments for everyone . . . food and drink twenty-four hours a day . . . a big bag of silver dollars presented to each girl in the party to gamble with.” The entire party had then been flown to Frank’s home in Palm Springs for the weekend.

  That degree of flamboyance soon palled on Bogart. As much as anyone, though, he enjoyed the razzmatazz of the rambunctious little group they formed.r />
  THE ORIGINAL RAT PACK was born of a night of drinking at Romanoff’s, according to Joe Hyams, a journalist who knew most of those involved. The in crowd, he learned, had decided to form “an organization with a platform of iconoclasm . . . against everything and everyone, including themselves.” Hyams interviewed Bogart, then wrote a story that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on December 15, 1955:

  “The Holmby Hills Rat Pack held its first annual meeting last night at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills and elected officers for the coming year. Named to executive positions were: Frank Sinatra, pack master; Judy Garland, first vice-president; Lauren Bacall, den mother . . . Humphrey Bogart, rat-in-charge-of public relations; Irving Lazar, recording secretary and treasurer.”

  The founding members, readers were told, had approved a coat of arms designed by Rat Pack historian Nathaniel Benchley, Bogart’s friend and the son of Robert Benchley, a renowned wit and a member of the Algonquin Round Table. It featured a rat gnawing on a human hand, and the legend “Never rat on a rat.” Members would soon be sporting lapel pins in the shape of rat’s heads, with rubies for eyes. The organization, Bogart told Hyams, had no function other than “the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for anyone else.”

  According to Niven, the group got its name when Bacall told the hungover survivors of the recent bacchanal in Las Vegas that they looked like “a goddamned rat pack.” Sands Hotel executive Jack Entratter then sent each member of the party a white rat—gift-wrapped. According to Hyams, it was in Beverly Hills, at Romanoff’s, that Bacall had welcomed her friends—“adults who acted much of the time like overprivileged delinquents”—with the crack, “I see the rat pack is all here.” Bogart said the name derived from the name he used for the English racing cars he and his pals owned, the Beverly Hills Rat Traps.

  “Rats,” Bogart told another reporter, “are for staying up late and drinking lots of booze. We’re against squares and being bored and for lots of fun.” Members had to be “against the PTA,” his wife quipped, “stay up late and drink and laugh a lot and not care what anybody said about you or thought about you.”

  Louella Parsons was not amused. She knew, she wrote in her column, “that you and your good pals meet only for social events or gay weekend expeditions to Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs. . . . It would all be very funny if it weren’t for the fact that so many teenagers take everything done by movie stars with dead seriousness.” “People have worked for years to lend dignity to our profession,” said William Holden. “It might sound stuffy and dull, but it is quite possible for people to have social intercourse without resorting to a rat pack.”

  Hollywood had seen similar cliques before. John Barrymore, and after him Errol Flynn, had presided over their own circles of dedicated drinkers. His little group, Bogart insisted, was only a joke. Two months after his Rat Pack announcement, though, the laughter faded. During a weekend at Frank’s home in Palm Springs, friends learned that Bogart had cancer of the throat.

  Frank was a constant support as his friend’s health declined. When in California, he visited Bogart at home almost every day. In the summer of 1956, when he was in Spain making The Pride and the Passion, he phoned or sent telegrams. “He cheered Bogie up when he was with him,” Bacall remembered, “kept the ring-a-ding act in high gear. . . .” As Bogart wasted away, he cracked jokes about his lean friend Frank. “I’ve slimmed down so much,” the sick man told the writer Charles Hamblett, “it’s got Sinatra worried. He was here yesterday afternoon, and he got quite jealous of my waistline.”

  In January 1957, in his last hours of full consciousness, Bogart watched Frank’s 1945 movie Anchors Aweigh on television. When he died, thirty-six hours later, Frank was in New York playing the Copacabana. He canceled performances and locked himself in his room, avoiding calls from everyone except Bacall. Then, after telling her he planned to fly back for the funeral, he asked Peggy Connelly to attend in his place.

  Frank did not sound especially emotional when he called about the funeral. “He never exposed his feelings,” Peggy said.

  THE MARRIAGE OF “BOGIE AND BACALL” is usually depicted as the show business romance of their day, Bogart’s death as its tragic last act. Yet all was not perfect.

  Bogart’s hairdresser and personal assistant, Verita Thompson, said years later that she had a long, sporadic affair with him that continued until 1954, nine years into the marriage to Bacall. The director Nicholas Ray, who knew Bogart well and directed two of his movies, claimed Bacall was no paragon of fidelity either.

  Bacall had found fame in 1944 after playing opposite Bogart in To Have and Have Not. She had been nineteen then, twenty-five years younger than the man she was soon to marry. By the 1950s, she acknowledged in her memoirs, she was occasionally tempted to stray. She had an “infatuation” for Adlai Stevenson, whom she first got to know during the 1952 presidential campaign. “His flirtatiousness encouraged me,” she wrote, and she saw him when she could. The following year she had been “very attracted” to the composer Leonard Bernstein. “If Lenny and I had been on the loose,” she said, “God knows what madness would have taken over.”

  By her account, no madness ever did take over. “I never dared. . . . I knew that Bogie—however much he loved me—would put up with flirtation, but if I ever really did anything he would leave me.”

  Peggy Connelly suspected that Frank and Bacall began an affair before Bogart died. “Frank loved Bogart,” she said, “but his woman was . . . just something else.” “It was no secret to any of us,” the playwright Ketti Frings said. “Everybody knew about Betty and Frank. We just hoped Bogie wouldn’t find out. That would have been more killing than the cancer.” Bogart did not know about his wife’s “real relationship” with Frank, Verita Thompson said. The actor William Campbell, however, thought Bogart had been uneasy on that score. “That’s the way I picked it up. . . . Because there was some relationship there, more on her part than his. And I think Bogart was aware of it.”

  Bogart was still worrying about it only months before he died. When Frank arranged a birthday party for Bacall in Las Vegas, in September 1956, her husband stayed away. He was “edgy and resentful” when she got home, and she soon found out why. “He was somewhat jealous of Frank,” Bacall remembered, “. . . partly because he thought Frank was in love with me, partly because our physical life together, which had always ranked high, had less than flourished with his illness.”

  By contrast, she said, Frank “represented physical health. . . .” He was “wildly attractive, electrifying . . . there must have always been a special feeling alive between Frank and me.”

  In the weeks after Bogart’s death, the special feeling intensified. By spring 1957 Frank and Bacall were going out together. On July 5, the day Frank’s divorce from Ava became final, he and Bacall were cruising off the coast of California aboard a rented yacht. “After that weekend,” she said, “the relationship just grew.” Frank was “very attentive, very caring, very lovely, and sweet with the kids.”

  Yet, looking back, Bacall could see that things had never been quite right even then. Frank had become inexplicably “remote—polite but remote,” before the boat trip. The cruise had been off, then suddenly on again. During the trip, she remembered wearily, Frank “got drunk and got into a fight with a waiter . . . he always did.”

  In September, nevertheless, she sold the home on Mapleton Drive she had shared with Bogart, because she felt “Frank would feel better if I moved.” She rented another house, having first had her clivia plants dug up and transferred to Frank’s garden because “they were his favorite color, orange.”

  At Christmas, just months after his most recent proposal to Peggy Connelly, Frank asked Bacall to marry him. How she responded is not clear, but two days into the new year he got drunk and behaved “like a maniac.” “He’s really acting peculiarly,” Bacall told Jack Entratter, a fellow guest at Palm Springs. “I think I should get out o
f here.” For more than a month the couple had no contact at all.

  In March, in Los Angeles, Frank came to see her. He seemed contrite, and proposed again. “I said, ‘Oh, well—what changed?’ ” Bacall remembered, but, “he was very convincing . . . all my barriers fell . . . I said, ‘Okay.’ ”

  When they ate at a Japanese restaurant that evening, a fellow diner came over to ask for autographs. Frank urged her: “Put down your new name,” and she scribbled “Betty Sinatra” on a napkin. By the time he left a few days later, to sing at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, Bacall felt blissfully happy. “The children would have a father, I would have a husband, we’d have a home again.”

  Just days later, on March 12, newspapers trumpeted: “Sinatra to Wed Lauren Bacall.” “ ‘Oh, Frankie!’ Sighs Lauren . . . He Popped the Question over Sukiyaki.” “Nuptials Maybe, in Oscar Time.”

  The story had been leaked either by the agent Swifty Lazar, with whom the couple had shared their news from the start, or by Bacall herself. According to one journalist, she said Frank had proposed and that she intended to marry him. Another quoted her as having said, “I don’t know nothing. Call Miami.”

  The reporters did call Miami, and an interview with a press spokesman led to a very different headline: “Sinatra Won’t Say if He’ll Marry Bacall.” When a reporter got to Frank to ask if the marriage was on, he got a brutal reply. “What for? Just so I’d have to come home earlier every night? Nuts!”

  Bacall had phoned Frank as soon as the story broke, and he had not seemed angry. Then, a few days later, Frank called accusing her of having leaked the proposal to the press. Then he simply cut off all contact. A month later, when the two of them dined at the home of mutual friends, he totally ignored her. He did the same when they bumped into each other after a concert in Palm Springs. “My humiliation was indescribable,” Bacall remembered. Frank had behaved “like a complete shit.” For years to come, they did not speak at all.