The latest rock ’n’ roll groups, Frank was to say, “miss the point because they don’t stop to think what lyrics mean: they listen to themselves too much. Some shout the whole damn night, like singing the Declaration of Independence in every note. Don’t they know shadow, nuance, color? That offends me.”
John Lennon, for his part, had no time for Frank’s music. “Peggy Lee I could listen to all day,” he said. “Ella Fitzgerald is great.” But: “Sinatra’s not for me; it just doesn’t do it, you know?” McCartney, characteristically, took the broader view. As a teenager in the mid-1950s, he said, he had realized that “if anyone wanted to go into show business . . . you were looking at a Sinatra-type person as the most rockin’ you were gonna get.” When he wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four,” at the age of about sixteen, McCartney remembered, “I thought I was writing a song for Sinatra.”
To most teenagers of the mid-1960s, Frank and his music were old hat, and he knew it. In public he began to make accommodating noises, conceding that, “We must stop and think that twenty-five years ago we made the music of our era. . . . Kids want identity.”
A few years later, Frank would record a birthday song for Ringo Starr’s wife, make his jet available to Paul McCartney, and welcome George Harrison as a houseguest. He would record both Harrison’s “Something” and Lennon and McCartney’s “Yesterday” and praise them as the best love songs written in decades. Frank could recognize talent, even in rock ’n’ rollers. In the end, it turned out, the new music and the Sinatra sound would coexist.
Even in 1965, many young people responded when Frank did what he did best. When “In the Wee Small Hours” was played in a Beverly Hills club, Talese noticed, “it inspired many young people who had been sitting, tired of twisting, to get up and move slowly around the dance floor, holding one another very close. . . . It was, like so many of his classics, a song that evoked loneliness and sensuality . . . a kind of airy aphrodisiac. Undoubtedly the words from this song, and others like it, had put millions in the mood, it was music to make love by, and doubtless much love had been made to it all over America.”
Lovemaking to the Sinatra sound, Talese wrote, had been enjoyed by couples rich and poor, “in cars, while the batteries burned down, in cottages by the lake, in secluded parks and exclusive penthouses and furnished rooms . . . in all places where Sinatra’s songs could be heard were these words that warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers.”
As he mused at that Beverly Hills club, Talese watched Frank standing in a dark corner, a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Sinatra was staring out into the room beyond the bar, where the young people were clustered. He had been in a “mood of sullen silence” all week. On either side of him was an attractive blonde, each of whom appeared to be waiting in vain for him to say something.
Again and again in the weeks that followed, in recording studios and in the casino at the Sands, on a movie set and in the street, Talese watched women around Frank. They swayed to his music, smiled smiles of adulation in his direction. None, so far as Talese could tell, got anywhere. “He needs a great deal of love,” the writer quoted Hank Sanicola as saying. “He wants it twenty-four hours a day.” In 1965, however, Frank found lasting love with a woman as unattainable as ever.
Emotionally, he was still bound to Ava.
29
The Child Bride
IF AVA GARDNER COULD NOT LIVE WITH FRANK, it seemed she was unable to live without him. In 1961 she had turned up for a Sinatra opening in Las Vegas, discovered that the first Mrs. Sinatra and her children had arrived ahead of her, and left town. A year later, she and Frank were seen out together in Los Angeles. Then, during his World Tour for Children, he made a detour to see her in Madrid.
It was not a happy visit. She had lived there for six years now, and had become known as a beautiful, pathetic drunk. The co-pilot of Frank’s plane, Dan Arney, witnessed a furious fight between them during the visit. “They went to dinner and got into a pissing match. Every time they got together they got into a pissing match. . . . She’d say, ‘I’ll never talk to that wop son of a bitch again.’ ”
Ava dragged Arney and the other pilot off to “a place that was really like a whorehouse, a motel with a lot of broads around. We go into this room with a big dance floor, and Ava orders up some flamenco dancers. . . . At 5:30 in the morning we said we gotta go, and she started cursing people out. . . . We saw her flat-assed drunk more than once.”
When Ava came to the States, Frank put his plane at her disposal. It ferried her to and from Palm Springs and Las Vegas and, to dry out, to the Elizabeth Arden spa in Arizona. “Can you imagine?” Frank said to Sonny King. “The way I used to chase Ava! And now she’s my patient.” Yet he still was chasing her.
He also constantly pursued other women. Frank would simply issue a summons, often with a message sent across a crowded room to a woman who caught his eye. His approach could involve effrontery. One evening in the 1960s, he sent a crony to another table in a New York restaurant to tell D’Amato’s friend Michael Hellerman that he would like to “take out” his date. “I brought the girl over to meet Frank,” said Hellerman. “Her eyes were glowing like two diamonds. She forgot I even existed. When she went out with Frank, she got so nervous that she threw up. He had to put her in a cab to get her home.”
Frank might date a celebrity, or a hatcheck girl, or pay for sex with a whore. The liaisons were usually brief, and left the nonprofessionals puzzled. “First, there were the incessant calls,” a young actress told Richard Gehman. “Funny calls, jokey, kookie calls. . . . Then there were the flowers and champagne and presents . . . then the nights at his favorite restaurant.” Then “all of a sudden he just stopped . . . just didn’t call.” Another woman said: “I don’t understand him. He takes me out, then seems to spend most of the evening talking to the guys.”
“I’m supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women,” Frank told Life in the course of an otherwise vacuous interview in 1965, “but the truth is I’ve flunked more often than not. . . .”
He had flunked, laboriously and over many months, with the dancer Juliet Prowse. They had met on the set of Can-Can in 1959. She had been twenty-three to his forty-four, a tall, intelligent, brilliant dancer who, had it not been for her height, would probably have become a ballerina. “He was singing a love song to her,” said her friend Shirley MacLaine, who introduced them, “and he fell in love with the person to whom he was singing, and she fell in love with his voice and the fact that he was Frank. Is that love?” The song Frank had sung to Prowse in Can-Can had been “It’s All Right with Me”:
It’s not her face, but such a charming face That it’s all right with me.
Juliet was no easy conquest, and perhaps that worked in her favor. The child of a British colonial family, raised in South Africa, she had been a dancing prodigy from early childhood. She was impressed when Frank made advances, but not bowled over. They went out together for four months before the affair became sexual, she said in her only in-depth interview about the relationship.
Frank seemed “amazingly kind and gentle. Maybe it was because I was close to his daughter’s age. Maybe he respected that more. I wasn’t a woman who had run around a lot. . . . I remember him saying—he said that many times—that this was the most comfortable he ever felt in a relationship with anybody.” There were times, Juliet said, when they sat quietly by the pool while she knitted socks for him. She tended the garden and he painted—a hobby he had taken up in the 1940s but for which he had little time. “She smothers me, and I love that,” Frank told MacLaine.
Frank proposed to Juliet. He flew to South Africa to meet her family and made her parents welcome when they flew to Los Angeles in late 1960. She resisted, however, and continued to do so even after five proposals. Though Frank was good to her, she did not like what happened when he got drunk. He tore into good friends for no reason, or would “thro
w things on the floor if the service was not as he wanted it to be.” He blatantly lied, saying he had “never ever quarreled or had a hard word” with the women in his life. He said a future wife of his ought to stop working, and that rankled with Juliet. Dancing was her passion and vocation. Frank would carry on, too, about Ava, “the big love in his life . . . the only one he ever spoke about.” Juliet put up with that, but his possessiveness was another matter.
Frank allowed her no life of her own, she said. He would stand on a street corner, watch her drive by, then nag her about driving too fast, rage at her for doing a dancer’s cartwheels in public in a fit of exuberance. He was, she said later, “really like a father figure.” When it came to other men, he was unfairly jealous.
“I knew he was seeing other girls,” Juliet said, “that he wasn’t just dating me. So I saw no reason why I shouldn’t also go out with this dancer, Nick Nevara. Well, he found out about it and came to my apartment at three o’clock in the morning, banging on my door. And I wouldn’t answer the door because I had Nick with me inside. He then disappeared, screaming and yelling. . . . I got mad, thinking, ‘How dare he do this to my life?’ . . . I just read him the riot act, said I never wanted to see him again and he shouldn’t try to get hold of me.” For six months, from the summer of 1961, they did not see each other. Frank did, however, see Marilyn Monroe.
SINATRA AND MONROE. Here were stars who shone with equal brilliance. They had met in 1954, when she was married to Joe DiMaggio and working on The Seven Year Itch. Frank and DiMaggio were pals then, and that year they collaborated in a bizarre episode involving Marilyn.
James Bacon, then a young journalist, saw them together at the Villa Capri on the evening of November 5. “It looked like a Sons of Italy meeting,” he recalled. “Sinatra, DiMaggio, and a few other paisanos. . . . I could see that DiMaggio was in a terrible mood.” At about midnight, Sinatra and DiMaggio joined private detectives, whom Frank had hired, outside a West Hollywood apartment building. The detectives had been watching the building in the belief that Marilyn was inside with a lover. Moments later, some of the men broke down an apartment door and rushed into the bedroom of a sleeping female resident—who was not Marilyn. They had raided the wrong apartment.
Frank would deny having gone inside the building but admit to having been present outside. One of the detectives involved, however, said Sinatra had been one of the intruders. DiMaggio’s friendship with Frank did not last. By 1960, long divorced from Marilyn but still obsessing about her, DiMaggio came to believe she was sleeping with Frank.
It seems clear that there was some sort of an affair, at a time when Marilyn was an emotional basket case. Frank had become solicitous during the collapse of her marriage to Arthur Miller. He presented her with a white poodle that she christened Maf, as in Mafia. In February 1961, when she was released after a spell in New York’s Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, Frank allowed her to use his house in Coldwater Canyon. One of Monroe’s press aides, Rupert Allan, thought Frank was merely acting as a good friend. Sonny King felt that he was her “big protector,” she his “favorite little friend.”
Marilyn was at the Sands, in a pitiful state, when Frank performed there in early June. “As physically beautiful as she was,” Eddie Fisher recalled, “the drinking and the pills made her ugly. . . . I don’t know whether Marilyn was drunk or stoned, but she was slobbering all over herself. When Frank started singing she started banging on the stage floor. I saw Frank make a simple gesture toward her, and guards appeared almost immediately and practically dragged Marilyn out of the room.”
The actress was still in bad shape in August when she joined Frank and friends for a weekend on his yacht. “I remember going up to Frank’s house before we got on the boat,” said Dean Martin’s wife, Jeanne, “and he said, ‘Will you please go in and get Marilyn dressed, so we can get in the limo and go.’ She couldn’t get herself organized.”
Marilyn shared Frank’s cabin. A photograph taken during the trip shows Frank lying on his back beside the actress, reading a magazine. Marilyn tried to socialize, others on board recalled, but seemed disoriented. “She was taking sleeping pills,” said Mike Romanoff’s wife, Gloria, “so she’d disappear at ten o’clock at night and not be awake till eleven or twelve the next day. We kidded Frank, saying, ‘Some romance this is!’ ” Jeanne Martin remembered Marilyn “wandering around the deck, pitifully trying to find more pills. She’d be unable to sleep and go lurching about half-dressed, trying to find someone who could give her ‘reds’ at three o’clock in the morning.” When the yacht pulled into harbor, and as the rest of the party got ready for a further gathering on shore, Marilyn walked off and disappeared.
Weeks later she had her New York maid, Lena Pepitone, fly to Los Angeles with a special dress. She was wearing it, looking her glittering best, when Frank arrived to take her out for the evening. “He pulled a box out of his pocket,” Pepitone said, “and clipped two gorgeous emerald earrings on Marilyn’s ears. They kissed so passionately that I was embarrassed to be standing by.”
That summer, according to Pepitone, the actress was talking of marrying Frank. Soon after New Year’s 1962, however, as Marilyn sat with the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, she read a newspaper report that, Johnson recalled, gave her “the vapors”: Frank had gotten engaged to Juliet Prowse.
In the seven months remaining to Marilyn, she would be rejected by the Kennedy brothers and see a good deal of Frank. It was in late July that he photographed her in a state of distress at the Cal-Neva Lodge in the company of Sam Giancana. Days later, at thirty-six, Marilyn would be dead.
Frank told the press he was “deeply saddened” by the news, that he would miss Marilyn very much. George Jacobs thought he was “in shock.” Barred from the funeral ceremony, he tried in vain to bribe his way in. He probably now regretted his throwaway line of a few weeks earlier, when a reporter had asked how well he knew Marilyn. “Who?” he had replied sarcastically. “Miss Monroe reminds me of a saintly young girl I went to high school with, who later became a nun. This is a recording.”
Told of this exchange, Marilyn had responded, “Tell him to look in Who’s Who.”
AFTER SIX MONTHS during which Frank and Juliet Prowse had not even spoken, he had met her at Los Angeles Airport, produced a diamond ring, and popped the question yet again. Juliet had said yes, but they called it off a little over a month later.
Frank’s insistence that Juliet should give up her work had contributed to the final break. So had his adamant refusal to fly to South Africa again, to discuss the marriage plans with his future in-laws. “He was the master of control, and he saw that as Juliet wanting to get her parents’ approval,” Shirley MacLaine remembered. “He wouldn’t even discuss it, wouldn’t even call her. He walked away, and Juliet didn’t pursue it anymore—because it was all so insane.”
During the brief engagement, Ava had sent Frank a telegram of congratulations. That anguished connection persisted, as the author Stephen Birmingham realized in 1963 in Mexico during the shooting of The Night of the Iguana. She and Frank, he learned, “stayed very, very close. Every time I’d be with her, he would call at least once . . . she would go up into her bedroom, close the door, and talk for half an hour.”
Even now, their occasional meetings were ruined by jealousy. “If a pretty girl came up and spoke to him,” Birmingham noted, “Ava would get furious. And Ava’s eyes liked to travel around the room; she’d fix on this one and that one, and the next thing you’d know the person would be over at the table and Frank would get furious.”
In 1964 they were both in Italy, where Ava was making The Bible with George C. Scott and Frank was shooting Von Ryan’s Express. She was involved with Scott. “Frank and I were living in a villa on the Via Appia,” Brad Dexter recalled. “The three of us would have dinner together, and she’d get drunk and stagger off upstairs. It was really sad. Frank turned to me one night and said, ‘She’s the only woman I’ve ever been in love with in my whole life, and
look at her. She’s turned into a falling-down drunk.’ ”
Ava was forty-two. In October, while in Los Angeles shooting interior scenes for Von Ryan’s Express, Frank took up with a nineteen-year-old.
MIA FARROW’S PARENTS, writer-director John Farrow and the actress Maureen O’Sullivan, had moved into separate bedrooms when she was eight, because her father was having an affair with Ava Gardner. When she was eleven, she had been introduced to Frank while out dining with her father. When Frank had said what a pretty little girl she was, her father responded, “You stay away from her.”
She next met Frank in 1964 at Twentieth Century-Fox, when she was nineteen and playing the lovelorn daughter in the TV version of the novel Peyton Place. Mia was familiar with the ways of Hollywood. Her parents were the product of it; her godmother was gossip queen Louella Parsons, her godfather the director George Cukor. According to the press, however, she was then “a wide-eyed sprite,” a “waif” with the “heartbreaking innocence, the defenselessness of a child.” She has described herself as having been an “impossibly naive teenager . . . afraid of men.” The only time she had been in bed with a man, she recalled, had been when required to fake a lovemaking scene during filming.
Mia looked the part of the innocent waif. She was just over five feet five inches tall, and gave her measurements as 20-20-20. She wore falsies, and once refused to do a nude scene because she felt the audience might be disappointed. Chaste though she may have been, the nineteen-year-old Mia was not entirely innocent in the ways of the world. While living in New York, she had been taken by Salvador Dalí to a Greenwich Village party at which she had seen other guests engaging in group sex. Frank’s friend Edie Goetz, Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, thought her “a very clever young lady . . . she knew exactly what she was about and what she wanted.” Liza Minnelli, a friend from childhood, said Mia was “stronger than all of us.”
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