Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  Frank took the initiative when they met at Fox, Mia wrote in her 1997 autobiography. According to her, he struck up a conversation when she visited a neighboring soundstage where he was working on Von Ryan’s Express. He invited her to a private screening of one of his movies, she wrote, held her hand when the lights went down, and asked her to fly with him—“that very evening”—to Palm Springs. Brad Dexter remembered the encounter differently. Mia made “googly eyes” at Frank on the set, he said, and badgered him to let her come down to Palm Springs.

  Frank did send his jet for Mia, not right after the screening but the next day, and she duly arrived at his house—with her cat. Though there were photographs of Ava all over the place, she remained unfazed. Frank took her in his arms while showing her to her room and, in her words, “the cat slept alone that night.”

  Soon the couple were spending every weekend together. Frank painted, and she sketched, beside the pool. They labored over cross-word puzzles together, and he introduced her to Vaughan Williams symphonies. At Christmas, when Mia was hoping for a puppy, Frank gave her “a diamond koala bear.” He also gave her a gold cigarette case and a yellow Thunderbird, to “match your hair.”

  Mia called Frank “Charlie Brown.” He called her “Angel Face” or “Baby Face.” From their first meeting, she thought “what a beautiful face he had, full of pain.” “They don’t really know him,” she recalled thinking. “They can’t see the wounding tenderness that even he can’t bear to acknowledge.”

  The song “The Impossible Dream,” from Man of La Mancha, reminded Mia of Frank, whose aftershave lotion, she noticed, was the same as her father’s. “I think of him,” she said of Frank early on, “as a man covered with scars who still fights to reach the unreachable star.” She suggested Frank record the song, and he did.

  Frank kept Mia very much to himself for the best part of a year. He did not introduce her to his children, and she was not at his fiftieth birthday party. “Frank was really plastered that night,” Sonny King remembered. “He slipped on the stairs, fell down. . . . His former wife Nancy helped him up and put his head on her shoulder. Then some of us got in the car—without Nancy and feeling no pain—and went to a hilltop retreat in the Hollywood Hills. When we walked in, there by the fireplace was Mia Farrow.

  “That was my first meeting with her. She looked like a little elf, and I liked her. But she didn’t fit. . . . She was like a hippie at the corner of Haight-Ashbury. Frank was hip in his own way, but not a hippie. . . . She had her own thoughts and he had his elderly thoughts. They just didn’t mix.”

  Though not optimistic, Frank’s young daughters befriended Mia. At the same time, oddly, their father went out of his way to cultivate people his own age or older.

  “Frank had decided that it was time for him to enter middle age,” an unnamed associate told Life. “He switched tailors. He started wearing double-breasted bankers’ clothes. . . . He took up with the old-time Hollywood establishment and began partying with the actresses Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert and Merle Oberon and their husbands. It seemed all his women friends were past fifty and all the men past sixty. He pulled Mia into this group and forced her on them, and neither she nor they liked each other.”

  Mia found herself in a set that also included Billy Wilder and Kirk Douglas; William Paley, the chairman of CBS; Random House president Bennett Cerf; the Irish businessman Loel Guinness; producer Arthur Hornblow; Twentieth Century-Fox production head William Goetz; Sears, Roebuck heir Armand Deutsch; and their respective wives. On occasion, Mia recalled, she encountered the children of such guests—all of them older than she. They would dine at what she termed the “kids’ table” while she sat with “the grown-ups.” After dinner at the Goetzes’, priceless Picassos would be mechanically raised and replaced by a movie screen, for the after-dinner movie.

  Life with Frank, Mia came to think, was comprised of three separate compartments. The first was their private time together, the second their highfalutin social whirl, the third Frank’s disconcerting “other world” in Las Vegas and New York. Being around the casino fraternity could be challenging for Mia. “She would call me up,” Sonny King recalled, “and say, ‘Sonny, could you come over and teach me how to say some words in Italian so I can answer Frank’s friends.’ She wanted to be in with them.”

  Mia would watch Frank gamble, throw money around, and drink. She discovered that he was capable of consuming an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s at one sitting. During what Mia remembered as the “interminable Vegas nights,” the men mostly talked with the men, the women with the women. In the predawn hours, she often found herself making conversation with painted women in slinky dresses, some of them hookers. (Soon after Frank and Mia met, according to George Jacobs, Frank had sent out for whores who bore a resemblance to Mia.)

  Press speculation about the couple had begun less than a year into the relationship, when Frank took Mia and a group of his older friends on a yacht cruise along the eastern seaboard. She bristled when people made cracks about their age difference—Dean Martin’s was that he had a bottle of Scotch older than Mia. The yacht trip was a magnet for the press, made more so when Frank went ashore at Hyannis Port to visit Joe Kennedy, still wheelchair-bound four years after his stroke. Time thought the voyage “probably the most closely watched since Cleopatra floated down the Nile to meet Mark Antony.”

  Frank and Mia were tumbling around, as she put it, in a “chasm of insecurities.” She went off traveling with a much younger man. Frank had an affair with forty-one-year-old Sheila MacRae, the entertainer and estranged wife of the actor Gordon MacRae. In the same period, in Miami, according to an FBI report, he took delivery of a “beautiful brunette” brought to his room by Joe Fischetti.

  They reconciled in the summer of 1966, after Frank had called Mia from Las Vegas in the middle of the night. Soon he asked her to marry him, and she accepted. He bought an $85,000 diamond engagement ring and presented it to her—in a cake box—during a transcontinental flight.

  “Marry Mia?” her fifty-four-year-old mother Maureen O’Sullivan had said of Frank earlier. “It would make better sense if he married me.” She thought her daughter not “emotionally prepared for marriage.” Dolly Sinatra dismissed the idea, saying, “My son is just helping this girl become a star.”

  Frank himself had doubts. At dinner with Juliet Prowse, he confessed that he “couldn’t seem to make up his mind.” He told Shirley MacLaine that he wanted her to meet Mia, to “pass judgment on her. He asked what I thought, and I think I said something like, ‘What do you say about someone who looks like a twelve-year-old boy?’ ”

  Ava, in New York for a premiere, was asked about Mia by the critic Rex Reed. “The Ava eyes brighten to a soft clubhouse green,” he wrote later. “The answer comes like so many cats lapping so many saucers of cream. ‘Hah! I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy.’ ”

  Frank continued to see Ava whenever they were in the same city at the same time. One evening in New York, Skinny D’Amato’s friend Michael Hellerman witnessed a disquieting moment. “I went up to Sinatra’s apartment,” he recalled. “He was as happy a guy as I’ve ever seen. We were all sitting there on the couch talking, when the doorbell rang. Suddenly Ava walked out of another room all dressed, carrying a suitcase, and headed straight for the door. She opened it, turned, gave a little wave, saying goodbye to Frank. . . . The guy at the door was a Spanish airline pilot. We were so embarrassed for Frank.”

  He saw her again in London, even so, when he was there starting work on a new movie, a bad thriller called The Naked Runner. Ava, who was tiring of life in Spain, was spending a good deal of her time in England. George Jacobs thought Frank still hoped to win her back. “I guess,” the valet remembered his boss saying after seeing Ava and being rejected yet again, “I got nowhere to run.”

  What he did was to run pell-mell into marriage to Mia, earlier than planned and in a rage. “The thing that triggered it,” said Brad Dexter, who was producing Nak
ed Runner, “was when I told him that instead of marrying Mia he should go to see a psychiatrist. There was a renowned man in London, and I said it would be a good idea to visit him. He knew there was something wrong, but he looked at me and said, ‘What? Do you think I’m crazy?’ Then Frank went ape. He picked up the phone and called Las Vegas and got Jack Entratter and said, ‘I’m flying in. You get in touch with Mia and get her ass up there. . . . I want to get married.’ He left the next morning.”

  In New York on his way to Las Vegas, Frank dined with Peggy Connelly and visited Sheila MacRae. He rambled on to MacRae about how he could help extract her from her twenty-five-year marriage. Then he quieted down, stared out the window, and said, “I want to be married.” According to Jacobs he then returned to his apartment and had a prostitute come over, before heading off to Las Vegas.

  He and Mia were married the following day, July 19, 1966, in a four-minute ceremony at the Sands. The hotel had been given just a few hours to arrange the wedding license, a judge to officiate—not too hard a task in Nevada—and the cake and the champagne. Frank had not told his family what he was about to do, but just before the ceremony instructed Jacobs to “call Miss G.,” so that she would not hear the news first from someone else.

  Frank referred to Mia as “my child bride” during the honeymoon, sat her on a stool and sang “September Song” to her in front of fellow houseguests. It all felt, Mia has said, “a little bit like an adoption.” Frank’s daughter Nancy, who saw them as “the Swinger and the Flower Child,” thought the contrast romantic. Tina, who was eighteen at the time, thought it “cute” when Frank showed up with Mia at the Daisy, a trendy Beverly Hills club, wearing a Nehru jacket and love beads. Sonny King, though, thought people were put off “when Frank walked in with one of those guru suits, and the chains that looked like chestnuts.”

  Frank’s former girlfriend Sandra Giles also saw the couple at the Daisy. “Mia Farrow was dancing with all the men,” she said. “He looked very lonely. And he came up to my table and said, ‘Sandra, would you mind if I sit with you guys?’ ” Along with the incongruities, there were deeper differences. Mia wanted children; Frank did not. Mia supported the anti–Vietnam War movement; Frank, who had begun to move to the right politically, did not.

  When they were away from each other making movies, in early 1967, it was evident the marriage was in trouble. The actress Tiffany Bolling said she had a dalliance with Frank while on location with him in Florida for Tony Rome, a detective movie. He seemed to her to be sad and lonesome, and he was drinking too much. Mia, meanwhile, was working on Dandy in Aspic, which involved location shooting in England and Germany. During that period, according to a published report, she sent her co-star Laurence Harvey a golden bird in a golden cage—with a note saying she felt much like the bird.

  As it had been with Juliet Prowse, the terminal rift was over Mia’s career. She insisted on honoring her commitment to finish her work on Rosemary’s Baby, rather than join her husband to work on another movie. “To lose Frank was unthinkable,” she said, “but I didn’t think he would leave me.”

  One afternoon in November of that year, without prior warning, Frank’s principal attorney, Mickey Rudin, showed up on the set of Rosemary’sBaby with separation documents drawn up and ready for signature. Mia signed where required and set off soon after for India, there to engage in meditation with the fashionable Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She was joined there by the Beatles. Mia was now in tune with the rock ’n’ roll aristocracy of her generation, and utterly out of tune with Frank. He had her flown to Mexico a few months later for the divorce. They had been married just over two years.

  THERE HAD BEEN RUMORS toward the end that Frank had been physically abusing Mia. The producer David Susskind said she once “showed up for work with black welts all over her body . . . bruised from head to foot, with mean red gashes and marks all over her arms and shoulders and throat, as though she’d been badly beaten.” Mia has repeatedly said Frank did not inflict these injuries. “If there’s one guy I don’t tolerate, it’s a guy who mistreats women,” Frank once said. Yet there are troubling questions about his treatment of women.

  As mentioned earlier, Zsa Zsa Gabor told of how, in the mid-fifties, Frank badgered her for hours until she had sex with him, just to get him out of her house. Now, more than a decade later, there was another incident.

  “I accepted an invitation to go to a screening at his house on Mulholland,” Gabor has written. “He was married to Mia Farrow, whom I knew and liked. . . . We all had drinks, then they began screening the film. In the middle, I went to the powder room. And Frank followed me and pushed his way in, persisting, ‘My darling . . . I want to make love to you again.’ With that, Frank began to undo the buttons on my black silk blouse. . . . Summoning all my strength, I pushed past him and out of the powder room, turning only to threaten, ‘Frank—I am leaving. Don’t you ever, ever try to touch me again.”

  Susan Murphy’s allegation is far more serious. In the late 1960s as now, Murphy was just another resident of Palm Springs. In late February or early March 1969, when she met Frank, she was just twenty and he fifty-three. He had been divorced from Mia for six months.

  The encounter began with Frank’s routine approach. One night when Murphy was on a date at a Palm Springs restaurant, he sent someone to her table with a note asking her to come and join him. She thought it “quite rude,” because she was obviously with another man, and she stayed with her date. Soon after, however, another male friend asked her to go with him to a party at Frank’s Palm Springs home. She went, she remembered nearly four decades later, wearing a “beautiful high-necked silk dress I’d bought at Bullock’s. It had sequins around the neck, and I wore silver shoes.”

  The first hint of trouble from Frank, though she failed to recognize it as such at the time, came early on. “What happened,” she said with some embarrassment, “was that I went to the bathroom and hadn’t securely locked the door. Sinatra walked in on me. He just opened the door. I had the feeling he knew I was in there, had followed me. He didn’t say ‘Excuse me’ and then close the door. He just looked at me, stared. It was like he had set out to do it. Then he turned around and walked away. I walked out and didn’t mention the incident to anyone.”

  As the evening wore on, Murphy’s date left. “The next thing I knew the idea came up that a few of us, Danny Schwartz [a wealthy industrialist friend of Frank] and his wife, and Sinatra and myself—and the pilot of course—should fly to Las Vegas. I thought ‘What the heck? That’ll be kind of fun.’ So we went to Vegas on his plane, to a casino. He drew a lot of attention. He acted like everybody was supposed to completely stop when he walked in the room.

  “I didn’t even know how to gamble, and Sinatra walked over and handed me a hundred-dollar bill and told Mrs. Schwartz to help me out. She told me to change the hundred, and was kind of teaching me how to play blackjack. Sinatra walked across and totally insulted me because I’d broken up the money. I was supposed to place it all on one bet. Everyone stared. At that point I thought, ‘I can’t wait to get home.’ And after not very much longer we got back on the jet. We flew to Palm Springs and the two of us were taken back to the house. It was one or two in the morning by then.

  “So I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well, I’m getting my stuff together. I’m going to leave.’ But he said he wanted to show me the rest of the house. At the beginning of the evening I’d seen only the main building, and I said ‘Well, all right.’ There were all these individual bungalows. So we walked into one, and I said something like ‘Really lovely. Well, I must go now.’ And he said, ‘No you don’t.’

  “He threw me on the bed. I said, ‘God, no!’ But he threw me where my back hit the bed, and just pulled my dress up, pulled down my panties, and did what he wanted to do. I knew I couldn’t overpower him. He was forceful, and it was over very quickly. I do remember—I found out without caring to—that he was quite large in that department. And that was that. Afterward I was crying, and in
no condition to drive or anything. I felt kind of halfway dead. So I just lay there and kind of went to sleep. He stayed, too, but he never said a word.

  “When I got up he asked me—I guess he was feeling some kind of compunction—if I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t believe the gall of that. I said, ‘Oh my God, definitely not!’ I was devastated. I had mascara and everything all over, and he wanted me to stay there! He said, ‘My friends call me Francis.’ I thought, ‘This is unbelievable, after what he did to me, saying that I’m his friend.’ I said I had to go, and I gathered my things and went. He got a driver for me. I never saw him again.”

  Murphy gave away the silk dress she had worn that night, and threw her underclothes in the trash. She told no one what had happened until long afterward. “I was frightened to bring it up. I wanted to go to the police, but I thought, ‘Me against Frank Sinatra? . . . No one’s going to believe this. So just keep your mouth shut.’ I was very scared because he knew a lot of people and had a lot of connections. I wasn’t anybody important, so I could be overlooked very easily. It frightens me even now, telling anyone about this.”

  Asked if she thought Frank was drunk when he assaulted her, Murphy replied, “I would say that he was, but it was not like he was staggering or falling down at all. He was in control.” At the party, hours before the assault, Murphy’s impression had been that Frank “needed, just demanded, the limelight. Egotistical. He acted like he was God.”