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Out of Control
A STAR IS A SPECIAL THING,” the social scientist Leo Rosten said on the Walter Cronkite program to mark Frank’s fiftieth birthday. “A Picasso. Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Sinatra. We shower them with special license, like the royalty of an earlier time. We say, ‘Gratify your desires. Satisfy every whim. Don’t resist temptation. Live for us. Live as we would live if we were beautiful or brilliant or lucky and very, very rich.’
“Mr. Sinatra generates excitement. He tantalizes the public and defies it with his private escapades. He’s a complicated man. . . . He has an animal tension. A suggestion of violence, even of danger.”
The public forgave Frank his flaws and “shenanigans,” Rosten thought. At the time, though, people did not know the full extent of the simmering violence in the man, nor how often it manifested itself.
Emerging from the tough culture of 1930s Hoboken, swept along on a wave of success, the youthful Sinatra had applied no brake to his temper. For a while in the 1950s, chastened perhaps by the publicity and the court case that followed his attack on Lee Mortimer, he lost control less often. He no longer sent telegrams warning of a “belt in your vicious mouth,” as he had to newspaperman Erskine Johnson. The press remained a bête noire, however, especially if it defied his edict that everything to do with his personal life was off-limits.
The menaces were not reserved for the media. There was the 3:00 A.M. call to Peter Lawford telling him “I’ll have your legs broken,” should he see Ava again. Talk of leg-breaking did not mean legs would be broken, but no one could be sure of that. “Let me tell you something,” Frank snapped at the producer Sam Spiegel in a restaurant. “The day you don’t speak to me is the day you get your fucking teeth knocked in.” Then he turned to Spiegel’s wife, Betty: “Look, doll. You got a pretty puss. You want to keep it that way, and shut up.” Spiegel’s offense that evening, a friend of the producer said, had been to greet Sinatra with a mere “Hello there” instead of addressing him by name.
Juliet Prowse’s first breakup with Frank was provoked in part by a warning call from his secretary. “You’d better get out of there,” the secretary told Prowse as she sat in her apartment. “Frank’s arranged to blow up your building.” Though nothing happened, she took the threat seriously. She knew Frank was close to gangsters and, she said, she “knew he had used them before.”
Tiffany Bolling, a female distraction for Frank at a low point in the marriage to Mia, remembered an evening when he threw a chair at someone who insulted him in a restaurant, then left in a rage. When his bodyguards spoke of returning to beat the man, Bolling said, she was so upset that she went home. Frank later told her he had restrained his men.
David Susskind received a warning call after crossing Frank during the marriage to Mia. “It’s Sinatra,” a woman close to Jimmy Alo told him. “He’s put the word out to get you. . . . He’s mad and he’s going to get other gangsters to do it for him. My guy says that no one touches anyone in the East without his okay, and that if anyone touches you, he won’t be alive the next day. But he says that you’re not to go to Las Vegas or Miami. He can’t control what happens there.” Susskind avoided those cities for a while.
Frank made light of stories that he attacked reporters. “In some segments of the press,” he said in 1965 at a dinner for James Bacon, a friendly journalist, “I am known as the Eichmann of song. . . . These are lies, vicious rumors started by a few disgruntled reporters I happened to run down with my own car.”
According to a report in the New York Journal-American, Frank had done exactly that while leaving a New York City nightclub in 1958. It began, according to reporter Dan Vandergrift, when Frank angrily objected to being addressed as “Frank.” Much as he had in his outburst at Spiegel, he insisted that Vandergrift address him as “Mr. Sinatra.” Then, photographer Mel Finkelstein said, Frank’s chauffeured limousine struck him a glancing blow as it was driven away. Finkelstein filed a complaint with the police, and there was widespread press coverage. The limousine driver admitted that the photographer “might” have been hooked by the rear bumper. From his suite at the Waldorf Towers, Frank issued a statement dismissing the story as “wild imagination.”
The same year, on a trip to Monaco, Frank threatened to throw a Time magazine journalist off a terrace. He was restrained and dissuaded by Billy Woodfield, who was traveling with him. In 1962, in San Francisco, Frank wrestled a photographer to the floor and insisted that he surrender his film. In 1964, following a clash with reporters in Spain, he was charged with disturbing the peace and fined. He claimed the journalists involved in these last two incidents had been trying to set him up by photographing him with women he did not know.
That same year, in Paris, he tossed cherry bombs at photographers, first in the street and then in a restaurant. Time quoted Frank as having threatened to “smash in” a female journalist’s face, and said he and his party routed French journalists “with drawn knives, a gin bottle, and a couple of clubs.” Frank scoffed at claims that two photographers had been injured, saying that if there were any injuries they were “selfinflicted.”
Rock Brynner, who was with Frank on the trip, remembered it as the “catastrophic assault on Europe.” “As the paparazzi’s cars would gather around ours,” he said, “Frank would ask the driver to find a cul-de-sac. There were cars in front of us as well as behind. So we would signal, and the car in front would turn down the cul-de-sac. He and his companion would pitch cherry bombs, doing very serious damage. Those cars would crash. There were people hurt. We’d trap the paparazzi, and I saw Frank’s companion drag one guy out by the collar and throw him down and mash his heel into the guy’s hand, just crushing the bones in the photographer’s hand. I remember that vividly.”
Cherry bombs had become Frank’s weapon of choice against photographers. He stuffed his pockets with them, Mia remembered, when setting out for the evening during their honeymoon. Frank also knocked New York Post photographer Jerry Engels to the ground during the trip, smashing his camera. The paparazzi can be unacceptably intrusive, but Sinatra’s acts of violence were indefensible.
Philip Irwin, one of the private detectives involved in the botched apartment raid designed to catch Marilyn Monroe with a lover, believed he was one of Frank’s victims. He had been beaten up by thugs, he told a state investigating committee under oath, after reporting to the California Bureau of Private Investigators and Adjusters that Frank had played a leading role in the raid. Irwin had no hard evidence as to who was behind the attack, but said he was “very much afraid” of Frank. Now that he had testified in public, he said, he was “afraid of being beaten up again.”
The agent, Milt Ebbins, said he heard of two alleged assaults by Frank himself. One, involving a hatcheck girl at Hollywood’s Florentine Gardens restaurant, had echoes of the sexual violence alleged by Susan Murphy. “Frank took the girl to his house,” Ebbins said. “As I understood it, she wouldn’t cooperate sexually and got into an altercation with him. He pushed her through a plate-glass window, and she was severely injured. Many stitches . . . Frank settled for a large sum of money.”
The second incident involved a parking attendant at Romanoff’s restaurant. When Frank abused him verbally for not fetching his car fast enough, the attendant slapped him in the face. “Frank didn’t do anything then,” Ebbins said. “He never did unless he had a heavyweight behind him. He left, but then he got ahold of Hank Sanicola, who was good with his fists. He and Sanicola later followed the guy as far as Mulholland, and they cut the car off and stopped it. Frank called the kid every name under the sun, and Sanicola beat the shit out of him.”
While Ebbins’s stories are hearsay, another parking lot fracas is well documented. It occurred when, Frank claimed, a car driven by a parking attendant missed him by inches. Of three attendants involved in the ensuing skirmish, one had his shirt ripped off by Frank. Another was pushed around. A third, who wound up at Hollywood Receiving Hospital with cuts and bruises,
said he had been beaten by “Sinatra and a bodyguard.” The heavy, one of Sammy Davis’s employees, was sentenced to ten days in jail and probation. Frank was sued for assault and battery, and settled out of court.
In 1964, during the Bing Crosby golf tournament at Pebble Beach, California, Frank turned up in the lobby of the Del Monte Lodge at 1:00 A.M. demanding something to eat. Told the kitchen was closed, he grabbed the phone and insisted on speaking to the hotel’s owner. When the owner arrived, carrying a bottle of champagne by way of apology for the lack of food, he was rewarded with a punch in the eye.
In Israel, in 1965, Frank went out looking for trouble. “Whenever Frank had too much time on his hands,” Rock Brynner said, “mischief was bound to follow. One evening, bored to death in the hotel, he said, ‘C’mon Rock, let’s go for a walk.’ Well, that meant trouble. We didn’t have security or anything, and he was really going out to provoke a fight. There were paparazzi, and also ardent fans rushing to get near him. He waited until the crowd was really close and tight and then he said, ‘Come on, let’s get outta here.’ A melee ensued, and we punched our way out to get back to the hotel. . . . It was always perfectly foreseeable.”
Over dinner at the Bistro in Los Angeles one evening in 1965, a drunken Sinatra abused the writer Dominick Dunne behind his back, then turned on his wife. Frank also spat venom at Lauren Bacall, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Swifty Lazar, who were also present. By way of finale, he tore the tablecloth from under the plates, glasses, and silver-ware, threw food over Lazar, and stormed out.
Dunne never did find out why Frank loathed him, though he may have borne a grudge over a TV show on which the writer had worked years earlier. An even worse incident took place the following year. “It was at the Daisy after a friend’s wedding,” Dunne recalled. “My wife and I were with a small group, and Frank was at the next table with Mia and Nancy and Tina. There was a captain at the Daisy, a wonderful guy, Italian, and he came and tapped me on the shoulder.
“I turned around to look up at him, and he said, ‘Oh, Mr. Dunne, I’m so sorry.’ Then he hauled off and punched me. The punch landed on my head, and the crowded restaurant went silent. I looked across at Frank, and he was looking back at me with kind of a smile on his face. It was as though I was his entertainment. I felt hate for him, because I knew this guy who had hit me as a decent, decent man. We got up and left. And as we were standing outside, waiting for the boy to bring my car, the captain ran out. He was sobbing and he said again, ‘I’m sorry, so sorry. Mr. Sinatra made me do it.’
“He said Sinatra had paid him $50, which back then was something like $300 is today. It was the social talk of the town. Horrible, and it showed the kind of power Sinatra had, to make a decent man do an indecent act.”
AS OFTEN AS NOT, Frank’s rages were triggered by alcohol, as they had been since the late 1940s. By the 1960s, he was openly flaunting his use of hard liquor. A flag emblazoned with a Jack Daniel’s bottle flew outside his house on occasion—as did another, spelling out Alka-Seltzer, for the mornings after. “Jackie Daniels,” Frank said, was his friend.
A bottle of the stuff was a required item in his dressing room, and he sported a blazer with the Jack Daniel’s crest on the breast pocket. Frank was a walking commercial for the brand, so much so that the distillers named him—with Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, and J. Edgar Hoover—a member of the Tennessee Squires, people formally allotted a spot of land at Jack Daniel’s headquarters in recognition of their proven devotion. Instead of the nominal square foot granted to other Squires, Frank was awarded an entire acre.
Frank joked about his alcohol use, and routinely appeared on stage carrying a glass that appeared to contain liquor—and often did. He claimed at one point that whiskey was good for his voice, and saw it as social fuel, “gasoline.” He ate a lot of chocolate, he said, because it absorbed the booze.
Frank used liquor as a stage prop to evoke both sadness and fun: sadness when he was the singing drunk in a bar, asking the barman for just one more for the road; fun as in a line quoted from his friend Joe E. Lewis: “You’re not drunk if you can lay on the floor without holding on.” Or in the inscription on a photograph of himself, with bottle, given to a friend: “Drink, Dickie! It’s good for your bird.”
In the 1970s, Frank would reminisce about sitting up until dawn with Yul Brynner getting “bombed, absolutely bombed, and playing Wagner as loud as anyone could play it.” A club owner in Hawaii recalled him coming in with a party of eight, ordering a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, then insisting on changing the order to “a bottle each for everyone.” All the bottles were emptied.
“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink,” Frank said. “When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” And later, in Las Vegas, on a rare occasion when he was obviously drunk on stage: “I don’t trust anybody who doesn’t drink. There’s something wrong with him.”
Frank usually quit drinking and smoking in the weeks before a performance, some who knew him have said. He knew excess was folly for a singer. Once, during a taping, the comedy writer Sheldon Keller saw him slumped in a chair reproaching himself: “Drink, drink, drink. Smoke, smoke, smoke. Schmuck, schmuck, schmuck!”
Some people got the impression that he was not really a big drinker. “More times than not,” Rosalind Russell said, “he talks more about drinking than he actually imbibes.” “In all the long years I knew him I only saw him really drunk once,” Leonora Hornblow said. “He had an enormous capacity for drink.” Where drinking is concerned, though, appearances can deceive.
There is some evidence that heavy drinking ran in the family. Frank once spoke of his father as having been a “drinking man.” His mother drank “a case of beer a day” in middle age, according to Frank’s cousin Marilyn Sinatra. Frank’s own drinking had a long history. He confided to Peggy Connelly that a doctor had warned him when he was still in his twenties that continued alcohol abuse could kill him. Gloria Cahn remembered Frank drinking hard with Jimmy Van Heusen soon after he moved to the West Coast in the mid-1940s. The comedian Pat Cooper, who warmed up audiences for Frank in the mid-1960s, thought it miraculous that “someone who would smoke and drink and drink and smoke the way he did” could survive, as would Frank, into old age. Holmes Hendricksen, the former entertainment director of Harrah’s, on Lake Tahoe, where Frank performed in the 1970s and early 1980s, recalled consuming “an awful lot of whiskey” with him both at home and on the road. Armand Deutsch, a regular weekend guest at the Palm Springs house, said Frank drank an entire bottle of whiskey every day over a long period. Frank admitted as much to his doctor. “He needed it,” Hornblow thought. “It became the pattern of his life.”
Rock Brynner, an alcoholic who achieved sobriety, remembered Frank as having been one of his “better professors” in the matter of drink. He thought Frank had suffered from “the outrageous, tragic effect of the disease of alcohol. I certainly saw him close to falling-down drunk, though more so at home. That isn’t to say that he couldn’t show some restraint. In public he was vertical at least. . . . It could be such a pleasure to be in his company. There was a great moment when the chemistry was great. Add two hours, and more Jack Daniel’s, and it was sickness. When you talk about Frank’s behavior, his mercurial shifts, a lot of it was just sick, fucked-up behavior—crazy alcoholic shit.”
The writer and radio host Jonathan Schwartz has said flatly that Frank was an alcoholic. Schwartz, who himself once sought treatment for alcoholism, thought Sinatra “a textbook case, who presented drinking as an act of manliness to millions of innocent drinking citizens the world over. . . . I didn’t catch on until late in the game because he was so gifted at covering it up with a bravado that authorized it, did it proud.”
The information on Frank’s drinking in this book was shared with two specialists in the field of alcoholism. Dr. Robert Morse, chairman of the Medical/Scientific Committee of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, said: “There is little d
oubt that Sinatra had a serious ‘drinking problem.’ He had several of the symptoms associated with alcoholism, but not necessarily diagnostic of that condition. To have had such a high tolerance—I see references to consumption of a bottle a day of Jack Daniel’s—is the most specific symptom. One can have this kind of tolerance only by becoming alcoholic. Much of what we know about Sinatra’s drinking is consistent with alcoholism.” The same information led James Graham, an authority on alcoholism in celebrities, to conclude that “Sinatra was an alcoholic.”
Symptoms of alcoholism, Dr. Morse noted, include “personality change while drinking, going from pleasant to nasty,” and “repetitive violent episodes.” “Sinatra would get angry with drink, especially after shows,” said Dean Martin’s agent, Mort Viner. “Something would set him off,” Bob Neal said. “He had a trigger you wouldn’t believe.” “The trick,” Swifty Lazar thought, was “to see him between mood swings. You can do it, but it’s a lot easier if he’s not on the booze. When he was sober, Frank had the potential to be a pussycat; when he was drunk, he was the meanest son of a bitch that God ever put on earth. It was Jekyll-and-Hyde time. . . . Jimmy Van Heusen once gave me some good advice on how to handle Frank if he’s drunk: Disappear!”
“It was predictable if you got to know him,” Brynner said. “You could see the turn coming. But he had an enormous temper, and when he got into a temper it had to pretty much burn itself out. He had no off switch.”
AN HOUR OR SO AFTER MIDNIGHT on June 7, 1966, the month before he married Mia Farrow, Frank arrived at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Dean Martin and eight other people to celebrate Martin’s birthday. They settled noisily in a booth in the Polo Lounge, too noisily for one customer seated nearby. The millionaire businessman and art collector Frederick Weisman objected to the obscenities that were flying around and asked Frank to get his group to pipe down. Moments later, he was down, seriously injured. Frank and Martin were gone by the time the police arrived.
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