Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  Weisman had sustained a fracture to the skull and been rushed by ambulance to Beverly Hills Emergency Hospital, where he lapsed into a coma. He began to recover consciousness only three days later, after brain surgery lasting two and a half hours. He suffered from amnesia for some time, and told detectives he could remember nothing after having arrived at the Polo Lounge and having noticed Frank Sinatra.

  Frank did not make himself available for questioning at first, and the Beverly Hills police chief said he was “in hiding.” “We all drove down to Palm Springs that night,” George Jacobs recalled, “to lie low.” Frank did eventually speak with the police by phone. Jack Entratter’s wife, Corinne, who was staying at Frank’s house, remembered the aftermath of the incident as “the only time I think I ever saw that man scared. . . . We just didn’t go anywhere. We just waited it out. Nobody knew how it would come out.” Three weeks later, the Beverly Hills district attorney announced that there was “no evidence of a crime,” and the case was closed.

  Newspaper readers of the day were left only with the accounts Frank and Martin had given the police. “The guy was cursing me and using four-letter words,” Frank had said initially. “I told him, ‘I don’t think you ought to be sitting there with your glasses on making that kind of conversation.’ The guy got up and lunged at me. I defended myself, naturally.” Later, however, he said, “I at no point saw anyone hit him—and I certainly did not.”

  Though no independent witness saw the injury, the Los Angeles Times reported that Frank’s right eye was “discolored.” Frank was quoted as saying Weisman had hit him with either his fists or an ashtray. Martin, who had gone to Lake Tahoe after the incident, told police that “some man struck Mr. Sinatra. Another man jumped between the two of them and our party walked out. As I looked back I saw a man lying on the ground. But I saw no one strike this man.”

  The friend who had been with Weisman at the Polo Lounge, Franklin Fox, said Frank had indeed told Weisman it was a mistake to sit there with his glasses on. According to Fox, though, Frank then came up “to vent his anger.” He tried to keep Frank away from Weisman, but then: “I was standing in front of Fred when Sinatra threw the telephone [authors’ italics]. . . . Dean Martin was trying to get him out of there, and the next thing I knew Fred was lying on the floor.”

  Weisman never spoke publicly about the fracas, but discussed it with his cousin Carol Weisman Wilson. She recalled him saying, when his memory returned, that the end of the confrontation had come in the valet parking area outside the restaurant. There, she said, “they just beat him up.”

  The following year, Martin changed his version of events. “We were a little loud,” he said. “When we were goin’ out the door, there is a couple of guys, and one of them says: ‘There goes the two loud Dagos.’ Well, Frank got there one split second ahead of me, and he hit one guy, I hit the other, picked ’em up and threw ’em up against the wall. The cops came. We said we didn’t know who did it and walked out. But we did, yeah.” Asked in a recent interview whether Frank struck Weisman, Martin’s former wife Jeanne nodded emphatically.

  Weisman never fully recovered from his injury, according to Carol Weisman Wilson: “He never was exactly the same personality after that.”

  THE MONTH AFTER THE WEISMAN INCIDENT, in London, Frank became enraged when Brad Dexter advised him against marrying Mia Farrow. “He went crazy,” Dexter said, “went ape, began to tear up the apartment on Grosvenor Square, busted lamps, turned the table over.”

  A few months later, his new wife at his side, Frank caused a scene in Las Vegas. As the comedian Jackie Mason was doing his act at the Aladdin, Frank began abusing him from the audience. Mason responded by calling Frank “a middle-aged juvenile delinquent . . . a nut case.”

  Soon after, someone phoned the comedian warning him not to repeat his remarks about Frank. Three shots were later fired through the window of his hotel room. Mason was unhurt, and went on cracking jokes about Frank. Three months later, when he and Frank were both working in Miami, there were more warnings and a physical assault. “I was in the car with a girl,” Mason remembered, “and we were a few blocks from the hotel that I was playing. I’m sitting there with her talking. And all of a sudden the door opens and a fist comes in, right into my nose and busted me—a fist with some kind of a ring on it that’s supposed to cut your face open.” Mason’s nose had been broken, and he required plastic surgery.

  Mason’s woman companion vividly recalled the assault. Later—she had jumped out of the car and fled during the incident—Mason told her what the assailant said before running off. “Like, ‘This is not the worst that can happen if you don’t keep your mouth shut about Frank Sinatra’. . . . Something like that.” Mason could prove nothing, and the police investigation was dropped.

  Frank spent several weeks in early 1967 in Miami with Joe Fischetti. In Mia’s absence, according to the FBI agents monitoring Fischetti, the mobster fixed him up with women. Stories spread that Frank had smashed up furniture and thrown a television set out the window of his suite at the Fontainebleau. Drinking hard, like Frank, was another comedian, Shecky Greene.

  “As bad shape as I was in emotionally,” Greene recalled, “I used to feel that if I needed four psychiatrists, he needed five. There was a show on television once called Sybil, about this woman with multiple personalities. It could have been about Frank.”

  Greene fought with Frank, not least because he, too, made acid remarks about Frank during his act. He told how one night, in the lobby of the Fontainebleau, “things got a little bloody.” His head was split open, he said, by one of Frank’s bodyguards and by Fischetti, who was wielding a blackjack. Greene appeared in Frank’s movie Tony Rome with his head bandaged, a detail explained in the film as an injury from a car crash. In reality, according to Greene, “the bandage over my head is from the beating.”

  “Frank had so many people sucking around him then,” Greene has said. “Those bodyguards would attack on command. Even if he doesn’t order the beatings, he allows the violence to happen by having those guys around.” Frank also used his own fists. That spring in Miami, according to an FBI source, he became enraged with an employee at the Eden Roc Hotel who answered the phone and refused to believe he was talking to Frank Sinatra. “Feeling no pain as he had consumed plenty of Jack Daniel’s,” according to the bureau report, Frank rushed to the Eden Roc and beat up the offender. The FBI was told that he then returned to the Fontainebleau, “laughing and feeling happy about the whole incident.”

  On the night of Friday, September 8, in Las Vegas, Frank entered the casino at the Sands with a group of visiting Apollo astronauts. When he asked for credit, which he had long been able to do as a matter of course, it was refused. The Sands had recently been purchased by Howard Hughes, Frank’s hated rival because of their mutual interest in Ava. Frank owed the house money, and had been heard to say he had no intention of paying off the debt. In response, Hughes’s manager had now cut off his credit.

  Frank restrained his anger in front of the astronauts. He left the casino, but returned in the early-morning hours in a rage. Paul Anka recalled how he “got up on that table and started yelling and screaming right in the middle of the casino.” Frank told one of the pit bosses he was “gonna break both your legs.” He told graveyard shift supervisor Dave Silverman that “were he not an old man he would bury him.” “I built this hotel from a sandpile,” Frank shouted, “and before I’m through that’s what it will be again.” Then he left, only to return at 10:15 A.M.

  Mia recalled riding with Frank on a golf cart as they at last headed, as she imagined, to bed. Her husband was wearing a shoe box on his head, to shield his eyes from the morning sun. Suddenly, to Mia’s horror, Frank speeded up, swerved, and smashed into a plate-glass window. He then strode into the casino, heaped up chairs, and tried unsuccessfully to set them on fire with his gold lighter.

  Frank flew home to Palm Springs, slept a while, and began drinking his way through the weekend. Sometime on
Sunday night he ordered up his plane, returned to Vegas, and apologized to the pit bosses for his behavior of two nights earlier. By dawn on Monday, though, he was roaring around demanding to speak with either Jack Entratter or Sands vice president Carl Cohen. Both were sleeping, but Frank told the hotel operator that if they were not roused he would “tear up this goddamn fucking place” and rip out every wire in the telephone room. Three frightened female telephone operators cowered in their office as Frank kicked and pounded on the door. When an armed security guard tried to restrain him, Frank said he would take his gun and “shove it up his ass.”

  Shortly before 6:00 A.M., having been woken, Cohen joined Frank at a table in the restaurant. Frank called him a “son-of-a-bitch,” “motherfucker,” “rat fink,” and “cock sucker,” and said “I’ll get a guy to bury you.” Then he turned the table over on Cohen.

  At that point, according to the report filed by the county sheriff’s investigators, Cohen “reached out with his right fist, striking Frank Sinatra in the upper lip, resulting in the loss of two front teeth.” Cohen stood over six feet tall and weighed about 250 pounds. Frank was knocked to the floor, but got back on his feet and screamed “You broke my teeth. I will kill you”—along with a new stream of invective. He again tried to hit Cohen and bashed a security man over the head with a chair when he intervened, opening a cut that required stitches. Then he left, having again threatened to have the casino boss killed. He phoned Mia sounding, she recalled, “bewildered and upset,” his speech “unclear.” Cohen had demolished much of the expensive dentistry on his front teeth.

  Two of the usual heavies had been at Frank’s side during the fracas, and at one point, according to Sonny King, Frank ordered them to “get” Cohen. Cohen responded, “You make one move and they won’t know which part of the desert to find you,” and the heavies backed off. “In that town,” pit boss Ed Walters has said, referring to the confrontation, “there were some people no entertainer better fuck with.” Cohen was one of them.

  The county sheriff’s investigators spoke with more than a dozen members of the Sands staff, but could not contact Frank, who had again left town. Years later, when testifying before the Nevada State Gaming Control Board, Frank dismissed the episode as having been “just an argument between two fellows” that he would “rather not discuss.”

  A couple of days before the Cohen incident, when his credit was cut off, Frank had phoned New York and protested to Jimmy Alo. Alo wielded great influence at the Sands, but he told Frank to drop the matter. Now, having had his teeth knocked out, Frank appealed to Alo again. Ken Roberts, then a New York–based concert promoter, was sitting with Alo and Henri Giné, Frank’s East Coast representative, when Frank phoned. “Jimmy was sitting there with a hat on, even in the heat,” Roberts remembered. “Sinatra kept calling, and Jimmy was so angry at him because of what he’d done. Instead of talking to Frank he spoke loud, so that Frank could hear him. Jimmy said, ‘Henri, tell him. He needed me Friday. I spoke to him Friday. I told him what to do. I told him to go home and forget about it, and he didn’t do it. I don’t need to talk to him.” Alo felt Frank had it coming.

  Even before the incident, Frank had been in discussions about taking his talent elsewhere. Now that Howard Hughes owned the Sands, he had no wish to stay. Now, a contract with Caesars Palace was announced even before his New York dentist arrived to fix his teeth.

  Frank was adrift. His latest marriage had failed, the long-standing business tie with the Sands had been severed, and he was an emotional mess. Watching him at work in a recording studio in 1967, the music critic Gene Lees thought how lonely he looked.

  “All his jokes, all his small pleasantries,” Lees wrote in High Fidelity magazine, “have drawn laughs from the control booth. But gradually I realize that it is more laughter than they deserve, and at this latest remark, everyone cracks up as if this were one of Fred Allen’s most pungent witticisms. It’s as if they have to, all these surrounding people. What’s odd about it is that they’re separated from him by a double window; he can’t hear them, has no way of knowing who laughed hardest at his joke. But they do it anyway.

  “This is the one hint of the staggering power that inheres in this contradictory man, whose tangled and obviously lonely life is a strange amalgam of elegance and ugliness, of profound failure and dizzying success, of adamant loyalties and equally adamant dislikes, of kindness and courtesies and rudeness. . . . Somewhere within him, Frank Sinatra aches. Fine. That’s the way it’s always been; the audience’s pleasure derives from the artist’s pain.”

  31

  Looking for an Exit

  FRANK’S RECORDING CAREER SURGED during his time of turmoil in the mid-1960s. “Strangers in the Night” in 1966 and “My Way” in 1968 became his new musical signature, Sinatra songs for a new generation.

  Frank did not like either song. “I don’t want to sing this,” he told his longtime aide Irving Weiss when he brought him the sheet music for “Strangers in the Night,” “it’s a piece of shit.” Soon after the song became a hit, when he was at a Las Vegas casino, he promised to “stick that violin bow up where the sun don’t shine” if the orchestra leader played the tune just one more time.

  Once, as he finished singing “Strangers,” an open microphone picked him up saying, “That’s the worst fucking song I ever heard.” “If you like that song,” he told an audience, “you must be crazy about pineapple yoghurt.” “You still like it?” he would mutter, after applause, then shake his head in disbelief. Al Viola, Frank’s favorite guitarist, recalled how he liked to mangle the lyrics. It amused Frank to have the stranger

  Wond’ring in the night

  Just where my pants is. . . .

  There were critics who called “Strangers” “dreck,” a “lounge lizard song,” and scoffed at the doo-be-doo-be-doo-ing at the end as “bad scatting . . . as if Alistair Cooke were talking jive.” Frank might have agreed, but he was a realist. “He’d make fun of that song,” Armand Deutsch said, “but he’d say, ‘It’s helped keep me in pizza’—it put a lot of money in his pocket.”

  “Strangers” became Frank’s first number one single in eleven years, and stayed in that position for fifteen weeks. It won four Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year and Best Male Vocal Performance. (The Beatles’ “Michelle” took the Grammy for Song of the Year.)

  Viola liked to stay on after a recording session to listen to the playbacks. It was a habit that, late on December 30, 1968, made him the first person ever to listen to “My Way.” “I was thrilled and shocked,” Viola recalled. “Shocked because it was so good. It was history. The man was singing about his life.”

  One day, tongue in cheek, Frank would dub “My Way” his “national anthem.” The song as he sang it—of a life lived hard, through laughter and tears and love and loss, without apology—came over as defiant autobiography. It had already been a hit in France when Paul Anka wrote English lyrics for it and brought it to Frank in Las Vegas. Frank thought it “kooky,” and had to be talked into recording it. He did, though, within forty-eight hours.

  “My Way” “really had nothing to do with my life whatsoever,” Frank would claim later. Yet Anka thought the song was “all him,” and Frank Sinatra Jr. said the “five words of plain English” of the refrain—“I did it my way”—summed up his father exactly.

  The Atlantic Monthly’s critic, Stephen Holden, dismissed the song as a “surly roar of self-satisfaction.” To Peter Silverton of the London Observer it was “something Hitler might have sung as he marched into Paris.” For Sarah Vowell, writing for Salon in 1997, it evoked “the temper tantrums of two-year-olds or perhaps the last words spoken to Eva Braun. . . . Can’t you imagine Oliver North defacing the Constitution with graffiti like ‘I faced it all. And I stood tall . . .’? Who wants to be remembered for blind rigidity?”

  “Every time I get up to sing that song I grit my teeth,” Frank said for public consumption, “because no matter what the image may seem to be, I hate boas
tfulness in others.” He told one audience that he only wished the “little Arab”—Anka is of Lebanese ancestry—would write a hit for him more often. His “embarrassment,” Anka said, was voiced only after “My Way” had been “overplayed and oversung.”

  “My Way” did not go to the top of the charts in the United States but, like “Strangers in the Night,” it established that Frank was still a major player. Yet he was as unsettled musically as he was in his personal life. The album My Way—the song was simply tacked onto the front of the next collection due to go on the market—misfired as an attempt to echo contemporary style. “For Once in My Life” belonged to Tony Bennett, and Frank’s version sounded like trespassing. He sounded not cool but plain silly when he tortured the words of “Mrs. Robinson” with bawdy Rat Pack–era slang—“How’s your bird, Mrs. Robinson?”

  To try to make “Some Enchanted Evening” swing, as Frank did in this same period, was a bizarre misjudgment. It was folly, too, to imagine as he did that he could play the comedian and have a successful record simply by reciting Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din,” with only bugle blasts and battlefield sound effects for accompaniment. Recorded just two days after the beating of Frederick Weisman, it sounded merely gauche. It was never released.

  There was much experimentation in the ten Sinatra albums released between 1967 and 1971. Two collections of work done with the Brazilian musician Antonio Carlos Jobim, creator of “The Girl from Ipanema,” included some brilliant performances, but were not for Frank’s traditional audience. The good moments in a collaboration with the pop poet Rod McKuen, on an album entitled A Man Alone, were obscured by descents into dross. Watertown, the soliloquy of a man whose wife has left him, was a protracted mix of narration and song. One critic thought it just “one more entry in a long era of unimportance.”