In May 1969, earthbound millions watched as the Apollo 10 astronauts circled the moon—the spacecraft was the first to send back live color pictures—and saw a cassette being loaded into a tape recorder. Across space came the voice of astronaut Gene Cernan addressing Mission Control: “This is just so that you guys don’t get too excited about the TV and forget what your job is down there.” Then viewers heard a familiar voice singing:
Fly me to the moon, let me swing among the stars, Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars . . .
To a global audience, a Frank Sinatra song remained a synonym for love and romance. Yet as the 1960s ended, Frank was a man alone.
FRANK’S FATHER, MARTY, suffered from emphysema, and died in 1969 at seventy-four. His son had flown him to Texas for last-ditch heart surgery in vain. Hundreds turned out when Marty was brought home to New Jersey for burial. Dolly tried to throw herself into the grave.
Frank took the loss hard. He arranged for his father’s remains to be disinterred and reburied in Palm Springs. He also raised funds for a modern medical training facility in the city, the Martin Anthony Sinatra Medical Education Center, which still operates today.
Dolly moved from New Jersey to live next door to Frank, though she loathed California. A constant physical presence now, she continued to pick fights with her son. While her father “adored” his mother and gave her anything she wanted, Tina Sinatra thought, “she drove him crazy.”
Tina was twenty-one as the 1970s began, emerging from a bumpy adolescence. While reproaching her father for his absences during her childhood, she has also praised him as the family’s “rock” in times of trouble. Frank Jr., by then in his mid-twenties and making his way as a singer, had felt shut out since being sent off to boarding school in his early teens. From that point on, he said, he was “away from the inner family circle.”
As a professional musician, Frank Jr. was trapped in his father’s aura. “Is it genuine talent,” a writer asked, “or the warm remembrance of the golden Sinatra era that has catapulted Frankie’s boy into the limelight?” Frank Jr. said bitterly that he had “just one simple dream—to say or do something, anything, any damn thing at all, that was mine, 100 percent mine. . . . I couldn’t even walk across a room without someone remarking, ‘He walks just like his old man.’ Often I would ask myself, ‘Who am I? As Frank Sinatra Jr., am I cursed or blessed?’ ”
Daughter Nancy had made it as a popular singer. “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” and “Somethin’ Stupid,” a duet with her father, had been huge hits. She was nudging thirty, embarking on a second marriage, and starting work on a book about her father to be entitled, she said, A Very Gentle Man. Two decades after their divorce, Nancy, his first wife, remained a quiet presence in Frank’s life, and evidently never seriously considered remarrying.
Frank was still pursuing women, but halfheartedly. He had dalliances after his marriage to Mia collapsed, but none went anywhere. He had used his old ploy, a summons to his table at a restaurant, to pick up the actress Patty Duke. She went to bed with him that night, she said, but they did not have sex: “Nothing happened. . . . I spent a few weeks with him off and on. . . . We slept in the same bed, but never was there any sex.”
Ava held his affection, even now, though she could be unnecessarily cruel. As a husband, she told a journalist, Frank had been “a sacred monster . . . convinced there was nobody in the world except him.” Soon after that was published, Pete Hamill sat drinking with Frank and friends at P. J. Clarke’s saloon in New York. In the early hours, as the whiskey flowed, someone played “I’m a Fool to Want You” on the jukebox. “A song out of Sinatra’s past,” Hamill realized. “Out of 1951 and Ava Gardner and the most terrible time of his life. Everybody at the table knew the story. Sinatra stared for a moment at the bourbon in his glass. Then he shook his head. ‘Time to go,’ he said. We all rose, and went to the side door and followed Frank Sinatra into the night.”
In his mid-fifties now, Frank was increasingly alone in other ways. His concept of loyalty, a concept he held sacrosanct, had led him to destroy key relationships. “My son is like me,” Dolly once said. “You cross him, he never forgets.” His concept of loyalty, Orson Welles thought, involved an element of “ferocity.”
Long before, Hank Sanicola had warned Frank that his involvement with Sam Giancana would lead to financial disaster, and Frank had rejected the advice. His twenty-five-year partnership with Sanicola had ended in one explosive argument. Frank had cut Jack Entratter out of his life after the fight at the Sands, and never spoke to him again. They, too, had been associates for a quarter of a century. The singer Phyllis McGuire thought it the action of a man “capable of being generous and gentle yet so cruel, a great friend yet a man who cut off friends.” Frank had broken with Brad Dexter by having him fired by a gofer.
George Jacobs, too, had been dumped. On the eve of Frank’s divorce from Mia, when the valet met her by chance at a Beverly Hills disco, she had asked him to dance with her. He obliged, and Frank heard about it. When Jacobs got back to Palm Springs, his key no longer fit the front gate. He was handed an attorney’s letter banning him from the premises, given no chance to explain, and—after fifteen years service— received no severance pay.
Four people who had been fixtures in Frank’s world died in just a few months in 1971: Entratter, dead at fifty-seven; Joe E. Lewis, finally killed by alcohol; Louis Armstrong, with whom Frank had starred repeatedly over the years; Michael Romanoff, a stalwart companion. Marilyn Maxwell, with whom he had stayed in touch, would die at the age of forty-nine. Hank Sanicola would also soon die.
“To be Frank’s friend,” Rosalind Russell said, “is like one of his songs, ‘All or Nothing at All.’ It is a total, unconditional commitment, a never-fraying security blanket.” Frank now received the required loyalty from a heavyset, one-eyed New Yorker named Jilly Rizzo. Born Ermenigildo Rizzo to Italian immigrant parents on the lower West Side, he had once dreamed of becoming a professional fighter. He looked the part—Frank joked that he had once mistaken him for a rhinoceros. After a four-year hitch in the army and a series of bartending jobs, Rizzo had bought his own nightspot, Jilly’s, on 52nd Street in Manhattan. It became Frank’s favorite watering hole.
With a flashing sign proclaiming it “Home of the King” and photographs of Frank adorning the walls, Jilly’s became a Sinatra shrine. Frank held court there when he was in town, enthroned in his personal blue wooden chair at the table that was always reserved for him. Rizzo sat beside him in an identical chair. When Frank wanted privacy, other customers were evicted.
Rizzo had been at hand in crisis after crisis—the brush with death in Hawaii, the kidnapping of Frank Jr., the breakup with Mia, and the death of Marty Sinatra. Frank’s mother called Rizzo “fuckface,” as a term of affection. Tina said Rizzo came to be part of the family. His services ranged from fixing Frank up with hookers to traveling with him to meet with grand personages: Queen Elizabeth II, American presidents, Jackie Kennedy Onassis. As Frank put it, Rizzo could “clean up real good.” The pair sometimes sported matching orange jackets embroidered on the back with the slogan “Living well is the best revenge, F.T.A.” “F.T.A.” stood for “Fuck them all!” To be close to Frank, Rizzo relocated to Palm Springs.
Rizzo said he loved Frank “like a goddamn father . . . the greatest human being around.” He recalled having told his hero, “Frank, you purify the goddamn room.” Frank reciprocated by giving Rizzo small parts in three of his movies, and appointed him to a post with his movie company, Artanis Productions. He inserted the line “Jilly loves you more than you can know” in his rendering of the song “Mrs. Robinson.” He rated Jilly a “poet,” for his silver tongue and what Frank saw as his “old-world wisdom.”
Rizzo had been arrested twice for assault before meeting Frank, a grounding perhaps for his bodyguard role, one he preferred to disown. A comic joked that Rizzo was Frank’s “tractor,” for the way he forged a path through the crowds. Often, what he d
id for Frank was not a joking matter.
In 1964 in Paris, according to Rock Brynner, it was Rizzo who had stomped on the hand of a French photographer, breaking bones. In 1972, at a Monte Carlo nightclub, Rizzo “pulverized” a young student suspected of snapping photographs. He was then spirited to the airport, to avoid arrest, and flown out on Frank’s private jet. At Las Vegas, Rizzo punished an abusive drunk by hauling him to a quiet spot and exploding cherry bombs in his pocket, so many of them that his hip was shattered.
In 1973, Rizzo took the fall after a guest was beaten up at a Palm Springs hotel. The guest sued, claiming that men in Frank’s party had surrounded him in the restroom chanting “Respect the Man! Respect the Man!” Then, on an order and a snap of the fingers from Frank, they had hit him in the head and body. Rizzo, who admitted having been one of the assailants, was found guilty of assault and ordered to pay the plaintiff $101,000.
Rizzo was deeply involved with the Mafia, though his FBI dossier contains conflicting reports as to whether he was actually a “made man.” One document categorizes him as an “LCN”—La Cosa Nostra—“associate.” Others connect him to Sam Giancana, Joe Fischetti, and the New York families. His best mobster friend was Dave Iacovetti of the Gambino crime family, with whom he and Frank socialized. He was on intimate terms with the family of another senior Gambino operative, Thomas Bilotti. Bilotti’s brother Jimmy acted as mentor to one of Rizzo’s sons and, after Dolly’s death, Bilotti’s mother would lavish affection on Frank as though he were her own child. With Carlo Gambino, according to an allegation in a 1971 report, Frank and Rizzo put up $100,000—nearly half a million at today’s rates—that was used in a failed stock scam.
Rizzo’s mob connections were to catch up with him in 1990, when he and several accomplices were convicted of a fraud that drained $8 million from a savings and loan association. He was spared jail on account of his age and poor health, and ordered to work a thousand hours of community service. Rizzo would be buried near Frank in the Sinatra family plot.
THE AMERICAN-ITALIAN ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE (AID), a new pressure group, was founded in 1967 with the stated aim of rebutting what it claimed were false allegations in books, movies, and the media that “taint unfairly 22,000,000 American-Italians as people of sinister character.” Frank, the most celebrated Italian-American of them all, agreed to be the group’s chairman. Eighteen thousand people jammed Madison Square Garden in October to hear him, resplendent in tuxedo and red pocket handkerchief, sing and rally people to the cause.
Taking on the chairmanship brought immediate negative publicity. A retired organized crime specialist with the New York Police Department, Ralph Salerno, told the New York Times that Frank’s involvement with mafiosi “hardly matches the image the League is seeking to project.” What was needed, Salerno said, was for the “fine decent people” who made up the vast majority of the Italian-American population to disassociate themselves from “about 10,000 wrongdoers,” the criminal community that included so many of Frank’s friends.
On AID’s board of directors, it soon emerged, were at least seven men who had Mafia membership or associations. Frank resigned and, though the board was cleaned up, the group faded from sight—only to be replaced in 1970 by the Italian-American Civil Rights League (IACRL). Again in the name of eradicating prejudice, the new organization drew huge attendance at rallies, raised thousands of dollars, and received national attention. Thanks to the group’s efforts, broadcasters and the Justice Department agreed not to use the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” in programs and official documents. This second league, however, was even more a creature of organized crime than its predecessor. Its founder and vociferous leading light was Joe Colombo, head of one of New York’s five crime families.
Leery now, Frank turned down a request from Colombo to perform at an IACRL rally. “Colombo was furious that Sinatra had pulled a no-show,” said Hector Saldana, a journalist to whom Jimmy Alo described what happened. “He let Sinatra know that if he came east of the Mississippi he would pay with his life. Alo checked and learned that a contract had indeed been put out. Sinatra was very frightened. ‘He called me every day crying,’ Alo said. ‘He was a crybaby.’ ”
Alo negotiated a compromise with Colombo. The hit would be called off if Frank would agree to perform at the league’s next big event, a concert at Madison Square Garden. He did perform, but skipped accompanying functions. “As far as can be ascertained,” an FBI report noted, “Sinatra no longer wants to be associated with the hoodlum element.”
During the first phase of the Italian-American protests, when Frank had been keen to help, he had been rebuked in print by Mario Puzo, then a little-known Italian-American writer. Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather, just the kind of book the league did not want published, sold a million copies in hardcover and eight million in paperback. The movie that followed, the first of three Godfather movies, made Francis Ford Coppola’s name and became one of the most lucrative films in the history of cinema. The film generated massive publicity, not least because, as mentioned earlier, the singer and Mafia protégé of the story was unmistakably based on Sinatra.
Frank got wind of it before the book came out—the movie rights had been optioned well in advance—and had his attorneys demand to see the manuscript. When that failed, he fought to get the Sinatra character written out of the movie. To placate him, and to avoid litigation, the producers cut back the role of the mobbed-up singer.
“Sinatra still wasn’t happy, and tried to have me muscled out of the part,” said Al Martino, who played the singer in the film. “But I had muscle of my own.” According to Martino, Frank was told to back off by Sam Giancana. During a chance encounter at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, Puzo recalled, Frank abused him in a “frenzied, high-pitched” voice, accused him of being a “pimp,” and threatened to “beat hell” out of him.
The Godfather furor was just one element in a barrage of bad press. In 1969, from New Jersey, came revelations obtained by FBI bugs planted in the office of Angelo De Carlo, Frank’s earliest Mafia patron. De Carlo had repeatedly been overheard discussing Frank—raising the possibility that Frank would contribute funds for a casino, telling how he had fixed Frank up with a woman, and talking about their quite recent contacts.
That summer, while aboard a yacht at Highlands, New Jersey, and thus within the state’s jurisdiction, Frank was served with a subpoena to appear before a commission investigating Mafia activity. He fought for months to avoid testifying, caving in only when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he would be subject to a three-year jail term should he fail to comply. When he appeared, Frank solemnly told his questioners he was unaware that top gangsters he knew or had known were mafiosi. Were Lucky Luciano, Willie Moretti, Sam Giancana, and Joe Fischetti Mafia members? Not so far as Frank knew. He did not know a single person, he said under oath, who could be described as belonging to organized crime.
As often as he was asked to testify about Mafia matters, Frank struggled to avoid doing so. In 1968 he used spurious excuses to put off appearing in a Miami court in connection with a libel case involving the Fontainebleau Hotel and the Miami Herald, then left Florida when ordered by a circuit judge to show up or go to jail. The matter became moot soon afterward, when the suit was dropped.
Four years later, having initially let it be known that he was prepared to appear before the House Select Committee on Crime, Frank left for England. When the committee voted to take steps to force him to appear, he vanished from London’s Savoy Hotel and laid low for a while in Europe. Six weeks later, when he did deign to appear on Capitol Hill, he was in a belligerent mood.
“Let’s dispense with that kind of questioning,” Frank said, when asked about his acquaintance with Tommy Lucchese, the Luciano ally who before his death had gone on to become a mob boss in his own right. Was there such a thing as the Mafia? “From the standpoint of reading,” Frank said, “I suppose you might say it exists. But I really couldn’t put my finger on it and s
ay it does exist, because I don’t know about it.” After testifying, he sounded off in the New York Times with an innocent citizen’s outrage that he had been summoned to appear at all.
Frank had roared into Washington “like Lear denouncing the wind,” wrote Life’s Thomas Thompson. In his appearances before both the New Jersey commission and the House committee, Frank had echoed Joe Colombo’s claim that he was being persecuted solely because of his ethnic identity. “If a man cries ‘Foul’ and ‘Innocent’ long enough and loud enough,” Thompson wrote, “it becomes easier and easier to believe him.”
ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 13, 1971, Thompson sat talking with Frank in a dressing room at the Los Angeles Music Center. Frank was smoking, wearing a shirt and tuxedo pants, and had one black patent-leather boot hooked over a knee. He called for hot tea, then changed the order to vodka. Then, as Al Viola strummed a melody, he quietly began to sing:
When a woman loves a man . . . try a little tenderness. . . .
Thompson thought the voice sounded “whispery, from far away, but gleaming, burnished like a gold coin kept in a velvet box.”
The five thousand people who would hear Frank sing that night included the vice president of the United States, the national security adviser, the governor of California, Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco (Grace Kelly), Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart, Jimmy Durante, Rock Hudson, David Niven, Jack Benny, Pearl Bailey, Barbra Streisand, Edward G. Robinson, Steve Allen, Carol Burnett, Diahann Carroll, Natalie Wood, Ali MacGraw, Clint Eastwood, Robert Wagner, and Frank’s family. They were there because Frank had announced that this would be the last performance of his show business career.
Two months earlier, Tina had come upon her father busy with pen and paper beside the pool at Palm Springs. He was drafting a statement, to be published by the columnist Suzy (Aileen Mehle) a week or so later, announcing his “retirement from the entertainment world and public life.” Frank had never had much opportunity, the statement said, for “reflection, reading, self-examination.” Now he looked forward to having time with his family, doing some writing, perhaps even teaching. His decision, he said, was final.
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