Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  The press sought a deeper explanation. Was he sick? Frank told Thompson that night at the Music Center that his health was “spectacular.” Was he quitting because his record sales had dipped and his most recent movie, the spoof western Dirty Dingus Magee, had flopped? Over the vodka with Thompson, Frank merely said, “I’ve had enough. Maybe the public’s had enough, too.” He had recorded more than nine hundred songs, many of them more than once, produced eighty-seven albums, and made forty-three movies.

  In part, Frank said later, he decided to quit because “Being a public figure got to me. People were always spiritually peeking in my windows.” He excoriated certain reporters as “slobs” and “garbage collectors,” a category in which he would certainly have included the prize-winning journalist Nicholas Gage. Gage had written a ground-breaking story in 1968 in The Wall Street Journal that for the first time publicly exposed details of Frank’s Mafia contacts.

  The retirement announcement, moreover, came a few months after another violent confrontation between Frank and a casino official, this time at Caesars Palace. The mob had again failed to back him up. Giancana, who mostly lived abroad following a spell in prison, was a spent force. Angelo De Carlo and Jimmy Alo were in jail. Joe Fischetti soon would be.

  Frank worried about his personal security. Two women he dated in 1971 said that he still carried a gun. He went out of his way to show it to one of them when she visited his home at Palm Springs. The other was stunned to see that he carried a gun in a leather shoulder holster.

  Peggy Connelly saw Frank at about this time. “He was not the him I’d known,” she said. “He had lost something. He had always been so vital, and now he had lost his charm. He seemed dead, in a way.” “All of us have our areas of despair if we are sensitive,” Burt Lancaster said the year Frank retired. “I think one of the reasons Frank is retiring while he is still a vital person is that he is seeking his own way to his own peace.”

  After midnight on the night of the retirement appearance, as Streisand finished a rocking rendition of “Oh, Happy Day,” Frank slipped on his tuxedo jacket and walked on stage. He said, “Here’s how it started,” and launched into “All or Nothing at All.” As he sang, many in the audience wept. Frank closed with “Angel Eyes,” uttered the last melancholy line, “Excuse me while I disappear” in the halo of a single spotlight, and walked off into the darkness.

  He returned to acknowledge a standing ovation, but declined to do an encore. “I’m tired,” Frank told Thomas Thompson in the limousine that swept him away from the Music Center. “It’s been a helluva thirtyfive years.”

  As a Mexican lament played on the limousine’s radio, Frank improvised some lyrics, sang a few bars, then stopped. “That, ladies and gentlemen,” he told his companions, “is the last time Frank Sinatra will open his mouth.”

  Everybody laughed.

  32

  “Let Me Try Again”

  FRANK INSISTED HIS CAREER WAS OVER. “I’m finished, really finished.... I don’t want to put any more makeup on. I don’t want to perform anymore. I’m not going to stop living. . . . Maybe I’m going to start living. . . . Like the first thing is not to do anything at all for eight months.” He would have time now for painting, he said—he had done numerous competent landscapes over the years, and was now experimenting with abstracts. He planned, too, to take photographs of cacti and hang them in the hospital wing dedicated to his father. He would “read Plato and grow petunias.”

  For months to come, Frank did not sing. “I wouldn’t even hum for anybody. Not a sound did I make. . . . I played a lot of music—I get a big buzz out of the opera and of classics.” He was spotted in art galleries pursuing his interest in modern American painters—and in Picasso, whom he revered. He worked a little on his golf score or, he said, did “absolutely zero.”

  He was stupendously rich, and laden with honors. In early 1971 he had received a special Oscar, his third, in recognition of his charitable work. He had sat listening in the gallery of the Senate as members marked his retirement with extravagant tributes. Senator John Tunney of California declared him “the greatest entertainer” in American history. The city of Palm Springs held a Frank Sinatra Day, and renamed the road he lived on—in the community today known as Rancho Mirage—Frank Sinatra Drive.

  Yet, Tina thought, Frank was the loneliest man in the world. He was finding it as hard as ever to sustain a relationship with a woman. Marianna Case, a twice-married dancer in her late twenties, was working part-time as a Playboy bunny when Frank noticed her in a bra commercial. He got a mutual friend to call and say Frank Sinatra hoped she would join him for dinner.

  On their first date, Frank sat Marianna next to him at a crowded restaurant table. She thought he was at once gentlemanly, loud, and nervous. He asked her out again, and there were more raucous evenings with his assorted male pals. Frank cooked for her at his place. She saw him when he had drunk too much, and when, as Jilly Rizzo explained one night, he was “having another mood swing”; when he raged, “face contorted in frustration,” after losing at the tables in Las Vegas. She was once summoned because, Rizzo told her, Frank was “acting really crazy, and I think if you came over he’d calm down. He always seems to lighten up when you’re around.” She arrived to find Frank having a temper tantrum, and watched silently as he screamed obscenities and hurled tapes around.

  She came to think she was an “entertainment” for Frank, though not in the bedroom. Once she asked if she could just “lay with him” for the night, but he said he did not want to “spoil anything.” The closest the couple came to having sex was “a kiss and a hug.” Marianna admired the side of Frank that put women, some women, “on pedestals.” Barbara Walters, then on the threshold of national celebrity, put him on her list of ten favorite men in 1971 “because of his old-fashioned courtliness. . . . He treats women as if they were made of glass. He’s as concerned with their comfort and dignity as a Victorian.”

  Frank deplored the recent excesses in women’s behavior and dress. What he looked for in a woman, he said, was intelligence, a degree of reserve, and elegance. He wanted “women to be women.”

  The actress Lois Nettleton, whom he began dating early in 1971, seemed in many ways to fit the bill. She was a lovely, vivacious woman fifteen years his junior, divorced and unencumbered by children. She was highly intelligent and articulate, with an established track record on Broadway, in films, and on television. After their first date, a symphony concert, Lois and Frank began a relationship that was to last almost a year.

  They became lovers, and as a regular houseguest she saw the private Sinatra, the man with a compulsion about neatness and order, who liked to lavish gifts on intimates. She cruised with Frank on his yacht, slept with him in his red, white, and blue stateroom, still has a jacket inscribed “Aboard the Christina.” They “went cycling together on quiet roads near his house in Palm Springs,” Lois remembered. “He gave me a bicycle with a beautifully woven basket on the front, and the day he gave it to me he’d had the basket filled with daisies—my favorite flowers. . . . He’d send me notes signed ‘Francis’—he preferred those who knew him to use ‘Francis’ rather than ‘Frank.’ One I’ve kept just says: ‘You’re scrumptious.’ ”

  Frank opened up a good deal, described what he knew of his difficult birth, talked of how much he had always loved trains—how as a little boy he had yearned to be given a model locomotive. He had told Marianna a few months earlier that he sometimes still felt as though he were a little boy. Now he showed Lois the sailor costume he had worn more than a quarter of a century ago for Anchors Aweigh, and reflected ruefully on the fact that it no longer fit.

  Since the 1940s, when he had first taken up painting, Frank had been drawing or painting pictures of clowns. One of the first of them had been a clown’s head with flour-white cheeks and a bright red mouth, with a ruffle at the neck. He hung a sad-faced clown face over his desk in his Warner Brothers office, dressed up as a clown when he went to a costume party. Special fr
iends and intimates received clown pictures as gifts. Peggy Connelly had one he drew on a toothbrush glass, with the scrawled message, “Good morning, darling.” Lois got a clown painting.

  Frank’s interest in clowns, he said, derived from his admiration for Emmett Kelly, the famous clown of the 1940s and 1950s. Kelly, creator of the hobo character Weary Willie, described himself as a “sad and ragged little guy who is very serious about everything he attempts—no matter how futile or how foolish it appears to be.” According to Tina, some of Frank’s clowns were self-portraits.

  With her, Lois said, Frank was almost always “tender, romantic.” His first compliment had been to tell Lois she was “such a lady.” “I realized that was especially important to him at that time. It was like he was going into another stage of his life. His idea of retirement was somehow to become part of really high-class life. He was very involved in the finer things in life, art, politics, social issues.

  “He gathered wonderful people around him, very elegant people, even among the performers. . . . We went to Gregory and Veronique Peck’s house for tea, to one of Phyllis Cerf’s [Bennett’s wife’s] parties . . . Candice Bergen and her mom came to dinner. My picture of Francis, definitely, is of him being the distinguished artist in an elegant world. He would sit at the head of the table, with me on his right. I had the sense that he was proud of me, wanted everyone to see him with me. I wasn’t flashy or ‘Hollywood,’ and I didn’t have hysterical fits. I was raised to be ladylike, tried always to be socially graceful and do the right thing. I think that mattered to him.

  “It’s like he was the king who points to the lady and says, ‘It’s you . . .’ I was one of the many women in his life, but I was chosen from amongst the court. It was lovely for a year or so.” Lois got the impression Frank had cut back on his drinking, and there was no coarse behavior while she was with him, no brutality. “With me, he was always a knight in shining armor. Yet there was an edgy side to him. He didn’t like to be challenged. He needed to be in control, and he had a quicksilver temperament. I was always a little frightened that he would change.” One night in late 1971, in the space of a couple of hours, he did.

  “He had a party at a Beverly Hills restaurant. We got there a little early, ahead of the other people. We were having a glass of wine and he said, ‘What do you think about us getting married?’ I was breathless, swept away. I only remember the happiness, but I probably said something like, ‘That’d be lovely.’ People were starting to arrive, and then we all sat down to dinner. After the meal I went to the ladies’ room to put on lipstick and fix my hair. Something had spilled on my dress and I was cleaning it off. A couple of my fans came in and I got talking to them. Then Tina, I think, came in and said, ‘Lois, what’re you doing? We’re leaving.’ Though I didn’t realize it at the time, everyone else had started to leave just after I’d got up to go to the ladies’ room. I guess Francis had figured he’d pick me up at the door. But I wasn’t there. . . .

  “When I caught up with him, on the sidewalk, he turned on me and screamed at me at the top of his lungs. He screamed in my face and called me names—because I’d been away so long. I’d left him hanging about, and he was so furious. The way he saw it, I realized, I’d humiliated him. I got into a car and I did go back to the house. Jilly Rizzo was there, and he sat me down in a bedroom and said, ‘He’ll calm down, he’ll come back.’ I thought ‘Well, okay,’ and it seemed as though I sat there forever. I had a gift for Francis with me, for either his birthday or Christmas, a little Sagittarius medallion on a chain.

  “I sat there in a fog holding that Sagittarius. We’d just been talking of getting married, and then he had screamed and left me stranded! I could hear them talking and laughing and drinking in the living room, and eventually I asked Jilly to get someone to drive me home. And that, really, was the end of it.”

  Frank asked Lois after a while to see him again, and they did meet a few times. The damage he had done, though, was irreparable.

  DURING THEIR AFFAIR, Lois had once found herself seated at Frank’s side as he played host to President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and his deputy, Alexander Haig. A few years earlier, they would not have been his guests. “Long after he has ceased to sing,” John Kennedy had said of Frank in 1961, “he’s going to be standing up for the Democratic Party.”

  Frank would continue to proclaim that he was “a lifelong Democrat.” Yet there he was, entertaining the opposition. When he dedicated the hospital wing in memory of his father, Vice President Spiro Agnew and California governor Ronald Reagan were his guests of honor. Agnew had hurried away from Tricia Nixon’s wedding, in Washington, to attend the Sinatra retirement concert in California. Frank’s earlier views on Nixon and Reagan had been savage. In 1960, asked to think of something that made him laugh, he had replied derisively by saying, “Nixon!” Shirley MacLaine recalled that he “hated Nixon with deep vitriol.” Frank had long despised Reagan for having appeared as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He dismissed him as “a bozo, or Bonzo”—after the chimpanzee that Reagan appeared with in one of his movies—as a “stupid bore” who had gone into politics only because his acting career had stalled. He thought Nancy Reagan, whom he had met during her acting days, “a dumb broad with fat ankles.” In 1966, when Reagan was elected governor, Frank declared that he might “leave the country . . . certainly ought to get out of this state.” He took to altering the chorus of “The Lady Is a Tramp” to:

  She dislikes California, it’s Reagan and damp . . . That’s why the lady is a tramp.

  Yet in 1970, when Reagan was running for reelection, Frank campaigned for him. “I support the man, not the party anymore,” Frank said. “If people don’t like that, screw ’em.” Suddenly he was praising Reagan as “the outstanding candidate . . . a very honest guy” who “believes what he does.”

  Though Frank never said as much, the Democrats had upset Frank. He had for some time remained loyal, in spite of the rebuffs of the Kennedy years. He had supported Hubert Humphrey in 1968. He was received with contempt, however, when Humphrey brought him to the White House in the spring to see President Johnson. Johnson at first ignored him, then sent him off with a souvenir booklet and a lipstick bearing the White House seal. He said of the lipstick, “It’ll make a big man of you with your women.”

  Frank continued to support Humphrey, even so, and did so yet more energetically once Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy. “Bobby,” he said, “is just not qualified to be President.” He shed no tears when Kennedy was assassinated. To Frank, his Reprise publicist Mike Shore recalled, Bobby had been “ ‘that fuckin’ cop.’ . . . The worst thing he could think of was to call somebody a cop!”

  Two months after Bobby’s assassination, Frank’s mob connection had the effect on the Humphrey camp that it had once had on John Kennedy. In May 1968, there was a press report that Frank had been dining with aides to jailed Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. Then, in August, came The Wall Street Journal’s story on his links to the Mafia. Humphrey’s senior aide Joe Nellis, who as an attorney for the Kefauver Committee had once interrogated Frank about his mob links, sent Humphrey a warning memo. Soon thereafter, Frank faded from public view as a prominent Humphrey supporter.

  All the same, well into the first Nixon presidency, Frank was still talking like a Democrat where national politics were concerned. “Nixon scares me,” he told the Los Angeles Times in July 1970. “He’s running the country into the ground. . . . The Democrats have got to get together and beat Nixon in ’72.” Then, as Thanksgiving approached, an internal White House memo shows, Nixon’s political strategist Charles Colson raised the idea of wooing Frank to the Republican cause.

  Vice President Agnew was at work on the project within days. As he later recalled it, he and Frank happened to meet at a Palm Springs country club, got together over the holiday, and hit it off. As a Greek-American, he said, his Mediterranean ancestry gave him a good deal in c
ommon with Frank. It helped, too, that he was hooked on the music of the 1940s, could play the piano, and liked to sing.

  Agnew became a regular houseguest at Frank’s place, and made eighteen visits in the months that followed. The two men played golf together, dined out, talked through the night in Frank’s den, and on one occasion watched the porn movie Deep Throat together. Frank’s guest quarters, once remodeled for John F. Kennedy, were eventually renamed “Agnew House.”

  By early 1971 an Agnew aide was able to tell the White House in a memo that “Sinatra is ready to be invited aboard.” Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, was told that Frank had “the muscle to bring along a lot of the younger lights . . . he should very shortly be invited to the White House to entertain.” There was some hesitation—the FBI had alerted the president’s office to Frank’s mob connections—but it gradually evaporated.

  “While Sinatra has been controversial,” presidential counsel Dick Moore wrote in November, “he seems to have settled down since his retirement.” Within two days Nixon himself sent Frank congratulations on a California state award, and Frank gave Attorney General John Mitchell’s wife, Martha, a ride in his private jet. When the House Select Crime Committee tried to force Frank to testify, Agnew attempted to delay the service of a subpoena. When he did testify, in July 1972, the president himself phoned to praise him for his defiant performance.

  “He’s aboard now,” Haldeman wrote in his journal the following month, and it was soon clear the Republican courtship had worked. Frank supported Nixon in his successful reelection campaign in 1972. After the Republican victory, Frank rented a house in Washington with Agnew’s aide Peter Malatesta. He continued to enjoy the favor of the Nixon White House, however badly he behaved.