Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  ’Scuse me while I disappear

  Only Frank, it seemed, was still filled with the piss and swagger of the Summit.

  It even got physical. Sure, there’d always been fists flying whenever he was around, but things were taking on an uglier tenor than ever before. A businessman who asked Frank and Dean to keep the racket down at the Polo Lounge wound up with his head smashed in with a telephone; comedians like Jackie Mason and Sheckey Greene who did bits about Frank got shot at, harassed on the phone, beaten up, hospitalized.

  “The air was volatile and violent around him all the time,” Greene remembered. “We played the same audience every night, and when I was onstage, there was nothing but laughter. Yet when Frank came out, that same audience erupted and people started fighting, drawing guns, and swearing to kill one another.”

  Maybe they were just feeding off of Frank’s disgust with things around him. He opened at the Sands in November 1966—the first gig of his Mia ever saw in Las Vegas—and launched into a bizarre monologue about the Watts riots and his marriage (“I finally found a broad I can cheat on”). It was tone-deaf, tasteless, shaming: He was out of it, and he was pissed off that he was out of it.

  The world—his world—was changing right underneath his feet. A few weeks after Frank creeped out that opening night audience, Howard Hughes arrived in Las Vegas with $500 million to burn and started buying up hotels like he was shopping for souvenirs: in April, the Desert Inn; in June, the Frontier; and in July, the Sands—still the sanctum sanctorum of all that was swank in the city. Hughes had slunk around the casinos for years—keeping suites and tables constantly reserved whether he was in town or not—but now he had set himself up as King of the Strip.

  This didn’t sit well with Frank. Not only had he been number one man in Vegas for the past decade, but he had a personal animus against Hughes, who, before he got freaky, had chased a lot of the same Hollywood talent: Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Marilyn Maxwell. Frank might’ve found a way to bury the hatchet if Hughes’d been willing to buy out his still-floundering stake in the Cal-Neva, but the billionaire turned him down cold and Frank seethed.

  Through the summer, Frank began looking around for another deal, and his eye alit on the gaudiest sight on the Strip: Jay Sarno’s brand-new Caesar’s Palace, just across the street from the Sands. In private, though not so quietly that press reports didn’t bubble up, Frank began negotiating a monster deal that would rid him of the Cal-Neva and guarantee him fortunes for his appearances.

  In September, he was scheduled to play four weeks at the Sands, and all the little bitternesses, tensions, and animosities building up inside him hit the fan. First he called off his Labor Day shows—throwing a damp towel on the Sands’s traditional highest-grossing weekend of the year. He said he had strep throat; Sammy and Dean filled in, then, as the hiatus dragged on, so did Nancy Ames and Frank D’Rone.

  After huddling in Palm Springs with a pair of Caesar’s executives, Frank returned to the Sands in an awful fettle. He was drinking and snarling and gambling heavily—and, as per his longtime practice, pocketing chips when he won and signing big markers when he lost. The Hughes people in the casino didn’t like it. They were aware that Frank might be leaving the Sands permanently at any time, and they didn’t relish the thought of him doing so with their cash in his pocket.

  On Thursday night, Frank finished his show, then walked into the casino with several Apollo astronauts who’d been in the audience; they went up to a baccarat table and Frank asked for credit; General Edward Nigro, Hughes’s new hotel manager, had already passed down the word that Frank wasn’t to be allowed to run up any more tabs; the casino manager told Frank he couldn’t do anything for him.

  Frank tried to save face in front of the astronauts by joking that Hughes, for all he’d spent to buy the hotel, was just as much a tightwad as the old owners. But inside he was on fire.

  He performed the next night, but he bailed on Saturday’s shows, forcing Jack Entratter to pull Frankie Avalon out of thin air as a substitute. Frank was still in town, though—still at the Sands, in fact, in his private suite. But he was so close to signing with Caesar’s that he didn’t give a damn about his old stomping grounds anymore.

  In the wee hours of Sunday morning, he went nuts. In full view of Mia and dozens of hotel employees, he threw a tantrum, destroying the furnishings in his suite, lashing out at the pit bosses who’d denied him credit (“I’m gonna break both your legs!”), and driving a baggage cart through a plate-glass window. “I built this hotel from a sand pile,” he shouted to stunned onlookers, “and before I’m through that’s what it’ll be again!” Then, before anyone could confront him, he disappeared, flying to Palm Springs.

  Later in the day, he signed his deal with Caesar’s, and he celebrated by returning to Vegas to drink and gamble in his new playground. His mood, however, was anything but gay: “He was on a tear,” said a Caesar’s executive. “He spent some time gambling here, and I knew he was very unhappy with the way things were going at the Sands.”

  In the wee hours of Monday morning, Act Two: He wandered back across the street to the Sands and raised merry hell. He strode up to the bell desk and demanded to see casino manager Carl Cohen. Told that Cohen wasn’t available, Frank grabbed a house phone and made the same demand of an operator, who, terrified, passed the call to her boss, who rang Cohen’s room only to get no answer.

  Frank next demanded to speak with Entratter, who, he was told, had asked not to be disturbed. He went apeshit: “You had better get him and tell him I will tear up this goddamn fucking place!” He turned to a nearby security guard and demanded to be shown the switchboard, but the guard held his ground. “You’re pretty tough with a gun, aren’t you?” Frank sputtered. “Well, I’ll take that gun and shove it up your ass!”

  The employees, many of whom were fond of Frank, were stunned. “You would have had to see Sinatra to believe it,” said one. “He went to the second floor of the hotel, went into the room where the switchboard is, and yanked all the telephone jacks out.”

  Finally, Frank got through to Cohen, who agreed to talk with him. At 5:45 a.m., Cohen rose, dressed, and dragged himself down to the hotel restaurant for coffee and something to eat before dealing with the situation. (“When Carl is mad,” his brother always said, “he eats with both hands and he don’t give a shit about nothing.”)

  Frank found him at a table and walked up to him, demanding to know why his credit wasn’t good in the casino.

  “I don’t own the hotel any more,” Cohen told him.

  “What are you so nervous about?” Frank asked.

  “You just got me out of bed.”

  Frank had gotten what he wanted, he had Cohen right there looking at him, but he seemed not to know what to do next. “What are you so nervous about?” he repeated.

  Cohen had had enough. “I’m not gonna listen to this bullshit.”

  He made like he was getting ready to leave.

  Frank grabbed hold of the table with Cohen’s breakfast on it and tossed it over before Cohen could get out of his chair. A pot of hot coffee scalded Cohen’s groin and abdomen. In a flash, he put his 250 pounds behind a right to Frank’s face, splitting his lips and knocking out two front teeth.

  Frank put a hand up to his mouth. Blood flowed between his fingers. “You broke my teeth,” he shouted. “I’ll kill you, you motherfucker son of a bitch.”

  Jilly Rizzo, who had followed Frank around the hotel for both of his late-night rampages, reached into his jacket—who knew what for—but a bald, hulking security guard stepped right up behind him and told him not to make a move.

  Cohen stood defiantly in front of Frank, who reached for a chair and swung it, missing Cohen but cracking the head of a second security man who’d arrived on the scene and would require stitches for his trouble. With blood still gushing from his mouth, Frank bolted through the revolving doors and out of the Sands forever, Jilly rushing obsequiously behind him yipping, “Wait, Frank, wait!”
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br />   Frank hightailed it to L.A. and had his dentist flown in from Connecticut to replace the caps Cohen had dislodged. As he sat being worked on in a borrowed dental suite, Frank received, legend had it, an urgent call; it was the powers back East who had sold the hotel to Hughes, men who valued Cohen’s decades of work and knew Frank was a hothead pain in the ass. They told him, in so many words, not to retaliate against Cohen in any way. Then they called Cohen to apologize for the incident and to assure him, as Cohen’s brother later recalled, “that if Frank lays a finger on you or even tries to shake your hand, he’s gone.”

  The story hit the papers in dribs and drabs over the following days, along with Caesar’s announcement of Frank’s new deal. At first, all Frank’s people had to say about the fight was that it was “a figment of someone’s imagination,” but reporters turned up a good dozen credible people who’d seen it all, so they backpedaled: “We can’t deny any of what happened in Las Vegas. There were too many witnesses. I have to assume it’s all true. We can’t even deny that his teeth were knocked out.” (In private, Frank admitted to Kirk Douglas that Cohen had bested him: “Kirk, I learned one thing. Never fight a Jew in the desert.”)

  All Cohen would say was “He’s through.” But he could’ve given speeches in the streets if he wanted to: He’d become an overnight folk hero to thousands of Las Vegans. The Sands was besieged by well-wishers and congratulators, as in this memo from a switchboard operator: “At approximately 8:00 p.m. on September 12, 1967, we received a call from a Mrs. MacBeth who wanted to donate $100 to Mr. Carl Cohen’s fund. We informed her that we had no such fund and she went on to say that she had read about the incident concerning Mr. Cohen and Mr. Sinatra and as she was 70 years old she was glad she had lived to see it happen. She advised that if Mr. Cohen could use the money in any way she would be glad to donate it to him.”

  Two months later, when civic elections were held, mocking posters appeared around town showing Frank with his front teeth blackened out. They read, “Carl Cohen for mayor.”

  Frank tried to make Caesar’s Palace like the old days, but he was unable to deliver his chums: Sammy stayed on at the Sands; Dean finished the final year on his contract there, then moved up the road to the Riviera.

  And Frank created ugly scenes at his new joint. Refused credit at Caesar’s by casino manager Sanford Waterman, one of his partners from the Cal-Neva days, Frank came on so menacingly that the old man pulled a pistol on him in front of a crowd of onlookers. After the situation was defused, Frank walked out of the joint and vowed never to return to Nevada again; he didn’t play the Strip for four years.

  It was the damn times. He got more and more desperate to catch a whiff of something young and fresh. He cut an entire album of Rod McKuen songs, and he wore Nehru jackets and love beads and probably smoked a little grass.

  He looked like an idiot.

  And he didn’t need it.

  In 1970, he was fifty-five, and he had completely lost contact with his past: He came out for Ronnie Reagan for governor of California.

  “It’s a shock,” said Joey.

  “It figures,” said Peter.

  The next year, he announced his retirement. He’d spent a half-decade chasing something that seemed not to want him anymore; the hell with it.

  He gave a lovely final performance at a benefit in L.A., closing with “Angel Eyes” and its haunting final line: “’Scuse me while I disappear.”

  It was beautiful and poignant—a great showbiz moment and a great piece of musical acting.

  But to a nation that had, for the most part, turned away from him, it looked kind of like a white flag.

  There were other ways to fade.

  Take Joey.

  In April 1967, he debuted as host of his own late-night talk show on ABC. He was gonna topple Johnny Carson, they said; they put $4 million into it. Regis Philbin was his sidekick, there were dancers and two wiseacres who sent up the news.

  Opening night, he had Governor Reagan, who arrived late, Danny Thomas, who preached at the crowd, and Debbie Reynolds, who demonstrated how to smother a fire on a living person by tackling Philbin: crash-and-burn.

  The thing limped along for two years, then he quit. ABC replaced him with Dick Cavett.

  The rest was a slow diminution.

  He was only fifty or so, but he was out of tricks. He became a semiregular on talk shows, quiz shows, bad multicharacter TV series. He mopped up for Mickey Rooney on Broadway in Sugar Babies, back in burlesque after all those years. He sat in frequently for Johnny on The Tonight Show—177 times over the years, more than anyone else; he was always welcome for short runs.

  He moved out of Hollywood, south to Orange County, golfing, fishing, cruising in a series of boats named after his long-ago catchphrase: Son of a Gun, Son of a Gun II, etc.

  He always had a tan, he occasionally showed up in a movie or on TV talking about the golden days with Frank and Dean and Sammy and Peter. He wrote letters to editors correcting stories they ran about the Summit and reminding the world that he was there.

  “I’m writing my own book,” he liked to joke, “ ‘I Was a Mouse in the Rat Pack.’”

  He had been.

  In November 1984, Peter, who’d been in and out of the hospital and a rehab clinic, had dinner with his old MGM pal Liz Taylor. She had tossed him a career bone—a few days’ work on a TV movie she was making about Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper: Decrepit Peter would play a shifty agent.

  Over dinner, Peter teased Taylor about her loudly trumpeted sobriety, a means, perhaps, of covering up his fear of screwing up the job. Which he did anyhow, showing up in a weird fog, gray, mumbling, hazy. He finally passed out and got the axe.

  Nothing had been right for him since Frank, Marilyn, and Jack.

  After Dallas, Pat and Peter waited a decorous two years before driving a stake through their marriage. In late 1965, she went off to a high-class divorce ranch in Sun Valley, spent six weeks to establish residency, showed up in court for a single afternoon, and was rid of him.

  A few months later, he pissed her off for well and good by taking a trip to Hawaii with two of her kids and Jackie Kennedy and hers; it looked to all the world like he was jumping his ex-sister-in-law’s bones. Then he committed hara-kiri in front of the whole family by bringing some pickup in a black micro-skirt to Bobby’s funeral; it might as well have been his own.

  He didn’t care. He drank even when he was in the hospital to be treated for drinking. He got deep into drugs—pot, pills, cocaine (he gave some to his son once as a birthday present)—and he started liking his sex more squalid: bondage, frottage, kinky role-playing, even a little pain: slaps to the face, razors to his nipples, hair-raising stuff. Eventually, he resorted to an Acujack, a kind of male vibrator that he would use for hours trying to achieve a pathetic little orgasm; his fourth and final wife (there was another one in there for a few months) left him out of disgust with the pastime.

  He had long suspected that Frank had tried to blackball him in the business, but the truth was he’d killed his own career himself. One producer confessed, “A lot of us hate Sinatra’s arrogance. If that son of a bitch ever tried to keep anyone from working, I’d have hired that actor for that reason alone.”

  It was Peter’s own squalor that did him in. He was lucky to get a film a year, and then it got worse: game shows, Fantasy Island, “nostalgia cruises” where he was forced to mingle with clutching, aging fans.

  Even when he’d forgotten all his wives and was too embarrassed by his state to see his kids, he still missed palling around with Frank. “I tried several times to apologize for whatever it was that I had done,” he moaned. “He wouldn’t take my phone calls and wouldn’t answer my letters. Wherever I saw him at a party or in a restaurant, he just cut me dead. Looked right through me with those cold blue eyes like I didn’t exist. Friends of mine went to him to patch things up, but he’d always say, ‘That fucking Englishman is a bum.’” In the late seventies, certain that enough time had p
assed, Peter flew to Vegas to catch Frank at Caesar’s Palace; after he’d been seated for a while, a couple of goons showed up at the table to tell him that Frank insisted that he leave or there would be no show.

  He stopped taking care of himself—shaving, bathing, changing clothes or bed linen. He’d once been so beautiful, so debonair; now he lived amid rented furniture in an apartment strewn with cat shit.

  Friends tried to get him into rehab. They flew him out to Palm Springs—his Golgotha—and then took a rental car to the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage. Peter wanted to know where they were taking him. “Betty Ford’s,” his wife said. “That’s wonderful,” he replied, thinking he was off on a social jaunt. “I’ve always liked Betty.” The detox in the desert looked briefly like his salvation, but he undermined it, hiring a helicopter to meet him out in the desert with shipments of cocaine, then using his exercise time to walk out, meet the pilot, and get high.

  Then dinner at Liz’s—his last party—and the disaster on the movie set. The day after he collapsed, he was back in the hospital. His liver and kidneys had virtually shut down; he turned yellow; he slipped in and out of comas.

  On December 23, 1984, he drank champagne and laughed. The next day, he went into spasm, blood spurting from his mouth, nose, and ears. That was it.

  Four years later, the mortuary still hadn’t been paid for his cremation or the cemetery for upkeep of his crypt. His widow declared indigence and blamed his kids, claiming they’d abandoned him in life and now in death. They offered to pay the bills if they were granted control over their father’s remains; the widow refused, then accepted a payment from the National Enquirer for exclusive rights to cover the removal of Peter’s ashes from his tomb and the scattering of them in the Pacific.

  He was always being tossed by the waves.

  Johnny Rosselli also wound up in the water.

  He had kept scamming the world after Operation Mongoose went belly-up. Frank and Dean sponsored him into the Friars Club, and he spent a few years in the can after being caught rigging a high-stakes gin game there.