Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown

by Moore, Roger

  With two founder members of the original Rat Pack, talent agent Swifty Lazar and David Niven.

  The night Frank and I met, we only really exchanged pleasantries. Frank greeted me warmly and said, ‘Hi, I’m Frank Sinatra,’ as if I – or anyone else in that room come to that – didn’t know who he was. His humility was another of his qualities that so impressed me. I thought this was a man I would like to meet again.

  Francis Albert ‘Frank’ Sinatra’s entry into this world had not been an easy one. For as long as I knew him, Frank continually said that he would like to meet and kill the doctor who delivered him. He had used forceps, which had badly damaged Frank’s ear and scarred his face. Alarmed that the just-born infant was not breathing, and with the doctor seemingly not knowing what to do, his grandmother hurriedly grabbed Frank and placed his head under a cold water tap, startling the baby into taking his first gasps of New York air.

  With dear Frank Sinatra and yet another princess, this time Princess Margaret at a swanky function in London.

  In later life, Frank suffered from terrible hearing and ear problems. He maintained it was due to that doctor’s negligence, which only fuelled his desire to ‘bump into him’ even more. As well as being loyal to friends, another of Frank’s qualities was that he always bore a deserved grudge.

  I didn’t meet him again until a decade later, in the mid-60s, at a London restaurant with his then wife Mia Farrow, who was in town making a film called Guns at Batasi (in which she replaced Britt Ekland whose new husband Peter Sellers had whisked her to LA for the weekend and refused to allow her back to Pinewood to continue filming) and Frank accompanied her.

  ‘We just love watching The Saint,’ said Mia, taking me totally unawares.

  ‘We watch it in bed, in our hotel room. It’s the best thing on TV,’ Frank added.

  We had dinner and chatted until the very late hours about movies, TV, London, family and just about everything else. Frank was very grounded and it was clear his success hadn’t spoilt him. He also made time to smile and say hello to our fellow diners as they passed our table, which undoubtedly made their night – being in his company certainly made mine.

  I can’t help think about an old story here – probably apocryphal – of a young man who approached Frank in a restaurant, and said, ‘Mr Sinatra, I’m so sorry to bother you, but I have my new girlfriend joining me on a dinner-date here this evening, and I wondered if you’d mind saying, “Hi, Al! How you doing?” when she gets here? It’ll really impress her.’

  Not wanting to deny the young chap a chance of getting his leg over, Frank said sure, no problem. A couple of minutes later the young lady duly arrived, Al leapt up to greet her and, in walking her to the table, they passed Frank.

  ‘Hey, Al! How you doing, my old friend?’ said Frank.

  The young man turned around and snapped, ‘Oh, fuck off, Frank! Can’t you see I’m with my girlfriend?’

  I was a huge fan of Frank’s, both his music and films, and revelled in his stories over the dinner table. He told me of the making of his movies and the people he’d worked with and hoped to work with in the future. Frank began his musical career in the swing era, with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey – Dorsey in fact called him ‘kid’ as a term of endearment. Frank told me that he realized a large part of their performing success was down to their ability to ‘phrase’, that is, to ‘say play’ their instruments and play without appearing to breathe and interrupting the rhythm. Frank took up underwater swimming to help increase his lung capacity and develop his breathing technique. From there, he practised his phrasing method, which you’ll see in evidence on screen whenever he sings: he developed a slight twitch in the corner of his mouth through which he breathed in, while expelling air through the rest of his mouth in song.

  As well as captivating all audiences with his singing, Frank also had a great screen presence. His ability to glide across it with seeming ease was one I envied greatly. Frank’s acting came naturally to him. He was an all-round natural performer, but he only ever did one good take.

  George Schlatter, who directed him in several advertisements and TV shows, told me that Frank psyched himself up so much for take one that if you didn’t get it on that first shot, then you never would. While he rehearsed dance routines for the big musical numbers, Frank literally walked on to the set word-perfect and ready to go. He never rehearsed dialogue scenes and loathed re-takes.

  ‘Bang-bang-bang, went the scene,’ said George. ‘And Frank would leave to await the next set-up.’ He didn’t suffer fools and expected everyone else to be as fully prepared as he was.

  I often read about Frank’s alleged personal and professional links with Mafia figures such as Sam Giancana, Lucky Luciano and Rocco Fischetti, so I asked him about it.

  ‘Kid, most of the venues I play are, in one way or another, controlled by the Mob – they run Vegas for a start,’ he said. ‘I turn up at the places and am greeted by all these suited guys who want me to pose for a photo with them. I’ve no idea who they are, yet in the photos they’re standing with their arm around me and appear to be long-lost friends. How many photos have you posed for with people you don’t know?’

  Mind you, I don’t think Frank ever did anything to publicly dispel the rumours of his underworld connections. He rather liked it!

  Frank had three children: Nancy Jr, Frank Jr and Tina by his first wife, Nancy Barbato. He was married three more times, to the actresses Ava Gardner, then Mia Farrow and finally to Barbara Marx, to whom he was married at the time of his death. He, like any loving father, supported his children in every way he could. I remember on Nancy Jr’s thirtieth birthday, she opened her present from her father to discover it was a clear $1million wrapped up. Frank was very generous like that.

  When his daughter Tina made the dramatized biography of Frank for TV, apart from mis-casting a rather – dare I say – plain-looking actress to play Ava Gardner, she showed her father having a string of affairs – and usually interrupted his bedroom scenes with a phone call to say his wife was in labour! It was a very unflattering biopic to say the least. I broached the subject with his wife, Barbara, and asked what Frank thought of it. She said that she had sat Frank down in the TV room with a large drink and ran the tape for him to watch, alone. When he emerged from the room he said, ‘I don’t think they quite got me, did they?’

  My former wife and I socialized a lot with Frank and Barbara, and spent virtually every Thanksgiving and Easter at their lovely home in Palm Springs, along with Gregory and Veronique Peck, Don Rickles, George and Jolene Schlatter, Cary and Barbara Grant and sometimes the legendary agent Swifty Lazar. They were great days. We would chat, run movies, eat, drink and go swimming in the pool. It was a rare recipe for total relaxation – which Frank relished.

  On Easter Sunday Frank would clear us out of the kitchen, and cook his favourite dish of spicy meatballs and pasta. It was the one day on which no one else was allowed to cook. Our only involvement was to help select the accompanying wine.

  ‘Come on down the wine room,’ he’d say, ‘and choose a bottle.’ Frank had one of the best-stocked (and biggest) wine coolers in the world, and was an expert sommelier. After an hour or so of exploring we chose many more than one bottle! Alas, I’m not a great authority on wine, but I can assure you that we drank some pretty good vintages, not to mention expensive ones. But that was Frank – a very generous and attentive host.

  One of our other favourite pastimes, aside from drinking copious amounts of Jack Daniels into the night, was gambling. We played the tables in Vegas on many occasions – rarely ever winning much, I might add – and as Frank was very much a night person, he loved it when people stayed up into the early hours with him. It wasn’t so much the gambling as the company he loved. He was a very social person and came to life in the late evenings. I couldn’t always keep up with him, especially if I needed a clear head the next morning for work.

  Frank had a view on hangovers, as he did most things, ‘I feel sorry fo
r people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.’

  Despite increasing success, in 1971, at a concert in Hollywood to raise money for the Motion Picture and TV Relief Fund, and at the age of fifty-five, Frank announced that he was retiring. Perhaps he thought he was at the pinnacle of his career, and this was the time to bow out? His self-enforced retirement didn’t last long, though – his public wouldn’t allow it. Two years later, Frank returned with a television special and an album, both entitled Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back. He certainly was.

  As far as I was concerned, Frank had never changed from the first day I met him. He remained humble, kind, generous and warm. He only ever had praise for me when he saw one of my movies, and when I was cast as James Bond he called to say how delighted he was for me. He never once criticized or offered advice on any of my performances, such as they were, he merely expressed his satisfaction.

  Despite various health problems, Frank toured extensively and remained the highest attraction on the worldwide concert circuit during the first half of the 1990s. Alas, at times his memory failed him as did his hearing. I asked how he could still pick up his musical cues. He said he ‘felt’ it through his feet, via the reverberations on stage. Nothing was going to get in the way of Frank performing.

  Having fought bravely against cancer, Frank sadly suffered a heart attack and died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at 10.50 p.m. on 14 May 1998, with wife Barbara and daughter Nancy by his side. His final words were ‘I’m losing’.

  The following night the lights on the Las Vegas Strip were dimmed. A light had gone out in all our lives. The tributes were manyfold and came from far and wide: Presidents, Prime Ministers, Royalty and, of course, his many friends and fans.

  Frank’s legacy to the world is a vast one: his many films and TV performances, his many concerts and his many recordings will live on forever, as will my memories of this amazing man who I was so fortunate to be able to call a friend.

  Dean Martin was a former boxer turned comedian, actor, singer and hugely charismatic man. I first encountered him way back in 1952 when, with my then wife, Dorothy Squires, I was in New York and we trotted to Times Square to see ‘Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ at the Paramount Theatre. I’d heard a lot about Dino and Jerry from the cast of the play Mr Roberts with whom I’d worked in London – and I was not disappointed. It struck me that, like Morecambe and Wise in the UK, Dino and Jerry were both very talented individuals in their own right, but together they were dynamite.

  The Cannonball Run, in which I played someone who thought he was Roger Moore.

  A few years later, when I was a contract artist at Warner Bros., I bumped into Dean on the studio lot – where he and Jerry Lewis were making their caper films – several times and exchanged pleasantries.

  Later in the decade, of course, he became a founding member of the Rat Pack with Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford, and went on to even greater movie success with them in Ocean’s 11.

  With the advent of rock and roll, Dean’s career as a crooner was eclipsed by his film work. He was riding high as a movie star and between 1966 and 1969, Dean starred in perhaps his most famous role in four Matt Helm films. They were, in essence, a US version of the Bond movies, though perhaps lighter in style. A planned fifth film, The Ravagers, was cancelled after the murder of Dean’s co-star and friend Sharon Tate. He said he was too distraught to consider ever playing the character again. In fact, Dean had always been fiercely loyal to his co-stars, as demonstrated when 20th Century Fox fired Marilyn Monroe in Something’s Got to Give (1962) and then attempted to replace her with Lee Remick. Dean reminded the studio that he had contractual approval of his leading lady and point blank refused to continue without Monroe. She was re-hired, but sadly died of a drug overdose before shooting could resume. Nine hours of unseen footage remained in the vaults at Fox for decades.

  I had to wait until the 1980s before I had the chance to work with Dean in The Cannonball Run and he became a very close friend thereafter. I’ll never forget when we were shooting in Atlanta, where the cars were all lined up before the race started, and I noticed there were two very pretty showgirls engaged in conversation with Dean. When I sidled over, I smiled and asked, ‘Have you just met the new Mrs Martin?’ Talk about the eternal flirt!

  Contrary to his image as a drinker, Dean told me he’d actually endured a lot of eye surgery in recent years and had been prescribed heavy painkillers, which meant he couldn’t drink. In fact he became hooked on the pills for a time. His trademark cigarette and glass in hand was known the world over, but what wasn’t known was that the glass was filled with apple juice.

  When he toured with Frank and Sammy on the ‘Rat Pack Reunion’, I occasionally visited and took in a show. But I noticed Frank (who was first on) would always sing one of Dean’s numbers, and then Sammy came on and told one of Dean’s gags. So when Dino eventually appeared on stage and the music piped up, Frank would shout, ‘We’ve already sung that!’ So Dean would start telling a story …

  ‘I’ve told that one already!’ Sammy would call over. This went on for a few shows and really got under Dean’s skin, until one night, as soon as the curtain fell, he took Frank’s private plane back alone to LA and refused to ever work with Sinatra again. They only made it up a short time before Dean’s death.

  I know the greatest tragedy to befall Dean, and one I don’t think he ever really recovered from, was when his son, Dean Paul Martin, died in a plane crash in 1987. So much so that, as cancer took hold of my friend in the mid-90s, he consoled his loved ones by saying we shouldn’t worry as he’d soon be reunited with his son.

  His tombstone carries the title of his most well-known song: ‘Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime’.

  Sammy Davis Jr was often billed as the ‘greatest living entertainer in the world’ and no wonder, as son of vaudeville star Sammy Davis Sr, he could do it all: sing, dance, act, perform stand-up comedy, play instruments and do just about anything else you’d care to throw at him.

  I was working in television at Warner Bros. when I first met Sammy, and he was a real movie buff who loved nothing better than being around a film studio – whether he was working or not. When I was filming the TV series Maverick, he became quite a professional pistol drawer and a past master at gun twirling. I socialized quite a lot with Sammy and realized his fascination with guns hadn’t diminished when, in the 1980s, another old pal of mine, lyricist and playwright Leslie Bricusse, threw a dinner party at his home in LA and Sammy arrived, opened his jacket and removed his revolver – handing it to the maid as you would a hat.

  Sammy was a hugely funny man and a deeply religious one too. His spirituality stemmed from a near death experience in a car accident in 1954, in San Bernardino, California, as he was making a return trip from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. It was as a result of this accident that he lost his left eye. At the time, it was feared he might lose his other eye, and his friend the actor Jeff Chandler offered one of his own eyes if it would save Sammy from blindness. Thankfully it wasn’t needed, but that always struck me as a truly selfless offer. After wearing a patch for a while, Sammy was later fitted with a glass eye, which he wore for the rest of his life.

  Though never one to miss an opportunity of sending himself up, Sammy once joked after overhearing someone complaining about discrimination, ‘You got it easy! I’m a short, ugly, one-eyed, black Jew. What do you think it’s like for me?’

  Years later, when he was hosting the Oscars, Sammy remarked, ‘Tonight, the Academy honours both my peoples with Fiddler on the Roof and Shaft.’ Audiences around the world loved Sammy’s self-deprecating style and wit.

  In 1957, Sammy famously became involved with the beautiful Kim Novak, who was then one of Columbia Studios’ prized young contract stars. Fearful of any negative press this relationship might attract – and its effect on the studio – boss Harry Cohn called mobster Johnny Roselli and asked him to persuade
Sammy to end the affair. Roselli did this by kidnapping Sammy for a few hours and eventually persuading him it was the only way of not having his one good eye ending up on the table. Sammy hastily arranged a marriage to black dancer Loray White for the following year in an attempt to put any controversy to bed, but the union only lasted fifteen months.

  I was having dinner with Cubby and Dana Broccoli at the White Elephant in London in the early 1970s and Sammy was at a table across the room. Through a series of gestures he asked if we wanted to go and see a movie with him. Cubby gestured back asking what it was, and Sammy smiled, put a finger in his mouth and then pointed at the collar line of his neck. None the wiser, we agreed and he then took us to the private cinema at the Mayfair hotel and Deep Throat started.

  The whole cast on The Cannonball Run – including Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise – was incredible and the director, Hal Needham, kept several cameras running at all times, just to make sure he didn’t miss any of the comedy ad libs.

  I guess we watched ten or fifteen minutes before Dana suggested we should leave. I think her decision was prompted by the leading lady, having oral sex performed on her, delivering the line: ‘Do you mind eating while I smoke?’

  Cubby and I grumbled we wouldn’t have minded seeing the rest of the film, but our wives did not permit!

  A little while later in Hollywood, Sammy invited us to dinner at his home and he’d had a giant screen installed in his living room to run movies. After dinner, we all settled down and waited for his projector to crank up for the promised ‘great movie’, and Behind the Green Door – the follow-up to Deep Throat – started. That was Sammy’s sense of humour!

  Sammy had been friends with Cubby for years and, in fact, he was offered a part in Diamonds Are Forever, which, of course, was filmed in Vegas. Before the sinister assassins Mr Wint and Mr Kidd murder the smuggler Shady Tree, a scene was shot in which Sammy is seen playing roulette at the Whyte House club, and having an exchange with Bert Saxby about contract differences he has with Willard Whyte. The conversation stops when Sammy sees and recognizes James Bond, saying, ‘They ain’t never gonna get a cake big enough to put him on top of.’ Sadly, the scene ended up on the cutting-room floor as it was felt it wasn’t needed – and when watching the final running time any ‘unnecessary’ scenes are the first to go, I’m afraid.