People who act in films have an unstated appreciation for those who also perform on the stage. We know what innate force it takes to get up there and project past the bright lights. As Dean once said, “Those spotlights look like three goddamn trains coming straight at you.”
Because of the acknowledged common experience of stage fright, just about every given moment in real life is used to create and rehearse “fun” and entertainment. Days are essentially devoted to the careful preparation of what will ensue in the evening. All of us who do stage work are night people. We come alive just after the moon comes up. As Dean once said, “I don’t stop throwing up until noon.”
During the filming of Some Came Running, I noticed that Dean and Frank’s “friends” from Chicago seemed to think better at night too. We were on our movie location in Madison, Indiana, when The Boys from Chicago visited Frank. I didn’t know who they were. I only knew that the nightlife of poker, jokes, pasta, and booze went on until five A.M. Our calls were at six A.M.
Dean and Frank had rented a house just adjacent to the hotel where I and everyone else lived. Frank’s “friends”—Sam Giancana, who seemed to be the boss, and various princes and consorts—were “on the lam” (as they explained) from Chicago, visiting their good friend Francis Albert, jimmy Van Heusen (real name: Chester Babcock and the man Frank secretly wanted to be) was there with Frank to oversee his creative needs by playing piano and serving as all-around court jester. Chester was a pilot and a daredevil, bald, rather rotund, and along with Sammy Cahn wrote some of America’s best standards and Frank’s best songs. Chester said he was in love with me and tried to persuade me to divorce my husband, and marry him. He, I’m privileged to say, wrote “The Second Time Around” to that end. I was sure I was not the only woman to have been on the receiving end of that dedication.
I was comfortable and friendly being around the guys in the group because I was perceived by most of them as a mascot. I was the only woman they allowed in the house, but that was because there had been a kind of communal decision made that I wasn’t really a girl—I was a pal, maybe even one of the boys.
It would come as a shock (but a predictable one) to me later when gently and separately both Dean and Frank visited my hotel room when no one else was looking. I wouldn’t classify either of their approaches as a pass, nor was I offended in any way. As a matter of fact, their visits helped alter the sagging image I had of myself as a not very sensual woman. Except for the incident with Wallis, no one in Hollywood had ever made anything close to a casting-couch move on me. One producer had called me in with my agent to see if I was pretty enough to star with Glenn Ford in The Sheepman. I passed muster, but even Glenn came to look upon me as a pal.
Once I did have a director bellow and insult me for unprovoked reasons. I simply walked off the set (it was on location, and Sunday too—the golden hours of union pay), which concerned me not in the least. Shooting shut down. He came to my rented house and admitted that his behavior had been motivated by his desire to “fuck” me (as he explained gracefully), but he hadn’t known how to tell me. I explained that I didn’t want to do anything with him because I was involved with someone else. He understood and that was that. He didn’t ask who it was.
I was married, but to most people it wasn’t real. By now, Steve was living and working in Japan so much of the time that there was no perception of me as a married woman who was part of a couple. People knew I had a daughter, Sachi, who was two years old, and that her father was somewhere in the Orient. Many a Christmas and holiday Sachi and I would hang out with friends or whomever I was working with, and my intimate relationships with other men, though discreet, were common knowledge in Hollywood and accepted as a natural result of a long-distance marriage.
Before our marriage, sex between Steve and me had been terrific. Afterward, not at all. Perhaps it was the geographical distance that resulted in sexual distance. Perhaps I was fearful of sustaining physical intimacy with someone I knew would be off again soon. Somewhere, somehow, and for some reason, I was afraid of committing totally to Steve. He was my friend and he had helped me a great deal, but the interplay of passion was absent between us. Yet he was definitely the person I cared most about, my primary relationship, and the man I would wait for until he had established his own identity in the world. Perhaps then, I thought, we would iron out our problems with trusting in intimacy. In the meantime I was free to operate in and around the hills and dales of Hollywood any way I wanted, and he was free to do the same in Japan or wherever.
Divorce was never an option, which was confusing to many of my friends and particularly to the men I had relationships with. In fact it was even confusing to me. Steve was only the second man I had ever been with, so I had not had much experience when I entered the Hollywood playground. I quickly learned that I needed to feel love in order to have sex with someone. So I created the illusion of love as an excuse to have sex. That was easy because the rich fantasy life inspired by scripts, love stories, and beautiful people guaranteed that I would fall in and out of love with people quite often. I thought it was real when it was happening and was frequently crushed to the earth with a splat when it was over. And it was usually over when the director yelled cut….
In spite of that, the men in Frank and Dean’s crowd acted more like adolescent boys around me than swinging seducers. They weren’t interested in me that way. There were plenty of other women for them.
One evening during a night shoot, as we sat around Frank’s house waiting for director Vincente Minnelli and his camera crew to call us to the set, there was the sound of screaming and a door being crashed open. One of the legion of women who surrounded the house twenty-four hours a day had broken through security and into the house. She barreled down the hallway and into the living room looking for Frank. “Frankie, I love you!” she wailed as she spotted him teaching me gin rummy. She pounced on him, began kissing him all over, and ripped off his shirt. He fell back and put his arms up in shock. I remember how helpless and ineffectual he seemed in the situation. He looked like a fallen stick figure, incapable of coping with someone who had taken control. He tried to wipe her kisses from his face. A security guard came and pulled the woman off him. Frank lurched to his feet. He looked around the room as though a bad smell permeated every corner. He brushed his trousers off, attempting to reinstate the crease. He threw the torn shirt under the coffee table and straightened his hair. “I feel dirty,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower.”
There was something chauvinistic about the way he said he felt dirty … as though women soiled a man’s existence. I remember wondering why he didn’t at least crack a smile or feel a little flattered that someone was that crazed for him.
Cleanliness was paramount to Dean and Frank. Whenever they took me with them for a little side trip to some gambling joints near Cincinnati, I’d sit in their hotel suite, fascinated at the spectacle of them primping for a night out. They didn’t mind my watching them. They thought of me as a loyal pet. They splashed on their cologne, each dousing himself with his own favorite brand (Fabergé’s Woodhue for Dean). Their white shirts were crisp and new, the ties well chosen, the suits expensive and impeccably tailored. But what got me were their hats. They wore wide-brimmed hats right out of the racetrack number from Guys and Dolls. They’d descend the stairs of our hotel and usher me grandly to the limo. They moved with self-assured pride, tossing away jokes and hundred dollar bills to bellboys. They adjusted their jackets and smoothed down their ties. Their shoes were uncommonly polished and I was certain their socks didn’t smell. Underneath it all, I sensed their underwear was as white and fresh as soft, newly fallen snow. I also knew I would never see it. It was just better that way. Why was it that they who consorted with gangster types and worked hard at entertaining people insisted on being perceived as so impeccably clean? Maybe to them cleanliness was next to godliness and these guys saw themselves as gods. Or maybe they felt they needed to cleanse themselves of something. I was such
an innocent then … an observer certainly, but unsure of what I was really seeing.
They took me with them everywhere, trailed by these friends who looked like gangsters. The “friends” adored basking in Frank and Dean’s fame, fame that was earned legitimately. Giancana was recognized in some places; in others he went unnoticed. But when he was recognized it was with fear.
Sam Giancana was usually fairly nice to me, although once he gave me a glimpse of what he was capable of. It happened in Mexico City. I had a day off from the film I was making in Mexico, Two Mules for Sister Sara with Clint Eastwood, and had traveled to Mexico City to see Sammy Davis, Jr., perform in a club. I went backstage to congratulate Sammy, and Giancana was there. He was on the lam again, ensconced within a four-wall protected home. He greeted me (God knows Sam Giancana was not an overtly warm individual) and I shook hands with him. His grip was strong. He glared out at me from under hooded lids. His shoulders were more stooped than usual.
“Pasta?” he asked.
“No thanks, Sam,” I answered. “I’ve had dinner.”
“It’s good,” he continued. I sensed trouble immediately, maybe because he hadn’t let go of my hand. “I want you to have some.”
Much as I always do when anybody tries to force me to do anything, I balked.
“Oh yeah?” I challenged. “Well, I don’t want to have some.”
God, I was so green. I hadn’t yet learned the art of feminine diplomatic compromise, in the face of possible trouble. No wonder the guys didn’t think I was a girl. Well, Sam didn’t either. He grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. It really hurt.
“Hey,” I yelled, “quit that. I’m sure your pasta is numero uno, but I’m full.”
He twisted harder.
Just then Sammy came out of his dressing room, jangling with gold chains and snappily dressed for the rest of the evening. He noticed my pained expression and my “disappeared” arm.
“What the hell are you doing?” Sammy asked Giancana.
I shrugged. “He wants me to eat his pasta,” I explained, realizing as soon as I said it how foolish it sounded. Sammy suppressed a giggle and glanced at the pasta. He walked over to Sam.
“C’mon, Sam,” he chided gently. “Let the kid go.” (Everyone in our group still called me kid.) “She doesn’t want any,” he went on. “She’s probably on a diet or something. You know how actresses can be.”
Sam smiled that crooked, hooded smile of his and twisted my arm harder. I groaned.
Sammy touched his arm. “C’mon, Sam. Let go.”
With that, Sam released my arm and slammed Sammy in the stomach with his fist.
“Okay”—he chuckled—“no pasta for either of you.” Sammy doubled over. He had another show to do that night. I stepped back, horrified. Giancana went to the bar and made himself a drink. Sammy straightened up, took a deep breath, and said to me, “Why don’t you come back later?”
I nodded and left. I wanted to deliver an exit line that would live in infamy, but I couldn’t. I was confused. Sammy was in pain. My arm was wrenched. This man seemed to be a monster. Beyond those feelings I had not yet ventured.
Years later I saw Giancana with a woman he loved. I was startled to observe how she operated with such a man. “Dominatrix” would be a mild description. To his face she referred to him as a “cock-sucking sleazeball who’s so chickenshit he loves to be whipped.” He ate it up. For some reason that made inverted sense to me. Those who dominate must love to be dominated. I understood him a little better.
Perhaps Giancana was wary of me from the beginning because of something silly I did—in total innocence—when we were on location with Some Came Running. We were in Frank’s house, sitting by the kitchen window, playing gin. I wore sunglasses to cut down the sun’s glare and to disguise my reactions to my cards. Unbeknownst to me, Sam was reading my cards from my Sunglasses. I kept losing—I couldn’t understand why. Just then the doorbell rang. Since I was the official butleress, I went to answer it. It was a delivery of cannolis from Chicago. I brought them back to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, placed them inside, and noticed that one of the boys bad put a toy water pistol on the first shelf. I pulled the pistol out and trained it on Sam.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” I questioned, thinking of the wall of a post office.
Sam leaped to his feet and pulled a .38 pistol, a real one, out of a holster inside his jacket. Just then, Frank and Dean walked in looking for something to eat. They saw Sam and me with guns trained on one another and fell down laughing.
As I said, I hadn’t processed who Giancana really was. His face was the texture of dough and his dark eyes were recessed under lids like protective ridges, I knew he was a hood of some kind, but at that point it was all so theatrically dangerous and amusing to me. I didn’t have the background that Dean and Frank had, growing up on the streets. I played. They knew.
The incident passed, to be joked about for years. But as time went on and I grew to understand more, I was horrified to realize how glamorous our culture had made the Mafia. I actually felt it happening to me. I saw audiences’ eyes gleam with glee at the secondhand thrill they received from watching performers who hung out with gangsters—their hands had shaken the hands of killers! What was it about us, that we glorified an individual so deranged he had no conscience? What did that say not only about us as a society, but about me? I too was hanging out with these guys, and found a lot of it fun. I was an innocent in the beginning, but when innocence departed and I slowly opened my eyes to their world, which I still didn’t truly understand, I was faced with my own inner conflict.
As for Frank, he was nice to me but muscled others. He was attentive and sweet to me but often cruel and rude to others.
When he said to me one day, “Just let me know if anybody bothers you and I’ll take care of it,” an electrical shudder went through me. It was a shudder of conflict. On the one hand, I basked in his protection; on the other—what would he do to someone who “bothered” me? What did he mean? And was the dangerous mystery of it all what made it attractive?
Years later, when I was doing my act in a hotel in Florida, there was a strike. My show was one of the shows targeted. I called Frank and told him how miserable they were making me: microphones shutting down in the midst of my performance, blackouts at inappropriate moments, static in the monitor system, etc.
“I’ll take care of it, baby,” he assured me. “Call me if you need anything else.”
I didn’t have to. I don’t know what he did, but I had no more troubles.
Often when we’d speak on the phone after not having talked for some time, he wouldn’t say, “Hello, baby, how are you?” He’d say instead, “Hello, baby, are you all right?” He somehow always implied that there was bound to be something wrong that he could fix.
It was because of Frank and his associations that I was beginning to understand the fundamental questions I needed to ask myself about human friendship, about power and morality. My eyes were being opened to other values and ways of operating. The ethics of my childhood and Judeo-Christian upbringing did not necessarily reflect how the country I lived in operated.
I was growing up in the twentieth century, and I happened to be doing it through the eyes arid moral requirements of Hollywood.
I began to think more about what I felt and feel more about what I thought. Hopefully I could balance both against what I perceived.
Was honor among thieves at least honor?
Was loyalty of any kind better than no loyalty at all?
And where did fear come in? Couldn’t people define themselves to a great extent by what they were afraid of?
I knew a violent revolutionary once who found through psychotherapy that he was suffering from a mental disorder defined as the fear of fear. When I read the biography of Sam Giancana, I realized what violent torture he had been put through by his own father—chained to a tree and beaten to a bloody pulp, within a heartbeat of losing his life for
nearly a week. No wonder domination and violence were erotic to him. No wonder he couldn’t allow himself to fear.
Dean and Frank also seemed unafraid of fear. They never appeared to weigh the consequences of their actions, and they never looked back. When Dean walked away from the cop’s uniform with Jerry, he closed the book. When Frank walked away from a relationship, there was no way back. And one never knew when the ax would fall. When he broke off his engagement to Juliet Prowse she called me. “I just said I wanted him to meet my family in South Africa,” she said. “And he regarded that as a slight. He won’t talk to me now.”
When Frank called me, he said, “She doesn’t really want to marry me, babe. I don’t need to pass muster with anybody.”
We went to dinner to discuss it. He said he not only loved Juliet, but liked her too. Yet there was no way back. He had shut his own door on the relationship, and his Italian pride would never allow another opening. Yet I felt Frank respected you if you knew what you wanted and stood your ground, even if you were against him. He went in for the kill when he sensed weakness. I suspect he hated weakness in himself and therefore never allowed it in anyone else. Dean was the same way, but less direct about it. Frank made his opinions and temperament obvious. Dean was more subtle and held his feelings within.
There’s a story about Dean that clarifies for me why the Mob never really pestered him. By pestering, I mean putting the strong arm on him to play Mob-owned joints.
Dean worked the Riobamba Club on Fifty-seventh Street in New York City. Riobamba was owned by Louis Lepke, a gangster who was awaiting execution on death row for murder. Louie Lepke was considered the hit man for the Mob.
Dean befriended Louie’s wife when he knew Louie was in trouble; she ran the Riobamba in Louie’s absence. It didn’t matter to Dean what Lepke’s morals were. Lepke had hired him and given him a chance; Dean would reciprocate the friendship with Lepke’s wife. When no one else would associate with the remainder of Lepke’s family, Dean did. He sat with them when Louie was executed—and was there for them afterward. The word got around that Dean was a good guy.
My Lucky Stars Page 7