My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  Dean didn’t do this to impress the bosses. As a matter of fact, he ignored the bosses. They, in turn, left Dean alone. All during the time that Dean and Jerry played Mob joints, as well as when Dean played them alone, no one leaned on him. No one made calls in the middle of the night. No one expected his services at funerals or daughters’ coming-out parties or weddings. If Dean went along with Frank (who did get calls), that was another story.

  I watched Dean studiously distance himself from The Boys. He didn’t run from them, he was just unavailable. Of course, he was unavailable to lots of people. He made Mob jokes and insinuated he had friendships with them, but there was a detachment that I admired. I wondered if it took courage. I wondered what would happen if they really leaned on him.

  There was one man who did lean on Dean. That man was Ed Torres, who operated the Riviera in Vegas. I remember hearing Liza Minnelli call him Uncle Eddie because her mother had worked for him. He had sounded cozy and friendly. Jesus. I worked for Torres. He was rough. He used to purposely annoy Dean. He wanted to be Dean’s boss, which was his first mistake.

  Dean owned ten percent of the Riviera and as a result had a permanent suite there where he kept the wardrobe he needed when he played. One night Dean arrived a day earlier than planned with Mort Viner (his agent as well as mine). Mort discovered that Eddie had rented Dean’s room out to someone else, clothes and all. He checked and found Eddie had been doing this all along.

  Mort and Dean said nothing. Dean played his engagement, and on the last night Mort played rough. He paid off a bellboy to collect Eddie Torres’s clothes and put them in the middle of the floor of Dean’s suite. Just before Dean left the hotel, Mort set fire to Eddie’s clothes and then rang the fire marshal and said he smelled smoke on that floor. Eddie gave up his need to control Dean.

  Frank couldn’t control Dean either. Through the years Dean often wouldn’t take Frank’s calls so Frank would call Mort to find out where Dean was. Frank wanted to socialize, tear up the town. Dean never liked going out at night. He liked to watch television and be alone. Many times I’d hear Dean say, “I can’t go out tonight. I have a girl in my room.” Of course, there was no one waiting for him but his faithful Western or a rerun of Kojak.

  Dean’s performance in Some Came Running was his best, I thought. He was a lot like Bama, a loner with his own code of ethics who would never compromise, so maybe it wasn’t really a performance. Neither he nor Frank liked Vincente Minnelli. They thought he was too precious and pursed his lips too much. The two of them could dislike people because of small things that personally offended them. They couldn’t overcome their judgment of a person’s teeth or hair or smell. They’d make jokes under their breath. They would cast someone out of their lives because his jockstrap showed under his shorts. They were primitive children and their reactions adolescent. They put crackers in each other’s beds and dumped spaghetti on new tuxedos. They would grab an ice cube from a drink and thrust it into the hand of a formally dressed fan and ask him to skate around on it.

  One night, on an angry, moody whim, Frank just arbitrarily canceled the evening’s shoot. No one could do anything. Another night Minnelli was taking a particularly long and artistic time of it. The shot involved a Ferris wheel in a scene at the end of the picture. Finally, after circling around the camera a few times with his lips pursed and much gesturing to himself, Minnelli put his head up in the air and closed his eyes. I tensed up. Dean and Frank and I stood waiting to do the scene. I could sense what was coming. The fans were screaming all around us. I looked over at Dean and Frank. The dawn was about to break. They were about to explode at Vincente’s artistic indulgence. Vincente came out of his reverie and instead of saying, “Move the camera,” he said, “Move the Ferris wheel.” Frank bolted toward his limo, dove into it headfirst, and ordered the driver to the airport. He went back to Los Angeles, and Dean went with him. I stayed. Production shut down. Vincente was oblivious. After a few days the head of production at Metro, Sol Siegel, wrangled Frank into returning with a promise that next time the camera would move, not the set.

  Frank could be just as ruthless with scripts. During an afternoon shoot, he invited me for a drink in his trailer. The assistant director came to the trailer to call us to the set.

  “We’re having a drink,” said Frank, “because it’s ’tini time.”

  “But, Mr. Sinatra,” protested the assistant director, “we are behind schedule and we need to make up time.”

  “How far behind are we?” asked Frank.

  “Two weeks,” answered the assistant director.

  “Say, buddy. You have a script handy?” asked Frank.

  I knew what was coming.

  The assistant director handed him his script. Frank counted off about twenty pages and then ripped them out of the script.

  “There, pal,” he said. “Now we’re on schedule.”

  The assistant director fled, not wanting to put us ahead of schedule.

  The pages never went back in. It was just like Frank. When he went on record that something was over, it was over. The writers had to piece the story together somehow. Frank realized later he had cut one of my big scenes, so he threw the end of the picture to me.

  “Let the kid get in the way of the bullet,” he said to Sol Siegel. “That’ll make the audience feel sorry for her because she tried to save my life. Might get her a nomination out of it.”

  He was right. I got my first Academy Award nomination for Some Came Running. I wondered what would have happened had he wanted two or three martinis that day.

  Where Frank was interested in martinis, I was interested in chewing gum. I always chewed it right up to “action.” Frank laughed and was amused when I never had a place to put it. One day the director yelled “action” and I took my gum out of my mouth and stuck it behind Frank’s ear. He mashed his ear up against it so it wouldn’t fall. This became our game and no one could figure out why Frank usually touched his ear before a take.

  For me, Vincente Minnelli was an excellent director, simply because he didn’t direct much. He “let” us actors find our own characters and our own way. Dean thrived on the freedom he felt with Vincente—one reason his character of Bama was the finest of his career. But Frank was threatened by this way of working because the freedom of choice exposed him too much. Where acting is concerned, he likes the security of an autocratic, dictatorial personality, as long as he respects their talent. He did his best work for Fred Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity), a man who is renowned for getting the shot regardless of hardship, John Frankenheimer (Manchurian Candidate), who insists on infiltrating your psychological stability, and Otto Preminger (Man with the Golden Arm), an outright emotional Nazi.

  Directors like that are okay with me too, because it is fun to please them, but I think I prefer a director who basically leaves me alone unless he or she can make a suggestion that is not really about ego.

  Minnelli was agonizingly unperturbed, which guaranteed that he always got what he wanted. The camera crew, art department, costume people, makeup, hair, and special effects were well aware of his taste and control. They loved him and found no problem obeying his leadership. I felt the same way.

  In fact, I guess you could say a really good director doesn’t need to do much but hire excellent people and act as a sounding board while they do their work.

  The mythology of the Clan began with Some Came Running in 1958. We all enjoyed working together so much that with Frank’s prodding we couldn’t stop. I did Can-Can with Frank in 1960 and All in a Night’s Work with Dean in 1961. When I worked with the two of them together, I usually played a cameo part in some stupid Mob-caper—Vegas movie and they’d give me a car or something as a salary. That was fine with me. It was fun and totally madcap.

  When we got together and made pictures at the same time that the Clan was appearing in Vegas, there was an energy there that has never been duplicated since.

  Two shows a night, seven days a week, for three months …
while shooting a picture. No one got any sleep. Granted, these pictures were not award winners—Robin and the Seven Hoods, Ocean’s Eleven, etc.—but the spontaneous humor on the stage and the set was unparalleled then and has never been matched since. The director never knew what was going to happen or how a scene would be played on a given day. But it didn’t matter.

  And at night the world came to Vegas to see Dean, Frank, Sammy, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, and, whenever they could inveigle me to the stage—me. Milton Berle used to love to come and interrupt, which was his stock-in-trade. Of course, Sammy knew that Milton was a filing cabinet of jokes and used to buttonhole him after every show for material that hadn’t yet been heard. Milton was having a hard enough time himself, keeping up with the uncontrollable antics on the stage.

  One night Dean wheeled out a table outfitted with a full complement of drinks. The audience howled, and he was off.

  “Frank, do you know how to make a fruit cordial?” he asked.

  “No, Dean,” answered Frank. “How do you make a fruit cordial?”

  Dean took a beat and shrugged. “Why,” he said, “be nice to him!” He bared his muscles and said, “You know how I got these muscles?”

  “No,” said Frank. “How?”

  “By carrying Jerry all those years,” answered Dean.

  Frank was playing the straight man for Dean. They both knew it. But sometimes Frank got sick of never getting any laughs.

  “How come you always get the laughs and I don’t?” he complained to Dean one night.

  “You’re not funny,” said Dean.

  “Well, let me try,” said Frank.

  “Okay, pallie,” said Dean.

  They went out on the stage and reversed everything. Dean played straight and Frank had the punch lines. Nobody laughed at Frank. In fact, they laughed at Dean’s straight lines. Frank began to understand on a visceral level the depth of Dean’s timing. No one could compare, and it was all because Dean had hit on the identity of Dean the Drunkie. He knew who he was with a drink in his hand, which, by the way, went with him everywhere. I have seen Dean carrying a “drink” on the golf course. His attitude is funny boozy, but the drink is apple juice.

  Jerry, who sometimes played Vegas at the same time as Dean, couldn’t fill the room. He still spoke of himself in the third person. Dean had decided not to be thrice removed from himself. He was blossoming without Jerry. He had found himself, and I began to find him really attractive—like a real girl! He made me laugh with his wit and sometimes his kindness and warmth were touching. We went on to do five more pictures together. After a while I was glad he and Jerry had split. That left room for me.

  While we were filming All in a Night’s Work, I developed a real crush on Dean. By now, I had finally become a “girl” to him too. I didn’t know what to do about it. So, one night after work I stopped by his home to talk. I didn’t know what I was going to say. Jeanne opened the door and ushered me into the living room, where seven children who had just finished dinner were playing. It was mayhem, the air thick with family interplay. I waited on the couch while Jeanne called Dean. The kids quieted.

  He came downstairs, saw me, walked over, and embraced me.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he said. “Wow. You came to see me. Hey, kids, look who’s here.” They acknowledged me and returned to their play. We sat down together. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Well, sweetheart,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  Jeanne yelled from the other room that there was a phone call for Dean. He looked into my eyes. Could he guess what I was feeling? I couldn’t tell him. Young-lady crushes he was probably used to.

  Finally I spoke. “I just wanted you to know how much I’ve enjoyed working with you. I think you’re brilliant.”

  Dean held my hand and smiled.

  “I feel the same way about you, sweetheart, you’re the best.”

  It was one of those moments when it is obvious that nothing more should be said. We looked at each other. I stood up and kissed him on the cheek. The kids had gone; the room was empty.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, honey,” said Dean. “Now, you take care of that sweet self of yours.”

  Oh boy. I excused myself as gracefully as I could and left. I felt like an idiot. I don’t know to this day if he knew what was on my mind. Even if he had known, would it have mattered? I think not. He would much rather have watched television.

  DURING THE YEARS OF WORKING WITH DEAN AND FRANK, I watched the two of them fall in and out of love with various women. I wondered how they actually conducted themselves in those relationships. Were they committed at all? Frank was in and out of engagements and Dean was married to Jeanne. Frank used to refer to Jeanne as the U-boat commander because he saw her as a Nazi who controlled Dean. Could they see women as real beings with needs and intelligence? Did they ever communicate on a fulfilling level? I was secretly grateful that I didn’t really see them as potential lovers. Had anything like that developed, I would have been in real trouble. But it felt as if they were protecting me more than anything else.

  Why had I drawn Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra into the formative years of my experience in Hollywood? Why them? These men were my friends and teachers. Why were Dean and Frank and I so comfortable together, given their backgrounds, which were diametrically opposed to mine? Sometimes I was flabbergasted not only at what I witnessed, but also at my reaction to it. When Dean and Frank took me places and our hotel rooms weren’t satisfactory, Frank would punch a hole in the wall to make them satisfactory. I can’t say I was appalled. It was like being in a violent cartoon. I’d watch the reactions of other people. Sometimes they were terrified. Sometimes they treated it as a joke he had included them in. That was always a mistake. Nobody was included with Frank unless you had earned it.

  Once, when Frank and Dean and I were watching television at two in the morning, Frank suddenly got hungry and called the manager, demanding that somebody wake up and fix them something to eat. I could hear the manager mumble his irritation, but secretly he must have liked the idea of seeing Dean and Frank at two in the morning. Bleary-eyed, but with a smirk, the manager came bearing sandwiches and beer to our living room, where the TV was blasting out a rerun. The manager threw his chest out like a prizefighter’s manager and gave Frank “attitude” about the late hour and loud noise. Frank offhandedly told the manager to go fuck himself, shut up, and get the hell out. The manager dropped the tray and called Frank a skinny wop. Frank took a swing at the guy and it connected. The guy swung back. Dean looked up. “If you’re gonna fight,” he said impatiently, “do it on the other side of the room.”

  Dean turned up the volume of the TV, opened a beer, and ate a sandwich. “Too much mayo,” he said. The manager rubbed his jaw, mumbled something about how crazy they were, and left.

  My stomach turned over. This really was crazy, wasn’t it? I mean, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t decide what I thought of their behavior. These guys were coming from a place that was so beyond my experience that I denied it was seriously sick. Of course my own proper upbringing in Virginia had nurtured in me an attraction to unruly, unseemly, rebellious behavior, because I always sensed that same repressed rebelliousness simmering under my own parents’ surface. They never expressed what they were really feeling. These guys did. In a way it was a release. These were real and intense feelings. They lived their own code. Because I was so young, I think I saw their actions as simply an alternative code of behavior, not sociopathic, and I guess I thought they behaved this way only among themselves. It never occurred to me that either Frank or his “friends” would really hurt anybody.

  I knew The Boys, of course, had been around when Frank grew up in Hoboken. They must have represented power and influence to him. But he was also a kid who told me he heard the music of the spheres in his head. The music sang to him, he said, calling him to his destiny.

  As a loner with a strong-willed mother in control, he must have been attracted to the collective
friendship The Boys provided. All for one—one for all.

  I wished so often that I had had something like that in my life. In my world privacy was more valued than anything. “Hoe your own little row of potatoes” was the motto in our house. I longed to do outrageous things away from home. These people were always there for each other regardless of the morality involved. So I can understand why I wasn’t appalled at some of what went on.

  Still, I was intrigued with the unpredictability of Frank’s behavior and what triggered it.

  I don’t think I ever met Frank’s mother, Dolly. Whenever people try armchair psychology to analyze Frank’s bizarre violence, they mention Dolly. His closest friends describe her as having been opinionated, emotionally intractable, unstable, foulmouthed, overbearing, and seriously unpredictable. Her son could do no wrong, she would say, and he would be “Big” no matter what. Frank told me he feared and emulated his mother simultaneously. He often spoke of her to me. “She was a pisser,” he’d say, “but she scared the shit outta me. Never knew what she’d hate that I’d do.”

  As I watched his obsession with Ava Gardner’s unpredictable behavior I could see the similarity. Was he addicted to being thrown off balance? Because Dolly had bullied him, did he need that from his mate? The fights and skirmishes between Frank and Ava were legendary. They couldn’t live with or without one another. Ava hated Frank’s gangster friends and wouldn’t treat them with “respect,” as glamorous terrorizers, the way the rest of Frank’s group did—she lived with Frank. On the other hand, they thought she was a whacko and didn’t act the way a real wife should act.

  Since Frank clearly preferred the company of The Boys to a regular home life, there was no real competition between them and Ava. But Ava satisfied an insatiable need of Frank’s to be bullied by a strong mother figure. Ava made him grovel. Ava humiliated him. Ava kicked him when he was down. Ava was unattainable, she was beautiful beyond words, and in her honey-dripping voice she mouthed words that could make a longshoreman wince. Ava was the perfect combination. And if she was unattainable, how could she become boring?