I let that one go.
“So, Frank,” I said. “It takes a lot for me to get into this dress, corset-wise. So I’m going to put it on and after you sing ‘My Way’ I’m going to walk out onstage and we’re going to do our medley.”
He looked at me funny. “You are?” he asked.
“Yep,” I answered. “So be ready.”
He shrugged that Italian shrug that could mean okay, or could mean you’re dead. The fact that we’d never had a rehearsal was something Frank didn’t remember.
I finished my part of the show. He came on. I changed into my sexy chanteuse dress with the corset, and when he finished “My Way” I wandered onto the stage. Frank had forgotten our conversation, of course, but he did hear the audience go wild when they saw us together. He couldn’t remember my last name, so there was no point in introducing me. I pointed to the monitors and Frank, Jr., leading the orchestra, began the first number.
The monitors had spelled out who was to sing what, but Frank couldn’t read them. He was going to have to fly by the seat of his pants. Well, he did. With every great performer, rising to the occasion is an occupational challenge usually met, and this was no exception. I had learned enough from him and Dean over the years to understand that I would have to find an attitude to play with him when we worked together. Dean was his sidekick drunk, Sammy had been his step-and-fetch-it talented friend, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme had been his singing buddies who led him around while they kidded each other, Liza Minnelli had related to him as Uncle Frank, and now it was my turn.
Up until then he had not worked with his sexual energy relating to any of his partners. Perhaps I could work with that. People probably thought we had had an affair anyway. But I still needed to find an attitude. I found it with the first song. When he began to sing “You make me feel so young,” I just stared at him. And when he sang “And even when I’m old and gray,” I said, “You are old and gray.” The audience loved that because I was stating what they were thinking. Frank laughed, thank goodness. I had found my attitude. When I saw him laugh at my making fun of him, I knew I was home free. Because of my own tenure in the business I had earned the right to give back at him, from a female point of view, what he had been dishing out all these years. And he was great about it. In fact he had a really good time. I put suggestive moves on him and he said he’d tell Barbara. I said she’d never minded before. He said, “Yeah, but now I’d probably do it and forget that I had.” We hardly finished a song because the byplay became what our little time together was about. He saw that there was nothing to worry about, and from then on we did our medley together, never knowing what would happen.
I took to purposely standing in front of his monitors so he couldn’t read his lyrics. He’d just laugh and berate me. I’d tell jokes while he was singing so he’d get mixed up. Once Frank, Jr., began a number and Frank, Sr., decided he wasn’t ready. He refused to begin. Frank, Jr., kept going. Frank, Sr., said, “Wait a minute, who the fuck told you to start?” (It’s considered tasteless form to use that word on the stage, but with Frank, there was no form.) Frank, Jr., played right ahead. I looked at the monitors. The operator didn’t know whether to follow the orchestra or follow the Old Man. Frank wouldn’t sing. He turned to me and said, “Why does he keep playing?” I said, “I don’t know. He’s your son.”
Frank, Jr., kept right on with the orchestra. “So what do you want to do, Frank?” I asked, the song half over.
“I don’t know,” said Frank. “What do you think?” It had now become a sketch instead of a medley.
“Well,” I said. “I guess I could do it, but you know I can’t sing that good. You could do it, but you’ll have to talk to this monitor guy because without him you’ll just get lost again. Or you could go speak to your son and we could start all over.”
Frank just looked at me. Then he said, “The hell with it. I’m going to the races.” And he walked off the stage. It was like that.
Once, at Radio City, he was suffering from a bad throat and we had to cancel the show. The next night he said he was fine, and I reassured the audience that he would follow me after intermission, not to worry. I finished my set, walked off the stage, bathed in sweat, and Eliot was standing in the wings, ashen.
“He’s on a plane, Shirley,” he said. “He left for California. Can you go out and do another hour?”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I don’t have my orchestrations with me. C’mon, Eliot, you must be kidding.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, will you go back out there and tell them that Frank isn’t here?”
“Are you kidding twice?” I asked. “You do it. You’re his manager. What’s wrong with him anyway?”
“I don’t know,” said Eliot. “He said he had a bad throat.”
“Sure, right,” I said sarcastically. “Well, now what? If he’s in California, how do we continue?”
“We’ll postpone for two weeks,” he said. “Can you come back?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought the Music Hall was unavailable because of the Christmas show.”
Eliot grimaced. “Lots of things suddenly become available when you face losing money.”
He picked up the intercom. The audience was leaving for intermission. “That concludes the program, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Mr. Sinatra will not be performing.”
That was all he said. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like such a jerk for having reassured the people that Frank was there, when he wasn’t even in the city anymore.
But that’s the way it was. Energy to be really bad and energy to be soaringly good.
Traveling back to California in his plane, across country, after our last stadium show, Frank didn’t want to sleep. It was late at night. He thought everyone else was asleep. I watched him. He went to the back of the plane and quietly retrieved the snack food from the galley. He got down on his hands and knees and surreptitiously stuffed everyone’s shoes with popcorn, peanuts, jelly beans, gumdrops, crackers, and nuts.
Frank Sinatra, my friend, legend, and glorious survivor, would do anything to have some fun.
THE IMAGE OF SINATRA ON HIS HANDS AND KNEES STUFFING gumdrops into people’s shoes seems to be the true Sinatra to me. This was the man-child that moved me. This was the coworker who reveled in the mischief of stashing my gum behind his ear.
Since Frank was an artist of music, I saw him as an artist of life. Because he heard and trusted the sounds in his head, I believed he was acquainted with the reality of other dimensions. I always saw something in his eyes that recognized that truth was more than it seemed.
I wondered if his Karma would catch up with him while he was alive today. Or would it wait until some other time around?
I believe the reason for so much of Frank’s emotional violence was his need to be understood on command. He couldn’t wait. He, like many true artists, lived in the moment. That moment was so expansive, so full of uncontrollable feeling, that those who didn’t “get it” were visited by his cruelty. His music was mathematical perfection with no room for imprecision. He saw the truth in the same way. Absolute—no deviation. He had to live in a world he created in order to control it, and his talent and street-smart shrewdness enabled him to get away with it.
I have never had the driving audacity to chisel such chunky drama in my life. I preferred to be an observe and in that respect I have been afforded uncommonly extravagant entertainment.
In much the same way as the American culture is attracted to the Godfather films of Coppola, I was attracted to observing the real thing with Frank and company. I admit to an interest in gangsters—almost like a child watching a car wreck with my hands over one eye. I couldn’t stop gaping. How could these people behave the way they did? How did their minds work? Did they derive malicious pleasure, or was it just part of the job, motivated by a sour deal or an unpaid debt?
I have always been curious about people who push the perimeters of human decency beyond the pale.
&n
bsp; Frank Sinatra never restrained his need for drama, or his feelings, or his behavior. It was constitutionally impossible for him. He cut a swath through his friends and his life.
I knew several of the wives and girlfriends of The Boys Frank hung out with. They fundamentally denied that their men were gangsters. In fact, a few were very involved with New Age thinking, holistic healing, and Buddhist principles of never hurting or killing.
One girlfriend invited me to her house many times. She grew her own organic vegetables, had an ecologically perfect landscape and garden, and meditated several times a day. She said God was her best friend and talked openly about the laws of Karma and how everything she put out would come back. She loved her man and thought that his reputation had been badly damaged by negative gossipmongers. Because of the bad vibes people directed his way, she had to live in a house surrounded by lead walls and bodyguards around the clock. I found her blindness paralyzing. How could she be so closed-minded? Was she a mirror for me? Here I was, gallivanting around the world, working, playing, and openly consorting with the same people. What was happening to my sense of right and wrong, my morality, my boundaries? I actually enjoyed what I was privy to. I found it harmless and I didn’t know why.
THEN SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT WAS A MAJOR REVELATION.
A close friend of Steve’s and mine who worked in Vegas came to see me in L.A. He wanted to talk alone and away from my house.
We walked on the beach. I couldn’t understand his need for such privacy. Then he reluctantly opened up.
“I hear rumors in Vegas,” he said.
“What rumors?” I asked.
“From The Boys,” he answered and looked over his shoulder.
“You mean the Mob?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “There’s some talk that they will kidnap your daughter.”
My mouth fell open.
“What do you mean?” I said. “Why?”
“In order to appropriate your talent,” he said. “They want to own you and this is how they’d threaten to do it.”
I’ll never forget my reaction. I feel it viscerally even today.
I felt the molecules of my blood boil in every inch of my body. I was prepared to kill, and I would have.
“You tell those people to go fuck themselves,” I said. “If they so much as cross to my side of a wide street or come within the same city as my daughter, I will call the President of the United States and every fucking reporter I know. I’ll blow the whistle publicly on not only them but their wives and girlfriends too. You tell them I think they are scumbags and I am not amused.”
My friend stopped dead in his tracks.
“And one more thing. Tell them to shove their horses’ heads up their asses.”
He looked too shocked to react. Finally he spoke. “Look,” he said, “I’m not even sure it’s true. I just thought I’d tell you.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s not true. Those cocksuckers are never coming near me or my daughter. On that you can depend.” I walked away from him. “Thanks for telling me,” I said. “Now you make sure they know my reaction.”
I called Steve in Japan and told him what had happened. He was horrified. “Sachi should come to Japan,” he said. “She should go to school here, where she’ll be safe.” After much soul-searching I agreed.
Soon after that, we enrolled Sachi in an international school in Tokyo, where she would live with her father during the school year. She would come home to me during the long holidays (one month at Christmas and Easter) and during the three-month summer vacation. In addition to the Mob threat, I wanted to get her away from what I perceived to be a growing drug culture in the Los Angeles schools and the fate of being a movie star’s daughter.
I was too frightened to ask Frank whether what I had been told was true, but I never hung out with the guys again. I had abruptly grown out of my morbid fascination with danger.
Of one thing I am certain, though. If the threat was real, Frank had nothing to do with it. He adored Sachi and invited us to Palm Springs and to his home in L.A. many times. In fact, it was not long after that Frank’s own son was kidnapped. No one ever got a straight answer as to who did it. I had my notions, of course. I just couldn’t figure out why.
There was one thing I did figure out, though. I had a reservoir of rage in me that would serve me well against injustice for the rest of my life.
6
POWER
I suppose you could say that my survival quotient speaks to my acquaintance with the knowledge of how to get power and how to use it.
Once I was through the act of being born, and out of my mother’s protective body, I engaged in the manipulation of my environment so that I could survive. I cried, I flailed, I smiled, I grabbed for food; I did whatever I had to do so I wouldn’t die. That’s what we all do because the squeaky wheel gets the grease and the grown-ups have to know what we need. Therefore, exerting control was one of the first of my human endeavors.
That hasn’t changed much. Even though I listen to advice, I’ll still do things my way. I personally am not so much interested in power as I am in doing something the way I want to do it.
Intrinsically, this point of view carries power with it. I didn’t know that when I first came to Hollywood. I just knew I didn’t want “them” to curl my hair, paint my face, force me into PR relationships or even into going to premieres of pictures I didn’t want to see.
I made a compromise sometimes. I’d drive up in my red Plymouth, have the valet take my car to the back of the theater, parade down the red-carpet aisle, all smiles, then duck out of the theater without having to sit through the film.
I had heard what everyone else in the world had heard about Hollywood … that it was all about money, that people’s very souls could be bought and sold for the sake of fame and the chance to be a star.
I have never understood why the concept of being famous—a star—never motivated me much. Perhaps it should have but it didn’t. I wanted to be good at my work. Frankly, now I consider my thinking to have been astonishingly limited and narrow. Why shouldn’t I have stardom as a goal? But I didn’t. I wanted people to like what I did, I wanted to be prepared, be professional, be imaginative, be a performer and an actress that people got a kick out of. As I said, my goals in Hollywood were limited. Yet, what I didn’t particularly care about was probably the secret of my success.
I never knew or cared about the deals being made—including my own. I cared about the script and whether I liked the people I was working with.
I read the trade papers but didn’t understand much other than Army Archerd’s column and whoever was writing trade gossip for the Hollywood Reporter. The manipulation of money and power went right over my head. And I was extremely impolitic when it came to playing the Hollywood game.
If studio heads or producers solicited my opinion, I told them the truth, unpleasant though it often was. And I had no diplomatic finesse in expressing my displeasure. On top of that, I almost always turned what should have been a creative or commercial discussion into a psychological interview about them.
Stumbling and offending at every turn, I couldn’t refrain from rushing in where angels feared to tread. I was a fool.
The Hollywood studio bosses seemed to have one kind of power and the artists had another. I didn’t understand either.
The artists knew how to speak to the subconscious, how to move people, how to make people identify with them. The bosses recognized that they didn’t know how to do that, so they exerted their control with money. They liked to make artists feel subservient, yet at the same time knew there was no industry without them.
Our business was called the “motion-picture industry,” not “motion-picture artistry.” But I saw that the real power lay in the artistry. Artists were the ones the people came to see. We lived the life the public identified with.
When Bette Davis did Regina in The Little Foxes, she elected to play the part the way it was written, with t
he darkness of a manipulating woman in complete control. Willy Wyler, the director, wanted her to play against the writing, which is to say, with more sweetness and a deceptive, likable quality. Davis said this wasn’t what the audience expected from her and refused.
There were arguments and emotional scenes on the set. Jack Warner called in Wyler and told him to leave Davis alone. She was the box-office queen on the lot, and he said Wyler shouldn’t “screw around with whatever the audience liked.” Wyler capitulated because of the power of Davis’s “queen bitch” quality.
I remember how Y. Frank Freeman, at Paramount, or Sol Siegel at Metro, or Zanuck at Fox would look into the faces of us actors and wonder what secrets of theirs we could perceive, things that they themselves were not aware of.
In fact, as the years passed I often thought about developing a relationship with a studio head just to see how they lived and functioned, but I never got that far because most of them weren’t around long enough. Studio power became a revolving door, particularly after Jack Warner, Harry Cohn (Columbia), Benny Thau (Metro), and Skouras at Fox retired. The old moguls who lived and breathed the “industry” were a breed apart. After the agents took over, I couldn’t remember anybody’s name because they were in and out so fast.
So what was power, then? Those people weren’t going to enable me to march to my own drummer, I was.
I was also developing a political point of view, so I became vigilant as to how my position in Hollywood could focus public attention on a cry in the dark, how I could help change those things that had been ignored for far too long in our society. I was learning that within the independent artist there resides the power to effect change in areas where the powers-that-be are too entrenched, too budget-conscious, or finally too embarrassed to do it themselves.
I was learning something else. Real power could reside in the seemingly most insignificant of crew members.
I remember a scene in Around the World in Eighty Days that we were shooting with thousands of extras. Filming ground to a halt because the propman had forgotten to put the champagne in the balloon with David Niven and Cantinflas. That’s power.
My Lucky Stars Page 11