The Teflon Don caused a similar problem for George a few years later but in a different venue when he booked the seats that Jolene and I had sat in the previous night and that George needed us to occupy again for continuity. When George heard they were taken, he told Eliot Weisman, “You’ve got to get those girls in those seats. I don’t care what you have to do, just do it!” The following night, there we were sitting in the seats George wanted us to be in—much to his relief. He told Eliot, “I don’t know how you did it, but well done.”
Eliot replied, “I didn’t do a thing. The Teflon Don was arrested last night.” And so he was, along with several others in an FBI raid. He was charged with thirteen counts of murder, racketeering, gambling, and tax evasion. He remained in prison for the next twelve years until his death.
I traveled the world with Frank, Sammy, and Liza as the Ultimate Event took to the road and developed a life of its own. We went to places as diverse as New Orleans and Osaka. Such was the public demand for the three stars that they continued to perform solo as well during that time, coming back together for the show that offered three for the price of one. Everybody wanted to see them. And I mean everybody.
Standing on the side of the stage at the Universal Amphitheatre in L.A. one night, I noticed someone’s feet sticking out from under the velvet curtains, where he was rolled up tight. Wandering over to the stranger peering through a gap, I poked him with my finger and made him squeal. Out popped a face I recognized immediately as an old friend of Sammy’s. I smiled and said hello.
“Er—hello,” replied Michael Jackson in that childlike voice of his. Looking across at Frank in open wonder, he said, “Isn’t he great?”
“Yes, he is,” I replied, completely unfazed. I was quite accustomed to fellow singers coming to Frank’s concerts to study his art, the way he phrased songs, his timing, his choice of numbers, and his presentation. Vic Damone came to stay at the Compound for a couple of weeks once to study Frank and really learned a thing or two. I asked Michael Jackson, “Would you like to stay behind and see him after the show?”
“Oh, I-I’m not sure.”
“Well, I know he’d like to say hello to you,” I said gently. “You see, I’m his wife.”
Michael lowered his head for a moment with embarrassment. At my coaxing, he unfurled himself from the curtains and stood watching the rest of the performance next to me. When Frank exited on the other side of the stage, I walked Michael to the dressing room. As I suspected, Frank was delighted to see Michael, and the two of them sat chatting about the last time they’d met, when Frank recorded “L.A. Is My Lady” with their mutual friend Quincy Jones. After a while, other people started coming in to congratulate Frank, so Michael made his excuses. He squeezed my arm in gratitude and slipped away.
Being on the road wasn’t always as charming and magical as that, however. I arrived one night at the Meadowlands arena in New Jersey an hour or so after Frank had gone ahead to prepare for a show he was doing with Liza. As we drove into the parking lot, I noticed that Frank’s car wasn’t at the stage door.
“Where’s Frank?” I asked.
“He left” was the reply.
Confused, I walked backstage, where I could already hear the crowd waiting out front. Tickets had been sold out months in advance, and the place was buzzing with anticipation. I went to Frank’s dressing room, and all was as it should be; his hospitality rider had been carried out to the letter. There were his must-have bottles of booze, cartons of cigarettes, bowls of candy, sandwiches, Italian antipasti, cans of Campbell’s chicken soup with rice (his favorite), packets of Luden’s cough drops, tea and honey for his throat. An empty glass stood ready to be filled with Jack Daniel’s and carried with him onto the stage. He’d tell the audience, “In case you’re wondering, this isn’t cold tea.” He’d also carry a single cigarette and a lighter, which he’d light up for one of his torch songs. His tux was on a hanger waiting to be slipped on at the final moment (never before, in case he creased it), and there was a color television for him to keep up with the news and sports. Everything he asked for from the bars of Ivory soap to the twelve freshly laundered towels was waiting for him, but there was no Frank.
I walked next door to Liza’s dressing room and found her having a meltdown. “Oh, Barbara! Frank’s gone! I don’t know what to do. Should I go on? Or shouldn’t I? What do you think? He’s not here!”
“What happened?”
Someone explained that Bill Miller, the show’s orchestra leader and conductor, had forgotten all the personalized sheet music that night, which meant that the orchestra couldn’t play. There was no time to go back to Manhattan and get it. When Frank saw everyone panicking about what they should do, he announced, “You do what you want. I’m leaving.”
We’d already arranged to meet for dinner at “21” in New York after the show, so I presumed Frank had gone straight there. I was still dithering about whether to join him or keep Liza from having a nervous breakdown when my friends Judy Green and Ann Downey arrived. Realizing that nothing much could be done, I told them, “I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?” they asked, surprised.
“To ‘21.’ Come and join us.”
“But we want to see the show!”
“There is no show,” I said, and so off we went to New York, where Frank was waiting at the bar with a drink and a cigarette.
“Bill forgot the damn music,” he told me. “What else could I do?”
Back at the arena, a hapless manager had to announce that the show was canceled because of “a technical fault.” The fans were offered a refund or a chance to reschedule the next time Frank came to town. Poor Bill Miller never forgot his lead sheets again. The man Frank named Suntan Charlie because he was so pale-skinned had it tough for a while after that, but at least he kept his job. Anyone else would have been fired. Bill had been with Frank since the 1950s, when Frank’s pianist walked out on him at the Desert Inn Hotel in Vegas after his wife asked him for a divorce. Frank asked Jilly to help him find someone, and Jilly took him to see Bill, who was playing on a funny little stage up over the bar. Frank, who hired him on the spot, always claimed he found Bill “on a shelf.” Not long after they met, Bill’s house was destroyed in a mudslide that killed his wife and put him in the hospital with badly broken legs. Not only was Frank a frequent visitor but he settled Bill’s medical bills and set him up with everything he needed to make a new start, including an apartment, clothes, and furniture, all hand-picked.
Frank couldn’t read music, so he learned everything by ear when Suntan came over to play for him. Listening to each number, Frank would memorize the melody, set the tempo, and work on the phrasing until they got it just right. Everybody loved Bill, especially Liza, Dean, and Sammy, who really appreciated his incredible musical talent.
Sammy was such a sweet little guy and utterly devoted to Frank, who’d first met him as a young fan waiting for Frank’s autograph at a stage door in 1945. I became very close to Sammy, who told me a lot about his early life. He was raised out of a trunk while touring in a vaudeville trio starring him, his uncle, and his father. I always thought the cheerful façade he put up stemmed from his tough childhood, but that was also why he was such a fantastic performer—he’d been performing his whole life. During the war he was the only black in his army unit, and his fellow soldiers teased him mercilessly. They even painted him white one night. In the end, he figured the only way he could get them to like him was to perform. He worked the racial abuse he’d suffered over the years into his act, claiming he’d been insulted in places “most blacks never get the chance to see.” The trouble with Sammy was that he was on, day and night. We were in Hawaii once, and he came running into our suite wearing tiny briefs, waving his arms around, and shouting, “The natives are restless! The natives are restless!” Then he ran out. Accustomed to his crazy antics, we looked up, laughed, and went back to our brunch.
It was such a shame that Sammy got hooked on cocaine and booz
e in the seventies, because that’s what really changed his relationship with Frank. Having married Altovise, one of his dancers, he turned her on to drugs too so that he’d have some company. That finally did it for Frank with what he called “this coke crap,” and he wouldn’t even speak to Sammy for three years, which broke his friend’s heart. Sammy was also in dire financial straits by then, and although Frank had helped him before, this time he cut him off completely. Sammy asked everyone including me to try to persuade Frank to let him back in, but it was no use. As far as Frank was concerned, Sammy might as well have been dead.
It was Alto and I who finally got them back together, having decided the silence had gone on too long. Just as Frank had gotten Dean Martin and his onetime comedic sidekick Jerry Lewis back together again (by walking onstage with Dean during one of Jerry’s muscular dystrophy telethons) and I’d done the same with Billy Wilder and Swifty Lazar (sitting them together at a party), I went to work on Sammy and Frank. I invited the pair of them to a private dinner at Caesars Palace without telling Frank. Fortunately, he wasn’t so mad at me that he walked out. He was still tough on his stand, though, and told Sammy how disappointed he was. “You’re the greatest talent there is, and yet you’re going to let this shit destroy you?” he asked. Sammy listened tearfully, and he did clean up his act after that—to please Frank, I always thought.
Sadly, Alto didn’t, and she ended up having a car accident in which she could have killed someone. Frank, Sammy, and I finally took part in an intervention with her therapist and a friend of theirs named Mark. We went to her house, sat in a circle, and took turns speaking. We told Alto that we loved her but that we’d reserved a room for her at the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs. Frank told her his plane was waiting, and Mark and I accompanied her to the desert. Sadly, she didn’t stay there nearly long enough. We were at some affair a month or so later and she asked me, “Please, Barbara, give me one sip of your martini?” I wasn’t aware alcohol was also part of her problem, so I handed her my glass. When she downed it in one gulp, I knew that she was back to her old tricks.
When Sammy started to have problems with his voice and was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1989, Alto couldn’t cope. Sammy was so afraid of losing his ability to sing that he opted for radiation rather than surgery, but then the cancer spread and he lost his voice after all. At a televised sixtieth anniversary tribute for Sammy, when everyone knew he was dying, more than thirty stars, including Whitney Houston, Clint Eastwood, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and Ella Fitzgerald, performed in an Emmy award–winning production. George Schlatter organized it, and knowing how Frank hated hanging around, George suggested he open the show. The only star to turn up with a single member of his entourage (Jilly) agreed, instantly resolving the petty backstage disputes about who should go on first. George told the others, “Put it this way, Sinatra’s opening and Ella’s closing, so where would you like to be in the lineup?” Frank came out, stood on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium a few feet away from Sammy, and told him, “I want to get my licks in before the rest do.” He called him “My brother … the best friend I ever had.”
Toward the end of his life, Sammy had a lot of people around who were telling him what to do, how big a star he was, and how he didn’t need Frank Sinatra anymore. The two of them were still friends, but they didn’t work together and Sammy went out on his own, doing numbers like his popular “Music of the Night” by Andrew Lloyd Webber. We went to visit Sammy several times in the hospital, but then he went home to Beverly Hills to die, so we flew back to L.A. from a concert in Detroit to say good-bye. Sammy had a trach tube in his throat by then and was clearly having trouble breathing. He couldn’t even speak anymore; it was tragic. Frank was very emotional, so leaning forward, I touched Sammy’s hand and said, “Sam, I thought you’d want to know that Frank’s called Andrew Lloyd Webber. He’s going to sing all his songs from now on.” Sammy thought that was so funny, he almost spat out his trach. A few days later he passed away. Frank canceled four Radio City Music Hall concerts to fly home and grieve in his usual quiet way.
Sammy was buried with a watch Frank had given him. His funeral was presided over by Reverend Jesse Jackson. I sat in the front row with Dean and Frank, and both men wept openly. It was so sad, especially for Frank, who’d lost Chester Babcock just a few months earlier. Altovise was at Sammy’s service, but she didn’t make much sense. She’d been so attractive, fun, and in great shape before drugs took hold of her. It was not a pretty picture, and although Frank was determined to support her as best he could, sadly, Alto died ten years later.
Like Sammy, Jimmy Van Heusen also couldn’t speak before he died, having suffered a catastrophic stroke. We missed his great humor as much as his writing talent. He and Sammy Cahn, who’d written together for years, fell out over something and never made it up. When Frank and I went to visit Jimmy toward the end, he was lying on a couch and could barely manage a facial expression because of paralysis. Frank leaned forward and said, “Sammy Cahn’s here, Jim. He wants to see you.” Well, Jimmy’s face twisted into a grimace then like you wouldn’t believe. Bless his heart.
Dear Dean lasted another five years, until respiratory failure claimed him too. That was probably the toughest loss of all for Frank. He said afterward that Dean was “like the air I breathe; always there, always close by.” The friend who he claimed brought more fun into his life than anyone else was gone. Frank couldn’t face that funeral; he couldn’t even talk about it, so I went in his place. Dean’s passing, of all of them, meant that the good old days really were over. Those slick young men I’d first spotted across a smoky bar at the Sahara in 1957 would be forever immortalized in film, on CD and vinyl, and their memory still makes me smile. But when they dimmed the lights in Vegas at the passing of Dean and Sammy, it seemed to both Frank and me that those lights would never be quite as bright again.
Frank refused to let life beat him and eventually pulled himself together. Like me, Frank was a survivor. We’d known some tough times, but we were able to say, “This too shall pass.”
He never lost his passion for life; in fact, losing people he loved only made him more passionate. His curiosity and interest in everything from the personal problems of his friends to the political crises of the world never waned. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and Saddam Hussein seemed to be courting disaster, Frank felt it was his duty and responsibility to write to both Saddam and George Bush. Mr. Fixit never gave up hope that he could fix everything. Needless to say, only President Bush responded to Frank’s letters, and the Gulf War was, sadly, not avoided.
One of Frank’s ways of getting past sad times was to celebrate, and he never needed an excuse. If there wasn’t a reason to throw a party or buy someone a gift, he’d invent one. He loved Christmas so much, with all its twinkling festive lights and message of goodwill to all men, that he had the lights kept on a tree outside his home all year round. “Everybody could do with a little extra Christmas,” he’d say.
Birthdays and anniversaries were always the biggest deals, though, and the older he got the more they came to mean to him. We had lots of places we liked to go—favorite clubs and restaurants in almost every city in the world. There was “21” or Patsy’s in New York, Café de Paris in London, and Lord Fletcher’s or Dominick’s in Palm Springs. But probably our most frequent party venue away from home was Chasen’s restaurant in Los Angeles, where Dave Chasen, an old vaudevillian, served excellent southern food, including his famous chili, creamed spinach, and “hobo steak.” Chasen’s had significance for so many of us. Zeppo had asked me to marry him there. Jimmy Stewart threw his bachelor party at Chasen’s. Dean Martin, Greg Peck, Kirk Douglas, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Elizabeth Taylor were all regulars. Ronnie Reagan proposed to Nancy in one of the booths. We had our own booth, and when the restaurant eventually closed someone bought it.
Chasen’s also served wonderful cocktails, including my favorite Flame of Love martini, which the barman Pepe Ruiz created for Dean Mar
tin when Dean told him he was bored with ordinary martinis. Pepe would pour a dash of Tio Pepe into a chilled glass, then tip it out. He’d light a strip of orange peel with a match and smear the hot oil the flame released around the glass. He’d then fill it with ice and vodka before wiping the rim with more flambéed orange peel. Heaven. Frank immortalized the drink in the song “Nothing but the Best” with the line “I like a martini and burn on the glass.”
It was in Chasen’s that Frank sang “True Love” to me at a party for one of our wedding anniversaries, which was one of the few times he sang at an informal gathering. It was also where we first met the singer Michael Feinstein when he was just starting out. Michael had been hired to play the piano that night and thought, What can I do to get Frank Sinatra’s attention? Frank had his back to him at first, but as soon as Michael began to play, Frank stopped talking and turned around with a look of astonishment on his face. Then he went over to the piano, where Michael was playing some of Frank’s earliest and least known songs. “Where did you get these tunes from, kid?” Frank asked, incredulous. “You’re only fifteen years old!” They were friends from that day on, even more so when Frank found out that Michael was a huge Gershwin fan.
Another place we liked was La Dolce Vita on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was there that Frank and Swifty Lazar got into a heated argument when they were both well into their seventies and Swifty was in a wheelchair. Swifty made some remark that Frank objected to, so, bristling, he told Swifty, “I oughta knock your damn brains out!”
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