Frank

by James Kaplan

  An interesting point. Frank was filled with vulnerability, but shame wasn’t quite part of his artistic palette. Not that it was a foreign emotion—he would feel deep shame at crucial moments throughout his life—but it wasn’t one he was fond of showing. Vulnerability was useful: vulnerability could get you laid. Showing shame, by Frank’s lights anyway (and maybe even by the code of the streets of Hoboken), could get you nothing but contempt.

  Kazan was right: Brando was the better choice for Terry Malloy. And when Spiegel had to break the news to Sinatra, he found it convenient to blame the decision on the director. It was a rotten business, the producer cooed; a terrible thing—might Frank be interested in the role of Father Barry, the waterfront priest?

  Frank swallowed the urge to tell Sam Spiegel that he and Elia Kazan could go fuck themselves. Instead, what he said was that he had already played a priest once, in The Miracle of the Bells, and it hadn’t worked out. He was going to leave the turned-around-collar business to Crosby.

  With all due respect, Spiegel said, The Miracle of the Bells was pap. And that had been years ago, before Frank showed the world what he could really do as an actor. Father Barry was a great part, an important part in a hard-hitting script, Spiegel said. Would he consider it?

  He considered it. “Frank Sinatra’s now practically sure to play the labor priest in S. P. Eagle’s waterfront picture,” Earl Wilson wrote on October 2.

  Then, on October 10, Louella Parsons wrote, “Frank Sinatra has decided against doing ‘Waterfront’ with Elia Kazan in New York. ‘I love the role of the priest,’ he said, ‘but I only had two scenes.’ ”

  But what had really happened in the week between Wilson’s column and Parsons’s was that Spiegel and Kazan had given the key role of Father Barry—who was in many more than two scenes in On the Waterfront—to Karl Malden, who’d co-starred with Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and had won an Academy Award for the role. Frank had been quite thoroughly shut out.

  George Jacobs, Frank Sinatra’s valet for almost twenty years, recalled in his memoir that in the fall of 1953, his boss was even more preoccupied with work than with matters of the heart. “In what would become a continual aspect of my working for Sinatra, we’d sit and play cards late into the night, and he’d drink ‘Jack’ (Daniel’s) and obsess about his career,” Jacobs wrote.

  He was on the comeback trail, though he didn’t feel he was home free again by any means. As far as he was concerned, his career was still up in the air. Although Eternity was doing big box office, Oscar nominations had not been tallied, and Mr. S still did not have his next film job …

  The first (of many) people I would see Frank Sinatra hate was the man who went on to be considered one of the grandest of all Hollywood producers, Sam Spiegel. One day I arrived to see the living room half destroyed. Two lamps had been knocked over, broken glass was covering the floor. At first I thought there had been a burglary, until I began cleaning up and found the remnants of several drafts of a script entitled On the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg … I found Mr. S in bed nursing several bad paper cuts on his hands, which he got ripping up the script. He apologized for flipping out and told me he had just been fucked over by the worst real Sammy Glick in the business, Sammy Spiegel … Then he went into a tirade against Sam Spiegel that lasted for the next couple of weeks.

  Mysteries abound in Jacobs’s beautifully candid, thoroughly believable autobiography, Mr. S. For one thing, the Sinatra he presents us with is far more human and complex and vulnerable than the two-dimensional images—Sinatra the Thug; Sinatra the Genius; Ring-a-Ding-Ding Sinatra; Sinatra the Wonderful Dad; Greathearted Sinatra the Secret Philanthropist—put forth by so many books and remembrances. Of course Frank could be all these things at various times, but he was also much more: at his center was the compound enigma of which George Jacobs enjoyed a uniquely close-up view. “I slept in the same room with that man,” he told me in 2009.

  Other paradoxes crop up when Jacobs’s account appears to contradict the smooth chronology of Sinatra’s life. Why, for example, would Frank even have a valet in 1953, when he was rarely in the same place for more than a week at a time, and in any case was pretty much broke?

  Sinatra appears to have first met George Jacobs sometime in the summer of 1951, when the singer’s career was plummeting. The scene was a Hollywood party. Jacobs was standing outside, next to the Rolls-Royce he drove for the agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar.1 Lazar was indoors. Jacobs badly wanted a cigarette, and decided he would cadge one from the first person who came up the street. That person was Frank Sinatra. Sinatra told Jacobs he didn’t have a cigarette—oddly enough—but a few minutes later emerged from the party holding a gold bowl full of them. Jacobs took one, but Frank insisted he keep the whole bowl. He patted Jacobs’s arm and went back into the house.

  Sometime in early 1952, Sinatra realized he needed a Los Angeles base of operations. Hotels were too expensive, and Ava’s Pacific Palisades love nest was often a little too hot for comfort. Accordingly, Frank rented a five-room apartment in a Spanish Mission–style garden complex at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Glen—the same complex, it turned out, where Irving Lazar lived.2 According to George Jacobs, Lazar spoke witheringly about Sinatra’s career slump. “He’s a dead man,” the agent would say. “Even Jesus couldn’t get resurrected in this town.”

  Now and then, after Frank moved into the new place, Jacobs would spot him taking a walk down Beverly Glen to Holmby Park, “head down, all alone,” as Jacobs remembered.

  Where were all those screaming teenagers now that he needed them, I’d think to myself … If I ever made eye contact, I’d smile at him, and no matter how down he looked, he’d always pull it together and smile back. I’m not sure he remembered the cigarette incident. He was just a naturally nice guy. “Everybody’s nice when they’re down and desperate,” was Lazar’s take on the situation. “Losers have the time to be nice.”

  By the fall of 1953, things had changed substantially. Frank’s marriage was disintegrating: he didn’t just need a place to camp out; he needed a permanent residence. At the same time, counter to everyone’s expectations (especially Swifty Lazar’s), his career was on the upswing—there was enough new action that he had to hire a secretary, a mousy-looking lady in spectacles named Gloria Lovell, and install her in an office at the Goldwyn Studios. One day, while Jacobs was doing an errand there for Lazar, he ran into Frank, who greeted him with great friendliness and directed him to go see Lovell at once. She handed him an envelope that turned out to contain keys to Frank’s apartment. “Welcome aboard,” Lovell said. Sinatra, who always enjoyed giving Swifty the needle, had simply hired Jacobs away.3

  This was the apartment where Frank retreated from the chaos with Ava; this was where he ripped up the script for On the Waterfront. Everything about the place spoke eloquently of its unique and obsessive-compulsive tenant. “When I opened his apartment door, I was surprised he needed a valet at all, the place was so immaculately neat,” Jacobs recalled.

  The five-room, two-bedroom unit was a shrine to Ava Gardner. There were pictures of her everywhere, in the bathrooms, in the closet, on the refrigerator. There were a couple of framed photographs of his children and of his parents but none of his ex-wife Nancy. Aside from one bookcase, almost all biographies (Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Booker T. Washington, and a lot of Italians—Columbus, da Vinci, Machiavelli, Garibaldi, Mussolini), most of his possessions were records and clothes. There was a whole wall of sound, though it wasn’t all jazz as I would have guessed, but albums and albums of classical music.

  The closets were in perfect order, with all the clothes organized by color, fabric, and style. Most of the colors were orange (his favorite) or black. I figured the guy wanted to come off like a tiger. There were more sweaters than I’d ever seen, cashmere, mohair, lamb’s wool, alpaca, you name it. And as for shoes, Imelda Marcos had nothing on Frank Sinatra. He had a whole closet just for shoes, dozens of wingtips predominating,
with a good number of elevators. No wonder he seemed taller than his given five seven. There were also a lot of hats, which seemed odd for casual Los Angeles, but because of a receding hairline, hats had become his thing, just as they were Humphrey Bogart’s. It was clear from his wardrobe that he had been keeping his eye on Bogart, because a lot of Sinatra’s clothes were identical to Bogart’s. The biggest surprise in the apartment was the industrial supply of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. I had no idea the man was a gum chewer, like his original teenage fans, but he was.

  Frank chewed a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint as he drove Jacobs (rather than the other way around; he insisted) up Beverly Glen in his black and silver Cadillac Brougham Coupe. He was taking his new valet to meet his family.

  It was odd, Jacobs recalled, being introduced to his new boss’s ex-wife, “who didn’t seem ex at all.” On the other hand, the valet thought, “Mr. S was like a little boy who had just gotten out of camp coming home for a home-cooked dinner … Big Nancy was so maternal to Frank, she seemed like his mother rather than his wife.”

  Jacobs was struck by 320 North Carolwood’s “rococo New Jersey style” furniture, its “bright orange and black color scheme, and countless family pictures everywhere, with Mr. S in all of them.” The place looked, he thought, exactly as though Frank still lived there.

  After dinner, while her ex horsed around with the kids, Nancy gave George a crash tutorial on how to cook for Frank:

  The correct way to prepare the paper-thin steaks and pork chops, the scrambled-egg sandwiches, the bread to be sautéed in Italian, never Spanish, olive oil, the soft, never crisp, bacon he wanted for breakfast. She emphasized his disinterest in most vegetables, except for eggplant parmigiana and roasted peppers, and precisely which brands of pasta were acceptable, how many minutes to cook each, and how much salt to put in the water. Finally, of course, that marinara sauce, with the Italian plum tomatoes, crushed just so, and the prescribed balance of garlic, parsley, and oil.

  When they left,

  [t]he kids never begged him to stay, but their longing expressions conveyed the powerful message, and it hurt. Driving back to the apartment, Mr. S looked down. I told him how much I liked his family, and all he could say was, “I know, I know.” He would call them every single day, wherever he might be, at six o’clock just before their dinner, and be the best telephone father there ever was.

  And in the meantime, the woman for whom he had sacrificed it all wasn’t speaking to him.

  While Frank opened at the Sands, Ava attended the Los Angeles premiere of Mogambo on the arm of her business manager Benton Cole, looking spectacular in a décolleté silver-spangled gown and a white mink stole, throwing her head back and laughing as the flashbulbs popped. “There’s nothing like the premiere of a girl’s new picture to lift her spirits,” read a newspaper caption.

  “Everything is fine, for the moment at least, between Frankie and Ava,” Louella Parsons wrote a few days later, “in spite of the rumors of a new rift that popped up when she failed to attend his opening at the Sands in Las Vegas.”

  Of course everything was far from fine. On opening night at the Copa Room, in front of a capacity crowd, Frank cursed out his musicians when somebody hit a clam; a couple of days later he was crying on Parsons’s shoulder over Ava: “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I love her.”

  He certainly wasn’t sleeping. Not even in the Sands’s Presidential Suite, with its three huge bedrooms and its own swimming pool. After finishing the last show of the evening toward 5:00 a.m., Frank, in his silk dressing gown, would sit on the side of the bed and phone his wife in Palm Springs, where she was renting a house with Bappie. He would yell, cajole, and weep until the sun rose. Ava, convinced he was screwing around in Vegas, was resistant to the theatrics. Frank would emerge from his suite, dazed, in mid-afternoon, after a couple of hours’ drug-induced slumber. Trying to placate his most valuable asset, Jack Entratter issued a memo on Frank’s behalf to Sands staff on October 20: for the rest of Mr. Sinatra’s engagement, Miss Gardner was banned from the premises should she attempt to show up, and under no circumstances should any phone calls from her be put through to him.

  But Frank’s attempt at face-saving was hollow: all the calls were going in the other direction, and Ava was immovable. Then came the call that did the trick. Unable to bear her coolness any longer, he took an old acquaintance to bed one night after the late show: a six-foot showgirl from Lou Walters’s Folies Bergere revue (they’d met once before, in Boston). As she lay snoring afterward, Frank again phoned Palm Springs. Ava answered, sounding groggy.

  Frank announced that he was in bed and he wasn’t alone. He’d been drinking, a good bit; he was holding a glass now.

  Silence on the other end.

  Frank spoke a little too loudly. If Ava was going to accuse him all the time when he was innocent, he said, he might as well get the fun out of being guilty.

  When Ava hung up, she remembered years later, she knew she and Frank had reached a point of no return.

  “Hollywood’s still betting the Ava Gardner–Frank Sinatra reconciliation ends in a divorce,” Erskine Johnson wrote on the twenty-first.

  Hollywood was betting on a sure thing. On October 29, Howard Strickling issued a memo on behalf of MGM: “Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra stated today that having reluctantly exhausted every effort to reconcile their differences, they could find no mutual basis on which to continue their marriage. Both expressed deep regret and deep affection for each other. Their separation is final and Miss Gardner will seek a divorce.”

  In the meantime, Frank had brought record-breaking crowds to the Copa Room. True, these were still early days in Vegas—there were only seven hotels on the Strip; the tumbleweeds blew among them. The Sands had been open less than a year; the paint was barely dry. But a pattern had been set, thanks in no small part to the heat of From Here to Eternity: suddenly, in this two-horse town, Sinatra meant excitement, excitement meant crowds, crowds meant gambling, and gambling meant money for the casinos, especially the one where Frank was playing. Ten years later, Billy Wilder summed up the phenomenon: “When Sinatra is in Las Vegas, there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It’s like Mack the Knife is in town, and the action is starting.”

  In a very real way, Sinatra built Vegas: not only was he present at the creation, but he was responsible for it. And the town’s true owners—Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello and Joe Adonis and Doc Stacher—wanted him to feel welcome, to come back again and again, and to bring all those lovely crowds with him. “The object was to get him to perform there,” Stacher said, “because there’s no bigger draw in Las Vegas. When Frankie was performing, the hotel really filled up.” The Sands’s real owners wanted Frank to own a piece of the place, 2 percent, and they wanted it badly enough that they were glad to front him the money, a mere $54,000. The problem was the Nevada Tax Commission, which smelled a New York or Miami rat and used Sinatra’s difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service as a club to beat him with.

  The equity idea had first come up in March; Nevada newspapers had inveighed against it; the tax commission had tabled it. Now, however, for whatever reason, the wheel had turned. On October 31, Frank went before the commission, in Carson City, to plead his case, and though one out of the state’s seven commissioners remained adamantly opposed,4 wondering yet again why the $54,000 Sinatra supposedly had in hand shouldn’t go straight to the IRS, the matter was put to a vote and he got his gambling license.

  When he left the commission, the reporters were waiting, but it wasn’t gaming licensure they wanted to discuss.

  “Frank! Is your marriage to Ava over?”

  He squinted behind his sunglasses. “I guess it’s over if that’s what she says.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  A long pause while Frank tried to think how he felt about something in whose reality he did not believe. “Well, it’s very sad,” he finally said. “It’s tragic. I feel very badly about it.”

 
; “What about the rumors that you might get back together with Nancy?”

  He waved the question off as he might have waved off a pesky housefly. Sanicola opened the car door for him and he got in.

  In Los Angeles, at exactly the same time, a United Press reporter who had managed to get the private number at 320 North Carolwood was asking the same question of Frank’s ex-wife.

  “There is positively no chance of a reconciliation,” she said. “All the rumors about Mr. Sinatra and me are false.” She slammed down the phone and leaned on the kitchen counter for support, staring out the window for a long time.

  Frank flew back to Las Vegas and, that night, hosted a Halloween party at the Sands. The next day, the New York papers carried an Associated Press photograph of the host standing between two chorus girls, wearing a clown costume. If his life was a kind of opera, at the moment it was Pagliacci.

  37

  Frank, hairline headed north, with the two Eddies: Cantor and Fisher. Colgate Comedy Hour, November 29, 1953. Sinatra’s cuff conceals the bandages on his left wrist, the result of a suicide attempt two weeks before. (photo credit 37.1)

  He’d been singing to many audiences, good, bad, and indifferent, over the past six months, but the songs he’d sung had shimmered out into the air and vanished: over that tumultuous period he hadn’t committed a single tune to posterity. This all changed on Thursday, November 5, when Frank returned to Capitol’s Melrose studios, shook hands with Nelson Riddle and Voyle Gilmore, and began recording what would become his first album for the label, Songs for Young Lovers.

  There were only eleven musicians in Studio C that night: two reeds, four strings, piano, guitar, bass, drums, and harp. No brass. George Siravo, not Riddle, had written the arrangements, months before, for the even more stripped-down bands (eight players) that accompanied Sinatra at the 500 Club, the Riviera, and the Sands. On this night, Riddle was there only to conduct, a role he never had much taste for. But it was Sinatra, and Nelson was glad to receive Frank’s warm greeting: he was now a known quantity.