Fresh from the end of her affair with Burt, she was somewhat fragile, but there was a core strength and optimism in her that made her consistently great company. Very comfortable around men, she quietly built her own television empire, handling the male-dominated industry with easy grace; and loved to play golf with the big boys, getting what she wanted most of the time. Never shrill or outwardly demanding, she was able to charm just about anybody, with all the greats of that era appearing on her talk show. She had a long, profitable, and elegant reign.
“Call her again, Frankie,” said my friend Annie Bancroft. “She’ll treat you like a king.”
I had a little house, my first, that I’d just bought in Wilton, Connecticut, for the exorbitant sum of $69,000 and was fixing it up. For the next few months when she was in town, Dinah would come up with a chauffeur in the afternoons and I would drive her back to the Waldorf Towers in the early morning hours. To this day, I don’t know how she did it, but she was able to cook a fantastic meal out of whatever ingredients were in my house. We never went to a restaurant or a premiere. I had no interest in being the next Burt and I think ultimately hurt her feelings by not wanting us to be seen as a couple.
This Tennessee-born woman was, however, a lovely interlude in my life, showing me enormous respect and genuine interest. My little house had, as its best feature, a big stone fireplace and we spent many hours in front of it listening to Diamonds and Rust.
Never once did I hear her say a negative word about Burt or her ex-husband or anyone for that matter. She pulled her knees to her chest, ran her fingers through her hair, and talked profoundly about inner strength and personal courage. She believed you made your own way in this world and any idea that because you were a woman you couldn’t climb as high as you liked was ridiculous to her. A trail-blazing Renaissance lady who also loved to look after a man. If there was a load of laundry in the basket, she did it. She cleaned up the dishes, washed down the sink in the bathroom, and made the bed before we headed back to the city.
And she did it for no other reason than the personal pride she took in doing everything the right way, making you feel she was there for you, because of you, but would never allow her essential persona to be subsumed by you. Dinah was an extraordinary example to me of what a woman can accomplish without a man and still retain her femininity. She had, without ever demanding it, real power.
It would not have mattered to me if she was one-tenth black, or all black, or a golf-club-wielding dyke. She was a person of soft and southern demeanor, full of integrity and honest curiosity. Attractive in either gender.
One night by the fire she asked me why I’d bought the little house in the woods. I told her I was reclusive by nature and liked coming there to retreat. “Retreat from what?” she asked.
In the most gentle and nonjudgmental way she then patiently lectured me on the subject of fear. Its corrosive power and its uselessness; and that conquering it was the single most important factor in how anyone should conduct their life.
“Nobody’s gonna come up, knock on your door, and drag you outta here,” she said. “I think you have to figure out what you’re hiding from.”
I bristled, and dismissed her insight, not yet ready at thirty-three to absorb her wisdom. Ultimately she gently and gracefully pulled away from me. My loss. She needed a better man than I was at the time.
GILBERT ROLAND, RICARDO MONTALBAN, and YVONNE DE CARLO
In 1974, when I met them, Gilbert Roland was sixty-nine, Ricardo Montalban fifty-four, and Yvonne De Carlo fifty-two. I was a measly thirty-six. We were to spend about five weeks together shooting a remake of The Mark of Zorro for television. I would play Don Diego Rivera, aka Zorro, a part that had been made famous by both Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power.
Born in Mexico, Gilbert, having started in silent films, was a genuine movie star of the Latin-lover, sloe-eyed-smoothie type. He would be playing my father. Ricardo, a serviceable Latin-lover wannabe who’d partnered many of the leading ladies of his time, often backstroking alongside swimming star Esther Williams in B movies of the 1950s, would play the sheriff. Bringing up the rear, playing my mother, was Yvonne, who had been a bona fide B-movie queen of the sultry, spitfire variety generating enough testosterone for the four of us.
“You think he’s too young to fuck me?” Yvonne said to Gil, putting her arm in mine on the first day.
“Well I’m not too old,” he said. Ricardo was desperately on the phone nearby, trying to secure a contract as spokesman for Chrysler cars on television. He landed it and eventually became ruthlessly imitated by every late-night T.V. host saying, in the heavily rolled-r’s Montalban style, “Corrrrinthian leather.” Several years later, he would star in the famous long-running TV series Fantasy Island.
Yvonne had hit a certain kind of paydirt as Lily on the TV series The Munsters from 1964 to 1966, and went on to introduce the iconic song “I’m Still Here” in the 1971 Broadway production of Follies. For the rest of her career, she valiantly struggled through mediocre film and television projects, and Gilbert rested on his former fame in grand old movie star style, making rare guest appearances on television.
“I fucked them all, you know,” Gil said, as we sat on canvas chairs outside his trailer on a hill in Tucson, Arizona. He then proceeded to give me a rundown of his specialties, detailing the sexual peccadilloes of every female star I’d grown up with. In a completely dry and analytical style he’d report:
“First I . . . for a little while. Then I . . . Then I . . . And then . . . !” He was so matter-of-fact and businesslike about it that I began to laugh hysterically as he described sex acts the way one man might tell another the order in which to oil, polish, lube, and wash his car. The more I laughed, the more explicit he became, not once cracking even the slightest smile. With one arthritic, distended, misshapen hand wrapped in a silk scarf, and explicitly gesticulating with the other, he regaled me with scenes of sexual acts in which he costarred with some of the most famous women in the world.
Even more hilarious were stories of acts declined on nights before early morning close-ups. “Those cunts,” he said, “I told them it’s good for the skin. And you know, Frank, the purer they were onscreen, the more of a whore they were in bed. And really beautiful women are lousy sex.”
An assistant director ran up the hill calling out, “Gil, would it be okay, since you’re sitting out here talking to Frank, if I used your trailer to change two extras real quick?”
“Roland dresses with no one,” he intoned.
As the guy slunk away, Gil turned to me and said:
“I have to do that. It’s expected of me.”
No smile! No irony! He just stared at me in regal grandeur. His acting too was of that style: stoic, sincere, corny. He was grand, imperious, and totally engaging; appearing always to have just flung back a tent flap after ravishing a maiden and heading for his horse. I just loved every moment I could grab with him.
Ricardo was Gil, made in Japan. A studied, empty vessel, concerned only with his profile and his panache. He managed to maintain a solid career, even as he was burdened with one crippled leg which he artfully kept concealed from the camera. Once in front of it, he was completely prepared, professional, and staggeringly boring. But a decent man protecting his franchise. Many years later, when I ran into him at a drugstore in L.A. and asked, “How are you, Ricardo?” he looked at me, raised his chin, and said:
“Still doing crrrap,” rolling his r’s in the Corrrinthian tradition.
Yvonne turned out to be the real gunslinger of the trio. Playing her role warmly and shyly, totally against type, she was by far the best actor, and the most committed of the three. On the set she was bawdy and provocative until the camera rolled. Then she became a warm and caring mamma; but with a healthy set of balls. “Again?” she’d say to the director when he asked for another take. “What the fuck for? We got it.”
When the da
y was over, she wanted some action, and she was determined that we should perform a certain sex act, or, more specifically, that she should perform a certain sex act, to which she was convinced I would give a standing ovation. She treated me like a pretty girl in the back seat of a convertible on a hot summer night on a college campus. “What’s the big deal, baby? Come on, just give it up. Close your eyes and think of somebody else, I don’t give a shit.”
We were, after all, on the road. So late one steamy night in my motel room at the foot of my cast iron bed, she stood with a Scotch in her hand, happy and satisfied.
And then at my request she performed an encore. This time in song. I was given my own private rendition of “I’m Still Here.”
There was an infectious nobility about these three people. They knew the score, fiercely played the game, and took no prisoners. All of them, in fact, managed admirably to stay afloat and tread water in the fluctuating currents actors swim. And all three survived for decades; creatures of eras long gone whom I still think of with great fondness. Totally original personalities, keeping up appearances, resisting the pull of the “I’m just a regular person” propaganda that has come after them.
In years to come, I would refer to Mom, Pop, and the Sheriff as my three caballeros. Tough old birds they were! Both men hanging on to eighty-nine, and Yvonne still there till eighty-five. There is, after all, no matter the goal, something to be said for perseverance.
JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS
I did two extraordinarily stupid things to Jackie. The first was forgivable. The second was not.
We were both weekend guests at Paul and Bunny Mellon’s house in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was the summer of 1968. Sitting one night on a Syrie Maugham couch in their living room when everyone else had gone to bed, we were nursing our wine and talking about a two-week run I had just completed opposite Anne Bancroft in A Cry of Players by William Gibson at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge. I told Jackie that we’d had an odd incident one night at the theatre.
“Bill wrote a memoir and in it he said things that offended some cousins of his and was receiving threatening phone calls, so we hadn’t seen him at the theatre for several days. Annie and I decided after one performance to drive over to the Gibson home to see what was going on. We drove down the long dirt road to their house, and as we got closer, we saw there were no lights on—none. It was pitch black. Not even the usual small walkway lights leading to the steps. I pulled the car around into the driveway and the second I turned off the lights and cut the motor, my door was flung open, a hand reached in, grabbed my neck, and a gun was put right at my temple. The same thing happened to Annie on the passenger side. We both froze and the guy by me said, ‘FBI. Identify yourself. Who are you? What are you doing here?’
“I said we were actors in Mr. Gibson’s play and were worried about him. Annie said she was so scared she almost burst out, ‘Anna Maria Italiano from Class 2B2’ as if she were still six years old.”
But Jackie did not laugh. She was looking at me intently, completely calm and relaxed. It was only then that I realized in the heat of my story, I had animatedly raised my hand in the shape of a gun and was pressing my finger against her temple. There was maybe a split second of silence and I lowered my hand.
“That must have been very scary for you both,” she said.
Jackie and I were not far apart in age. She was just nine years my senior. But our backgrounds could not have been more dissimilar. She was born in Southampton, New York; I in Bayonne, New Jersey. Jackie had been raised always knowing the right thing to do and the right thing to say. I, on the other hand, had been raised by a pack of Italian wolves who hadn’t known a demitasse from a debutante. And this debutante very gracefully handled what had been a totally stupid but unconscious blunder on my part. A woman with an unerring sense of control and discipline.
Shy is one of the words most often used to describe Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But that is not the woman I knew. Canny, it seems to me, would be more appropriate. She was certainly shrewd enough to choose Bunny Mellon as one of her closest friends and confidantes; a woman she knew would never betray her and who lived in rarefied and private kingdoms provided by the limitless wealth of her husband, banking heir Paul Mellon. It was in the two particular kingdoms of Antigua in the British West Indies and Cape Cod that my relationship with Jackie flourished, beginning in the immediate years following her husband’s assassination.
The days and nights on Cape Cod were lazy and luxurious. Rarely did any of us have breakfast together formally, but when Bunny’s door was open we might end up sitting on her bed or the beautiful couches and chairs in her room looking out over the water, playing someone’s favorite song or reading magazines. Jackie was always barefoot, without makeup, and up for anything. We drove into town or had lunch down by the dock, or wandered next door to the “Dune House” that Bunny had built for herself. A gorgeous path of high dune grass led to this white and gray small house. It was completely appointed, as if constantly lived in, but was there only as one of Bunny’s projects, a “hideaway” a hundred yards away from the Main House.
The Mellons’ world was my first taste of a life where money is truly no object and Jackie was the first but not the only woman I’ve known for whom money is an aphrodisiac. I rarely, if ever, saw her carrying multiple shopping bags or taking things off racks or shelves, but I witnessed her quietly point, indicate, and say “there” about sweaters in all colors, pots and pans, candles, pillows, dishes, and furniture when we went shopping. I once quietly calculated $50,000 worth of purchases in twenty minutes, but Jackie signed nothing and left empty-handed.
She was certainly not empty-handed when it came to jewelry. One late afternoon I came upon her and Bunny laughing like hyenas in a little silo-like studio on the grounds of the Cape House, another of Bunny’s hideaways used to paint or write. They were both sitting on the floor surrounded by small and large gift boxes with tiny white cards scattered nearby. Their ears, fingers, wrists, and throats were covered with what seemed to be several million dollars’ worth of watches, rings, bracelets, and necklaces in emeralds, rubies, diamonds, pearls, etc. On each of their heads sat a few tiaras. A good deal of it was sent from Aristotle Onassis to Jackie during the period he was trying to persuade her to marry him.
As I stood in the doorway, staring down at them, Jackie looked up at me and said: “See anything you like, Frank?”
“You could sail around the world on just one of those baubles,” I said.
They sat there, giggling like schoolgirls, exchanging rings, tiaras, and necklaces like so many pieces of penny candy.
“I don’t know what to do with all this stuff,” Jackie said.
It appeared to mean absolutely nothing to her as she began taking it off and throwing it into a large velvet bag. She then tossed the bag into a larger canvas one, got up, and said, “Well, now I have to go and write a thank-you note to the pope.”
Jackie’s public image was certainly of an unadorned woman.
No “dripping in diamonds” look for her. And at the Cape she was lovely. Clean-scrubbed face in the mornings, barefoot, simple shift dresses, shorts and halters, a large straw carry-all always holding a book, a scarf, and some bare essentials. Mostly, though, she carried nothing.
One hot August night at sundown I was tunneling through the tall grass toward the Dune House and, over the sound of the wind, I heard a heavier noise of feet running toward me and strong breathing. Jackie ran right into me, hair loose and flying, face flushed. She always spoke in that famous, hushed whisper, whether across a table or a room; but the voice had a deep throaty sound to it that made it carry. She came upon me fast and my hands went up to her shoulders, breaking her stride. Beautiful in the dusky light, I’d caught her in one of those moments we all have when we do not expect to be seen. Had she been crying, calculating, or just having a run? I couldn’t tell. We sat down in the dune gr
ass.
After a few words about the “magical night” and the “caressing air,” she said:
“Why do you suppose they’re doing this to Ali MacGraw?”
It was about the time Ali had left the producer Robert Evans for the actor Steve McQueen. “They just hate her now. Why?”
“She was the golden girl who fell off the pedestal,” I said.
“But nobody has the right to do that. They should leave her alone.” She fell silent and stared out toward the water.
“Do you want to talk?” I said.
“No.” It was dark now, only the sway of the dune grass and the gentle lapping of the water.
“We better get back now,” she said. “I’ll go first.”
Those Cape days and nights all blend into one another now. As do the conversations and games, hellos and good-byes, and the reminder that I was, when there, living a kind of storied life. I would return to my four-flight walk-up on 61st and Third in New York and pursue my acting career. Then again hop in a waiting limo, go to the Mellon private plane, arrive, met by a limo, go to the house, unpack in my room, and join the privileged.
If the Cape was a simple and basic lifestyle, the Mellon house in Antigua was exotic and sultry. Giant yucca plants, swaying palms, and air like in no other place I’d ever been. It soothed your skin and made you feel constantly caressed and stroked. I spent a number of my birthdays (January 1) there. Usually flying down around December 26 and staying for one or two weeks. Jackie was often there and at other visits during the winter months.
The guest rooms were slightly away from the main residence down by the pool, which overlooked the Caribbean. Next to the pool was a little house with French doors, decorated as impeccably as the main house, with oversized couches and chairs in sailcloth fabrics. It was in that little house that we would often have dessert.
Antigua was hot in the day and warm at night. All senses heightened there. We would often take midnight swims and lie under the stars in silence. Jackie always occupied the same room overlooking the pool; mine changed according to houseguests but was often next to hers with a little back corridor adjoining them. She was an avid reader and we left books in each other’s rooms at night. Sometimes she’d leave a sticker in a page of poems for me to read. One book we shared over a particular visit contained a collection of love letters written by English monarchs to their lovers and husbands, and Jackie particularly liked a letter written by Victoria to Albert showing such passion and adoration that Victoria sounded as if she were a teenage girl. She was, in fact, an old lady when she wrote it, and Albert had long been dead.
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