Mr. S
My Life with Frank Sinatra
George Jacobs and William Stadiem
To my children who are still with me.
—G.J.
Contents
1 Last Tango in Beverly Hills
2 Swifty
3 From Eternity to Here
4 Gangland
5 Camelot
6 Flirting with Disaster
7 Jet Set
8 Generation Gap
9 Aftermath
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Last Tango in Beverly Hills
SUMMER 1968. The only man in America who was less interested than me in sleeping with Mia Farrow was her husband and my boss, Frank Sinatra. Theirs had to be one of the worst, most ill-conceived celebrity marriages of all time, and after two years of one disaster after another, it was all over except for the paperwork. Mr. S’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, who was a combination bag man, hit man, and Hollywood hustler, was planning to take Mia down to Juárez for a Mexican divorce that would get her out of Mr. S’s life once and forever, which, for everyone who knew them as a noncouple, couldn’t have been soon enough.
I may sound like Mr. S’s friend and idol Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca when I ask myself, of all the gin joints in the world, why did Mia have to walk into the Candy Store that hot night? But she did, and because I danced with her, and because the spying eyes of America, courtesy of an undercover scout for gossip queen Rona Barrett, were upon us, that frug, or watusi, or whatever it was, got blown up into a wild affair. And because I was Sinatra’s valet, and because I was black, and because Mia was America’s reigning Love Child, the rumors got particularly crazy, sort of Upstairs, Downstairs meets Shaft. Mr. S, who was the lowest he’d ever been in the fifteen years we’d been together, got even crazier. It cost me the job I loved, and it cost him a guy who loved him.
The summer of 1968 had been a particularly bad one for the generation gap. There had been the student seizure of Columbia University and the subsequent police riots and brutality. Then the same thing happened again in Paris. Soon there would be the Days of Rage at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and before too long Mr. S, who had been King of the Democrats, was supporting Richard Nixon. Because he thought that the permissive youth culture was a threat to the American Way, or at least His Way, Mr. S wanted all the police brutality he could get. On the other side of the fence, Mia was getting all moony about student radicals like Mark Rudd and hippie radicals like Abbie Hoffman, with the end result that Frank and Mia wouldn’t even speak to each other.
At first they would argue politics over our Italian dinners that Mia would barely touch. Mr. S thought she wasn’t eating as a kind of hunger strike against his “capitalist pig,” power elite, “get a haircut” attitudes, but it was more that Mia just wasn’t much of an eater beyond yogurt and trail mix. Mia wasn’t really a debater, either. She would just look at Mr. S with a betrayed look in those save-the-world big blue eyes of hers, as if to say “How can you possibly think like that? How cruel, how insensitive, how unloving!” And those big blue eyes that Old Blue Eyes himself had been such a goner for would just drive him up the wall, and certainly away from the table. Then she’d turn those guilt eyes on me, as if I were the voice of the ghetto. But I wasn’t about to get into that trap. I stayed as neutral as Switzerland. “The only thing that’ll save this world is my eggplant parmigiana,” I’d say, carefully avoiding the mention of any animal protein. Then she’d give up and go read a script or call her agent. For an unmaterialistic hippie, Mia was wildly ambitious.
The Bel Air house we were renting, a big Wuthering Heights number just north of Sunset Boulevard, got to be like Berlin before they tore the Wall down. Separate rooms, separate meals, separate lives. The weirdest part about it was that there was no music. Mr. S didn’t play his jazz, didn’t play his Puccini, and Mia didn’t play her Beatles or her Moody Blues. It was truly the sounds of silence, and it was loud as hell.
It’s probably a good idea for me to point out that while I sometimes refer to the Chairman as Frank, or Sinatra, when we were together, I only addressed him as Mr. S. He generally called me George, but when he was being rambunctious, particularly with his so-called gangster friends, with whom he loved to act as “bad” as he could, he’d call me Spook. I know these were the days of Black Power, but somehow it didn’t bother me. After all, one of the few times I ever saw the guy cry was earlier that year when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. (He did not shed a tear for Bobby Kennedy, but that’s another story.) He called his plane the El Dago. He called Dean Martin Wop, Gene Kelly Shanty, Cary Grant Sheenie, Jerry Lewis Jew, Laurence Harvey Ladyboy, Johnny Mathis the African Queen. Those were his terms of endearment. This was way before political correctness, and because he loved being the Bad Boy, he insisted on doing the opposite of whatever was political and whatever was correct, except around the kingpins of his youth like Sam Giancana with whom, ironically enough, he was always on perfect behavior, like a little altar boy.
But now Sam Giancana was long gone, in exile down in Mexico, in Cuernavaca. Johnny Rosselli would soon be going to prison. Because he grew up in a New Jersey subculture of godfathers, padrones, mob bosses, and such, Mr. S always seemed to need some power figures to look up to. His new kingpins became the Old Guard of Hollywood royalty, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, Leland Hayward, and, above all, Bill and Edie Goetz, he being the big-time producer of everything from Ma and Pa Kettle to Sayonara, she being the daughter of Louis B. Mayer and the Queen Bee of A-list Hollywood hostesses. I had gotten my start in showbiz nearly twenty years before as a liveried waiter, at their Holmby Hills estate, which was L.A.’s answer to Versailles. The Goetzes were the ones who actually pushed Mr. S into marrying Mia, because the Goetzes had embraced her as “one of them,” so Frank thought he was marrying royalty himself. But he didn’t account for the huge generation gap. Frank was then fifty-two, and Mia was twenty-three. Thirty years is a wide age gap at any time, but in 1968 it was as if they were a hundred years apart. What was worse, though, was that Mia’s star was starting to shine more than Frank’s.
Mia’s film career was taking off, and Frank’s was dying an ugly death. The fact that Rosemary’s Baby had just come out and was the number one movie in America was killing Frank, especially since his new movie, The Detective, despite respectful reviews, lagged far behind it. But it was a lot more than box office. Rosemary was everything Mia embodied and embraced, occult, spiritual, freaky, out there. Detective was pure tough guy Frank. It was also, despite some attempts at kinky sex and gay murders and black cops, totally square and retro, as out of it as Frank had become. Moreover, Mia was supposed to be in it. The Chairman was going to “make her career” by creating what he considered a breakthrough part for her, but which was actually only the second romantic lead (romantic with Sinatra’s character, of course). Mia turned him down to stay on in the title role in Rosemary, which was running way over schedule, and ended up making her own career.
Frank may have thought he was punishing Mia by having an affair with his Detective costar Lee Remick and flirting with Jackie Bissett, whom Frank “discovered” in England and cut her beautiful long hair short to replace Mia in the movie. It didn’t make Jackie’s career, though. It took the wet T-shirt in The Deep to do that. In addition to teaching Mia a lesson, these relationships were important for Frank to reassure him that he was still the Man. The problem was that Mia didn’t seem to care. Without Mia’s remorse the machismo factor didn’t kick in to make Frank feel better about himself. So they retreated to their separate rooms and their separate ways, Mia with her crunchy granola, Frank with his olive-oil-fried-egg sandwich
es. Because of their different schedules (she’d get up early to go to the set, he’d sleep late) Mia and Frank each had his/her own bedroom suite, both on the second floor. In their lovebird days, they’d start the evening together, usually retiring to Mr. S’s chamber after dinner and rarely earlier than two A.M. After about an hour or so of whatever they were doing, Mr. S would doze off, and Mia would go into her room to sleep a few hours before going to the studio. Once the Rosemary conflict began, these slumber parties came to a crashing end.
On the rare occasions when Frank and Mia did interact, I always wished they hadn’t tried. Mia had a big white cat named Malcolm that she adored. She always talked in sign language to the cat, who was deaf. Mia’s obsession with Malcolm was bad enough, but the sign language really got on Frank’s nerves. He didn’t mind cats in general, but he came to despise Malcolm in particular. One day Mia was out by the pool, reading one of her Maharishi books and doing signs with Malcolm. Frank came out, didn’t speak to her. He took out a cherry bomb, quietly lit it, and placed it next to the cat’s food bowl. Kaboom! The poor thing ran off like a cat out of hell. Frank, who was obsessed with stupid practical jokes, and particularly ones with Three Stooges-type explosives, burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. I honestly hadn’t seen him so happy since he married Mia. “Deaf?” was all he said. Mia started bawling. “How can anybody be so cruel?” she cried. It got a lot worse when Malcolm never came back. He must have run all the way to Mulholland and gotten lost, maybe even eaten by the coyotes. Mia tried to find him, but couldn’t.
I felt almost as bad as Mia did. This was the second pet Mia had lost on my watch. The year before Liz Taylor had given Mia a little Silky. Mr. S didn’t mind dogs, so this pet didn’t bother him. One day I had my three young kids up playing by the pool, and they threw the poor dog in. They didn’t know he couldn’t swim. I dove in and pulled the dog out, then tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was too late. The kids were crying, Mia was crying. Frank was nicer then, got her a new Silky, but it was the cat she really loved. When that one went and Frank didn’t even apologize or try to replace it, I knew there was no healing this marriage.
Mia and I actually got along pretty well. Mr. S basically had me babysitting her all the time. We’d go shopping in the organic food stores, New Age bookstores, funky dress shops. I’d almost fall asleep listening to her spirituality rap. I actually preferred smoking pot with her and getting stoned, because then she’d zone out and shut up with the psychobabble. I obviously never told Mr. S about this. Like kids, we’d go off in the car to some secret park, usually up on Mulholland staring out at the psychedelic lights Mia loved. We would never do anything countercultural in the house. That would have been a death wish. Despite his own Jack Daniel’s binges, Mr. S detested drugs, and everything that went with them. He detested hippies, detested long hair, even had his screenwriters write in jibes about them in his films that preceded The Detective, 1967’s Tony Rome and The Naked Runner. The latter film turned out to be a major debacle, because Mr. S hated London, where the film was set, for being taken over by the Beatles and the Stones, and hated the swinging, Carnaby Street Mod atmosphere so much that he basically dumped the picture, went back to L.A., and let the producers worry about putting together what footage they had. It had to be one of his worst films.
Mr. S didn’t care how good the new music was, whether British Invasion or San Francisco psychedelic rock. To him it was all one big excuse to take drugs. The Doors’s “Light My Fire” drove him around the bend. DJs played it so often that he smashed one of the car radios with his heel when it showed up on three stations in a row. I guess that, for him, in time there was nowhere to hide from the all-consuming youthquake, except in the all-comforting, Republican, antidrug arms of Richard Nixon.
I remember Mr. S getting paranoid when I let my hair and sideburns grow a little bit that I had been “body-snatched” by some hippie cult. He was dumbfounded when I got a motorcycle. I blamed it all on Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, and since McQueen was one of the rare actors of the new generation whom Frank liked, probably because he kept his hair short, Frank let it go by. I was lucky it would be another year before Easy Rider would have made having that bike impossible. I guess I should have been flattered that Frank cared so much about me that he wanted to protect me from the rise of the drug culture. I was thirty-seven, he was fifty-two, and he liked playing Big Daddy to me, protecting me from all those evil influences he feared I would be unable to resist. To him, the hippies were the coming scourge of the earth, as savage and destructive as the barbarians who sacked ancient Rome.
Yet Frank had married the ultimate hippie. How could the sharpest, most hard-boiled guy on earth not see what he was getting? I guess it was because he liked what he saw. Ava Gardner, the greatest love of Frank’s life, described Mia to me as “a fag with a pussy.” (Forgive Ava’s pungent language, but she didn’t mince words.) She’s also been quoted as saying Frank had always wanted to fuck a boy, but I don’t believe it. If anyone knew how straight Frank was, it was Ava. No, Mia was very sexy. Even though she was compared to Twiggy, she was anything but a stick. She was much more like supermodel Kate Moss, and she would flaunt her body, using self-effacement as provocative bait. She always paraded around almost naked and would say, “It doesn’t matter ’cause I don’t have anything for anyone to get excited about,” when she knew damn well that she did. In fact, she was totally confident that she was beautiful, and that confidence was the sexiest thing about her.
Mia, at nineteen, had snared Frank when she was on the TV show Peyton Place by showing up on the Fox set of Von Ryan’s Express wearing a totally translucent veil dress with absolutely zero underneath. Plus she “accidentally” dropped her purse right in front of him. It was filled with tampons and condoms. Although Frank tended to go for more voluptuous women like Ava, or Kim Novak, or Marilyn Monroe, he definitely didn’t have a single type. Mia actually brought back sweet memories of his affair with the teenage and similarly built Natalie Wood, whose own insanely ambitious Russian mother had pushed her on Frank, who needed no pushing himself. Also, Mia’s naughty purity and blondness reminded him of Grace Kelly. The day he met her, he sent me out to buy copies of Mademoiselle, Glamour, and Seventeen, all the young fashion magazines, to admire the endless versions of Mia who filled their pages. It was as if he was testing himself to see if he could truly get excited by this new breed of creature. Then he got his dear friend, favorite composer, and whore wrangler Jimmy Van Heusen to have their favorite madam send over a number of Mia “types,” just to sample the future merchandise. Before they had had their first real date, he was already obsessed. Aided by her mother’s friends, the Goetzes, hyping her fancy pedigree to Mr. S, Mia had expertly laid her tender trap. Pretty clever for a teenager. I suppose she wasn’t on Peyton Place for nothing.
So if on the surface Mia seemed like one of the million hippie drug chicks you would see on the Sunset Strip in those days, she was anything but. She knew she had the right stuff, but part of her come-on was pretending she didn’t. She was so confident that even though Mickey Rudin was preparing the divorce papers, and had even had her served with them on the set of Rosemary, Mia thought she could get Frank back if she wanted to. She also thought she could get him to give her a child, which is what she wanted more than anything else, and what Frank, who already had all the children he could barely handle, wanted least. Mr. S always had felt bad about his life as an absentee father, particularly after the nightmare of Frank Jr.’s. 1963 kidnapping. He surely didn’t want a new baby to feel bad about.
Mia didn’t care what Frank thought. Motherhood was, only after stardom, the most powerful imperative for her. At times, she’d sit with me and go down her list of all the great and famous men she wanted to have children with after Frank. She knew the relationship would end sometime, but she assumed it would be at her time, and only after she had created one of what would be her master race of offspring. She was talking some major names, on he
r wish list: Leonard Bernstein, who was gay, Picasso, who was almost dead, J. D. Salinger, who had disappeared, and Bob Dylan, who was badly disabled from his motorcycle accident and underground. The girl thought big. She was that focused, and maybe if the Candy Store fiasco hadn’t occurred, Mia might have even gotten her way with Frank and stopped the divorce at the eleventh hour.
But it did occur, and the rest is history and Woody Allen. Mr. S was down in Palm Springs. The tension in the Bel Air house had gotten so bad that even the big mansion was too small for him when Mia was there. Out in the 115-degree desert, he holed up watching television, which he never normally did, except for the old Friday night fights on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. Now he would watch Mod Squad, but without bothering to arrange to meet Peggy Lipton. He didn’t even want to dial up Jimmy Van Heusen’s endless parade of call girls. I knew the man was depressed, and I was worried about him.
I had to stay in L.A., though, because Mr. S wanted me to look after Ava Gardner, who was coming into town from London, her new home after living in Spain for over a decade. In addition to this major relocation from the land of sun to the land of rain (“What does it matter?” Ava said. “I sleep all day anyway.” Like Frank.), Ava was coming off of a disastrous romance with George C. Scott, whom Frank hated, and an end of starring roles in her film career. She had just played second fiddle to Catherine Deneuve and Omar Sharif in the flop Mayerling. Getting older was a nightmare for a movie star, bad for Frank and far, far worse for someone like Ava who lived—and died—by her looks. Frank was worried about her and had always been protective. But he was in such a deep funk himself, he sent me in to sub for him.
Ava was staying in a bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Some friends were taking her to a Count Basie concert that night. I was going to meet her after the show at the hotel and hang out. Ava and I had developed a real bond, which was easy to do considering she was the earthiest, and most down-to-earth, movie star you could ever imagine. She always told me she was part black, that “poor white trash,” the stock she came from in North Carolina, always had black blood in them. (Maybe that was why so many of them joined the Klan, going overboard to conceal their true roots.) Ava totally identified with her role as the mulatto in Show Boat, though she never forgave MGM for dubbing her songs. Like me, Ava was a frustrated singer. I knew that tonight I would go over to her bungalow, get plastered, and we would sing to each other until daylight.
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