But first I had an evening to kill. It was a pretty dead weekday in Beverly Hills, which was never what anyone would call a party town. The stars had to get up too early to be on the sets to support a real nightlife. It was usually dinner, at Romanoff’s, Chasen’s, the Bistro, then home to bed. Still, there were a few hangouts, which is a few more than there are now, which is nothing but fancy designer chain stores catering to rich Asian tourists. First I stopped in at the Luau, which was a Trader Vic’s-style Polynesian fantasy right on Rodeo Drive, big banana trees and koi ponds and hurricane lamps and giant clam shell urinals that were the restaurant’s chief conversation piece. The Luau was owned by Steve Crane, the ex of Lana Turner, who had been an ex of Frank in his early Hollywood years (who wasn’t?). But it was dead, as was the Daisy, which was owned by Jack Hansen, whose across-Rodeo boutique JAX was where Marilyn Monroe, and every other star in town, outfitted herself in the California casual look. But the Daisy was dead, too, so I ended up at the Candy Store two blocks away from Rodeo, on Canon Drive.
The rise of Black Power notwithstanding, there weren’t many brothers who could get into the Candy Store. Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain, Sidney Poitier, the Candy Man himself, Sammy Davis Jr., and me. I may have been riding on Mr. S’s coattails, but who in this town wasn’t riding on someone else’s coattails? Everyone needed his or her Savior, his or her Messiah. Otherwise, they wouldn’t get into Hollywood Heaven. Mr. S played Messiah to a lot of people. At his prime, in the JFK years, he was the most powerful man in the entertainment business. Now it was starting to slip away, but no one, absolutely no one in this town, was about to show the slightest hint of disrespect for Frank Sinatra. Hence I was one black man who would always get past the velvet rope, would always get a great table, would always get the run of the house. I also got a lot of beautiful girls in the process. Celebrity is a major aphrodisiac, but even celebrity adjacency can cast its own spell. It wasn’t as if they wanted to use me to meet Frank. Except for Mia, hip young chicks had no interest in meeting Frank Sinatra in those days. He was off the radar of coolness. But the idea of my working for him, of my being that close to him, that was what was cool. It was like working at the White House. It made folks want to meet you. It gave you a mystique.
The Candy Store was the disco of the moment in Beverly Hills. Because it was new, it was the place to be. The owner, Gene Shacove, who was partnered with Tony Curtis, George Hamilton, and other stars who could draw a scene, was one of the two hairdressers to the stars in Beverly Hills. Gene, the inspiration for Warren Beatty in Shampoo, slept with a lot of his clients and rode a motorcycle, just as in the movie. But his biggest kick was making over these women into something they never dreamed they could be. One of his greatest makeovers was Jill St. John, who had been a rich, overweight Beverly Hills High School princess. Gene convinced her to change her last name from Oppenheimer, lose weight, get her nose done, and let him give her what became her trademark red hair. It worked like a charm. Frank was crazy about her, as were Sid Korshak, the Teamster lawyer who everyone feared as the Mafia consigliere in show business, Henry Kissinger, and Robert Wagner, with whom Jill finally settled down. The other celebrity hairdresser was Jay Sebring, who would come to the house to do Frank’s hair, or what was left of it. Frank was super-sensitive about his baldness and his wigs. It was one of the few things he couldn’t control. He would never set foot in a barber shop, so Jay would do house calls, even driving down to Palm Springs when summoned. The next summer he would be a tragic victim of the Manson family.
There were a lot of pretty girls that night at the Candy Store. But because I was meeting Ava later, I wasn’t planning any pickup attempts. I was just hanging out at the bar, when who should come in but Mia, with her dear friend John Phillips. If the world thought Mia was in seclusion mourning her upcoming divorce from the Chairman, they would have been surprised by the gay party mood she was in that night. And if anyone symbolized the drug-rock culture, or lack thereof, that Frank Sinatra detested and feared, it was the long, greasy-haired, always stoned John Phillips, Mr. California Dreaming himself. Despite the drugs, Frank did covet Phillips’s gorgeous blond wife, Mama Michelle, which probably made him hate Phillips even more. “Georgie Porgie, pudding n’ pie, kiss this girl and make her sigh,” Mia greeted me in a playful singsong voice, as if she hadn’t seen me for years, though I had just been with her at the Bel Air house that afternoon. I thought she was high, high as a kite. “Dance with me, Georgie Porgie,” she insisted, dragging me out to the floor while John Phillips went into the men’s room to smoke a joint, or do something stronger. “John won’t dance,” she complained.
We danced for what seemed an eternity. I kept looking back to the men’s room to see when John was coming out, but he must have been having a wild time in there. Frank had never told me not to go out with Mia; on the contrary, he was grateful for what he called my “babysitting” her to keep her out of his orbit. And he never, ever spoke one bad word about her. But he never said anything good about her, either. At any rate, given the pending divorce, the scene at the Candy Store, innocent as it was, made me uncomfortable. Each dance felt as if it would never end. “Sunshine of Your Love.” “This Guy’s in Love with You.” “Love Child.” But when the DJ put on “Somethin’ Stupid,” the previous year’s number one duet by Frank and daughter Nancy, it was time to give up the floor. Mia didn’t see the humor, or the horror, of the situation. I’m not sure she was even aware what the song was. Finally, John Phillips returned, stoned and smiling. I left Mia in his hands and went out into the night. The air of Beverly Hills never seemed more refreshing.
I went up to Sunset and the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ava had had a wonderful time at the Count Basie concert and was in great spirits, unusual given her loathing of Hollywood and its denizens. She was so up that she insisted we go for a nightcap in what was then Hollywood’s lion’s den, the Polo Lounge of the hotel. This was the place with the banana leaf wallpaper and the Philip Morris midget and the telephones at every banquette, where, if you were anybody in the business, you had to be paged. The polo players like Darryl Zanuck and Howard Hawks who inaugurated the place were gone, but everyone else would come there. I hadn’t been in the Polo Lounge for nearly two years, since the big fight there where Frank’s friend Jilly Rizzo broke a phone over the head of a powerful local businessman who had asked Frank, Dean, and a crew of their friends to hold down their noise. As Ava and I entered, the lounge was crawling with lizards like Paramount studio head Bob Evans, another guy Frank hated, not least because he was the executive in charge of Rosemary’s Baby.
Evans had even more women running through his house than Frank did. Because he and his brother were big Seventh Avenue garment tycoons, they had endless model connections on both coasts, and Bob was using them strategically to do sexual favors for everyone and rise to the top in showbiz. That night Evans was so surrounded with starlets that he didn’t even look up to notice Ava as we made our way to a back booth. He had been a bit player in Ava’s 1957 film The Sun Also Rises, and she had thought he was so miscast as a matador that she, Hemingway, and Tyrone Power all signed a telegram to Darryl Zanuck demanding that Evans be fired. Zanuck refused, issuing his famous command, “the kid stays in the picture.” Evans could deliver pussy, and pussy always trumped talent in Hollywood. Ava figured Evans still resented her and was ignoring her, gloating that now he was on top, and she wasn’t. She couldn’t have cared less. At forty-five, she was, for a Hollywood goddess, way over the hill, yet she was somehow relieved to be there, to be earning her living doing character parts rather than star turns. To her, acting was a job, not a passion. Now the heat to be fabulous was off. The paparazzi cameras had stopped clicking. The Bob Evanses of the world had stopped looking up.
London was a fresh start. Ava liked the city as much as Mr. S hated it. She had a townhouse in Knightsbridge, she had her Corgi, she had culture everywhere, and she had rain. She said she had been in Spain for more than a decade, so long, she had forgott
en what rain was. Her best friend at the time was the singer Bobby Short, who often flew over from New York to visit her, and she said she was hanging out with some other black jazzmen in England. She felt she was out of the fast lane forever.
We talked about Frank and Mia, which Ava knew was a ridiculous match from the outset. Everything she predicted had come true. However, she wasn’t the slightest bit pleased with the accuracy of her predictions. She felt as bad for Frank as I did. I urged her, as always, to try to get back together with him. It seemed to me that the entire fifteen years that I had been with Frank were a kind of crazy odyssey on his part to do everything in the world, and I mean the entire world, to get over losing her. I often wondered how much different my own life would have been if they had only stayed together. Ava laughed it off. She always laughed it off. She would always love Frank, but it was more as a friend, or actually a wayward son, than as the grand passion he once had been for her, and, alas, she remained for him.
One of Frank’s favorite songs was “I Can’t Get Started with You,” and he always had Ava in mind when he sang it. “I’ve been around the world in a plane, I’ve started revolutions in Spain, I’m down and brokenhearted, ’cause I can’t get started with you.” What he meant was that he couldn’t get started again, and that was the story of his life. Every love song he sang was for Ava, and every woman he had was an attempt to make him forget her. Nothing worked. Ava wasn’t at all melancholy about it. She was a no-bullshit woman, totally realistic. She called it the way it was, and the way it was with Frank was not meant to be. Poor Mr. S.
We gorged ourselves on margaritas and the Polo Lounge’s famous guacamole and Fritos. Ava said she didn’t care if she gained weight. Eating well was the best revenge. We went back to her bungalow and listened to her new jazz albums. We drank, sang, laughed, like old times. Then I went home at dawn to the haunted house in Bel Air. Mia never came back that night. The next day I took Ava to the airport, to see her off to San Francisco to visit some friends. Then I drove east to Palm Springs. The three-hour drive through the rapidly dwindling orange groves that were being replaced with a suburban wasteland of shopping malls, car lots, and junk food emporia was especially miserable in the blast-furnace heat of summer. It was a true descent into American Hell. And to think that all my friends around the country had this fantasy about how wonderful California was. California Dreamin’, all right. That John Phillips had the last laugh, he and the Beach Boys. They had sold a major load to the public. I wasn’t hearing any songs about West Covina, or Loma Linda, or Redlands. This was the real California, and it was nothing to write about.
Neither was Palm Springs, which was at its ghost-town worst in the summer. The place was in the process of being trashed with cheap motels and bad restaurants. When Frank Sinatra had first come out, in the early fifties, Palm Springs was a secret Hollywood hideaway. I used to come down to the Racquet Club, which was super clubby then, with my old boss Swifty Lazar, and meet people like Cole Porter and Moss Hart, and the real Polo Lounge social crowd that actually played polo at the Zanuck estate, Ric-Su-Dar, named after the mogul’s kids. Frank Sinatra, even with Ava Gardner, was considered a second-class citizen, a nouveau New Jersey outsider, by this entertainment royalty. Maybe he never got over it and that was why he was toadying up to the Goetzes the way he was. But he didn’t have to. At that point, as far as Palm Springs was concerned, no one was bigger royalty than Frank Sinatra. He was the emperor of the desert. Even though President Eisenhower was still alive here, Frank Sinatra owned this town, and the world knew it.
But Palm Springs was on the downhill slope. Even Mike Romanoff, Frank’s dear friend and the ultimate restaurateur to the stars, couldn’t make his magic work. He had tried to open a branch here called Romanoff’s on the Rocks, a black-tie supper club in this wild concrete bunker on the side of a mountain, and, despite Frank’s help, he had to go out of business, which broke his heart. There were still stars around, but the spirit was drained. I would see Elvis Presley driving around aimlessly in his pink Cadillac convertible, looking for action that he was never going to find.
Palm Springs had lost its glamour, just as Mr. S was beginning to be losing his. His movies were duds, his last hit, “Somethin’ Stupid,” was more than a year before and vastly further from Cole Porter, and his child bride was making him look silly. Still, I believed Mr. S would come back. He was too fierce a survivor. This was no quitter. He had resurrected himself from show business purgatory in 1953, just when I went to work for him, and I knew he would do it again now. The times had indeed changed, but wasn’t Mr. S timeless? I was devout in my belief that I had the greatest job a man could have. At thirty-seven I was earning $1,500 a week, plus endless fringe benefits. Wall Street lawyers and bankers my age weren’t making anything like that. Nor were most movie executives. I wasn’t a rich man, but I might be, and I sure was living like a prince, the fresh prince of Bel Air, long before Will Smith.
So it was the greatest shock I’d ever experienced when I found that my key to the Sinatra compound didn’t fit the lock. It had been changed. I rang and rang the bell. What was wrong? Finally one of the Filipino houseboys came to the gate, but refused to open it. “Mr. Sinatra very crazy,” he warned me. “No good to come in. You must go. Before it be too late.” Too late for what? I pressed him, but he wouldn’t elaborate. And what about all my stuff? “Movers pack up.” And he disappeared into the house. I stood in a daze in the baking desert sun. In one split second, my life had been turned upside down, inside out, and I didn’t have a clue why. Then one of the black maids came out. She had been there for a year, and I knew her well, but she was clearly too terrified to show me any sympathy. Instead, she handed me a letter, cut her eyes downward, and scurried away. It was from Mickey Rudin’s law office. I read it. It was short and anything but sweet. I had been dismissed, as of this instant, from Mr. Sinatra’s service. I was not to reenter the premises, nor telephone, nor in any way approach or try to contact Mr. Sinatra. My belongings would be delivered to me in three days. There was no explanation, no apology, no severance pay. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not darken this door as long as you live.
Frank had done it to Peter Lawford, to his original manager Hank Sanicola, and to Jack Entratter, the Copa and Sands boss, who stood up for Frank when few others would. No one could bear a grudge like Frank Sinatra. He did it to these great friends, and he did it to others, but for all the tantrums I witnessed, all the fury, all the venom, I never imagined he would do it to me. It turned out that nothing traveled faster than gossip, and as much as Frank scorned and attacked the press, he believed the gossip before he would his best friend. He was a one-man Spanish Inquisition, and, at his worst, just as cruel.
And so it went, the job of a lifetime destroyed by a spin on the dance floor. I was devastated. I had lost my best friend, my idol, my boss. I loved the guy, and I assumed he loved me, too. I had no idea what to do. I had the greatest life in the world. But now I realized that it was his life, and now I had to figure out how to get one of my own. It was amazing how things changed, literally overnight. From being the toast of the town, or two towns, Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, I became the ghost of those towns. It was as if I didn’t exist. Even Mia, whom I saw on Beverly Drive a few days later, crossed to the other side of the street to avoid me. She never spoke to me again, not to say she was sorry, not to share old times, not to offer to set the record straight. Not that Mr. S would have listened to her. Unlike Yogi Berra, who said it ain’t over till it’s over, when Mr. S said something was over, it was over.
Word had gotten out that Frank Sinatra had fired me, and people, even people I thought were friends, didn’t dare even to speak to me for fear of incurring the wrath of the Chairman. The folks in show business feared Sinatra the same way the folks in Communist Russia had feared Stalin. There a party leader who had fallen from grace was known as a “nonperson.” Now that’s what I was, frozen out Moscow-style right here in sunny California. In those first
cruel weeks of alienation and isolation, my only solace was in my memories. For nearly two decades I, too, had been a party leader, at one of the greatest parties the world had ever known. I had partied with the kings and queens of the planet, movie stars, record stars, sports stars, princes, presidents, gangsters, goddesses. It was an amazing trip, and even more amazing that a poor black kid from Louisiana like me got to take it. Although Mr. S had turned my world upside down, he couldn’t destroy what he had helped me become. The incredible experiences we shared had made me one interesting man. That was the armor I would wear out into the world, and the shield of confidence I had to deal with whatever came up, good or bad. I could honestly say, without an ounce of boast, that I had seen it all. As I pulled myself together and tried to figure out the next chapter of my life, I looked back at the past twenty years and couldn’t help but smile. If I could pull all that off, I could handle anything. As Mr. S loved to sing, “…the memory of all that, oh, no, they can’t take that away from me.”
2
Swifty
THE only thing the superphobic superagent Swifty Lazar feared more than germs was failure. “It smells worse than shit,” he would say, “and you can smell it from even farther away.” By that token, Swifty was very uncomfortable with Frank Sinatra, his apartment house next-door neighbor. “He’s a dead man,” Swifty would say of the fabled crooner whose career had taken a southerly turn. “Once you lose it in Hollywood, you don’t come back. Even Jesus couldn’t get resurrected in this town.” Although Swifty was always smiling and polite to Mr. S, he never invited him into the apartment and almost had to take one of his multiple showers whenever he ran into him. “I wished he’d get so broke that he’d have to move out,” Swifty often said, because Swifty felt that having a loser in the complex somehow made him look less like a winner to his famous friends and clients. “He makes them uncomfortable,” he’d say, but the one who was most uncomfortable was Swifty, who judged everything and everyone by appearances and how they ranked in Variety. To Swifty, Frank was one more Hollywood has-been who was particularly inconvenient because the shadow of his decline happened to be darkening Swifty’s door. So here I was, George Jacobs, Swifty Lazar’s Man Friday, pitying Frank Sinatra, feeling awful for the biggest star in the world. What a totally weird state of affairs that I could be feeling sorry for him. I guess for a black man in his early twenties, I was riding pretty high at the time.
Mr. S Page 2