Sam Spiegel was the Mike Romanoff of producers, a European con man and ex-jailbird who went on to fool all of the people all of the time. He was the total caricature of the fat cat movie mogul, gold chains, big cigar, pinky rings, “Frankie baby” this and “Frankie baby” that. He was always surrouded with beautiful women, whom he graciously dispatched to his friends, or whomever he wanted to sell something to. He seemed like a joke. Yet he was the real deal. He had made, and would continue to make, some of the greatest classic movies, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia.
One of the many people Spiegel fooled was Mr. Doubting Thomas himself, Frank Sinatra. Spiegel had promised Sinatra the part of the tormented, poetic hoodlum Terry Malloy in his upcoming production of On the Waterfront. Spiegel had hyped Sinatra to kingdom come, promising that Maggio might get him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but that Malloy was guaranteed to garner him the Best Actor statuette, ensuring Sinatra’s career literally from here to eternity. Spiegel had brought home the Oscar bacon for Sinatra’s idol Bogart in The African Queen. Now Sinatra was trusting Spiegel to do it for him. Sinatra naturally wanted to believe Spiegel, who assured him time and again what a great, natural, earthy, and real thespian he was, how he was the symbol of the working man, the voice of the people, and that there was no other actor in the world who could do justice to this part of parts. The film was going to be shot in Hoboken. “For Chrissakes,” Spiegel said, “you are Hoboken!”
But, as it turned out, there were too many people in Hollywood who, like Swifty Lazar, lacked confidence in the resurgence and staying power of Frank Sinatra. The bottom line, and producers believe in nothing except the bottom line, was that Sam Spiegel could not get his dark tale of labor unrest in the New York docks financed with Sinatra carrying the film. So, for all his declarations of Sinatra’s uniqueness, he found another actor who could do even better justice to Terry Malloy, the ultimate justice of getting him to the screen. That actor, who would become Sinatra’s continuing nemesis, was Marlon Brando. Brando had originally refused to work with the Waterfront director Elia Kazan, because he hated Kazan for being a stool pigeon, a name namer in the Communist witch-hunt of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. That’s why Spiegel came to Sinatra, telling him “you’re better than Brando.” Spiegel totally snowed Frank, put him under his ether. And then, when he was finally able to put Brando under that same ether, getting him to forgive Kazan, he stabbed Frank in the back.
I had never seen Frank Sinatra pissed off before; he had seemed so sweet and downtrodden the whole time I had known him I didn’t know he had this venom in him. (Man, did I underestimate that one.) Sam Spiegel had spoiled Sinatra’s Oscar party before the party had begun. He was ruining his comeback. Worst of all, he had lied to Frank. He had made a promise and he had broken it, and, as Frank told me, fighting back the tears, where he had come from that was the worst thing a man could do. Frank really beat up on himself for getting suckered by Spiegel. He’d talk about how Spiegel had done prison time for writing bad checks and other frauds in England and had been deported for his crimes. He should have known, and he felt stupid. I was about the only one he could complain to at that point. Bogart loved Spiegel, because he had helped him win the Oscar. Lazar loved Spiegel, because he wanted to sell him things. Romanoff loved Spiegel, because he was pretty much the same guy himself, and Spiegel was one of his best customers. So there was nowhere Frank could go with his rage. All Frank could do was rant to me and look for the next best part that the buzz from Eternity could help him get.
Mr. S and I spent our first month or so getting to know each other. I was pretty awkward at first. I’d shine every pair of shoes twice, and press his pants and coats three times, just to be sure they were 100 percent right. I was much more compulsive than I had had to be in the Navy. I wanted so much to please him, I know I overdid it. Once I was hovering so close to him over dinner that he said to me, “Who do you think you are, Ted Lewis?” He was referring to the guy who sang “Me and My Shadow,” and it gave both of us a big laugh and was helpful in breaking the ice. So was a time when he had some people coming over for drinks and hors d’oeuvres and I spilled something on my shirt so he gave me one of his. We were just about the same exact size, so his stuff all fit me. The only problem was the initials on the shirts. One of the guests, a Broadway music type, began giving me a hard time about the shirt. “What’s your name?” George. “Then what are those FS initials for?” the wise guy kept sticking it to me. “Fast service,” I improvised, and Sinatra broke out laughing. “He’s a bullet, George is,” he said. “Don’t mess with him.” That got his respect.
We bonded still further on his first sleepover conquest during my watch. She was a pretty starlet from the studios whom neither he nor anyone else ever saw again, but he had me put on a candlelit spread as if he were entertaining a princess. I had to go to Parisian Florist in Hollywood, the best in town, to get roses, to Jurgensen’s fancy grocery shop in Beverly Hills for the best champagne and chocolate, to Monaco’s Italian deli for prosciutto, plus a long trip downtown to Bullock’s Wilshire, the top department store in L.A., for a gift of an engraved notebook because she had said something about wanting to become a writer. When it came to women, and to his friends, Mr. S was the most thoughtful man I ever met. He didn’t miss a thing. The girl barely touched her meal, but, when Mr. S told me I could leave for the evening and she was still there, I knew all our military operations for this romantic D-day had not been in vain. The morning, or rather afternoon after, I accidentally ran into Mr. S as he was coming out of the shower. Stark naked. It was the first time I had seen him au naturel, and it looked so unnatural, I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out, “My God, that thing’s so big you must rub olive oil on it!” He turned beet red, then broke out laughing. “I bet somebody had a good time last night,” I went on. He grinned that big conquest grin and said, “About time I got lucky.”
Whenever Mr. S would be impressed or amazed or shocked by something, he would exclaim to me, “Holy mackerel, Kingfish!” quoting his favorite radio and TV show, Amos ’n’ Andy. He got off imitating a black dialect. He wasn’t doing it because I was black, though he liked the fact that I understood the genuine article. He’d do Amos and Andy imitations with all his friends, so it made me feel like one of the guys. And he liked telling black jokes. “What’s long and hard on a black man?” “The third grade.” Or “Why are blacks sexually obsessed?” “If you had pubic hair on your head, you’d be sexually obsessed, too.” Or one of the corny ones he inexplicably fixated on, “What’s black in a tree?” “A branch manager.” If he told any of this shit today, he would be sued for racial harassment. But not then. He’d tell these stupid jokes to Sammy Davis Jr. the same way he’d tell them to Humphrey Bogart, and pretty much the same way he’d tell them to me. Being black was never discussed, nor did it seem to be considered. He never used the “n” word, except to complain that someone like Sam Spiegel was “treating him like a nigger.” He would use it as an adjective of oppression, but never as an oppressive label. He wouldn’t stand for that. He saw himself as a member of an oppressed minority and had total empathy for anyone who was similarly situated. Where race was concerned, the man was color blind, even if today he’d be viewed as criminally insensitive. Whatever he was doing came from the heart. A year or two later, when he’d sometimes call me “Spook,” I took it as a brotherly nickname, not a racial epithet. Everybody in the Rat Pack had a “ratty” nickname, and now so did I. I thought I had “arrived.”
Mr. S didn’t keep many secrets from me. I had to deal with all his inadequacies. The biggest one was his hair. Every morning after he shampooed, I’d have to spray hair coloring on the ever-expanding bald spot on the back of his scalp. Like Humphrey Bogart, who had the same hair problem, Sinatra would never go out without this cover-up, and without one of his trademark hats, though he’d only wear one of the many custom hairpieces made for him by Max Factor when he was shooting a film or performing at a sho
w. His other main point of self-consciousness was the entire left side of his face, from his ear down to his neck. When he was born, it was a difficult delivery. The doctor had to use forceps, which scarred and deformed Sinatra’s face and punctured his eardrum. The latter injury had kept him out of the service in World War II, while the former deformation forced him to personally apply makeup over the rough, cratered scars every day of his life. It was funny watching Mr. Tough Guy pat his face with this little powder puff, but I didn’t dare tease him. Mr. S wasn’t vain about his appearance; he was embarrassed.
The thing that bothered Mr. S the very most may have been his lack of education. He felt bad that he had never gone to college and was a flop in high school. He wasn’t a big talker, mainly because he wasn’t sure what to say. He was constantly in fear of putting his foot in his mouth, of using the wrong word, of exposing his lack of learning. So whenever he’d have a quiet hour, whether at home, at the studio, on a plane, he would always have a leather-bound hardcover dictionary with him, and he would sit there reading all the words he didn’t know, from A to Z. New words, which he’d mark and circle, were like new toys, which he loved playing with. What’s more, each new word he learned made him feel more secure. He would have actually enjoyed going back to school. “Growing up, I was told reading made people go blind,” Mr. S often joked. He wasn’t a big talker, but his love affair with the dictionary gave him unique patterns of speech. For example, instead of saying “I need this like a hole in the head,” he’d go on entire medical riffs. One day he’d say “I need this like hemophilia.” Then the next he’d say, “I need this like Parkinson’s.” And then “I need this like peptic esophagitis.” He sounded like a doctor, all from poring over that Webster’s. Apparently, Cole Porter got many of his rhymes the same way.
For all his playboy antics, Frank Sinatra was dead serious about his career, which he placed before everything else. By career, I mean singing. Movies, he was coming to realize, were a crapshoot out of his control. In that game, there were slicker players than he, guys like Sam Spiegel. He wanted to be a top actor, wanted to be a star, wanted to succeed as in everything else he did, but he understood he couldn’t be the Best There Was. Music was another matter. He had been at the very pinnacle of pop music. He knew what it was like at the top there; it wasn’t a fantasy like films. It was a reality he had savored, and he wanted to savor it again. “Fuck movies!” he declared defiantly when “Young at Heart” topped the Hit Parade, at the depths of his despair over Sam Spiegel. He had the same reaction when his rendition of the theme song from “Three Coins in the Fountain” also topped the charts. Knowing what his trump card was, he was totally disciplined about his singing. He’d religiously spend an hour every day before he went to the recording studio listening to classical music and to opera. His favorite singers were Richard Tucker and Lawrence Tibbett.
Mr. S approached his first big Capitol album recording session in the spring of 1954 with the rigor of one of his seductions. Retreating to his Palm Springs home to avoid any distractions, he would rest as hard as he normally played. He would only drink hot tea with lemon and honey, no Jack Daniel’s, and no cigarettes. If you saw him at the studio with a drink or a smoke, they were merely props. His voice was his moneymaker, and he treated it with the utmost respect, which is what he had for his new arranger, Nelson Riddle, who helped channel the rage and pain of Sinatra’s turbulent thirties, midlife in those pre-youth-culture days, into turning the man from the ultimate crooner to something much deeper and stronger, the ultimate stylist. Those spring sessions, for the album called Swing Easy!, turned out such classics as “Just One of those Things,” and “All of Me.”
That same spring he finally won his Academy Award. He had never pretended it didn’t matter. In fact, although Mr. S was one of the least religious men I had ever met, the entire month before the Oscars he’d go down to the Good Shepherd Church in Beverly Hills and pray. He didn’t even see any girls that much, he wanted God’s help so bad. I remember the day of the Oscar show, I helped him dress in his tuxedo and a “good luck” toupee he would wear on opening nights. He also had special underpants made, a cross between a panty girdle and a jock strap. The idea was to hold down that big thing of his, so it wouldn’t show through his tuxedo pants. He wasn’t quite John Dillinger, but he was hung enough to have to take special precautions. This was the Eisenhower era, and “family values” prevailed. Speaking of which, Mr. S brought Little Nancy and Frank Jr. as his dates to the ceremony at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Big Nancy had given him their own ceremony earlier in the day, where the family presented him with their own Oscar, a medallion with the statue engraved on one side and a saint on the other. Later that night he beat Brandon de Wilde, the blond kid in Shane, Jack Palance, the villain in Shane, Eddie Albert, the sidekick in Roman Holiday, and Robert Strauss, the comic captive in Stalag 17. There was no wild celebration afterward. He took the kids back to Nancy, then returned to the apartment and called his mother in Hoboken and put me on the phone as “your new son, Giorgio.” He seemed shell-shocked, more relieved than happy. So many things had gone wrong, especially the Waterfront fiasco, that he couldn’t believe he would get the Oscar until he held it in his hands.
Although there was no orgy that night, the games were about to begin. First Sinatra had to finish his Swing Easy! album, and then his new film Suddenly, a B picture in which he played a psycho who wants to assassinate the president. This choice of subject matter reflected how down and depressed Mr. S was when he agreed to make it. Yet it reflected a theme, that of political assassinations and how easy it was to pull them off, in which he was deeply interested and would come back to again in both The Manchurian Candidate and The Naked Runner. Mr. S thought such movies would get Americans talking as well as buying tickets to see what he considered one of the ultimate “what ifs.” Mr. S’s explorations into this deadly heart of political darkness got him into big trouble in 1963, when the rumors arose that his Mafia chieftain friends may have been behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who was seen as having betrayed both them and Sinatra.
Once the recording and filming work was over, it was time to party. The revels were led by Jimmy Van Heusen, who was Sinatra’s best friend and the role model for the swingin’ music man that Frank would now become. Unshackled by the constraints of family and of failure, as well as of Ava, who had left him for a famous bull-fighter and for good, the joker could now go wild. Jimmy Van Heusen was a decadent womanizer, an Olympian boozer, a war hero, a daredevil pilot, and one of America’s best songwriters. Bogart may have been Sinatra’s role model for style, but for lifestyle, it was Van Heusen “All the Way,” the Oscar-winning song Van Heusen wrote with his lyricist Sammy Cahn. Sinatra called Van Heusen “Chester,” after his real name, Chester Babcock. Van Heusen, who had won his first Oscar composing “Swinging on a Star” for Bing Crosby, was the ultimate swinger. Balding and WASPy, Van Heusen had the reassuring presence of the military test pilot he had been. (His Sinatra song “Come Fly with Me” was completely autobiographical.) He was also a wild man.
As a young guy, Van Heusen had spent some time in an upstate New York seminary before going on to Syracuse University, where he earned tuition by playing piano in a brothel. His whole life seemed to be a debauched backlash from that early religious schooling. Van Heusen had his own place in the hills above Palm Springs called the Rattlesnake Ranch, which was all sex, all the time. He would have entire plane crews of stewardesses, when stewardesses were the big sex symbols, crashing there at once.
He also loved hookers. His own “whore wrangler,” the guy who rounded up the ladies, was a fat song plugger named Murray Wolfe, who looked like hell but was a brilliant salesman, especially with the name Frank Sinatra to drop. Wolfe was a precursor of the payola people who would bribe disc jockeys to play songs on the radio. Wolfe would bribe anyone to do anything, and he got results. Wolfe worked closely with a madam in the Valley named Joyce, who was tight with all the casting people at
the studios, keeping long lists of which starlets were new, which ones were hot, and which ones needed extra money—basically all of them. She also knew lots of non-Hollywood California beauties who wanted to earn extra pin money, girls like Judy Campbell, who would later pull a sexual trifecta with Sinatra, Jack Kennedy, and Sam Giancana.
Some people would call Jimmy Van Heusen, who, bored with his original name, chose his new one from a shirt ad, a bad influence. His own songwriting partner, the nervous, milquetoasty, pun-spouting Sammy Cahn, was horrified by Van Heusen’s nonstop debauchery. But these excesses were just what Frank Sinatra needed, or thought he needed, to make it through the long Ava-less nights. Van Heusen, while not corrupting, had written “Nancy with the Laughing Face,” about Little Nancy, to show his respect for Frank’s family-man side. At his lowest depths, Sinatra was said to have slashed his wrists in Van Heusen’s New York apartment in 1953, before I started with him. It didn’t seem like his style, but the despair was there. If it was true, then Van Heusen’s mission was to never let his friend get so low again, and, to that end, he kept the booze and the broads flowing nonstop. Van Heusen, with his military training, had the stamina for this sexual boot camp. I was actually surprised that Mr. S, who was frail and fragile, could keep up with him, but he did. It was an occasion he spurred himself to rise to.
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