But when all the television cameras began to arrive that day to do the live shoot (Murrow stayed in the studio in New York, smoking his cigarette; this was all high-tech for the period.), I saw two Asian guys, also in white butler coats, arrive at the house. They looked as though they had come from Central Casting, and I was close to right. Gloria Lovell had hired them from some domestic agency for the day. One was Filipino, the other from Japan. I assumed they were there to serve drinks and food to the Person to Person crew. Then Mr. S took me aside and broke the bad news. I wasn’t going to be on the show. What? I was crushed. I felt as bad as Sinatra did when he lost the Terry Malloy part. “Are you ashamed of me, boss?” I couldn’t stop my hurt self from blurting out.
“Just the opposite, George,” he said. He chuckled at how badly I had misread the situation. “If you’re on that show tonight, you’ll be working for Jules Stein tomorrow. I can’t risk losing you.” Valet snatching was a crime that was rife in Beverly Hills. If I was on national TV, I would instantly achieve major status as blue-chip help, and Mr. S didn’t want to lose me to some blue-chip mogul like Stein, the head of MCA and a social lion on the same level as the Goetzes. To salve my wounds, he doubled my salary, to $300 a week. He also gave me an envelope containing ten brand-new $100 bills. It was a small fortune in 1956, though I still would have preferred saying hello on the air to the great Ed Murrow.
Even if the show were live, it somehow seemed as fake and staged as the Asian houseboys. There was the signed photograph from Franklin D. Roosevelt and the award from the Al Jolson chapter of B’nai B’rith and the comment from Mr. S that, in terms of stage fright, the toughest number he ever had to do was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Polo Grounds. Then again, I shouldn’t have expected Ed Murrow zooming in on Mr. S pouring Jack Daniel’s for Sam Giancana with Judy Campbell draped over the couch. In plain and simple terms: Frank Sinatra loved gangsters, or at least the world they lived in, just as most Americans have had a fascination with this world from Little Caesar to The Godfather to The Sopranos. The big difference was that Mr. S could get a lot closer to the flame than the rest of us. In fact, aside from the so-called gangsters that were Sinatra’s friends and at least honorary Godfathers, many of his close pals in show business were also somehow gang-related.
Humphrey Bogart looked and sounded like a hoodlum even if he wasn’t one. George Raft, a dear Sinatra ally, the guy who gave me his dancing shoes, went way back with the mob, as far back as Al Capone. Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. had been working in mob joints for years. Where else, as Sinatra would wonder, was a guy supposed to sing? If anything, Dean embraced the mob even more strongly than Mr. S, and Sammy embraced anything Mr. S embraced, maybe even harder. For all his genius and all his courage, when around Mr. S, Sammy would act like the Stepin Fetchit of the footlights. That’s not really fair, because the one thing Sammy never played to was any kind of black stereotype. In fact, he was just the opposite. If he were performing in London Sammy would develop an aristocratic British accent that was more perfect than the Duke of Edinburgh’s. He sounded like Noël Coward. But that was what bothered me. Sammy was always trying so hard to please everyone, he was like a court jester, even more of a servant than I was. He may have been the most exciting, entertaining servant in the world, but still a servant. By playing the jester, Sammy made Mr. S feel even more the king than he already did, and maybe this was all part of a Machiavellian plan to someday usurp the throne. Yet while Sammy played this “yes, master” game, until I got to know him better and saw that it may have been an aspect of his brilliant act, he was the only person in Mr. S’s world who made me aware of being black, and made me feel second-class for it. Actually, Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father, made me feel black, too—like a Black Panther, who wanted to kill that racist bastard. But later about him.
Sammy was even more insecure than Mr. S about his lack of education. He basically begged people to teach him what they knew, whether singing from Sinatra, jokes from Rickles, boozing from Dean, acting from Eddie Robinson. He was a little hangdog acolyte. His personality cried out, “Help me!” Nobody who met him could resist. And nobody who ever taught him anything ever had a smarter student. He was the quickest study I’d ever seen. He could do dead-on imitations of anyone, from Cary Grant to Jimmy Cagney to Marilyn Monroe to Judy Garland. He actually would have made a great female impersonator. The only person Sammy was more solicitous of than Mr. S was Sam Giancana. Sammy would literally kiss the ring of this top capo, though it may have been more out of genuine respect and gratitude for the gigs Giancana had gotten him than the fear he seemed to feel for Mr. S. I say fear, but I must also say love, for Mr. S had helped save both Sammy’s life and his career after his accident, and Sammy would have eternal gratitude for that. But Sammy was no saint. He could be a naughty boy, as we saw in his self-promotional episode with Ava Gardner in Ebony. Sammy may even have had designs on Ava, for he was the horniest of guys and Ava was crazy about him. I think Sammy felt secretly guilty that he fantasized about replacing Mr. S as the King of Entertainment, and his obsequious behavior was compensation for his massive ambition.
You might have thought Sammy and I would have bonded as brothers, but we didn’t. He was always polite, but distant, as if there was a certain pressure for him to get down with me. I think I made him uncomfortable. One black in the Clan was enough. I was much closer to Sammy’s valet, a black guy from Watts we all called Murphy. I’m not sure whether that was his first name or his last. He was just Murphy, like Liberace or Fabian or Valentino. His job made mine look laid-back. Even if Sammy were just doing a weekend in Vegas, he’d carry seventeen or eighteen big suitcases of clothes. Mr. S, on the other hand, liked to travel light, one suitcase, one hanging bag, one briefcase. That was it.
Sammy was the most fabulous dresser. He was always totally turned out. He didn’t know the meaning of “casual.” Even his lounge wear was theatrical, the silk robes, the Chinese pajamas, the ascots. Whenever Sammy would sit down and talk to me, I felt as if I was with the pope, or rather the chief rabbi of Jerusalem. Sammy took his Judaism very seriously. He observed every holiday, every ritual. He said it gave him the grounding, the moral center that he needed. It was Sammy who eventually got me interested in my long-lost Jewish roots. Whatever Sammy talked about, whether religion or golf, he could turn you on to it. He was a real pied piper. He was so on, so brilliant, even alone with me. If he had you in his presence for ten minutes, he’d have you for life.
As for Dean, he knew what he owed the mob guys, if that’s what they were, but he was cool about it, just as he was cool about everything else. Dean simply Didn’t Give a Shit about anything, except maybe golf. He was completely relaxed, which may have had something to do with his massive consumption of alcohol, far, far greater than that of Mr. S, who was a teetotaler by comparison. But Dean never got nasty; he got sleepy. He had a mobster’s coolness, the laid-back nonobliviousness of a seasoned hit man. One thing that did make Dean a little nervous was race jokes. His natural inclination was to be about as subtle as Governor George Wallace, but he knew that was wrong and didn’t want to hurt the “little guy’s” feelings, be he a “Nig” or a “Hebe.” Jerry Lewis had put Dean off Jews for two lifetimes, and he was naturally suspicious of anyone with anything vaguely Jewish about him, a name, a nose, a career, like agent or jeweler.
As for blacks, Dean used me as a sounding board for jokes, almost always written by someone else. Dean’s forte was his delivery, not his originality. “Nothing could be bigger. Than to play it with a nigger. At the Copa.” This was to “Carolina in the Morning.” I think Sammy Cahn wrote this as Dean’s intro to Sammy at the Copa Room of the Sands in Vegas. I thought it could piss some people off. Dean at first didn’t get it. He saw it as a “tribute,” and done with amore. And the “n” word? “Niggers don’t go to the Sands,” was his attitude. I eventually talked him out of it, though not out of a joke after Sammy’s marriage to the Swedish actress May Britt: “What’s black an
d white and has three eyes?” “Niggers won’t care about this one, just blind people,” was Dean’s defense. If Dean would get upset with Sammy, the worst thing he could say was that Sammy was “Jerry turned inside out.” Dean wasn’t sensitive to any of this because he saw himself as an equally oppressed minority. Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.
Because of the later Rat Pack, Mr. S is most usually identified in Hollywood with Sammy and Dean (Peter Lawford was strictly fair weather and was basically a bridge to the Kennedys, one that turned out to be a bridge too far). In actuality Frank Sinatra was, in the mid-fifties, closer to Eddie Fisher than to the others. If anyone could give Mr. S a run at bedding famous women, or any women, for that matter, it was Eddie. Once the money began rolling in for Mr. S, he took a penthouse apartment in New York in a cul-de-sac at Seventy-second Street and the East River. Good views, better privacy. Eddie Fisher had the penthouse next door, and even Mr. S was impressed by the sheer volume of Eddie’s conquests. In truth some of the conquests were triumphs of the checkbook. In the high rise right next door to us lived dozens of fancy call girls. It was one of the highest concentrations in Manhattan. Because of the dead-end location of the block, limos could double park while celebs and politicians could pop in for quickies. Or the “girls next door,” as we’d call them, could pop out. Eddie, like Mr. S, was so horny that it didn’t matter if he had just had Liz Taylor. If there was a fuckable girl around, he had to have her, cost be damned.
Eddie proudly described himself as the Jewish son Sam Giancana never had. He’d also fill in for Mr. S at the Copacabana in New York or in Miami or Vegas if Mr. S would ever get sick or go chasing Ava or something crazy. Eddie wrote his own book on girl crazy, so he’d always understand. Luckily for their friendship, Mr. S claimed never to be attracted to Liz Taylor. He thought she was too high maintenance, higher than Ava. He also thought her legs were too short, and he was definitely a leg man, though I think it was his high regard for Eddie that stopped him far more than Liz’s gams. Assuming you don’t count Sammy Davis Jr., Eddie Fisher was one of the rare Jews in Mr. S’s entourage. Another was Jack Entratter, whom Mr. S knew from the forties, when Entratter was a bouncer at the Stork Club. The tall, handsome, dapper Entratter would rise through the club world to become manager of the Copa. In the early fifties, the mob dispatched Entratter to Vegas to run the Sands. The Sands would be Mr. S’s Vegas headquarters for more than a decade and Jack his favorite “businessman” until they had a violent falling-out that saw Mr. S smash a golf cart into the Sands’s glass doors. Then his best Jewish buddy became “that scumbag kike.”
Not that Mr. S was antisemitic; he simply felt most comfortable with guys from his same background. As with Eddie and Jack, if the Jewish guy had ties to gangland, that somehow gave Mr. S that extra measure of trust. Trust was something that was in short supply for Mr. S where the Jews of Hollywood were concerned. No man could hold a grudge longer than Mr. S, and no grudge was bigger, not even his loathing for Sam Spiegel, than the one he held against Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein, his former agents at MCA who had dumped him in the early fifties. He blamed them for trying, and almost succeeding, to kill his career, and him. Murdering Jews, he called them, the real gangsters. He was complaining about them any chance he could get.
At his forty-second birthday roast at the Villa Capri in Hollywood in 1957, his friends were still making jokes about his hatred for these powerful Jews. Yet among these friends were other powerful Jews, Jack Benny, Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis, Mike Romanoff, Sammy Cahn, who sang a ditty to “All the Way,” making fun of Frank’s Italian dining habits at the Villa: “Every meal’s a bleeder. When you’re eating with the leader. This life’s not for Jewish stomachs. Pass the bicarb, I say…” Dean Martin, to “You’re the Top,” sang “He’s a wop, Records sell like Nestlé’s, He’s a wop, But they don’t top Presley’s.” Dean’s jab about the hated Elvis showed how Mr. S needed all the business help he could get. Help from Jews. Hence Eddie Fisher serenaded the birthday boy with “Bert’s His Papa,” a tribute, to the strains of Fisher’s trademark song, to Sinatra’s William Morris agent Bert Allenberg. “All roads lead to Jerusalem,” Mr. S conceded. When in Dean’s number he tried listing rhyming Italian Hollywood names, Tommy Leonetti, Annie Alberghetti, Tony Franciosa, Pori Rubirosa, the drunken table pointed out that Rubirosa wasn’t Hollywood, nor was he Italian. “Shows how hard up we are,” Mr. S shouted.
There was one song-and-dance man, probably Mr. S’s biggest idol, who probably didn’t know who Sam Giancana was. That was Fred Astaire. Once we were on the Warner lot, and we saw Fred Astaire walking by. Mr. S was as excited as the schoolgirls used to get excited by him. He insisted we follow Astaire around the lot, hiding in the shadows to make sure he couldn’t see us. They must have met at the Goetzes or somewhere, but Mr. S didn’t think he was worthy to go up to him. “Look at how he moves. Just look at him,” Sinatra would whisper to me. “I feel like a klutz.” Sinatra may have had total self-confidence as a singer but very little as a hoofer. His nonmob friend Gene Kelly had taught him his steps in Anchors Aweigh and On the Town, but Mr. S claimed he forgot the moves as fast as he learned them. “It’s not natural for me,” he’d lament. That’s why Astaire was a god to Sinatra, because for him it was natural, just as being cool was natural for Bogart. Astaire never spotted us that day at Warners, but if he had, I’ll bet Mr. S would have asked him for an autograph. He was that starstruck.
I was pretty starstruck myself when I got to meet some of my own idols traveling with Sinatra on the concert circuit and to Las Vegas. I loved going on the road with Mr. S. I began our road trips in 1956, and he treated me royally on them. He was totally dependent on me, and I loved this kind of responsibility, like in the Navy. It feels great to be the right hand of a king. I’d make calls, book appointments, arrange dinners and parties, entertain waiting friends and dignitaries, coordinate everything. I was beside Mr. S twenty-four hours a day, always ready to jump to any occasion and please him. It was a pressure cooker, though he never blew up at me, probably because I never fucked up. He made me feel a key part of his life and work and introduced me to everybody. “This is George Jacobs,” was all he had to say. He didn’t need to explain what I did, because I did it all. Explaining would have taken way too long for Mr. S, who wasn’t one to explain things, anyway.
Almost until the sixties, I was one of the only blacks allowed to stay in the Sands in Vegas and other hotels where Sinatra played. As Dean said, “Niggers don’t go to the Sands.” There was generally no room at the inn for blacks even if they were performing there. Even a star like Sammy Davis Jr. had to stay at the Moulin Rouge, which was the only black hotel, if you don’t count the cabins on the outskirts of town, which were about as inviting as the Bates Motel in Psycho. And at one hotel, when Dorothy Dandridge went for a swim, guests demanded that they drain the pool so they wouldn’t get some rare black infestation. Sounds like something Swifty Lazar would have come up with. Vegas was a Wild West, cowboy town back then, and these cowboys didn’t cotton to colored dudes. Eventually Mr. S was the key man in getting these barriers dropped, so he could share stages, as well as floors, with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, whom he called Sassy. My favorite was Billy Eckstine, who was so sharp that the second he saw me and saw how much we looked alike, he embraced me and cried, “My son!” On second thought, I bet Mr. S put him up to it, just to give me a thrill.
For all his Amos and Andy humor, his “yo mama” jokes, Mr. S genuinely loved his fellow black musicians and kept that humor to his largely Dago best buddies. He only saw talent, and I only saw stars. Both Frank and Sammy were very tight with these fellow performers, though their styles were different. Sammy liked to clown around, do impromptu numbers, show off. Frank was much more serious, though he would never talk about music with these great singers. He might talk about movies, or even politics, but never music. He figured they had
enough of that on the job. Black or white, he rated Tony Bennett as his chief rival. He felt Tony’s voice was every bit as good as his. He also admired the ease and charm of Tony’s delivery. Then again, Tony was a much easier guy than Mr. S, and certainly no party animal. He was very quiet and loved to paint. In his down time, he’d go out by the lake at Cal-Neva or to the desert in Vegas and bring his sketch pad. Because Mr. S liked to paint as well, this was what he and Tony would talk about most. In New York, Tony would come drinking with us at Toots Shor’s or, later, Jilly’s, but he’d be long gone by the time we closed these places. In 1962, Mr. S decided to cut his own version of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” but after making and releasing the single, he listened to it next to Tony’s classic, then ordered it withdrawn from the market. Such was respect.
Back to the Sinatra circle, after Jimmy Van Heusen, Mr. S’s closest music friend (and his music friends, like his music, were more essential to him than movie friends and movies) was Hank Sanicola, a physically big boxer-turned-roadhouse-pianist who became Sinatra’s bodyguard in the Tommy Dorsey screaming-bobbysoxer 1940s and had graduated to being his Manager, with a capital M. The way to becoming a success in the Sinatra organization was often through your size, or brute force. Sinatra liked guys who could save his life, if necessary. Burly Hank was a protector, as were Jilly Rizzo and others like Brad Dexter, whose lifesaving skills elevated him from bit actor to big producer.
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