Rarely did any of these guys actually lift a fist for Frank. Jilly, who had an even crazier temper than Mr. S, did a few times, often with disastrous results. Once he did save Sinatra from a stalker who got into Mr. S’s hotel bedroom in Melbourne, Australia. Jilly beat him over the head with a large standing ashtray and nearly killed him. Brad Dexter’s bluff was far bigger than his bite. We used to call him “Superman” because he walked around with his chest all puffed up and out. Sanicola, on the other hand, was the real thing. He would break your legs if you even said anything bad about Sinatra. And if the adversary were bigger than Hank was, he had lots of friends whose specialty was “talking to people,” which was Hank’s euphemism for their distinctly nonverbal approach to handling problems. Sanicola had Sicilian roots, which Frank found simpatico. He called him “Dag,” as in Dago. It was the same name he used for Dean and others of his Italian friends. (They called him “Sinat.”) It was pronounced like “Day-Glo,” not like Dag Hammarskjöld, the head of the United Nations, though Sinatra and company got the biggest kick mispronouncing his name, turning the distinguished Swedish diplomat into an Italian homeboy. Sometimes he’d even call me “Dag.” I was thrilled to be included as a paesano.
Another beloved “Dag” had nothing to do with the entertainment business at all. Not if he could help it. Yet he couldn’t help it, and it ruined a great deal of his life. He was married to the biggest movie star in America, and he was the biggest sports hero in America. It was a guaranteed recipe for disaster. The Dago in question was Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, the Pride of the Yankees, Mr. New York, long before he was reduced to Mr. Coffee. He was the only Italian in the country bigger than Frank Sinatra. Mr. S was deeply honored to be his friend; it was a measure of how far the kid from Hoboken had come that he could hang with a hero, who was the Fred Astaire of America’s pastime. One of the most Old World Italian characteristics of Mr. S was his deeply superstitious nature. Mr. S put great stock in the fact that DiMaggio’s name and that of the character who had restored his career, saved his life, were the same. He saw it as an omen, a miracle.
I, too, was in awe of the guy, and I knew zip about baseball. At first he seemed arrogant, barely acknowledging my presence, but I came to see that he was painfully shy and private. Marrying Marilyn Monroe was suicide for a guy like that, but that’s why she was Marilyn. The more Joe drank, which was a lot, the nicer he would get. He’d even try to turn me on to baseball by telling war stories about Babe and Lou and his own glory years, which was unusual for a guy who hated to brag. It wasn’t so much boasting, but rather disbelief that I knew and cared so little about the national pastime, “What?! You don’t know about my fifty-six-game streak?” And I was so out of it, I said something like “Was that really good?” And all the guys would roll their eyes, like what planet was I from. The answer was planet New Orleans, which was no baseball town. The people there were too busy eating and fucking, I’d defend my position. Once I mentioned Ted Williams, and Joe dismissed him with “He throws the ball like a girl.” That surprised me, that Joe would put a fellow superstar down like that. I guess he liked being the Greatest and didn’t want to hear about the competition. Joe was no jokester, but he thought he was being a real rib-splitter when he started calling me “the Commie,” as in Communist. The idea was that only a Communist didn’t dig baseball. Don’t forget, these were still McCarthy times.
Mr. S and the Clipper had met at Toots Shor’s restaurant, a famous booze, meat, and potatoes men’s club of a joint thick with cigar smoke and filled with sports stars, gossip columnists like Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson, and musicians from the nearby jazz clubs of the West Fifties. Talk about mob ties. Toots, whom Mr. S also called “Dag,” was a tough Philadelphian who had run speakeasies for Lucky Luciano and never met a mobster he didn’t like. Toots never gave Sinatra a bill, not when he was down, and not when he was back up, either. Not that Mr. S was trying to get off cheap. At the end of an evening, Sinatra would hand out c-notes to every waiter, busboy, and bartender who had crossed his path. Beside that, the lure of having Frank Sinatra in the restaurant was worth a fortune in itself. Toots was no fool.
Toots Shor’s was one of Mr. S’s favorite New York hangouts, but he preferred being with all Dagos, all the time. There were too many tourists who might bug him in Little Italy, and Jilly’s place was still in his future. So his hangout became a joint called Patsy’s on West Fifty-sixth Street. It was a red-checked-tablecloth, red-clam-sauce kind of place with an upstairs dining room that Mr. S joked was “headquarters for Murder, Inc.” He enjoyed being close to the action, particularly that kind of action. I had no idea who the clientele was, just a lot of heavy-set guys with big cigars, bigger pinky rings, and still-bigger-breasted companions, “floozies” was the word.
The first time I went to Patsy’s, with Sinatra, Sanicola, Van Heusen, and some of their own floozies (Mr. S liked to travel in a pack), some big guy said “Who’s the nigger?” I’d never seen Mr. S give a look that could kill like that before. By the time we reached our table, I looked up again and that guy was gone. His whole table was gone. And I never heard the “n” word in Patsy’s again, though I never saw any other brothers, other than Sammy, in there until the sixties.
In Los Angeles, Mr. S’s favorite hangout was another Patsy’s (no relation). This was Patsy d’Amore’s Villa Capri in Hollywood, one of the rare Southern California outposts for authentic New York / New Jersey red-sauced Italian food, the food Mr. S had grown up on in Hoboken. Patsy d’Amore (they mispronounced it “dee-amor,” Hoboken-style) had a genuine New York wood-fired pizza oven. What’s more, he delivered, and we used him all the time to cater parties. And the fancy, real dishes I had learned to make in Italy? Fugged-abboudit! Same with Romanoff’s, which Mr. S might use for dates with movie stars and moguls, but which he felt was way too hoitytoity for normal wear and tear. He and Mike Romanoff, while cordial, would bond only after Humphrey Bogart died. The Villa Capri was the scene of the fiasco that ended Mr. S’s friendship with Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. Perhaps the biggest thing the two men had in common, bigger than their Italian-ness, bigger than their stardom, bigger than their gargantuan cocks (Joe was supposedly the Milton Berle of swat), was their amorous travails at the hands of their goddess wives. Frank had been there first with Ava. He knew precisely the hell that the Clipper was going through with Marilyn. He also knew how insanely, murderously jealous these women could make their men, precisely because there were always other men, thousands, millions of other men waiting, drooling in the wings. Not that either guy would ever mention his amorous problems to the other. Each was way too macho to whine about love. Whenever I was around them, they’d only talk about sports, usually boxing and never baseball. That was a cornerstone of the Sinatra conversational philosophy: never talk to a pro about his job when he was off duty. So he wouldn’t talk to Lionel Hampton about vibes and he wouldn’t talk to Joe DiMaggio about Louisville Sluggers.
So here they were in 1954 at the Villa Capri, Frank still mooning over Ava, Joe in a state of shock over Marilyn just divorcing him on grounds of “cruel indifference” though neither actually referring to their tribulations. Yet Mr. S liked to talk about Joe’s Marilyn problems with me. It seemed to make him feel better that he wasn’t the only Dago superstar in the doghouse of love. The charge of “cruel indifference” was a laugh, Mr. S had told me. The Dago Slugger was anything but indifferent. He was blind with rage at the way his wife was being used as national cheesecake, what with that porno shot of the subway gust blowing her skirt over her head in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. Wilder had described the scene to Sinatra, said you could see Marilyn’s pussy through her white panties. Mr. S arranged a prerelease screening at a friend’s house, not the Goetzes, they were too square, looking for Marilyn’s pussy. It sounded like the Basic Instinct of its day, but it was all quite innocent. No pussy made it to the screen, barely a flash of panties. But Joe was still bent out of shape. And for all their awful fights and all the
whispers that Joltin’ Joe was a wife batterer, the man was deeply in love. He wanted her back, and he believed she would come back if he fought hard enough. This man was the ultimate champion; he was not a quitter.
Mr. S knew and liked Marilyn, and he would come to love her, well, almost love her himself, but right now he was there for his hero. Mr. S indirectly pushed Joe to go and get her. He did this by hiring a private eye buddy (he had more than a few) to track Marilyn as a gift for Joe. That was the present for the star who had everything, his own private eye. That night at Villa Capri (I wasn’t there, but I heard it all from Mr. S later) the dick called and said he had hit paydirt. Marilyn was shacking up with her drama coach. Acting lessons, my ass! Frank and Joe plus Hank Sanicola, who apparently were totally looped at this point, were going to stand up for Marilyn’s honor, which was more than she ever did. These Old World Dago men of respect were going to throw this clown out, show Marilyn the error of her ways, show her how much the Clipper cared about her. However, when they joined up with the dick and his aides and the whole gang descended on the love nest and kicked down the door, all they found was an old lady in bed by herself. They got the wrong apartment. The right apartment was the one directly upstairs, the home of another member of Marilyn’s drama class, who was letting Marilyn and her coach do a “cold reading” there. The old lady went on to sue Sinatra and DiMaggio.
It was deeply embarrassing. Mr. S didn’t even talk about it at first, he was so humiliated. It seemed to me like a Keystone Kops comedy, but to Mr. S it was no laughing matter. The last thing he ever wanted was to be made a fool of like this. It was his detective, hence his fault, even if the detective was on the right track and had made an honest mistake. Mr. S would take a dishonest score over an honest mistake any day. He never used the detective again, and he blacklisted him with all his friends. It was tough for a Hollywood dick to survive under that cloud. The mistakenly raided woman got paid off, but Joe began to suspect Frank, like every other man, had his own designs on Marilyn and had set up the whole raid to destroy things with Joe, so Sinatra could have her himself. Mr. S thought Joe was preposterously paranoid, even more paranoid than he was about Ava. But as the years went by, and Mr. S got closer to Marilyn, and then introduced her to the Kennedys, treating her, in Joe’s eyes, as power catnip, no better than the whore Judy Campbell, Joe cut Frank completely. He later would blame him for the death of the woman he loved and would never forgive him. So much for Dago solidarity. Joe was replaced by famed player and coach Leo Durocher as Mr. S’s “baseball friend.”
Most of the time, however, as long as they weren’t competing over some girl, which could make enemies out of brothers, the Italians did stick together. One of Mr. S’s favorite “old neighborhood” guys was Skinny D’Amato, who was also a great friend of Joe DiMaggio. Skinny was the Toots Shor of New Jersey, the perfect host who never charged his famous guests. He was also a great impresario. Playing his 500 Club in Atlantic City was like playing the Colosseum in ancient Rome. It was the big ticket in the Garden State. It seemed like Valhalla to Mr. S when he was starting out, just as the Yankee Clipper seemed like Zeus. And now the boy could walk on Mount Olympus with his gods, and Skinny was the god of nightclubs. Normally among the Italian guys, Skinny would have been a fat slob. They liked to give each other reverse names. But Skinny, whose real name was Paul, was really skinny. He looked more like a senator, very distinguished, fine clothes and bearing. I guess he had come a long way from the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where he had done time for white slavery. To Mr. S that sentence was hardly a blot on his record, but rather a red badge of courage. It proved why Skinny had a way with the ladies; he always treated Mr. S and his crew to amazing hookers. At Lewisburg Skinny had made great life contacts, especially with some Philadelphia crime lords who set him up after parole as their front man at the “Five.” It was also at Lewisburg where Skinny made the connections that led 500 Club patron and Prohibition bootleg supplier Joseph Kennedy to turn to him when he needed to find out whom to bribe to ensure that his son would win the 1960 West Virginia primary. Skinny was Kennedy’s “bag man” in the state, and, that, too, became a mark of honor.
In the same way that Skinny never charged Frank, Frank never charged Skinny. I’m sure Skinny paid Mr. S for his performances in the dark ages of the early fifties when few others would book him. But once the man was back on top, he would perform five shows a night for nothing but the honor of being there. On my first trip with Mr. S to Atlantic City, it was like a homecoming celebration. Here was Jersey’s favorite son, and they all came out to cheer him. We took a whole floor at the Claridge Hotel on the Boardwalk, which was wall-to-wall beauties courtesy of Skinny. I would have thought that after five shows, at five in the morning Mr. S would have liked to get back to the Claridge and the ladies or at least to sleep. No way. He was home, and he was wired. We went down to the black belt of clubs on Kentucky Avenue, places with names like Timbuktu and Club Harlem, to a place called Grace’s Little Belmont to visit Sammy Davis Jr.’s terrific mom, Baby Sanchez, who still ran the bar there. “Sammy’s Mammy,” Dean called her. Mr. S was passing out fresh hundred-dollar bills, like Rockefeller with his dimes, to everyone, waiters, patrons, winos on the street, guys in the band. I’ve never seen anyone so happy to be in one place. And he always gave credit where credit was due. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Skinny.”
That same trip to Atlantic City, Mr. S took me to Hoboken to meet his mother and father, Dolly and Marty. The first thing she says, right in front of me, is “You never told me he was a nigger! Who do you think you are, Ashley Wilkes?” Mr. S was embarrassed, like any kid would be with his mom. I had no idea what to do, to run for cover or what. Then she gives me this big hug and kiss and welcomes me into her home. That was the way Dolly was. She was a chubby, bubbly dynamo with a big mouth and an even bigger heart. She said whatever came to her mind, no censorship. She may have been something of a local politician, yet she was anything but diplomatic. Hoboken, when Mr. S was growing up, was one big race riot. The Germans and Irish, who ran the place, hated the Jews, who were up and coming, who hated the Italians, who were down and out, who hated the blacks, who were nowhere at all, and so on.
Everybody hated everybody. It was nothing personal. Because once you were a friend, that’s what you were, not a black or a Jew or a Dago, but a friend. So if Frank liked me, Dolly liked me, and she quickly adopted me as her second son, her “Jigsilian,” which was Dolly-ese for black Sicilian. She took me into the kitchen with her, taught me how to cook Jersey-style braciole, scarpariello, cannoli, though she lamented, like any loving mother, how little her boy would eat. She’d lament a lot, despite his vast success, all the basic stuff, his family, his home life, or lack thereof. She adored Ava, I think, maybe more than Nancy. Dolly had stayed close to Nancy on account of the kids. But Dolly understood her son’s compulsive need for glamour and action. Because Dolly was, if anything, a realist, she knew Nancy wasn’t going to work but hoped that, if her son got his act together and got over the Don Giovanni part, the Ava thing could work. She made me her emissary in trying to talk sense to him, not that that ever did any good.
I could see from meeting his mom exactly where Mr. S got his verve and his sass from. She should have been on stage. If she had, Marty, his father, would have been hiding in the wings, cringing. A boxer who became a fireman, Marty called his son “Mr. Big Shot,” as if he still thought Frank was crazy to try to get into show business. Marty was a tough, quiet, little guy, the kind you see playing cards all day in those Italian social clubs in Little Italy. He was Old World, a little bit of Palermo in Victorian, run-down Hoboken. Marty had seen how his boy had almost lost it all once, and you could see he was afraid he could lose it all again. Take nothing for granted that comes too easy, that was his philosophy. That was why he had gone to the firehouse every day, even when his son would have gladly bought him ten firehouses. Dolly (whose heritage was Genoese) gave her only child unconditiona
l love, but Marty, superstitious Sicilian that he was, would never give up his doubts. I could see the pain in Mr. S’s face from his inability to get his father, of all people, to believe in him. In his own way, without meaning it, Marty Sinatra made him feel just as bad as Sam Spiegel had. As a result, Mr. S spent much more time talking to his mother, whom he’d call almost every day, like his kids, than his father.
Despite an awkwardness with Marty, Mr. S was great to his parents, whom he addressed as “Mom” and “Pop.” He paid for everything for them, though Marty was much prouder than Dolly about taking money. Mr. S would secretly slip three or four hundred-dollar bills in his father’s coat, so Marty could buy drinks for everyone down at the old bar he hung out in. He’d drag his parents to all his New York music openings and proudly show them off to his high and mighty friends. This was one man who wasn’t embarrassed by where he came from, though Marty and Dolly may have been embarrassed by where he ended up. They despised everything about Hollywood and generally refused to let Frank fly them out to his gala film premieres or Vegas debuts. He begged his parents to let him set them up in high style in Beverly Hills, sort of an Italian Beverly Hillbillies, so they could be near their grandkids. But neither Dolly or Marty liked Los Angeles; they thought it was bogus and preferred New Jersey.
Marty especially hated the food in California. He thought Frank’s beloved Villa Capri was a bad joke. Marty was actually an even better cook than Dolly. He made the greatest “pastafazool” and taught me how to do a perfect calamari salad, though he told me the squid in California was all frozen. “Fake” was his favorite word for everything Pacific Coast. I think he liked me because I was from New Orleans, which wasn’t a fake place, because my dad had a bar, which to Marty was a noble calling, and because one of my dad’s partners had been a big boxer, Kid Coco, and Marty considered boxing the true sport of kings. As a result of his parents’ California antipathies, Mr. S would fly his three kids to his East River penthouse as often as their school schedules allowed, so they could keep in touch with their grandparents across the Hudson and with their bedrock immigrant values, which Mr. S deeply admired, even though he didn’t necessarily live by them.
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