Mr. S

by George Jacobs

  Quickly Dolly became indispensable to the Irish politicians who ran the town. They even got her a job as the official court interpreter for the off-the-boat Italians, whom she would then convince to vote the Democratic ticket. Dolly loved her political work so much that, even after Frank was born, she continued to do it full-time, not to mention her after-hours midwifery, which she also translated into still more Democratic votes. Little Frank would be left in the day care of Dolly’s Old World mother. He often spoke to Dolly fondly of Grandma, which might explain his own Old World courtliness to the fairer sex. His mother’s absence on behalf of the Democratic Party had made a big impression on little Mr. S. He would not forget it, hence his near-religious admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose signed photo held a place of honor in the Bowmont house. There was thus an actual tradition of the Sinatras and the Irish working together for the Democratic cause. What Mr. S would now do was to elevate this tradition from the slums of Hoboken to the White House.

  By 1958 Mr. S had pretty much played out his hand in movies. After winning his Supporting Oscar for Eternity, he hoped to go all the way and get the Big One, but it didn’t happen. His best effort and best shot was playing the junkie gambler Frankie Machine in The Man with the Golden Arm. He got a 1955 Best Actor nomination but lost to Ernest Borgnine in Marty. He couldn’t hold it against Borgnine, Borgnine had played Fatso, who had killed Maggio in Eternity, and by doing so won Sinatra’s character the sympathy that resulted in the Oscar. “He won me one, he lost me one.” Mr. S tried to be nonchalant, but it hurt. His major cinematic satisfaction was his showdown with Marlon Brando in the big-budget extravaganza Guys and Dolls, whose Damon Runyon dialogue about heat and lettuce and markers and action and broads was the inspiration for the future gangsterese Rat Pack-speak. Sinatra loved the idea of being in the movie, based on one of the best shows ever to hit Broadway. It was an honor, a prestige production all the way, starring not one but two Oscar winners, and directed by the great Joe Mankiewicz, who made All About Eve. The only problem was that Sinatra wanted Brando’s role, which was bigger and required more singing. The producer, the all-powerful Sam Goldwyn himself, leaned on Mr. S to roll with the punches. After all, Brando’s Waterfront Oscar was for Best Actor, not Best Supporting Actor, Goldwyn reminded Mr. S, as if he needed to be reminded. Bottom line was that even Frank Sinatra didn’t say No to Sam Goldwyn.

  The shoot was a horror show. I would come to the set frequently, to do errands for Mr. S, and the tension was as thick as poisoned molasses. Everyone was just waiting for things to blow up, and they often did. Sinatra called Brando “Mumbles.” Brando called Sinatra “Baldie.” (A word Brando would come to eat.) Although Brando had the romantic lead of Sky Masterson, Sinatra relished Brando making a singing fool of himself, totally unable to carry the tune of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.” As Nathan Detroit, Sinatra sang the wonderful title song and felt he had blown the great Brando off the screen. “He and his Actors Studio can fuck themselves,” Mr. S gloated. While Goldwyn bribed Brando with a new black Thunderbird to do publicity, and gave nothing to Sinatra, Mr. S was so competitive that he carefully calculated that he had bedded more of the spectacular chorus line known as the Goldwyn Girls than had the despised Mumbles. Mr. S’s revenge came in many forms.

  He had great expectations for his tribute biopic of his friend Joe E. Lewis. The Joker Is Wild was wall-to-wall with references to mob brutality in the music business, which proved to be a turn-off to a Pollyanna public. It flopped, despite “All the Way” winning the Oscar for Best Song. So did Johnny Concho, a Western that was the first film Mr. S produced himself. He had his dream, costarring with two of his idols, Bing Crosby in High Society and Cary Grant in The Pride and the Passion, which Mr. S called “the cannon movie,” and was embarrassed by. He was more embarrassed that he had used the film as an excuse to be in Spain (I stayed at home for this one) and chase Ava Gardner one more time, and had failed dismally in the process. He couldn’t compete with Spanish matadors, Italian film studs (Walter Chiari), unknown black jazz musicians, or, most difficult of all, his own shattered past with Ava. He was so distracted romantically that he spent no time at all with Cary Grant, who under normal circumstances he would have loved getting to know. He was also ashamed to face Cary after his endless tantrums on the set, taking out on the film the frustration he felt toward Ava, made him seem like a prima donna. If anyone had the right to be the prima donna it was Cary, and Mr. S knew it. Yet Cary was a total pro, and Frank a total brat. A few years later, Cary came up to the house for some dinners, and Pride never once was mentioned.

  On the record front, his 1958 Nelson Riddle-arranged Only the Lonely album was one of his best, the pinnacle of a prodigiously productive relationship with Riddle. The immaculate, Dutch Reformed-reared Riddle may have resembled a square accountant, but he was a musical genius whom Frank treasured every bit as much as Dean Martin or Jimmy Van Heusen. Sinatra worshipped Riddle, who added his swinging strings to Sinatra’s emotional ballads, making them wonderful to listen to without sacrificing their romantic intensity. Their new sound together at Capitol Records, beginning in 1954, helped recharge Mr. S’s singing career. Yet, for all their affection, Frank and Nelson rarely hung out on the Toots Shor carousing circuit. Nelson had too many problems at home. That’s why he always seemed sad. His wife, a devout Catholic, had flipped out on a guilt trip over an abortion Nelson pushed her into early in their marriage. She became an alcoholic, and an even worse one when their little girl died of asthma when she was six months old. The only person Nelson was more devoted to than Mr. S was his poor wife, though even that got so much for him that he broke down into a drunken, guilt-filled affair with Rosemary Clooney in the early sixties. If Sinatra had a lot of romantic pain to draw from in his music, so did Nelson.

  Mr. S couldn’t read a note of music, but he knew greatness when he heard it. He was truly the Man with the Golden Ear. For the technical side of music, and it is extremely technical, he relied entirely on Nelson, whom he often called “Maestro.” He never misbehaved around Nelson. Even though I would come to many of their recording sessions at the studio on Franklin and Vine as the designated bartender, Mr. S laid down a law, which applied to himself as well, that no one could take a drink until after the session was completed. It was strictly tea with honey, followed by an endless supply of Luden’s Cough Drops. Once, when we were doing a session with the all-black Count Basie Orchestra, we ran out of Luden’s. I gave Mr. S some licorice breath drops that turned his tongue black. “What is this shit?” he barked. “If you’re gonna work with spooks, this’ll help you sound like them,” I joked. Liquor or none, we had fun.

  If Nelson Riddle seemed on the surface too square for Mr. S, Mr. S himself may have been getting too square for America. He was beginning to feel the greasy shadow of Elvis Presley. Elvis outsold Mr. S, and that bugged him. He denounced the King of Rock n’ Roll as degenerate and vicious. In fact, Sinatra was treating Elvis the way Washington was treating another rebellious upstart from the south, Fidel Castro. To Mr. S Elvis was another “Mumbles,” the Marlon Brando of music, and what could be worse? “If I want a nigger I’ll get a real nigger,” he said to anyone who’d listen, including me and Sammy. It didn’t offend either of us, because it was Mr. S’s attempt at Don Rickles-type humor, and we all knew that comedy was not Sinatra’s strong suit. Sinatra did, too. His idea of a great comic was Danny Thomas, who was perhaps the top laugh draw in Vegas. Mr. S would like to sit in on Danny’s shows, incognito at a back table, trying to analyze what made a joke work.

  By the same token, he wanted to analyze what made Elvis work. Mr. S hated Elvis so much that he’d sit in the den all by himself at the music console and listen to every new track over and over, “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” “Teddy Bear.” He was trying to figure out just what the hell this new stuff was, both artistically (though he’d never concede it was art) and culturally (though he’d never concede it was culture). Why was the public digging this stuff
? What did it have? What was the hook? These questions got the better of Mr. S. I knew he was in trouble when he said he preferred Pat Boone. I secretly loved Elvis. I bought all his records. My wife dug him as well. But I didn’t dare tell Mr. S. It was like reading heretical books during the Spanish Inquisition. He would have burned me at the stake, or at least fired me as some pervert. So I just lied to keep the peace. Sometimes all you can do is lie.

  I never lied about how I felt about Joe Kennedy. Mr. S felt the same way about the old man, but he did like the boy. He believed in the “product” the old hustler was pushing Mr. S to not only promote but also take a piece of. It was the best investment, the ambassador hyped, that Sinatra could ever make. Mr. S had a lot to overcome. He had an instinctive hatred of the Irish from Hoboken, when the Shanty gangs were the Dago gangs’ worst enemies, never to be trusted. Mr. S had an immediate mistrust of Joe’s son Bobby, though he hadn’t met him in person. How could he trust a nasty kid, a street-fighter type, forget the Harvard sheepskin, who could be working for Joseph McCarthy one day chasing Commies in Hollywood among Mr. S’s friends, then the next day be working for another kind of witch-hunter, Sen. John McClellan, the phony devout Southern Baptist, chasing Teamsters in Chicago, again among Mr. S’s friends. What was worse was Bobby’s efforts to humiliate Sinatra’s most sacred cow, Sam Giancana. When Bobby subpoenaed Mr. Sam before him, the polite don took the Fifth, and always with a smile. “I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana,” Bobby insulted the owner of Chicago on national television. “Can you believe this little weasel?” Mr. S shouted when he saw it. “Can you believe how crazy this goddamn Mick is!”

  If Mr. S didn’t naturally cotton to the Irish, he had even more reservations about the English. Poor English, Cockney English, East Enders, they were fine with Mr. S, who had always been wonderfully received in Britain and, besides, was a born champion of underdogs, wherever he found them. But English aristocrats, whom he had not exactly encountered in the Hoboken gang wars, he feared as much as Sam Giancana on a deadly rampage. “Never trust that fancy accent,” he warned me. “They’re the most treacherous bastards you’ll ever meet.” I don’t know on what these attitudes were based. The only high-toned Englishmen he saw often were David Niven and Cary Grant, who only were acting the part. There was Mike Romanoff, who spoke with a plummy fake British accent. There was the hated Sam Spiegel, who used London as home base but was beyond borders. And then there was Peter Lawford, who was the fanciest Englishman in Hollywood, as close to an aristocrat as we had, who just happened to be the showbiz link to the Kennedys. Making things harder for Joe Kennedy to enlist Mr. S into his crusade was the fact that Peter Lawford embodied every treachery and bad trait Mr. S ascribed to the lords of that Sceptered Isle. Maybe it was the Slimey Limey himself who brought Mr. S so down on his people to begin with.

  Cheap, weak, sneak, and freak were the words Mr. S most often used to describe Peter Lawford. The two had met in their early days in Hollywood on the MGM lot in 1946, when they costarred with Jimmy Durante in It Happened in Brooklyn, a musical about a sailor played by Mr. S who tries to get into show business. As far as movie stardom went at that point, both young men might as well have been in Brooklyn, the brass ring seemed that far away. To Mr. S, however, Peter Lawford, with his British accent and worldly upbringing as the son of Sir Sidney Lawford, a British general who traversed the empire from Europe to South Africa to India to Australia, was one of the “classiest” guys he had met. Peter had the added polish of having been a child star in England, but he also had the added pressure of having to support Sir Sidney and his pushy stage mother, Lady Lawford, who had pushed her husband into some shady investments that had fizzled. Young Peter was the cash cow, or calf, and he would always be under the gun, whether from his family or from the Kennedys.

  Because Lawford was an eligible bachelor in the swinging late forties, Mr. S, still married to look-away Nancy, brought him into his circle of musical swingers, including Jimmy Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn, and Jule Styne, who wrote the score for Sinatra’s Anchors Aweigh and later for Marilyn’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Peter Lawford, like these other guys, preferred hookers. Peter was whips-and-chains kinky, and not the slightest bit ashamed of it, at least around me. He told me how his mother used to dress him up as a girl, then beat him with a hairbrush if he became a mischievous boy while in little lady drag. His remembrance of things past would get him going. “Let’s go buy some puss, old boy,” was his call to action. Alas, his expensive tastes were not matched by his struggling thespian pocketbook, and he got a reputation for stiffing working girls. That was a real no-no among the Mr. S group, which had deep respect for hookers, and treated them with gallantry. Sinatra often said to me he preferred an honest hooker to a conniving starlet. Honesty was a key virtue to Mr. S. Although he was one of the last romantics, sometimes Mr. S just wanted it His Way, and fast, and he valued the service and fair exchange the best call girls provided. As he said, “a pro is a pro.”

  Lawford became a self-parody of the high-class tightwad by never once picking up a check, for anyone else, or his own. Lawford’s cardinal sin, however, was that of disloyalty. Sinatra had confided to him, and to anyone else who might listen, about his heartbreak over Ava. At the depths of Mr. S’s miseries, in 1953, Ava had returned to L.A. from Rome from filming The Barefoot Contessa with Bogart. There she had spurned Mr. S’s attempts at reconciliation for the gossip columns of the world to read. Aware of all this, Lawford still took Ava on a date to an Italian place called Frascati in Beverly Hills the first night she was back in town. Having died by the swords of the gossips myself, I am fully aware how mistaken they can be, and even more aware of how unforgivingly judgmental Mr. S could be. It’s entirely possible, probable in fact, that nothing happened. Lawford was sneaky, while not suicidal, and while Ava had many types, she had told me Peter was not one of them. She preferred Latins and blacks, she liked strong men, and she detested cheapness, though not poverty. That all left Peter out. Furthermore, Sinatra’s temper was already world-famous for his punching out (rather having his bodyguards punch out) columnists, parking attendants, whoever done him wrong or rubbed him wrong, although I had not at this point seen him or his crew hit anyone. But he certainly had a fear-inducing aura. Whatever did or didn’t happen, the Ava-Peter date was itself a fact, and Hedda, Louella, Sheilah Graham, the whole lot, went wild with it. Just as he would later dump Lauren Bacall for getting his name in the papers, Mr. S dumped Peter Lawford. I never once heard his name until Joe Kennedy began putting the arm on Mr. S around 1958.

  Mr. S was so down on the guy that he might have shunned Lawford forever had Old Joe not put his daughter Pat on the case. After highly publicized romances with a number of other heiresses, fortune hunter (by necessity, as the movie parts weren’t doing it) Peter had married Pat Kennedy in 1954, in one of the society weddings of the year. Now, propelled by this front-page marriage, he was the star of The Thin Man, a sophisticated detective comedy that had made him the Cary Grant of the small screen, the smoothest, slickest guy in America, debonair, English, a Kennedy, a star. He had it all. Except the acknowledgment of Frank Sinatra, which at this point was in Hollywood what a “By Appointment to Her Majesty” tag was in Britain.

  It was at an A-list party at the Gary Coopers’ in Holmby Hills where Pat, who had had an admitted crush on Frank since his crooner days, accomplished a feat of social engineering. She got Rocky Cooper, the tall blond patrician and sporty, totally Town and Country, wife of Coop, who preferred working on cars in overalls to black tie, to invite her and Peter under the same roof as Mr. S. Of course, the way to Mr. S’s heart was through his libido. Pat turned on the charm. Although she was obviously pregnant at the time, Mr. S smelled a potential seduction of one of the most high-profile “super-broads” in America. Sinatra had few scruples regarding a gentleman’s honor toward some English snob who had already tried to stab him in the back. The prospect of Pat Kennedy opened Mr. S’s eyes to the even more exciting pr
ospect of John Kennedy. Presto, the grudge against Peter Lawford disappeared.

  Soon Pat gave birth to a daughter, Victoria Francis, whom the Lawfords said they were naming after their dear friend, Francis Albert. Talk about flattery, and Mr. S ate it up. With Mr. S’s eyes trained on Pat, Peter became his new best friend. It was as if the old times had never existed. Lawford overnight became one of the “Clan.” Sinatra cast him in his new war movie with Gina Lollobrigida (Gettalittlebitofher, Sinatra droolingly renamed her), Never So Few. They drove twin Dual Ghias, a supercool Euro-style roadster produced by Chrysler on a Dodge frame. I think they got them free, for the publicity. Mr. S even partnered with Lawford on an Italian restaurant, called Puccini, after Mr. S’s favorite composer. Naturally cheapskate Peter didn’t put up a cent. He was getting the free ride of all time, his tightwad dream come true. What did the ultimate Italian restaurant guy need an English partner for, anyway? Why not Dean? Why not Vic Damone? Because they weren’t married to Kennedys, that’s why. Another deal they had together was the production of the Vegas heist movie Ocean’s 11, a script Peter and Pat paid their own money to option, ostensibly for Peter to star in, but it also brought them closer to Frank. I don’t know why Pat’s name never showed up on the credits as producer, but she deserved it.