Lady Day begged Sinatra to get her a fix of heroin. Begged him. As much as he hated drugs, and hated what they had done to this genius of the blues, Mr. S tried to get her what she wanted. Mr. S offered money to the top doctors at the hospital, but they were terrified that Mayor Wagner, who was on a campaign to rid New York City of drugs, would cut off their funding if they got caught. He made some calls to try to get to the mayor, but struck out. Frustrated at the front door, he tried going through the back. Sinatra went out and used all his connections to find the biggest dealer in New York. He gave him a big wad of cash, and put him to the task.
But the cops were staking out Lady Day’s room night and day. The dealer couldn’t get through to deliver Mr. S’s gift of mercy. As he was trying, Lady Day’s liver failed, she went into a coma, and died. Mr. S beat himself up for letting her down. What good was all his power if he couldn’t help a friend? He locked himself in the Seventy-second Street penthouse and wept for two days, playing her songs like “Autumn in New York,” drinking, and crying. I had never seen him hurt so much, even for Ava, but, then again, who else could match this horrible waste? Mr. S told me something she had said, that you don’t know what enough is until you’ve had more than enough. Now she knew, but it was too late, and it killed him a little bit as well.
Billie Holiday’s death intensified the midlife vulnerability Mr. S had been starting to feel. He was forty-four, the same age as she. And she was dead. Mr. S was awash in fame and now power, but what, he asked himself, did he really have? Aside from myself, there was nobody even there to comfort him when Billie died. What about the basics of life, the stuff that mattered to a real guy, a guy like his father? He had a family, whom he rarely saw. He had more sex than Hugh Hefner, more than Casanova, but where was the love? He hadn’t been in love since Ava, but Ava was a lost cause. Most of his crew were now married. Even Sammy had bitten the dust. Now it was just him and Jimmy Van Heusen and their legions of hookers. Oh, he had plenty of dates, but he wasn’t crazy about anyone, and Mr. S had to be crazy to be alive. His most recent consort was Dorothy Provine, a blond rising star on a show called The Roaring 20s. She was gorgeous, but not exciting. Mr. S called her “Deadwood,” after her birthplace of Deadwood, South Dakota. The only woman Mr. S had any real interest in was Pat Lawford, though that was probably as much a political fantasy as it was a romantic pipe dream. After JFK was elected, the notion that she and Peter would break up proved to be nothing but wishful thinking. Although she and Peter were estranged by now, there could be no cracks in the perfect façade of America’s First Family. Pat had learned about the hookers and the drugs and had retreated to her own room. But they were forced to “play house” for the world, and that house was a worse prison for Pat than it was for Peter, who was a master of façades. “Brother-in-Lawford” could have his whores, just as did Pat’s father and brothers, but taking the cue from endlessly suffering Mother Rose, the unbreakable rule for the Kennedy women was Stand by Your Man.
The big problem for Mr. S was that there wasn’t anybody good enough for him. Mr. S, beneath all the tough guy Jersey stuff, was as big a snob as Old Joe. He was the King. He felt he was entitled to a Queen. A sparkling commoner like Dorothy Provine, adorable as she was, didn’t have the right stuff. There was someone, however, who just came back on the market after the election. She was as big as Frank, larger than life, the most famous woman in America, probably the world. And she loved Frank Sinatra with all her heart. On paper, at least, Marilyn Monroe was the perfect match for Mr. S. After the debacle of The Misfits, Marilyn, because of her endless takes, lateness, and fuckups on the set, was blamed for giving Clark Gable the heart attack that killed him. In turn Marilyn blamed her distress on her imperially detached husband, Arthur Miller, who, she would tell me, made her feel like “the stupidest woman in the world” and thereby destroyed the self-esteem she was seeking by marrying a genius. Marilyn divorced Miller and returned “home” to Hollywood and to Mr. S, who stepped up to the challenge that had defeated such previous champs as DiMaggio and now Miller.
While a Monroe-Sinatra match would have been a bigger royal wedding than when Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier, bigger than Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Mr. S had a ton of misgivings about Marilyn. She was a total mess. She was usually drunk, which he could deal with. She was also usually filthy, which he couldn’t. She was frequently too depressed to bathe or wash her hair, she ate in bed and slept among the crumbs and scraps, she would wear the same stained pants for days. She was too miserable to care. Furthermore, she was usually fat, twenty pounds overweight, which she would lose on mad crash diets right before starting a film, like drugging herself into a near coma for a week at a time so she wouldn’t eat.
The image was glorious; the reality was squalid. Mr. S claimed he didn’t even want to sleep with her. Of course, that rarely stopped him from doing it. If Marilyn Monroe wanted sex, and she did constantly to make herself feel desirable, Mr. S would play Sir Galahad and rise to the occasion. He would rarely turn a good friend down. He called them “mercy fucks,” and it fit in with his padrone self-image to give rather than receive. Aside from Marilyn, Peggy Lee was the occasional beneficiary of Mr. S’s largesse. So was Judy Garland, who, at her lowest depths, made major sexual demands on Mr. S, showing up on Bowmont Drive at all hours of the night for a shoulder to cry on and his manhood to pacify her. We wanted to rename the street Blowmont. Frank had had an affair with Judy in the late forties, when she was one of the biggest stars at MGM and he was just getting started. Then she was adorable. By 1958 she was not.
Judy had just returned from a London engagement that was a sellout triumph, except for the vicious English press attacking Judy’s appearance as pudgy, dumpy, chubby, bloated, how many ways can you say fat. Judy was also having money troubles as well as hubby troubles with former test pilot turned horse-breeder/producer Sid Luft. Whenever she and Sid were separated, which was often, she would descend on Bowmont, drunk as a skunk. (Like Billie Holiday, Judy would get cirrhosis of the liver.) She wanted Mr. S to hold her, to love her, to make her feel beautiful again, and he did. Sinatra had the highest regard for Judy and her talent. She had one of the biggest personalities in the business, all charisma. That had turned Mr. S on, even if her physique hadn’t. But now he loved her the way he had come to love Big Nancy. Judy, however, was not self-effacing like Nancy. She would never settle for “just friends.” She had to have sex, and even when Mr. S couldn’t force himself into the mood, she’d unzip his pants right on the orange couch in the den where they’d listen to records and create the mood she so desperately needed. These confidence-building sessions would continue for years, until the early sixties.
Because of Marilyn’s nasty habits, such as never using sanitary napkins or tampons and bleeding all over her bed, Mr. S did not take her into the Bowmont house to live with him, as she would have liked. Instead of a ring he gave her a poodle, which she promptly named “Maf,” short for Mafia, just to annoy him for not loving her enough. And instead of spending the time with her she madly desired, he dumped her on me. He put us both into an apartment house at 882 North Doheny Drive, between Sunset and Santa Monica on the border of Beverly Hills and an area then known as Boys Town, and now as West Hollywood. The building was called “The Sinatra Arms,” because in addition to Marilyn and me were Sinatra’s secretary Gloria Lovell and his longtime on-off bedmate Jeannie Carmen, who became Marilyn’s best girlfriend.
Mr. S would sometimes live there himself between houses and women. I was living there because after a decade of marriage, my wife Sally and I were splitting up. Given the job I had, both of us were amazed we lasted so long. I could blame the divorce on Mr. S, but I’ve tried not to. But the beginning of our end came just as his romance with the Kennedys started. We had kept our personal lives completely separate. I was there for him, he paid me handsomely, that was that. I wasn’t trying to be part of the Clan. One weekend, however, he insisted I bring my wife and kids down to the desert. He ha
d just bought the new compound on Wonder Palms, off the fairway of the Tamarisk Golf Club. There was lots of room, and he was one of the most generous men alive. But his eyes popped out when he met Sally. She was good-looking, in a Nordic way, but I probably had taken her for granted by then. “Hey, hey, hey, George,” he said when she put on her bathing suit and got into the pool. “What the hell did you do to deserve that?”
“I work for you, boss,” I joked. “All good things come to those who stand and wait.”
“You’ve been holding out on me, playboy.”
“I had to marry the dame to get her, Mr. S,” I told the truth. “Ain’t no play in this boy.”
“You spooks are such fucking studs. You kill me, George.”
“If all men are created equal, we have to even it out somewhere, Mr. S.”
From that day on, he would insist Sally and the boys come down whenever they wanted, which turned out to be about once a month in the season. And he treated us like all the guests, inviting us to the table for dinner with the Lawfords, Van Heusen, even David Niven and his family. Instead of the servant, I would be served, by Sinatra’s other maids and houseboys. Mr. S, who was big on a man’s dignity, wanted me to look good in front of my wife and family. He had one maid there just to look after our kids. I only began getting suspicious when he would send me on long errands, like to Vegas to pick up financial documents from the Sands or back to L.A., to get clothes or art, whenever Sally came down. When Sally began listening to Sinatra music all the time, and reading fan magazines, which she never before had done, I got even more suspicious.
I knew Mr. S’s mentality when it came to the spouses of some of his friends, Lawford, Bogart, Romanoff. He liked their wives, plain and simple. In his religion, he was capable of suspending the commandment about thy neighbor’s wife. As the King, his subjects owed him more than total loyalty; they owed him their families. Yet what was I going to do, accuse my wife of fucking my boss, or vice versa? Lie in wait and try to catch them in the act? I was getting jealous of my employer, which is about as bad an occupational hazard as you can have. I tried to put it out of my mind, and I tried to limit Sally’s visits, but I couldn’t do it to my boys who had this fabulous country club for themselves. Mr. S was great to the boys. He bought them all BB rifles, and they immediately proceeded to shoot out half the windows of the Palm Springs house. Mr. S didn’t get mad; he thought it was hilarious. That was his kind of prank.
Maybe I was being paranoid, being unfair to Mr. S, who had been nothing but good to me. I had done enough damage of my own to Sally by being gone so much. I was married more to Sinatra than I was to her. Nevertheless, the poison had gotten into the system. As did Sally’s conversion to becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. She’d stand on street corners handing out The Watchtower and other religious propaganda, and she had our little kids out there with her handing out the stuff. That got me crazy. I wasn’t pushing for them to be Jews or anything else, but I didn’t want my kids out in the street pushing, be it faith or drugs. Within a year or so we got separated, then divorced. Sally met a rich white businessman, not a Witness, dropped the religion bit, and took the kids to live with him in Hawaii.
Our divorce was extremely ugly. Even though she had found a cash cow in Honolulu, Sally decided to milk me as well. She found a lawyer who dragged me into court looking for big support payments. Their claim was that I was making thousands monthly in undeclared tips from the friends of Frank Sinatra. So here I was up on the stand, being bombarded with questions about how much money has Sam Giancana given you. I didn’t like my name being dragged out in public. I could imagine how Mr. Sam felt. I was worried I’d get a bullet in my head to keep me from testifying, but Mr. S assured me not to worry. After the press, Mr. S’s least favorite group of people were lawyers, and he stood in my corner, got me a top lawyer, though he avoided coming to court. Every day, if they weren’t nagging me about Giancana, it was Dean, Ava, Sammy, Bob Wagner, Sam Goldwyn, Yul Brynner. Mentioning Yul showed how ridiculous the whole thing was. Yul wouldn’t tip a scale. The truth was none of them gave me tips. That would have been insulting both to me and to Sinatra, who, his friends all knew, paid me plenty. I wasn’t a bellboy. I got so mad that, after court one day, when a press photographer was hounding me, I picked up a big trash can and threw it at him. The picture made all the papers. Mr. S loved it. “Who do you think you are, Spook?” he asked. “Frank Sinatra?” In the end Sally got nothing more than the normal support I had offered to pay her. Mr. S took me to Romanoff’s to celebrate the court victory.
My consolation prize was to move in with Marilyn Monroe. Well, it was next door, but we were together a lot of the time. Not “together” together, mind you. I was a caretaker for Mr. S, so I tried to be professional. But Marilyn didn’t want a servant, she wanted a friend, needed a friend. I could have stayed with Mr. S at the Bowmont house. I had my own room there by the pool. But I needed a little space all to myself, and if I had stayed there, there would have been no such thing as off-duty. So it was off to Doheny.
Marilyn’s apartment was hardly the lair of a superstar. There were three rooms, one bedroom, with hideous white, Maf-stained shag carpet that must have been there since she first rented the place in 1953 while DiMaggio was courting her and her star burst onto the screen in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. There was a badly out-of-tune piano, a few ratty chairs and couches, a fireplace that took me a week to clean out so “we can live like Connecticut,” as she had with Arthur Miller. This place was a long way from Connecticut. There were no posters, few books, a small television, a lot of records, Sinatra records, which made me sad about my wife. One of Marilyn’s few big luxuries were thick curtains, a double set on each window, so she could sleep all day. She was a much worse night owl than Sinatra. I used to call her “Drac” because she kept vampire hours. Her other indulgences were full-length mirrors in every closet, every room, “so I can see how disgusting I am.”
Marilyn may have been a space cadet about many things, but she was an absolute virtuoso about projecting her own sexuality. Bloated, pimply, filthy hair, broken nails, Marilyn could still get any man and she knew it. That’s why she had those mirrors, to flaunt herself, half naked, or fully naked, to whoever happened to be around. In a way, she was like Mia Farrow in reverse. Mia would always say I’m so skinny and flat, who would look at me? Marilyn would say, I’m such a fat pig, who would look at me? Marilyn, however, was masochistic. She would get fat just to see if men would still like her, just as she would put on black wigs and glasses and go down to the bars on Santa Monica Boulevard, just to see if she could fail to be picked up. When she did fail, she would come home and get drunk and cry for hours, or worse, she would pop a bunch of sleeping pills. That’s why Mr. S put me there, to prevent these bouts of self-loathing from turning into self-destruction. Mr. S instructed me to look in on her (he gave me a key) before I went to sleep—to make sure that if she were asleep she was breathing normally, and if she was awake that she wasn’t drugged out to a danger point. If possible I should sit with her until she went to bed safely.
“Nobody even looked at me. Not once all night,” she moaned to me after an abortive bar hop.
“What do you expect? They’re all queers where you went,” I told her.
“Oh.”
“Why didn’t you just go to Chasen’s?” I asked her. “Play some Ping-Pong.” They had a table in a back room that was one of the town’s best pickup spots.
“No, George. They’d know me there.”
“Are you looking to get laid or to get rejected?”
“I’m looking for love. I’m looking for someone to like me for me, not some stupid movie poster,” Marilyn said, popping open a split of champagne. Her refrigerator was full of them, and little else. “Here’s to love, George. True love.”
We clinked glasses. “Who’s gonna like you in that ugly wig? You look like a cross between a witch and a telephone operator.”
“That bad, huh?”
“I thi
nk you’re going overboard not to be you.”
Marilyn ripped off the wig, took off the glasses, unzipped the dowdy cocktail dress. As usual, she had nothing on underneath. I went to get her a robe. “Aw, do I have to? It’s so hot.”
“I’d better be going,” I said.
“Chicken!” she taunted me and put on her robe. “What if you didn’t work for Frankie?”
“Then I’d be on welfare.”
She started to laugh. “What’s our boy doing tonight? Does he have a date?”
“With his Vicks Inhaler,” I told her. Mr. S had a cold. Jimmy Van Heusen had sent him an additional remedy, a redhead sinus clearer. I didn’t tell Marilyn this. Mr. S had given me strict orders, under penalty of God knows what, to tell Marilyn nothing of his private life. He knew any other woman would make her insanely jealous and potentially self-destructive.
“Do you think he’ll ever settle down, George?”
“Do you?” I tried to avoid all diplomatic confrontations by letting her answer her own loaded questions. If I said what I thought, that Frank wouldn’t settle down, not now, it might have extinguished Marilyn’s hopes and made her suicidal.
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