Mr. S

by George Jacobs

  Mr. S’s other potential conquest was fifty-eight-year-old Leo Durocher’s gorgeous twenty-something blond date, by far the most beautiful woman on the tour, or whom we even saw on the trip. The only catch, and it was a big one, was that she was a devout Jehovah’s Witness and a committed virgin. Durocher had met her, I think, as a shopgirl in some Beverly Hills boutique. She certainly appeared to be the picture of sophistication. Was that look ever deceiving! The goddess carried a large Bible with her and read it constantly. Poor Leo was in an agony that became a three-month running joke. Durocher was a totally cool guy. I could see why Sinatra loved him. Not only had he been a great shortstop, but he was an even greater manager, cultivating Willie Mays and leading the Giants to their 1954 World Series championship. He was also a famous wit. “The Lip,” as he was known, was more often quoted than Yogi Berra. His most famous saying was, “Nice guys finish last.” He also had such immortal lines as “God looks after drunks and third basemen,” and “As long as I’ve got a chance to beat you, I’m gonna take it.” Leo loved Hollywood. He had been married to the beautiful actress Laraine Day, who starred in Mr. Lucky with Cary Grant and in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (Leo had an eye as well as a lip), and liked ladies of pleasure almost as much as Jimmy Van Heusen. This hypersexed Wizard of the Polo Grounds couldn’t have picked a more inappropriate companion. “Maybe if I steal the Bible, you can get a blow job,” Mr. S teased Leo. It never happened.

  Al Hart was there to talk business, which at this point had eclipsed sex and sports as Sinatra’s favorite topic. Mr. S had broken with Capitol, over the one-sided (their side) deals he called artistic slavery, and had started his own record label, Reprise, in 1961. He was insulted that Capitol wouldn’t finance his own company in return for a 50 percent ownership stake. Capitol argued that if they did this for Sinatra, they’d have to do the same thing for their other great, Nat King Cole. As much as Mr. S admired Nat, he insisted on being “special” and regarded Capitol’s refusal as a sign of deep disrespect. “I’m gonna tear that fucking tower down,” he said of the landmark circular Capitol Records Building in Hollywood, which had been built “on my back,” he insisted, in 1956.

  Mr. S also didn’t like the technological direction in which the record business, and Capitol, were heading, with too many overproducing, meddling technicians. This was shorthand for not wanting to be forced to stay in the studio for days instead of hours. Mr. S was a great believer in spontaneity and not beating a horse, or a song, or a movie line, to death. Because Sinatra was Reprise’s own cash cow, he could use the label to discover other singers, like Trini Lopez, whom he met in the men’s room at P.J.’s, a club on Sunset, where Trini was struggling; or to give his less fortunate friends, like comedian Joe E. Lewis (on whom Joker Is Wild was based) and singer Jimmy Witherspoon, the fair deals the big record companies would not. The revolutionary hallmark of the Reprise contract was that rights to the master recording reverted to the performer, who could “reprise” them. There was also another meaning. Sinatra purposely mispronounced the name of his company “re-prize,” as in reprisal, against the now-hated Capitol, which itself had rescued his career in 1953.

  Despite being unable to bring Nelson Riddle with him at the start (Nelson was under an unbreakable contract to Capitol until 1963), Mr. S worked with other top arrangers—Billy May, Sy Oliver, Neal Hefti—and Reprise was big out of the gate, just by recording Sinatra as well as Sammy and Dean, who had left their previous labels for him. But Mr. S wanted it to get a lot bigger. His goal was to become an entertainment mogul on a par with Harry Cohn and Jules Stein, and Al Hart was his numbers man. His first Reprise album, Ring-a-Ding-Ding, sold huge numbers, and the two men had endless financial discussions on upcoming albums and films, as well as casino interests, that kept them away from most of the tourist highlights, like Mount Fuji or the Eiffel Tower. “Who gives a shit?” was the way Mr. S saw it. Since he had given me a chunk of stock in the new company, I was perfectly happy that the boss was taking care of business, keeping his blue eyes on the bottom line. (By the way, ring-a-ding-ding, which became Sinatra’s swinging watchword, was taken straight from the prologue to Cole Porter’s sly ode to sex, “Let’s Do It”: “When the little bluebell, in the bottom of the dell, Starts to ring: ’Ding, ding!” Such are the roots of cool.)

  Our first stop was Tokyo, where we stayed at the New Japan Hotel. The whole city was so alien and confusing to Mr. S that he didn’t want to leave the hotel, not even to see the nearby Imperial Palace and the famous cherry blossoms that were just starting to bloom. “The only cherries I want to see are the geisha girls,” he decreed and Van Heusen rounded up some in-suite entertainment. When the girls refused to kiss him, Mr. S threw a tantrum. “You eat sushi but you won’t kiss my lips?” He felt seriously insulted until our translator explained that kissing was not popular in Japanese culture. “You call that culture?” he snickered. We played a huge, packed arena at the Mikado Theatre, and Mr. S was given a solid-gold key to the city, which softened him up a bit to a country that he continued to distrust as a World War II enemy. “How the fuck can you trust anyone who eats raw fish?” he defended his position. Still, his generosity toward any needy soul was immune to any tinge of chauvinism or racism.

  One thing Mr. S did religiously was read the local English-language newspaper. On our first day in Japan, he saw a story about a group of struggling, nearly starving Buddhist priests in a remote mountain monastery near Mount Fuji. He decided he would help them. He chartered a helicopter to fly up to see them. When the fog was too heavy to reach them, he gave the helicopter to me and some others to tour Tokyo. Even though I had no idea what the signs said or what anyone was saying, my ignorance was bliss. I loved Japan. Tokyo was vast, but very serene, with lovely temples and gardens to punctuate the urban sprawl. There seemed to be no noise, no honking horns, no sirens. It was clean, polite, civilized. In New York the people were pushing one another off subway platforms to get on a train, and here they were bowing to each other. Mr. S barely saw the city, but he did bring the priests down by train, hosted them at the hotel for a week, and made a major donation to the order. It was weird, priests by day, geishas by night. He didn’t go so far as to mix these two constituencies, though he did proudly play his records for the priests and had the translators explain the lyrics to them. The religious guys seemed to dig the songs, as did everyone else in Japan. Probably the biggest kick Mr. S got in Japan was learning about a school that gave a course in English to corporate executives that consisted of playing his records and having them sing along. Sinatra was their model of perfect enunciation. What better compliment could a singer have?

  We then flew to Korea, which was run-down compared to Japan (its economic miracle was yet to happen), then to Okinawa to entertain the troops at our military bases there. Mr. S were worried that the GIs were all “Elvis guys,” and that they wouldn’t dig him. He was completely wrong. Sinatra had made peace with Elvis by putting the King on his 1960 ABC television special when he got out of the service in Germany. The show got monster ratings, because of the King, better than any the Chairman had ever gotten on his own. Hence it was a bittersweet triumph, but a hit was a hit and Mr. S just accepted it. He had even let Little Nancy go on some dates with Elvis, who was reputed to be a tad twisted with the ladies, the white cotton panty fetish, hangups from his Memphis boyhood. He turned out to be a perfect Southern gentleman. “I didn’t want to get killed,” the King told his friends. Now Nancy had married another, Elvis-like Deep Southern rock singer, Tommy Sands, who had had a gold record with “Teenage Crush” and was total crush material himself. Their romance was a version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner with a rocker instead of a black man. Like Spencer Tracy in the movie, Mr. S got over it. There was simply no getting away from the new pop sounds. The one “pop” he couldn’t bear, however, was being Nancy’s “pop.” Her growing up, wanting to be a star herself, a rock star, made him feel old for the first time. Thus when the GIs in Okinawa went as wild
for him as those Paramount teens in the forties, it gave him back his youth and a lot of the confidence the Kennedys had recently cost him.

  Next stop was Hong Kong, where we stayed at the legendary Peninsula Hotel, where the uniformed bellmen pad around the colonial lobby with signs paging MR. SINATRA. He stayed out of the lobby, but loved the opportunities it provided for practical jokes. He’d page guys like Durocher, have him go back to the room, where a cherry bomb would explode when he opened the door. He had a guy page Van Heusen saying he was some big pimp and he had this incredible brothel in the Walled City of Kowloon, which was so dangerous that it was off-limits to the cops. But there were no risks Van Heusen would not take for the sake of sex, and he went on a wild-goose chase that nearly got him mugged by pickpockets. Mr. S thought this was hilarious. “Some guys have an Achilles’ heel. You’ve got an Achilles’ dick,” Sinatra roared at him. “Chester” didn’t get pissed off. It wasn’t in his nature. He could take the pranks as well as he could dish them out.

  The other thing Mr. S liked about Hong Kong was the overnight custom tailors. He had a dozen orange blazers made, and custom elevator shoes in alligator and snakeskin. Why so many coats? Mr. S wasn’t like Jerry Lewis, who would throw a jacket away after wearing it once. He just liked to travel light, and he could afford it. He wanted one blazer for L.A., one for Palm Springs, one for New York, one for Vegas, one for the road, and some backup. That was all. Who was to argue that people were freezing in Siberia? Mr. S was nice enough to let me get a bunch of outfits made for myself.

  In addition to his jackets, Mr. S had at least two dozen pairs of fine wool slacks made up. As far as he was concerned, he couldn’t have too many trousers. He was embarrassed by any creases, thought they looked slovenly. He would often change pants if he sat down once. That’s why he was forever pacing. He may have seemed wired and edgy, but the reality was that this vain fashion plate didn’t want to wrinkle his trousers and spoil the perfection. Mr. S did love clothes, and the richer he got, the more clothes he would buy. Despite living in Palm Springs, he abhorred the notion of casual, both for men and women. Casual was for golf courses, and swimming pools, and that was it. One of the reasons Marilyn Monroe drove him so around the bend was that she didn’t like to dress at all, much less dress up. To Mr. S, the more elegantly, more formally, a woman dressed, the better. Expensive jewelry was a fetish item for him. He would have liked living in the court of Louis XIV, when women spent hours making themselves out of this world. As for ladies’ dress colors, for Mr. S black was most beautiful. He hated orange on women. Orange was for him, and him alone.

  Mr. S couldn’t resist a prank with the Hong Kong tailors. He bribed Mike Romanoff’s shirtmaker to sew on the sleeves so that one would quickly fall off. By the time we got to Paris, all of Mike’s lovely new shirts had fallen apart. He was completely mystified, which gave Mr. S a bigger kick than a screaming crowd. I do think he would have been content being the host of Candid Camera. The tailors were meticulous craftsmen, and they had an appreciative customer in Mr. S, who had no patience for shoddy work or less than a 100 percent effort. “I dig these coolies, George,” he said. “I may have to replace you.”

  That was typical of his sense of humor, always a little nasty, always containing a threat that would make you slightly insecure, then the laugh that said it was all a joke, that Sinatra really loves you, baby. You hoped and prayed. I never answered him back. I would just wait for the punch line, which was the laugh that always came. If it hadn’t come, I’m sure I could have gotten an A-list Hollywood job if I had wanted one. There was a lot of status attached to having worked for both Lazar and Sinatra, and status was all the A-list was about. However, I had no desire to work for anyone else, even the Bill Goetzes or the Jules Steins. The Sinatra job was unique, and because there would be nothing to replace it, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of anxiety whenever he threatened me, even in jest, with losing it.

  The only time Mr. S lost his temper on the trip was at his concert in the Hong Kong City Hall. On his closing number, “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road),” the spotlight was supposed to keep getting smaller and smaller until it went black and Sinatra would disappear. The Chinese camera operator forgot to turn off the light, ruining the dramatic fadeout. Mr. S went crazy, smashing up not only his dressing rooms, but also his Peninsula suite. He didn’t need Jack Daniel’s to stoke his incompetence rages, though the Jack did add fuel to the fire. They said rock bands were hard on hotels, but Mr. S was worse, both foreign and domestic, wherever mistakes were made, whether on the stage, as in Hong Kong, or overcooking a room-service steak in Chicago. “Fucking slant-eye Chink bastards,” he’d shout and rip up a priceless antique screen or shatter a Ming vase. The guy got off on breaking things, as if it were sex. The only good part for me was that I stopped worrying about being replaced by a coolie. I’d just stand back with my mouth shut, watch this private version of Demolition Derby, and help the chambermaids pick up the pieces when it was over. Telling Mr. S to calm down would only make things worse, like showing a red flag to a bull.

  After our week in Hong Kong we flew on to Israel. Mr. S adored Israel, and Israel adored him right back. Here was a whole country of underdogs and survivors, the people Sinatra respected most, people like himself who had beaten the odds. He was so awed by the place, so respectful, that he didn’t tell a single one of his beloved “Uncle Scrooge Cheap Jew” jokes the whole time we were there. These weren’t the Beverly Hills fat cats who had treated him so badly, hence his bitter humor. These were battling pioneers. He was genuinely ashamed to have put them all in the same category. Oddly enough, the two cheapest people Sinatra knew were the Anglo Peter Lawford and the Russian/Mongol Yul Brynner, hardly Bev Hills Jews. The King of Siam was such a penny pincher that he actually made the Thin Man seem like a big spender. Peter could be shamed into paying but not Yul, whom I never saw pick up a check.

  We were in Israel in early May for their Independence Day celebrations, and Mr. S was welcomed to the reviewing stand with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Gen. Moshe Dayan as if he were secretary of state. We stayed at the King David Hotel, which had been blown up in 1946 when it was British military headquarters in Palestine. The violence drove the British out of Palestine and led to the creation of the State of Israel. We also went to the Wailing Wall, the Via Dolorosa, and other shrines—most movingly for both Mr. S and me, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on the Hill of Memory, where all the trees had been planted in memory of the victims. This was a stunning and solemn place. The external beauty of the land of milk and honey contrasted with the horrors shown within, particularly the underground Children’s Museum, where each of the more than one million tiny lights represented the life of a child that had been snuffed out. Afterward Mr. S said the visit had made him feel rotten about not fighting in World War II and that Israel was a wonderful country “worth dying for.”

  Israel was the only place on the whole tour where Mr. S took a real interest in the country as anything other than a concert stop. He wanted to see everything, and Israel rolled out the red carpet. When he wanted to cross the Sea of Galilee and see the Golan Heights, the Israelis contacted the Syrians to tell them that our long convoy was not a troop movement and to hold fire. The sundown on the Sea of Galilee was beautiful. “Another few days and I could become a believer,” Mr. S half-joked.

  After dedicating a youth center he endowed in honor of his friend Jack Entratter’s late wife, we chartered a yacht and cruised the Mediterranean to Athens. There he performed in an ancient Greek theatre, one of the oldest in antiquity, in the shadow of the Parthenon. Mr. S couldn’t have cared less about the history. He couldn’t wait to get back to his suite at the Grande Bretagne Hotel and see what brothels Van Heusen had excavated. The whores Chester found were even better than the one Melina Mercouri had played in Never on Sunday, and treated Mr. S like Zeus on Mount Olympus. Two of them even came back with a giant moussaka they had made in his honor. When the trip was ov
er, he pronounced the Greek hookers his favorite of all the international damsels he had sampled, not necessarily for their looks but for their warmth and hospitality. Sinatra had no need to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Nor did he beware of social diseases. He never once asked me to buy him condoms, on this trip or any other. He hated the idea of condoms, though this was way before AIDS or even herpes had become scourges. He was so fastidious about cleanliness, body odors, excess perfume, dirty nails, smudged makeup, any hint of less than immaculate grooming, that he prided himself on his personal radar detector of potential contagion, which would call for the instant dismissal of a dangerous candidate. “If I have any doubt, I’ll let you test them for me first, George,” he’d tease me. It never happened, nor did I ever know him to get a dose of anything.

  Wherever we went Mr. S kept reading the papers. In Greece he found a story about a poor kid who needed open-heart surgery. He paid to have the boy brought to Athens for the operation, and he insisted on no publicity. He was like the benefactor on the TV show The Millionaire, which, not surprisingly, had supplanted Amos ’n’ Andy as his favorite program. From Greece, we sailed back to Israel, then flew to Rome. Until then we had been flying on chartered planes. The El Dago, a DC-6 prop, with a classic Sinatra orange interior, wouldn’t have made the long distance ocean routes. But the plane was waiting in Rome for the rest of our European hops. Except now it had a new name, the Tina. The purpose of the trip was to rehab Mr. S’s image. Somehow his handlers figured out that the name El Dago might not play in Italy. Mr. S was glad to see the plane. He was getting homesick, and the El Dago was a slice of home. It had a terrific sound system and all his records, a projector for most of his films, as well as the latest studio offerings, a great bar, of which I was the barman of the skies. I was also chef of the skies, but because the galley was so small, I mostly made sandwiches of the best bread, prosciutto, cheeses, and salmon I could find in whatever city we were in. I served lots of caviar, too. The flights were great, a true movable feast. It was a flying cocktail party. There was a bedroom in the back of the plane, but, to my knowledge, Mr. S never joined the Mile-High Club. He was too superstitious about flying in sin, worried that going down on El Dago might might make El Dago go down.