Mr. S didn’t play particularly well in the land of his ancestors. To begin with, he had no interest in visiting the Sicilian village where his father was from, or even his mother’s legendary Genoa. The people in the street loved him, every guy trying to get close to him and claim to be his long-lost cousin. On the other hand, the richer people who could afford the tickets to his shows in Rome were rude, shouting “Ava, Ava.” It could have been that some of the Italians felt Sinatra wasn’t excited by his homecoming as they thought he should be. I attended all the concerts on the trip, and for whatever reason the Rome shows were the least inspired. Mr. S threw a minor fit when the people at the Perugina chocolate company, for whom he was filming a commercial, asked him to do a second take. We were at the RCA studios, and the ad people requested that Mr. S say the three words, “Buy Perugina Chocolates.” It didn’t seem like much, but he turned beet red, went over to the camera, and had the operator remove the film and destroy it. “It’s not in the contract,” Mr. S seethed and left. The spot never was redone. Even the food in Italy turned him off. At the Principe di Savoia in Milan, we had a kitchen in the suite, where he had me cooking night and day, Hoboken style. Talk about carrying coals to Newcastle, but that was His Way, and you just didn’t argue. You would only lose.
His only joyous moment in Italy that I ever saw was, on a brief tour a few years before, returning to his suite at the Excelsior in Rome and finding Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who was living outside of Rome, sitting in the pitch-black room waiting for him. At first I thought it was going to be a mob hit, especially when Luciano got up and kissed Sinatra. I assumed that was the kiss of death. But it was the kiss of friendship. Sinatra had met the head of Murder, Inc., in the forties in New York, before Luciano was deported to Italy. The Rome reunion was old-home week. They sat up until morning talking about the glory days. It was sheer nostalgic bliss for Mr. S.
Italy was so bad that England seemed like a homecoming for Mr. S. We took over several floors of the Savoy Hotel, where the waiters and bellmen, all Italians, treated Mr. S far more reverently than the people in Italy. At the Royal Festival Hall, we had a terrific concert, with young kid performers singing with Mr. S, who had dinner afterward with Princess Margaret, who was extremely good-looking and flirtatiously sexy, especially for a member of the famously unsexy female half of the British Royal Family. Mr. S said he loved her ass. The princess had admitted to her American best friend, Sharman Douglas, the daughter of Harry Truman’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, that she had held a crush on Sinatra for years. Mr. S in turn had learned this from Sharman’s boyfriend, Peter Lawford, when he and Mr. S were still MGM buddies. The princess’s supposed obsession had stuck in Mr. S’s mind for over a decade. Late at night after the concert, Sinatra and “the guys” all speculated on how hard it would be to fuck her, how he could get into Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle and get into the royal bed. If Mr. S had really been serious about the exercise, he would have never discussed it with anyone.
On the tour Mr. S took special care of his voice. He only drank tea with honey the day before concerts, and the glass he carried on stage that everyone thought was his trademark Jack Daniel’s was actually Lipton’s. He also swore off milk and cream. He believed that all dairy products caused phlegm, the bane of any singer. Nor did he ever touch soft drinks. The carbonation caused gas and bloating, and Mr. S was horrified by anyone who belched, especially himself. I never ceased to be amazed at how polite Mr. S was to strangers, and not only royal ones. At a cocktail reception, he would put out his hand and say, “Frank Sinatra. Nice to meet you,” even though he knew he needed no introduction. He didn’t like the way Hollywood stars took their fame for granted. He had almost lost his once, and his downplaying his fame was one more superstition that he hung on to.
We had our most fun in Paris. There were hordes of waving Frenchwomen as we tooled around the City of Light in a caravan of Chrysler convertibles. The most beautiful of these were the Bluebelles, the chorus girls of the Lido on the Champs Élysées, where Mr. S performed. A lot of them came for a big after-party in our suites at the Georges V, which was the Hollywood headquarters in Paris. We saw Darryl Zanuck in the lobby, but Mr. S made a point of ducking him. The idea was to get away. Mike Romanoff took us to all the famous restaurants. He knew Claude Terrail of Tour d’Argent, who had been married to Jack Warner’s daughter Barbara. The restaurant, maybe the most elegant in the world, overlooking Notre Dame, was renowned for its wine cellar and its pressed duck. However, Mr. S was uncomfortable around Terrail, a dashing world-class polo player and playboy, who had had affairs with everyone, including Ava and Marilyn. Mr. S drank tea, ate a steak, and left early. I had found him some Campbell’s Franks and Beans at Fauchon, a luxury grocery store that stocked American treats. I’ll never forget his opening a can at five A.M. and feeding it, forkful by forkful to two visiting Bluebelles. He didn’t get any action from the showgirls, however, prompting Mr. S to complain how the Bluebelles had given him blue balls.
Through Romanoff, we also saw another superstud, Porfirio Rubirosa, the polo-playing Dominican Republic diplomat whose first wife was the daughter of the dictator Trujillo, who had just been assassinated in 1961. Rubirosa had gone on to become the ex of superheiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton. Because of this high-stakes conjugal double play, Rubirosa had developed a reputation as the greatest playboy since Casanova. He was famous for having the biggest cock in the world. French waiters called their peppermills “Rubirosas.” Mr. S wasn’t interested in the competition. He was polite to “Rubi,” but kept his distance. Surprised that Sinatra wasn’t interested in his hospitality, Rubi, who was then fifty-three, took me under his wing. He took me back to his art-filled apartment and cooked me rice and beans. He was from the Dominican Republic and part black. I think he was sick of all the polo-playing aristos and liked the idea of having a black buddy. He also took me to meet Madame Claude, the world’s most famous madam, who lived in a fancy apartment near the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t a bordello. It was more like a salon. Madame Claude was a tiny birdlike woman who resembled a banker more than a madam. She spoke no English, but welcomed me as if I were royalty. If I was Rubi’s friend, I had to be okay. When he told her I was Sinatra’s right-hand man, she lit up and begged me to bring him over. It would be her honor to service him, she told Rubi, who said she serviced everyone from the Rothschilds to Lord Mountbatten to the shah of Iran to Picasso. There were five girls there when we arrived, two tall American cover girls, the others diamonds-and-pearls European upper-crust types. That was Madame Claude’s specialty, arranging for her clients to have affairs with “normal” girls who would never turn a trick except for huge money. A lot of her girls had married Wall Streeet and Hollywood tycoons. She was very tight with Zanuck. When I told Jimmy Van Heusen I had met her, he told me he preferred the street girls of Pigalle, the Irma la Douce-types. Madame Claude, to him, was a rip-off, “You’re paying for class, not ass,” he said.
At that point it was class that Mr. S was really looking for. He found the embodiment of class at our next stop, Monte Carlo, in the person of his Dream Girl, the princess of Monaco. Or as he called her, “Gracie.” She called him “Francis.” He and the fake prince Romanoff visited the real prince and princess at the royal palace, and got the grand tour. Francis had been crazy about Gracie since he’d first gotten to know her on the set of Mogambo and later as her costar in High Society. But because first Ava Gardner and then Bing Crosby were looming heavily over Mr. S in those two productions, he had been too self-conscious about making a play for the actress he viewed as the screen’s most elegant. Now that Gracie had retired from the screen, and now that Francis had no powerful presence to inhibit him, he was ready to make his big move. But what about the powerful presence of the prince of Monaco? That’s where I came in.
To achieve his goal of spending some “quality time” alone with Grace, Mr. S concocted a plan worthy of his Italian forebear Machiavelli. To begin with, he sent me
back to the palace with a case of special bonded Jack Daniel’s for Prince Rainier. The prince received it, and me, personally. The prince had a funny little moustache that made him remind me of a stocky version of the actor Vincent Price, who was so “Euro” in his demeanor. Although the prince was a bit portly, the minute he started moving he could have been Fred Astaire. He handled himself with total aplomb, effortlessly switching between five fluent languages. He was the nicest guy, much less “princely” than the pompous Mike Romanoff. He loved jazz, and he loved cars. He took me down to the royal garage and showed me his collection, which included Bugattis and old Daimlers, and grand prix Ferraris. He took me for a spin in the hills in his Facel Vega, which reminded me of Sinatra’s Dual Ghia, but was even more expensive.
Mr. S was so happy that the prince and I had bonded, he sent me back with more gifts. He was also using me as a decoy, I believe, just as Sam Giancana had used me with the FBI. When they were alone on the balcony of the palace after a reception there, I had overheard him and Gracie make elaborate plans to meet at some villa near the David Nivenses at Cap Ferrat. When I went to the palace and was served a fabulous lunch in the state dining room, the prince said that the princess was at the flower market. I was told by Mr. S to say that he was rehearsing. I knew he wasn’t. But he never did tell me what went on. All the hypothetical arrangements he talked about for Operation Princess Margaret may have been put to work with Princess Grace, while the prince and I were listening to his Count Basie and Duke Ellington collections and talking about how seeing Josephine Baker dance had changed his life. I felt bad being part of any plan to deceive this good guy, but they say the French are “sophisticated” about things like this.
All I know is that Mr. S had such a grand time, he began returning to Monaco every summer to be the star of Gracie’s Red Cross Ball, and to do God knows what else. On this and later trips, we stayed at the Hotel de Paris across from the casino, which Mr. S declared “a joke” compared to those of his beloved Las Vegas. He got a special kick hiding on his balcony and lobbing cherry bombs and eggs at the snooty black-tie couples going in to gamble. He even got dressed up himself, went in and won thousands of dollars without breaking a sweat. At the roulette wheels, he would bet either on red or on black, and he would win. Afterward, we would all drive in a caravan down the coast to a restaurant called Le Pirate, which was a simple outdoor grill place, but for billionaires. Even though it was totally French, it had adopted the Greek tradition of smashing plates after dinner, maybe because the place was a favorite of Aristotle Onassis, who had bailed out Prince Rainier when his kingdom was in financial trouble. Mr. S and his party immediately got into the Greek swing of things, breaking every piece of china and glass in the house before the dawn rose over the Mediterranean. He paid for the damage with his casino winnings. “That’s what all this play money’s for,” he said.
After Monaco we returned to England to record an album of British love songs, such as “A Nightingale Sang at Berkeley Square,” and then we all flew home. I hadn’t seen Mr. S so exhilarated and positive since “TP” won the election two years before. He immediately began talking about going back, especially to Monaco. This world tour had finally made him worldly. It had cured him of his reluctance to trot the globe. Like many glamorous people with the advent of the 707 jet plane, Mr. S began to look at Europe as another playground with infinite possibilities. He was now forty-seven, and he wasn’t feeling his age one bit. If Rubirosa could swing the way he did at fifty-three, Sinatra was, relatively speaking, a mere kid. There was nothing unseemly to Mr. S for “a man his age” to live it up globally. The best was yet to come. It was too bad that he had to return to the midst of all Marilyn Monroe’s troubles, as well as new ones of his own. Being squeezed at one end by Bobby Kennedy and at the other by Sam Giancana, Mr. S had nowhere to hide except in his music and in the enormously successful business that his music had become. Between 1962 and 1963 Sinatra released at least six new Reprise albums, all great: Sinatra and Strings, Sinatra-Basie, The Concert Sinatra, Sinatra’s Sinatra, a collection of Broadway hits, and more. He also starred in the movie version of the Neil Simon Broadway smash Come Blow Your Horn, in which he played a playboy, but the role was getting tired, just as it was in real life. It wasn’t age so much as sheer repetition.
The truth of the matter was that Mr. S had been seriously looking for love, thus far in all the wrong places, such places being anywhere in the glare of the Hollywood spotlights. He said he didn’t want a woman with a career, so why was he dating the likes of Dorothy Provine and Juliet Prowse? Quietly, secretly, or at least as secretly as Frank Sinatra could be, he began throwing a wider net. As I have said, he was looking for “class.” His first serious nonshowbiz candidate was a woman he met at George Raft’s Colony Club, a gambling den in Mayfair, on an English concert tour in 1958. Her name was Lady Adele Beatty, and while she sounded terribly English and had been married to, and divorced from, a Lord of the Admiralty or something, she was in fact a country girl from Oklahoma. She had climbed up the social ladder, first rung in Dallas, where she modeled at Neiman-Marcus. Next stop Beverly Hills, where she married a prominent lawyer, whom she dumped for Lord Beatty, whom she met while he was visiting Southern California and moved with him to England.
Lady Beatty’s goal had been to reinvent herself in Europe as a full-scale aristocrat. She had done it well. Tall, skinny, chic, sporty, a real Jackie Kennedy-type, Lady Beatty was considered one of the top partygivers in all London. When the party king arrived in town, she descended on him, and, well, ring-a-ding-ding. But there was more Hollywood in Lady Beatty than met the eye. She missed a lot of what she had left behind in Beverly Hills. She ultimately left Mr. S and married the director Stanley Donen, whom Sinatra resented for giving him second billing to Gene Kelly in On the Town. Ava couldn’t stand Lady Beatty, whom she saw as a phony social climber. Of course, even while courting the lady, Sinatra was trying, as usual, to get Ava back. He had given her an expensive ten-carat “reengagement” ring from Bulgari in Rome, where Mr. S was pursuing Ava while Ava was pursuing the comedian Walter Chiari, known as the Danny Kaye of Italy. In addition to being funny, Chiari was incredibly handsome in a chiseled, muscular way, as perfect a man as Ava was a woman. Understandably, Chiari was the rare male who made Sinatra insecure. When Ava found out about Lady Beatty, she left Sinatra’s ring with the concierge at the Hassler Hotel, where he was staying, with instructions to give the ring to Lady Beatty. By then, however, the lady had chosen Donen over Mr. S.
The next socialite on Mr. S’s marriage prospect list was a Southern belle from Kentucky named Josephine Abercrombie, who was no relation to the store Abercrombie & Fitch but equally posh. Blond, voluptuous, an accomplished equestrienne, Josephine was a horse-breeding heiress who had been married five times when she met Sinatra in her midthirties. Her father, “Big Jim” Abercrombie, who made his fortune inventing oil-drilling equipment, was one of the richest men of the Bluegrass State. Mr. S had met Josephine on a jet-set blind date in Jamaica and had pursued her from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to supper at Saks. I’ve never seen him give a woman so many gifts, diamonds, furs, a Cadillac convertible. She gave him just as much in return, things such as the finest crystal, china, porcelain, linens, and somehow turned on this boxing fan to the nuances of domestic luxury. “She’s going to turn you into an interior decorator if you don’t watch out,” I warned him. “Who’s the fag, now?” I had been with him long enough to feel at ease ribbing him about any personal subject, except his hairpieces and his makeup.
“If fags could get ladies like that, they wouldn’t be fags,” Mr. S closed the subject. The catch with Josephine was that she was so far out of show business, she wasn’t sufficiently impressed with Mr. S’s accomplishments. Her father was even less impressed. Big Jim saw Little Frank as another greasy Yankee Dago. Mr. S’s pursuit lasted over a year. He never took me with him to Lexington, Kentucky, where she lived on a plantation/horse farm. “I don’t want to get you lynched,
” he teased me. Apparently Josephine had an army of “slaves,” as Mr. S called them, and he didn’t want me to feel like one of them. I doubt that Josephine would have let that happen. I had met her when she came to Los Angeles and Palm Springs. She was a real lady, a Dixie belle. Josephine was no breathless fan who wanted to meet the Rat Pack. She genuinely liked Mr. S for himself and preferred being alone together with him, taking long walks or, better yet, getting Frank up on a horse, which I told her was not going to happen.
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