The absence of Mr. Sam created a void that was filled by one of the great male “love affairs” of Frank Sinatra’s life, Jilly Rizzo. You might say Jilly was a Sam substitute, though that wouldn’t be fair to either man. If Jilly was replacing anyone, it was Hank Sanicola. Giancana was too big to replace. Sam was an overlord; Jilly was a saloonkeeper, albeit a wonderful one. Jilly was the owner of a nondescript bar in New York’s theatre district that had one unusual distinction: it served Chinese food, perhaps the worst Chinese food in New York. New Jersey-style Chinese food, chicken chow mein, moo goo gai pan, sweet and sour pork, totally inauthentic and not even tasty as fake food. Mr. S thought it was magnificent, the franks and beans of the mysterious East. He’d say “Let’s go get some Chinks,” and you knew where you were heading. A lot of Broadway chorus girls hung out here, running tabs they would never pay. That also may have had something to do with the place’s appeal to Sinatra.
Jilly was a short, squat, square guy, but he was tough as nails, with a temper as quick and violent as Mr. S’s. His speech was right out of Guys and Dolls, but much dirtier, all “dese fuckers” and “dose cock-suckers,” and Mr. S liked to imitate him. “I smashed the rat bastard in the mouth and the cocksucking motherfucker went down.” That was how Jilly talked. Sinatra thought Jilly was a comic genius. He laughed at all Jilly’s bad jokes. Things like: “A guy walks into a bar with a duck under his arm. The bartender says that’s one hideous pig you got there. The guy says, hey, that’s my duck you’re talking about. And the bartender says, Fuck you, asshole, I was talking to the duck.” That one cracked Mr. S up. Jilly had a wife named Honey, who was Jewish and had blue hair, straight out of Miami Beach. Sinatra called her “the Blue Jew.” To my knowledge, he never made a play for her, which was a token of his esteem for Jilly.
With both Sam Giancana and Hank Sanicola out of the picture, Mr. S could not live by Jilly alone. He needed a whole new entourage, and he set out to recruit it, basically along the path of least resistance, that is, the actors in his films. When it came to this entourage, for Mr. S, Size Mattered. Sensing that, now more than ever, his body could stand being guarded, he gravitated to big, burly bodyguard types. Two of his favorites were Brad Dexter, a powerful Serb, and Dick Bakalyan, an equally powerful Armenian. Both were with him in Hawaii for the 1964 filming of None but the Brave, and both were around for his supposedly near-death experience when an unexpected undertow swept him out toward treacherous high surf. I was there, and it was much less near to death than the press made out. The producer Howard Koch’s wife Ruth was swimming on the beach in front of our rented house. The water was quite shallow very far out, so there wasn’t really much risk of drowning. However, the undertow tripped Ruth up and Sinatra, who swam over to help her, got tripped up as well. Immediately a young Hawaiian surfer paddled over to help them both out. As he was helping them back to the beach, Dexter, who saw from the house that something was going on, dove in and assisted him.
They may have swallowed a lot of salt water, but neither Ruth nor Frank was in mortal danger. However, it seems as if everyone near the incident made it appear far worse than it was and took credit for helping save Mr. S’s life. Mr. S’s modest candor (“I just got a little water on my bird,” he told reporters) about the incident was written off as his trying to be cool. Nevertheless, delighted that it hadn’t been as bad as people thought and following his superstitions about always being grateful, Sinatra gave credit to everyone, including film credit. Dexter was designated a full producer (a title, like talk, is cheap in Hollywood) on a number of Mr. S’s next movies, until he started believing he was a real producer. Then Mr. S cut him down and cut him out. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.
Maybe if I had been bigger, I might have become a producer, too. But I never wanted to be one. An actor or a singer, maybe, but a producer? No way. All I had seen producers do was take a lot of abuse from stars, about everything from the nature of their role to the furniture in their dressing rooms. How many times did I see Mr. S make Howard Koch cry? I could easily pass on producing. Instead I just kept doing my job, which I still loved despite its having become as perpetually unpredictable as Mr. S’s shifting moods. As he got older, approaching fifty, I might have thought his maturity, if not his Sicilian superstitions, would have made him kinder, gentler, more appreciative of the little things in life. Instead he got more psycho. One night in Hawaii, I was cooking a dinner for him and his guests Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Tracy was one of Mr. S’s favorite actors. One of the highlights of Sinatra’s career was working with Tracy in The Devil at 4 O’Clock, also shot in Hawaii in 1960. Mr. S admired Hepburn, too. He also wanted to fuck her. That desire had taken him by surprise. He used to think of her as a sexless tomboy until he saw her in the see-through tank suit she wore to go swimming in the ocean at dawn, just as Mr. S was drunk and about to go to sleep. He talked about the erotic dreams he had about her, about her being the hottest fifty-something star in the business.
Mr. S’s lust was pure fantasy, because no couple in Hollywood was tighter than Tracy and Hepburn, who were superdiscreet about their affair for decades. Maybe that’s why they were invulnerable, even to a sexual Machiavelli like Mr. S. They never went out in public together, hence our at-home dinner. It could be that Mr. S was feeling particularly horny and frustrated, because he was extra edgy that night. When I served the spaghetti marinara, which I had made a million times for him, he tasted it, started raving that it wasn’t al dente, and picked up the bowl and threw the pasta all over me and my white jacket. This was the only time he had ever abused me, but once was enough. Tracy and Hepburn were so appalled that they left immediately, while Sinatra cleared the table by smashing all the dishes. I left, too, trying my best to conceal the hurt and humiliation I felt. I thought about leaving permanently, for the first time in my tenure with him. Then I thought better of it. Instead, I went down to Kalakaua, the Fifth Avenue of Honolulu, and treated myself to about $2,000 worth of new clothes, and had them send the bill to Sinatra. The next day when I got back to the house Mr. S tried to treat the incident as a big joke. “You’re not pissed at me, are you, Spook?” he asked, trying to make me feel like a square for not playing his party game.
“Me, boss? Pissed? Why should I be pissed?” I tried to be as cool as he was. I had vented my anger in my shopping spree, which he didn’t know about yet. Mr. S never apologized, but he never complained about the bill, either. Being Frank Sinatra meant never having to say you’re sorry, but it didn’t mean he was without remorse. You just had to know how to read his “Remorse Code.” Whenever he tried to treat a slight as a big chuckle, you knew he was trying to apologize to you.
We kept traveling and kept escaping. Aside from all the trips to Europe, one of my most memorable journeys was returning to New Orleans, which, at the time of my father’s murder, I had vowed I wouldn’t do. Mr. S made it easy for me. We stayed in the Presidential Suite at the Roosevelt Hotel on Canal Street. As a kid I had worked as a shoeshine boy in the barber shop there. In those days they didn’t even have black chambermaids at the Roosevelt. Now here I was, all duded up in a suit and tie, and with Frank Sinatra to boot. The old-timers at the Roosevelt who remembered me as the little bootblack nearly fell over. It was hail the conquering hero. I showed Mr. S my old neighborhood, I showed him the River Road plantations that I used to run away to, I tried to get him to eat a fried oyster po’boy sandwich, but he wasn’t adventurous about food. One place we didn’t visit was my father’s grave. Some parts of home you really can never go back to again.
We often returned to Israel, which Mr. S decided was his favorite country. Mr. S often boasted he was “King of the Jews.” He donated big money to Zionist causes, and would plug the place every time he had a chance, like doing a cameo in the 1965 epic Cast a Giant Shadow, about the bloody founding of the Jewish state in 1948. Kirk Douglas starred, and Mr. S did a cameo as a bomber pilot. I liked Israel, too, so much that on one trip to the Promised Land I let Sinatra and Va
n Heusen talk me into rediscovering my “Jewish roots.” Why, they insisted, should Sammy Davis be the only black Jew? They pointed to the Falashas, the black Jews of Ethiopia, who were a sect in Israel. Come on, George, they pushed me, embrace your Inner Jew. What the hell, I thought. I probably could use some faith. I had lost two families. I was alone. I may have thought I was pretty cool. I may have thought I was Frank Sinatra. I may have been crazy. Yes, a little religion might keep my life in order. So I let them find me a rabbi in Jerusalem, and after a three-day crash course, they got me a quickie bar mitzvah at a beautiful temple overlooking the ancient walls of the City of David. Afterward, to celebrate my being a man, they took me to a brothel filled with frock-coated Hasidic diamond dealers drooling after the blond Polish hookers. Then we went to a fancy restaurant and I got so drunk on kosher wine I passed out.
The next morning when I woke up, I had an instinct something wasn’t quite right. I soon found out that Sinatra, Van Heusen, the entire group, had all flown back to England, a day earlier than we had planned. I also discovered that all my credit cards had been taken, and that all I had in my wallet was less than fifty dollars. This was before cash machines, and no one in this country wanted to extend credit to this black Jew. I tried calling London, but the guys had canceled their reservations at the Savoy, with no forwarding address. In L.A. Gloria Lovell was clueless. For whatever reason, she said she was unable to wire money to me in Israel. I had no family to call for help. My life had come to revolve so entirely around Frank Sinatra that I had absolutely no one else.
As it turned out, everyone was in on what was a massive joke, including Gloria Lovell, who had lied to me. The conversion wasn’t part of the joke. They liked my becoming a Jew. They only wanted to teach me what kind of Jew I really was. The answer was a scrambling Jew. It took me three days and a lot of fast and heavy bullshit to get a series of cheap flights that took me back to London, where they had just left, then on to L.A. Was it mean? Absolutely. Mr. S loved being mean. That was his sense of humor. Yet he gave me a bar mitzvah present of a thousand dollars when he saw me, plus a big hug for being as resourceful as he knew I would be in getting home. Just because he liked torturing me didn’t mean he didn’t love me. Or so I thought.
8
Generation Gap
BY 1965, everything about the Hollywood that Frank Sinatra had come of age in was in decline, including Frank Sinatra himself. As if approaching fifty weren’t traumatic enough, seeing your city and your business on the eve of destruction made life seem precarious, especially for a control freak like Mr. S. The film industry was in a mess, precipitated by the financial disaster of Cleopatra, which ruined a lot more than Eddie Fisher’s marriage. Fox, which had produced the Roman scandal, was forced into selling off most of its back lot to create the office park of Century City. It wasn’t just Cleopatra that was killing the movies, though that was the biggest of all fiascos, the most costly flop. Most films were terrible, and most people were giving up on them and surrendering to television.
Los Angeles itself was going the way of the big screen. The great restaurant/nightclubs like Ciro’s and Mocambo and the Trocadero, with their plush banquettes, black-tie crowds, palace-level service, towering and flaming dishes, were all out of style and out of business. These restaurants were like Cleopatra, too spectacular for their own good. The stars weren’t out at night anymore. The Sunset Strip was a dead zone, in the weird limbo of nothingness between the Eisenhower fifties and the psychedelic sixties, but the sixties, as we would know them, hadn’t yet happened in 1965. The Beatles were just emerging from England, and big change was in the air, but Mr. S thought the moptops were a stupid fad like hula hoops and Davy Crockett coon-skin caps. They weren’t quite as bad as Elvis; at least they’re white, he joked. He didn’t give them long. He wasn’t any keener on the Motown sounds of the Supremes or the Temptations, the Brill Building pop of the Drifters, or the surf rock of the Beach Boys, though he was a bit more tolerant of the Four Seasons, mainly out of Jersey Dago chauvinism. The one who drove him completely around the bend was Barbra Streisand, and not because she was Jewish. I thought he might approve of her if only because she wasn’t a rocker, but he thought she symbolized how low Broadway had sunk. He didn’t like her style of singing. Mr. S thought Barbra was too phony, too forced, too theatrical, rubbing her Brooklyn-ness in your face. He wasn’t rubbing Hoboken, at least not when he sang. To Sinatra, modern music was either bubble gum or mediocre. He saw himself as the last bulwark of quality and tradition, the one who cared about something more than the crowd’s quick buck. By and large, then, Mr. S was pretty down on America.
In view of these feelings and what a sad place Los Angeles was, Mr. S decided that he’d rather be in Europe, even in his hated Big Italy. So there we went to film his macho World War II picture, Von Ryan’s Express. Between takes he would listen to Puccini and old Neapolitan folk songs and throw cherry bombs at the elegant but pompous ski crowd of Cortina d’Ampezzo, where we were shooting. He also liked to use extra explosives to blow up the hotel toilets of his tough-guy supporting actors/cronies Brad Dexter and Dick Bakalyan, exactly at the moment they needed them.
Sometime Mr. S’s jokes would get so malicious that even he couldn’t stand them. There was a beautiful Italian production secretary on Von Ryan who had recently married a young American film publicist living in Rome. Mr. S had a thing for her, but as a newlywed she was too much in love to cheat on her husband, even with Frank Sinatra. Mr. S simply couldn’t fathom this. He said the publicist was “a zero,” unworthy of his new bride, and I’d say Mr. S was more jealous of this poor guy than he was of Prince Ranier. Every manifestation of the couple’s love for each other just stuck in Sinatra’s craw, particularly a lovely white cashmere sweater the husband sent the secretary as a gift. One weekend, when the husband came up to Cortina to visit, Sinatra ran into the couple in the lobby of the Miramonte Majestic Hotel. The secretary proudly introduced her husband to Mr. S, who responded by taking a fountain pen and autographing “Frank Sinatra” in huge letters on the back of the white cashmere sweater. The couple was speechless. Before the secretary broke down crying, Mr. S had left the lobby. The next Monday, when the stores opened, he had me go and buy three identical cashmere sweaters, in red, white, and blue, and deliver them, without any note of explanation or apology, to the secretary’s hotel. Mr. S never told me he was sorry, but I know he was. It just wasn’t his style to express regrets, outside of his music.
On weekends we didn’t spend on Cortina, all Europe was our playground. We went to Spain to see Ava. She was at the tail end of a violent affair with George C. Scott. Until Ava fell in love with Scott while in Rome filming John Huston’s epic on the Book of Genesis, The Bible, Sinatra had nothing but admiration for Scott. He was a real actor’s actor, a Broadway light married to another Broadway light, Colleen Dewhurst, and now a movie star. Mr. S didn’t frequent the theatre, though he loved Scott in The Hustler and Dr. Strangelove. But once he started with Ava, Sinatra hated him. I suppose he felt that way about any man Ava chose over him, like Walter Chiari. He felt defeated, like a loser.
Scott was threatening to Mr. S in other ways than winning Ava and serious acting. He was a genuine tough guy, a former Marine and a brawler who actually beat up paparazzi and nosy journalists, things Mr. S was accused of doing but never did. I had met Scott briefly in 1963, when Mr. S had done a one-day cameo (along with Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, and Burt Lancaster) in John Huston’s murder mystery The List of Adrian Messenger, of which Scott was the star. He had a lot of presence. I could feel his seething power just watching him move so determinedly. Scott was also only in his late thirties, younger than Ava, who had crossed forty, and a decade younger than Frank. What Sinatra hated most of all, though, was that Scott used all his brutality on Ava. He had beaten her up several times, fracturing her collarbone in Rome and putting her in a neck brace, and destroying a suite at the Savoy in London and leaving her black and blue. Yet Ava kept going back for more,
and that drove Mr. S nuts. Eventually, she called the London cops, who arrested Scott, then finally called it quits. Scott went back to Dewhurst, but got so depressed over losing Ava he ended up in a Connecticut sanitarium.
Ava could do that to a guy, even the toughest guys like Scott and Sinatra, to whom she was still doing it almost a decade after their divorce. Although he chased her to Spain, Ava blew Mr. S off romantically. She let him sleep in the garage of her Madrid home but not in her bed. Thwarted by Ava’s rejection, Mr. S, in turn, blew up. We flew down to Málaga on the coast to try to relax, but it didn’t work out that way. When some Spanish cop came to our hotel and wanted to question Mr. S after a groupie in a Málaga nightclub he had dismissed without an autograph tried to get attention by claiming he had hit her, he flipped out. He called Generalissimo Franco “a Spic faggot.” Such talk was not cheap in Spain. Protesting his right to “free speech,” Mr. S was thrown in jail overnight, and the Von Ryan’s producer, Saul David, had to fly in from Italy to post the heavy bail. “Fascist bastards!” Sinatra yelled as we got on the plane. Luckily Ava was relocating to London, so we wouldn’t have to go to Spain again. Until Franco finally died, Sinatra was persona non grata in Iberia, while Spain was even more non grata in Mr. S’s travel book. As with most producers, this was Saul David’s first and last film with Sinatra. It was further proof that producing was one career move I could gladly forgo.
This time Mr. S was relieved to be back on American soil. We returned to the Fox lot, where the interiors of Von Ryan’s were shot on a sound stage. “One-take Frank” was how Sinatra was known to the Fox executives. At that point his serious acting ambitions were just about over, but nobody expected much from him other than to show up and be the star that he was. Frank did do one double take the day he saw Mia Farrow’s underwear-free silhouette. The nineteen-year-old star of the TV hit Peyton Place had come over to our sound stage to watch one of her idols at work. The rest was history, love and marriage, then more history.
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