Mia’s looks, her willingness to show all, and the shock of the new that she showed him under her see-through dress, got her through Mr. S’s Palm Springs door and into his bed. The rest was accomplished by Mia’s cheering squad of Hollywood’s Old Guard who were friends of her mother and late father. Pushing Mr. S into the arms of Mia, in what became a campaign To Get Frank Married, were Mr. S’s new group of powerful Establishment friends. This cabal was a combination of Old Hollywood Stars, like Roz Russell (Auntie Mame) and Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night), and Old Jewish Money, like Bennett Cerf, the star of What’s My Line and the founder of Random House, and Armand Deutsch, the heir to Sears, Roebuck, and, of course, the Goetzes. Where were the Dagos of yesteryear? The “big” ones had gone the way of Sam Giancana, who had finally been sent to prison for contempt of court (and of Bobby Kennedy). The Jilly boys were in the background, trotted out for after-hours revelry. Basically, Mr. S had ascended to the Swifty Lazar–New York elite “theatah” crowd. It had taken him ten years, plus his expulsion by the mob and by the Kennedys, to land him there, but this was his new life, and Mr. S was convinced by its denizens that Mia had the Right Stuff to be part of it.
Taking time to analyze the eligibility situation, I calculated that Mia scored very high on Mr. S’s checklist for what he wanted in a woman:
Beautiful.
Classy.
Pedigreed.
Intelligent.
Big eyes.
Thin.
Sleek legs.
Irish Catholic.
Natural (minimal makeup and perfume).
Healthy (doesn’t smoke).
Immaculate.
No kids (now or ever).
Blind devotion.
A corollary to the last requirement was that the candidate would give up whatever career she had to make Mr. S her full-time career. Age and maturity were not important criteria for Sinatra, who could be attracted to either young or old, silly or serious.
Where Mia fell most short on the Sinatra Test was on the intelligence part (not that she was stupid, just spacey), the smoking part, and, above all, the kid part. Nor did she act classy, in the Grace Kelly sense. She was a funky hippie. But that could be changed. That was what playing Pygmalion was about, if that’s what Mr. S wanted to do. Thus far in his fifty years Frank Sinatra had never found a woman to get the perfect score. Ava was the closest, and she remained his ideal. Then again, maybe he didn’t want to find his perfect mate. He often said that his loneliness and longing were what made his singing what it was. If he were content, the music would lose its edge, its soul, its heart and heartbreak. Perhaps it was better that Saturday night be the loneliest night of the week. Once he met Mia, though, he began to think perhaps not.
Where to spend his nights, lonely and otherwise, was becoming an issue. Outside the rarefied world of his first-night, Lazarian crowd, Mr. S was as down on New York, New York, as he was on Los Angeles. He called the Big Apple “the Sewer.” Manhattan in the midsixties was at a low ebb, rife with crime, garbage, and flight to Scarsdale. Mr. S had absolutely no nostalgia for the city of the forties that had made him a star. He had less than no interest in taking a walk down Broadway or any other sentimental journey on the sidewalks of the city. Of course, I got a rush out of being in the city, just being out on the town, and he couldn’t understand it. “I guess you don’t have to worry about being mugged,” he said to me. “You’re camouflaged.” The idea was that blacks didn’t prey on each other, and he blamed them, and the Puerto Ricans, for destroying his “wonderful town.”
Mr. S gave New York no chance whatsoever of a comeback. His Manhattan was a closed circle of Patsy’s and Jilly’s, for Dagoism, and La Grenouille and Le Pavillon, the two most expensive French restaurants in the city, where he went with his theatrical friends and society dates like Gloria Vanderbilt. Although he had been intimidated by the equivalent snobby “frog pond” kind of place in Paris, such as Tour d’Argent, the nasty French captains in New York knew how to suck up to Mr. S. They would give him the Jilly treatment that their haughty counterparts would never do on their native soil. Normally, Sinatra would have lit a few cherry bombs to shake up this pretentious bullshit, or do his favorite party trick of pulling the tablecloth from the table, usually leaving the china and silver in place, but sometimes blowing it, and a small fortune in crystal. But now he was buying into the phoniness. I was glad he didn’t start making me wear a uniform. I think it wasn’t so much that he was aging, but that he had joined an aged elite that behaved in a mannered way. Mr. S wanted to fit in with them, play by their polite rules, go to their rarefied haunts. Yet the Old Sinatra was still there. That’s why he insisted on keeping Jilly around, to remind him of where he had come from and the high/low life he had loved to lead. And that’s why I was there, for the same reason. To him I was still the old George, his man “Spook.” He didn’t treat me any differently. Mr. S wasn’t quite Jekyll and Hyde, but the two sides to him were working out an arrangement of how to peacefully coexist.
Back in L.A., the Goetzes seemed less intimidating to me now than when I was a temp waiter for them. Maybe because Edie’s potentate father, Louis B. Mayer, had died, maybe because they were older, maybe because I had gotten around since then, they were much more accessible. They still “Snoogied” each other to death, kissing and hugging and flattering, and their dearest wish was for their boy Frankie to have a marriage as blissful as theirs. I now noticed that Bill Goetz’s humor wasn’t much more elevated than Jilly’s. He, too, loved corny jokes, and for all his art, he’d say things like, I’m going to Madrid to see that naked broad in the Prado, meaning Goya’s Naked Maja. The Goetzes still gave the best parties in town. Once, during some dinner for visiting royalty that happened to fall during the World Series, they set up twenty televisions, one at each table, inside and out, to make sure no one had baseball as an excuse to miss their glamorous affair. These were the most gourmet TV dinners you could imagine.
While Mr. S was embracing seniority, Dean Martin was getting younger than ever. Drink in hand, he parodied himself on his hit TV series, backed by his famous chorus line of showgirls. He knocked the Beatles off the charts with “Everybody Loves Somebody,” which became the number one pop song in America. And he became an American James Bond in his Matt Helm series of spy spoof films. Dean, one hot Dago, chided Mr. S for hanging out with the “Hillcrest Set,” shorthand for the old rich Jews of the showbiz country club. Frank and Dean always had different temperaments. Now, with the Rat Pack gone with JFK, they remained in their different worlds. One Sunday in Palm Springs, Dean stopped by after a full morning of golf and found Mr. S, Jilly, and Jimmy Van Heusen still asleep with six hookers in various states of undress sprawled around the house. Dean shook his head with the dismay of a serious older brother of a juvenile delinquent. “You’d think they’d be sick of this same old shit by now, wouldn’t you, George? Hell, you must be sick of it.”
“You know I love this job,” I said, poured him a drink, and turned on the television so he could watch sports until the boys woke up.
Sammy was pretty much gone as well, doing the “family thing” with May Britt. While Mr. S was hanging out with the “theatah” crowd, Sammy was actually in the theatre. He had a huge Broadway smash Golden Boy, which ran from 1964 to 1966. And instead of hanging out with Bennett Cerf, as Sinatra did, Sammy actually wrote and published his autobiography, Yes, I Can, which was a top bestseller in 1965. Sinatra was pleased for the success of Dean and Sammy, though he seemed somewhat perplexed that they had not only thrived without him but also might be leaving him in the dust
One of the “Old Jews” Dean had teased Frank about who wasn’t a Jew was the very patrician, very rugged Princeton dropout and agent turned theatrical producer Leland Hayward (South Pacific, Gypsy), who was the closest substitute Mr. S had found for Humphrey Bogart. Like Bogie, Hayward was heavy on the booze and loved by the ladies. He had been married to actress Margaret Sullavan (the first wife of his client Hen
ry Fonda), then to Slim Hawks, whom he took from director Howard. Now he was with Pamela Churchill, who had been married to the son of Winston. Hayward was probably the best socially connected man in all show business, and Mr. S hung on his every glamorous success story.
Hayward had his big flops, too, and certainly he would not have won a Tony for child-rearing. One daughter committed suicide, and the son himself was committed by his father to a loony bin for running away from prep school. Mr. S was fond of the boy and even flew to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka to visit him. The boy eventually got out and produced Easy Rider (which in Mr. S’s current mind-set would have meant that the kid should have stayed in the clinic). Third wife Pamela, who was a famous British adventuress, with affairs with Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, and one of the Rothschilds under her belt, had big eyes for Frank Sinatra. Strangely, he had none for her. Finding her dumpy, he called her “the Jersey cow.” Pam was forever stroking Mr. S’s back, flattering him, flirting. It did her no good. He asked me to seat her away from him at Palm Springs dinner parties. If Pam had been skinny, her ploys might have worked, but her maternal routine didn’t play with Mr. S. “I’ve got a mother,” he said. I think the problem was one of keeping Mr. S down on the farm, after he’d seen mini-Mia. Once he’d been captivated by her “new look,” for Mr. S, Thin was In.
After her “unveiling” on the Fox lot, things between Mia and Frank moved quickly. She was down at Palm Springs and in his bed in short order. I had to stock up on more organic, vegetarian food for her than I did for Greta Garbo, though now it was easier to find. The odd couple did have some history in common. Mr. S told me that Mia’s late father, John, an Australian boozer and womanizer, had directed Ava Gardner in Ride Vaquero in 1953, at the height of her turmoil with Mr. S, and had had an affair with her. Thus Sinatra had this score to settle, even if it had to be done over John Farrow’s dead body. Mr. S had even met Mia once before, when she was about twelve, at the time he was doing his cameo in Around the World in 80 Days, for which her father would share the Oscar for Best Screenplay. He claimed to think she was awfully cute back then, and claimed that John Farrow was deeply threatened by those thoughts, given his own transgressions with Frank’s wife. There was some chemistry there, but when Mia first showed up at the house with her pigtails and weighing about eighty pounds, what came to my mind were not wedding bells but the teens on American Bandstand.
Then the coven of golden oldies got their marriage campaign into high gear. Most of them were friends with Mia’s mother, the beautiful Maureen O’Sullivan, who had played Jane in all the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies. Ungawa! Mia, it turned out, was one of the most eligible society girls in L.A. She ran with a pack of beauties who had been her classmates at Marymount, the exclusive Catholic girls’ school where Nancy and Tina had gone. (That Tina was only two grades behind her dad’s new squeeze didn’t strike anyone in this crowd as weird. I guess Bogie and Bacall, pillars of this community, had the same spread.) Mia’s friends and romantic rivals included Candice Bergen; Tisha Sterling, who was the daughter of actress Ann Sothern; Kris Harmon, the daughter of football great and sportscaster Tom Harmon and sister of future star Mark Harmon; and Sheila Reeves, whose father owned the Los Angeles Rams. Mia was lowest on this list of teen goddesses; she had her own score to settle, to show these little bitches who was Number One. She may have seemed like a meek church mouse, but in fact she was every bit as driven as Sinatra.
At first Mr. S was embarrassed to be seeing this teenager. He wasn’t embarrassed by much, but this one was a little beyond the pale. Mia came down to Palm Springs, and they’d never go out. It was a total backstreet deal. The only people who knew about her were Jilly, Van Heusen, Jack Entratter, and Yul Brynner, who was hanging around a lot at the time, sponging off Frank for food, drink, and girls. As I said, Yul was as cheap as Peter Lawford. He may have been the King of Siam, but to us he was Uncle Scrooge, the king of tightwads. Mia seemed more impressed by Yul as a star than she was by Mr. S. Sinatra may have been Mia’s idol, but all she was idolizing was an image, a style, a legend. Mia knew zip about Sinatra’s songs, his movies, his struggles. I thought the coven’s idea that Frank should marry Mia was insane, though of course I held my counsel.
It wasn’t that Mia was a Beatles girl or a Stones girl, as opposed to a Frank girl. She was a nothing girl, a total space cadet. In a while, she would become a yoga freak, a Maharishi devotee, but in the first bloom of her romance with Sinatra, she was a clueless nineteen-year-old whose main passion was her deaf cat. She was like a kid in a contest with other kids to see who could be the first to get the autograph of a big star. As it was, the real autograph Mia Farrow was after was Frank Sinatra’s DNA.
Mr. S himself was like an insecure schoolboy, wanting to know what the guys thought of his girl “She’s fantastic, don’t you think?” he’d ask, and what could you say? That she was “modern?” “Different?” “Cute?” Yul was the most supportive. He was a closet AC-DC himself, having had a secret affair with Sal Mineo. He pushed the Mia thing, saying she was “divine.” Fascinated with colors and fabrics and styles, Yul sounded like a Seventh Avenue fashion designer. Mia was his own little model. As for the tougher critics in the group, Mr. S would have liked us to say what a sex kitten she was, but none of us had a frame of reference for anyone like her. Marilyn Monroe, even dead, was still everyone’s ideal. Julie Christie was the new British look. But Mia was…Mia. Twiggy wouldn’t hit the scene for two more years. Kate Moss was decades away. Waif was the word, but it wasn’t a word Mr. S would have dug. I guess he was way ahead of the curve on Mia.
Eventually, Mr. S, urged on by the coven, particularly Edie Goetz and Roz Russell, went public with his new squeeze. He was most uptight about introducing her to his kids, who were basically her age, and to Big Nancy, who he knew would be appalled. Dean’s great joke was that the Scotch he drank was older than Mia, and Ava’s great joke about Mia being “a fag with a pussy” was that Frank was a latent homosexual who was finally coming out. She knew better, but she couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease Mr. S. No one, absolutely no one, took this romance seriously. Yes, Lauren Bacall was nineteen when Bogart found her, but she was throaty and sexy and seemed twenty-nine. Mia seemed twelve. I was there when he brought Mia to Big Nancy’s to meet the family. At first there was a lot of dead air, pregnant silences. It was so weird, seeing the past and future Mrs. Sinatras side by side. It was a true test of Big Nancy’s tolerance, and the fact that she didn’t try to strangle Mia—or Frank—got her a gold star from me. Big Nancy had basically no comment the whole time, but Little Nancy, who in December had her first huge success with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” was over the shock of Tommy Sands leaving her and was feeling secure enough to be gracious. And since Mia and Tina were pretty much contemporaries, they had much more in common than Mia had with Frank. Aside from Frank Jr., who had distanced himself from his father and didn’t bother to show, the Sinatra kids were incredibly nice to Mia, and didn’t give their dad any shit about her.
Mr. S pressed on, despite an awful beating from the press, with which he had had a dreadful relationship for decades. Reporters hounded him and Mia everywhere they went, including out to sea. In August 1965, he chartered a big yacht, the Southern Breeze, to sail up the rocky coast of New England. Mia’s Peyton Place producers gave her a hiatus on the show by putting her character on the show in a coma. Soon Mia may have wished she were in one, or at least under the covers. On the yacht were Roz and her husband, Freddie Brisson, an Anglo-Danish Broadway and West End producer, Claudette and her husband, Joel Pressman, an ear, nose, and throat doctor at UCLA, the Armand Deutsches, and the Goetzes. Not exactly a swinging group, the yacht party would turn into Voyage of the Damned after a crewman drowned off Martha’s Vineyard.
Just before that, Sinatra had taken Mia ashore with the group at Hyannisport to visit old Joe Kennedy, who was still alive but still not talking. I think the Goetzes, who knew Rose, were the prime movers of the excursion,
as Mr. S hadn’t really spoken to a Kennedy since he asked Bobby for help when Frank Jr. was kidnapped. For all the venom he felt toward Joe, the only reason Mr. S would have had to go see him would have been to pull the plug on Joe’s respirator. Maybe he was doing it to show off: “I’m fucking a teenager, and you’re a vegetable, Mr. A. Eat your heart out!” All through the cruise, there were daily headlines about the romance. Mother Dolly held forth from Hoboken that the whole affair was a publicity stunt that her magnanimous son was doing to help Mia’s career, a fresh air fund for struggling actresses. Mia’s mother pronounced that if Sinatra was to marry anyone, it should be her. The mama of Mia was only four years older than Mr. S. Although the cruise was supposed to last a month, Mr. S pulled the plug after a week of hell on the high seas.
Mr. S’s fiftieth celebration at the Beverly Wilshire in December, 1965, created a new set of diplomatic and logistical problems. This birthday party was being given by the Two Nancys, and at least one Nancy wanted No Mia. Mia threw a fit, Big Nancy threw a fit, Mr. S threw a fit. That the party ever came off at all is a miracle. It was like the Israelis and the Arabs, there was so much fruitless shuttle diplomacy. Big Nancy basically said this was her party for her husband, and she sincerely would have taken long odds against Frank’s actually marrying Mia. She saw her as just another girlfriend, with a limited shelf life. This party was for eternity, for good memories forever. Why should it be spoiled by a passing fancy? At one point, however, Little Nancy prevailed on Big. Let’s make Dad happy, was her plea, and Big Nancy, ever the good sport and blessed peacemaker, relented. Little Nancy then invited Mia, but now Mr. S realized Big Nancy was right to begin with. He told Mia to skip this one.
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