So Mia ended up staying home, as did Frank Jr. The latter’s absence really hurt Mr. S. It looked as though Sammy Davis Jr. wasn’t going to show, either. Then he jumped out of the birthday cake. That was the only smile Mr. S had all evening. Adding to all the embarrassment, the next time Frank saw Mia, in protest against her exclusion, she had cut off all her hair. “Now I really will look like a fag,” Mr. S moaned. But he tried his best to put an Audrey Hepburn spin on the whole little boy look. For all his whining, something about Mia kept turning him on. And on and on. He wanted men, and not just gay men, to find her sexy, but when one did, he went insane with jealousy. When he found out Mia had been dancing, with wild brio, with British singer Anthony Newley (The Roar of the Greasepaint) at the Factory, a new disco on Santa Monica Boulevard in Boys Town, Sinatra and Jilly planned an elaborate “ambush” of Newley, who was soon due at the Sands. Newley, who was married to Joan Collins, knew that merely dancing with Sinatra’s girl was an act of treason and sedition. He knew that his impure thoughts would come back to haunt him. The guys were going to “lean on the Jew.”
Before the rendezvous at the Sands we ran into Newley at Matteo’s, the new red sauce, red tablecloth Hoboken-style restaurant in Westwood that was run by Matty Jordan, an ambitious waiter whom Dolly Sinatra had delivered when she was a midwife. Matteo’s had become Mr. S’s new favorite hangout. It had toy trains, Mr. S’s new passion, running on a ledge around the entire dining room. There was nothing but Sinatra Muzak. It was his kind of place. I was at the bar drinking while Frank, Jilly and some others were having dinner. I was highly surprised to see Newley, who must have been tempting fate by going in there. When the Brit saw Sinatra, he turned a whiter shade of pale. I think he tried to bolt, but Sinatra and Jilly jumped up from their table and beat him to the door. I expected a bloodbath, as did Newley. Jilly grabbed him, and Sinatra put his arm around his shoulder, as a prelude to strangulation. But it was all prelude. Sinatra congratulated him on his newest song, they talked showbiz, and not a word about Mia. Because Sinatra was heading to London to make his next film, Newley offered him the keys to his city, and then some. His groveling was almost comical, were it not so real. The fear was as satisfying to Mr. S, if not to Jilly, as the blood, and the ambush at the Sands never happened.
Jilly’s bloodlust was sated in June. Mr. S was at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel celebrating Dean Martin’s forty-ninth birthday. At a nearby banquette was a pillar of the Beverly Hills community, Fred Weisman, who was married to the sister of an even bigger pillar, conglomerateur and art collector Norton Simon. Simon himself was married to Jennifer Jones, another trophy Mr. S had coveted and never got close to. Somehow words, dirty words, got exchanged between the Weisman and Sinatra tables, and because it was a drunken Dago birthday night, “Kike,” “Hebe,” “Sheenie,” and other terms of endearment began flying from Sinatra and friends. That’s amore, from this crowd. Somehow Weisman didn’t feel the love. He got offended, and Jilly, who would stand up for Mr. S’s honor even when there was none to stand for, began beating Weisman in the head with one of the phones the Polo Lounge was famous for parvenus wanting to be paged on. Weisman was lying inert in a pool of blood on the deep green carpet. The Dagos got out of Dodge, pronto, before the cops and the ambulances could arrive. Mr. S was really pissed at Jilly and his mad temper, but he wouldn’t ever have ratted him out. He knew that if he had been the assailant, Jilly “would take the bullet for me.”
We all drove down to Palm Springs that night, to lie low. Two weeks later, when Weisman, who had been in a coma at Cedars-Sinai, finally emerged and decided not to press charges, Mr. S was as relieved as Anthony Newley had been. The fact that Sinatra and Mickey Rudin bought these millionaires off with God knows how many millions more of hush money obviously had a lot to do with it. But wasn’t that what all the money was for, to buy your way out of nightmares? To celebrate, and to honor all those superstitions of his, Mr. S decided to “do the right thing” with Mia. He knew that thing was the wrong thing with his family, so he insisted on total secrecy when he went to a trusted, discreet Beverly Hills jeweler and bought Mia a nine-carat diamond engagement ring for ninety thousand dollars. No sooner had he slipped it on her finger than he got farther out of Dodge, jetting to London and leaving the future Mrs. S behind to contemplate their glorious future together. Mr. S truly believed he was living on borrowed time and that the good times were starting to run out.
The first few weeks in London on The Naked Runner were like a running bachelor party. “Swinging London” was in high gear. There were countless Mia-like waifs in their Biba miniskirts and Mary Quant tights strutting their great stuff on the King’s Road. This was heaven on earth for leg men. Mr. S celebrated his dwindling time as a swinging single every second he wasn’t filming. His enabler here, as always, was Jimmy Van Heusen, who rounded up gaggles of goddesses to party at the apartment we had rented on Grosvenor Square, across from the American embassy. Sinatra got me a room in the penthouse of the Playboy Club overlooking Hyde Park, another great source for “birds.” We also went to visit Ava’s new townhouse in Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge. If she had only said she would give their love one last try, Mr. S would have dumped Mia then and there. But Ava was delighted with her low-key life in London. Her heart, she told him, now belonged to her Corgi, Rags. Mr. S even walked Rags for her, to show what he’d do to win her back. It wasn’t enough. “I guess I got nowhere to run, do I?” he said sadly on our long walk through the rain back to Mayfair.
By the time we got to London, Mr. S’s new record, “Strangers in the Night,” was the top single in the world. He was bigger than the Beatles on their own turf. People in England worshipped him. It was amazing going into some trendy restaurant with him, like Trattoria in Soho or Alvaro’s in Chelsea. The waters would part. He liked the scene, but he didn’t like the food. I’d always have to cook for him back at the flat. Late at night we’d go out to the gambling clubs, Crockford’s, the Victoria Sporting Club, and his favorite, the Colony, George Raft’s place in Mayfair. It was full of Jersey gangster types and made Mr. S feel right at home. There was nothing to him like feeling at home. We went to some producer’s American-style cookout at this stately home out near Oxford. The producer had a really bratty young kid, and Mr. S gave the kid a hot dog. The kid tried to take a bite, but the hot dog was plastic. The kid started to cry. It was a trick Mr. S had bought at some magic store in Piccadilly Circus. He couldn’t stop doing practical jokes like that, even to little kids. It seemed kind of cruel, but that was the Sinatra humor. He ate out on the kid’s shocked face for days. As for the classic, clubby British aristocratic stuff, nothing turned Mr. S off more. It was funny how he had come to embrace French phoniness, at least as it was practiced in snobby Manhattan temples of gastronomy like La Grenouille, but British phoniness somehow was different. One night he walked into, and out of, Annabel’s in Berkeley Square, the chic-est nightclub in London, because he said the people all reminded him of Peter Lawford and he wanted to throw up.
He was also horrified at the prospect of running into Sam Spiegel, who lived in London like a pasha and was considered the lord of the film business at a time when lots of Hollywood types were living there to take advantage of the highly favorable exchange rate and of the James Bond–Beatles sensibility that had captured the imagination of potential ticket buyers. He often said he would beat the shit out of Spiegel, who had so many enemies that he traveled with bigger and meaner bodyguards than those of Mr. S. The showdown was all talk and no fisticuffs. We did happen to see Spiegel and his entourage of babes a few times at Alvaro’s. Spiegel waved, Mr. S imperceptibly nodded recognition, and nothing else happened. The only star we would regularly go out with was Laurence Harvey, who never stopped stroking my inner thigh and trying to stick his tongue in my ear. “What do you expect of a fag Polack Hebe trying to pass as a straight British gent?” Mr. S said. “Let him blow you, George. How do you know he’s not good? Just close your eyes and think
of England.” Contrary to orders, I kept these eyes wide open.
The Naked Runner’s plot cast Sinatra as a retired CIA-type assassin whose son is kidnapped to blackmail the killer into going back to work. Talk about two sore subjects for Mr. S, political killings and kidnapping. Was he being masochistic? I think he was making one last effort to get that Best Actor Oscar. He figured, if you suffer enough, confront your worst demons, the Academy will reward you. As a measure of his seriousness, the film had almost no women in it, and no Sinatra trademark wisecracks. Yes, he had some snide comments about his film son’s Beatle haircut. Long hair drove him batty, probably because he had so little left of his own, and because our half-hour toupee drill every day was such a tedious ordeal. There was also a big product plug for Jack Daniel’s and a scene in a model-train shop, but this was no Tony Rome where Sinatra was playing Sinatra. It was more like The Manchurian Candidate, where Sinatra was acting, playing a man in conflict, a man in pain. On second thought, maybe he wasn’t acting after all.
Pain or no pain, Mr. S was taking this film very seriously. He was not only the star but also the producer. (He had produced a number of his own films: Johnny Concho, Robin and the Seven Hoods, None but the Brave.) As producer, he had hired a young Canadian director named Sidney J. Furie, whose previous credit had been the Michael Caine espionage thriller, The Ipcress File, which had been an international hit. At the beginning of the shoot, Mr. S was very nice to Furie. When Furie’s grade school teacher came to visit the set to see how far her star pupil had come, Sinatra took the two out to lunch, and gave the Canadian schoolmarm the thrill of a lifetime. Soon, however, he decided to interrupt the entire production, so he could fly to Las Vegas and marry Mia. He had left her at home because he expected to be terribly busy at the beginning of the shoot. I suppose he came to miss her. We took off in his new Lear jet, which had been a gift from his friend Bill Lear. The Lear replaced the El Dago, though Mr. S didn’t give the Lear a name. Being Sinatra meant never having to pay for anything, since whoever gave him a gift, whether liquor, a car, or a plane, was assured of being featured in endless free publicity. The whole world wanted to live the way Mr. S lived, warts and all.
I think Mia must have been putting a lot of pressure on him, because the way it happened sure felt like a shotgun wedding. He didn’t tell Big Nancy, he didn’t tell the kids, he didn’t even tell his mother, and he normally told her everything. We took the Lear jet back to America, overnighting in New York, where Mr. S had dinner with some old friends, then had a knockout redheaded hooker come over to the apartment. I suppose he was giving himself his own bachelor party, yet there was no joy the morning after. As we flew on to Vegas, Mr. S barely spoke, and I didn’t dare make any jokes that came to mind like whistling “Get Me to the Church on Time.” He wasn’t drinking much, but he was chain-smoking. He looked grim, as if he were on his way to major surgery, or his own execution.
When we arrived in Las Vegas, we went straight to the Sands and did the deed. There was no luncheon, no premarital toasts, no festivities. We just got out in what was 110-degree heat, and drove to the hotel, where Mia was waiting. Mr. S gave her a quick peck on the lips, but it was certainly no From Here to Eternity embrace. The ceremony was performed by a judge in Jack Entratter’s suite at the Sands. The only guests there were Jack, the Goetzes, Red Skelton, who was performing somewhere in Vegas, and me. Mr. S looked nervous and shell-shocked. Mia looked radiant, as if she had won the Irish Sweepstakes. The girl had gotten her man, at last. Now the even harder part was figuring out how to keep him.
We flew back to L.A., where the Goetzes gave the newlyweds one of their stop-at-nothing dinner parties. Hollywood royalty may have been there, Tracy and Hepburn (in separate cars, as always), Edward G. Robinson, Billy Wilder, George Cukor, but no Sinatras. They found out in the papers, and that was a slap in the face. Mr. S did stop in New Jersey en route back to London to introduce his bride to his parents. Dolly gave them a huge feast, but because of Mia’s odd dietary restrictions, she would only eat salad, which was no way to the heart of an Italian mama. All the scungilli, calamari, mortadella, osso buco, it all was wasted on the waif. Nor was Dolly impressed by Mia’s Broadway friends, such as Liza Minnelli, who was way too la-de-dah for the crowd on the wrong side of the Hudson. It felt like a cataclysm waiting to happen.
Because she understood her son’s obsession with beautiful women, Dolly could understand Frank’s marrying Mia, something Big Nancy could not. However, Dolly, who was as much a social and achievement snob, New Jersey-style, as Mr. S was, thought Mia was beneath Frank’s station. He deserved a major movie star. In Dolly’s view, Marilyn Monroe would have been the right girl for her famous son. So what that Marilyn couldn’t cook? Neither could Mia, and at least Marilyn liked to eat. Dolly took me aside and said, with a combination of annoyance and defeat, “She’s a little nothing. Is that the best he can do?” Dolly didn’t believe Mia would amount to anything. This time she was wrong in underestimating her.
Big Nancy was too polite to complain to me about Mia. Her approach, as before, was a disrespectful silence. She didn’t berate Frank for what Big Nancy’s maid told me her boss saw as a sneaky, cowardly “Pearl Harbor” approach to the marriage. Big Nancy had this view of herself as Mr. S’s only legitimate wife. All the rest was a Hollywood show. That he now had taken this child bride, behind Nancy’s back to boot, was the cruelest insult he could have dealt her. The girls, while supporting their mother, both thought Mia was totally cool, and would try to hang out with her as much as they could, without rubbing it in Big Nancy’s face.
Mr. S simply couldn’t deal with the whole thing. He escaped to London, taking Mia with us to the Grosvenor Square flat. And there the troubles began. Mia knew far more people in England than Frank, including half the rock stars on the radio, and she wanted to see all of them. Mr. S wanted to see all of them dead, so that was a big conflict. Now Mr. S refused to go out at all, for fear of Mia’s running into her young hipster friends. So she became his Prisoner of Zenda. Mia would stand at the window staring out across the square at the ugly modern American embassy with its huge and scary American eagle sculpture perched on top of it as in some monster movie. She reminded me of a teen who had been grounded by her folks. There was so much action in London, she complained to me, and her husband was “an old fuddy-duddy.” She never said that to him. Mr. S never mentioned anything to me, that wasn’t his style, to bellyache about his new bride. But he didn’t seem happy. Neither Frank nor Mia acted like a blissful newlywed. Mr. S may have wanted to walk across Hyde Park and cry on Ava’s nearby shoulder, but she told me, on my own occasional visits to Ennismore Gardens to walk her Corgis with her, that she wouldn’t have it. He made his bed, let him sleep in it, she said. And so he did. There were few displays of affection outside the closed door of the bedroom, where Frank and Mia did spend most of their time together. Once shooting resumed on Naked Runner, the picture seemed to fall apart. Mr. S was both testy and unfocused. He was sleepwalking through his part, and the times when he would wake up, he would go into a rage. I felt sorry for the director, who was half in tears all the time.
Every weekend we would take the jet and go visit some rich old fart, like Jack Warner, who had a villa on the French Riviera. The idea was to keep Mia away from young and therefore bad influences. Eventually, Mr. S got the brilliant idea to shoot the rest of the movie in Palm Springs, which was kind of a stretch substituting for the green and gray of East Germany that the story required. “It’s my picture and I’ll shoot where I want to,” was Mr. S’s dictatorial attitude. When Brad Dexter, who was titular producer of the opus, tried to speak up for the “integrity” of the film, Mr. S basically cut him off and never spoke to him again, sending his hatchet man Mickey Rudin to do the dirty work. An even bigger hatchet was taken to the film by the critics, who saw it for the incoherent jumble it ended up being. So much for Mr. S’s Oscar plans. At this point in his life, he was in such a deep depression that he seemed ready, willing,
and able to self-destruct.
One thing Frank Sinatra missed terribly was the excitement of being a political kingmaker that he had tasted in the JFK election, before being stabbed in the back by the kings and princes he had made. With Lyndon Johnson in office, Yankee Dagos couldn’t have been less welcome in Washington, D.C. Mr. S was a fighter who had been barred from the ring. He knew he was the champ; all he wanted was the chance to prove it. He got that chance in 1966 in the California gubernatorial campaign. The Democratic candidate was incumbent Pat Brown, who asked for Sinatra’s help against his Hollywood challenger Ronald Reagan, in his first bid for public office. Mr. S was apoplectic that a bozo, or Bonzo, like Reagan would have the audacity to run for any office higher than dogcatcher. If anyone in Hollywood should be governor, it was Mr. S. Besides, at the time, Sinatra was still a liberal. He saw Reagan as a right-wing John Bircher, a Pacific Palisades Klansman. He also made fun of Nancy Reagan as both a failed actress and a failed Sinatra groupie (he claimed she had come on to him as a starlet in the forties, and he had said no), plus she had fire-hydrant legs. This election was a piece of cake. Just look at the entertainment lineup of Mr. S’s Democratic superstars versus the Republican lineup: Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Pat Boone. It didn’t seem close. It wasn’t. Reagan won handily. Once again, Mr. S ate humble pie.
The only place where Sinatra could get the respect he deserved was at his desert fiefdom, the Sands. But even in Vegas, the times were beginning to change. Sinatra’s first engagement as a new husband saw him sinking to a new low in tasteless humor. With Mia in the audience in front of the stage, Mr. S began a routine about his wife that was more appropriate for Henny Youngman (“Take my wife…”). He introduced Mia saying, “Finally I found a broad I can cheat on.” He didn’t stop at Mia. He joked that Sammy wasn’t there because he was at his own opening, of a gas station in Watts that sold three varieties of petrol: regular, ethyl, and burn, baby, burn. As noted before, comedy wasn’t Mr. S’s forte, though that didn’t stop him from trying. He came up with these routines himself. Because he was Frank Sinatra, the audiences would laugh, if only as a knee-jerk reaction, and often with their jaws dropping in bewilderment.
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