Mr. S could give, but he couldn’t take. When his onetime buddy Shecky Greene made his famous joke; “Frank Sinatra saved my life. His goons were beating me up and he said, ‘Enough,’” Mr. S did not laugh and excised Shecky from his buddy list. Jackie Mason might as well have been a dead man walking with his jokes about Sinatra’s toupees and dentures and Mia’s braces. Both Shecky and Jackie were badly beaten up by anonymous assailants. Although Mr. S had long broken with Sam Giancana and his genuine Mafia connections, he still knew a lot of tough guys who liked to pretend they were made men and did thuggish “favors” for Mr. S, favors he didn’t want done. The press had a field day playing Guess Who. Mr. S felt he was being crucified.
Nothing was safe for Mr. S, not even the Sands. The hotel, and much of Vegas, was about to be bought up by Sinatra’s old rival for the affections of Ava Gardner, Howard Hughes. The mob was having so much trouble of their own, they welcomed the opportunity to unload their casinos. Hughes was the sucker they had dreamed about. By now Sam Giancana was out of prison and had left the country, living in walled splendor in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and devoting his energies to criminal opportunities in Latin America, Colombian cocaine, Panamanian shipping, things of that sort. Mr. S sometimes reminisced about the old days in Chicago, Cal-Neva, early Vegas. He missed Mr. Sam like a lost uncle, or godfather, as it were. Johnny Rosselli was still around, actually helping broker the sting of Hughes. Now that Mr. S had gone the way of the Goetzes, he and Rosselli never crossed paths. Besides, after Cal-Neva and the split with Giancana, Rosselli was probably under mob pressure to give Sinatra the silent treatment.
An even worse treatment for Mr. S was the humiliation of having his credit cut off at the Sands, the House that Frank Built, but now it was Hughes’s house. The Apollo astronauts, heroes of Mr. S’s, had come to see his show. It was a total mutual-admiration society. The astronauts were completely snowed, particularly when Mr. S sang “Fly Me to the Moon” for them. Sinatra wanted to further show off by staking the moonmen to bets at the tables. But all bets were off. Again I stood back as Mr. S went wild. He hijacked one of the golf carts that the bellhops used, put Mia in shotgun, and proceeded to play bumper cars with everything in the lobby before crashing the cart into the all-glass entrance. He didn’t intend to drive through the glass, for that would have put him and Mia at a risk even he, in his worst rage, wouldn’t have taken. But the cart, like Sinatra, went out of control and hit the window, shattering it but not going through it, as the press reported for more dramatic effect. Somehow, neither Frank nor Mia was hurt in the demolition derby. He then tried to do a burn, baby, burn number to some couches and drapes in the lobby, which, luckily, didn’t catch. When Mr. S failed to light his, or anyone else’s fire, he took Mia and left. During the tantrum, no one, no guard, no clerk, dared to interfere with him. They still treated him as if he owned the place and had the right to destroy it if he wanted to.
If Jack Entratter, who was still managing the Sands but was somehow away from the place that night, had been around, this scene would have never happened. Yet without Entratter there to bend them, the new Hughes rules were strictly enforced. Mr. S was no longer God. It’s hard not to be God anymore. The next day, Mr. S had a confrontation with Carl Cohen, Entratter’s Number Two, a why-hast-thou-forsaken-me kind of man to man. And instead of kissing Mr. S’s ring, as in the not-so-old days, Cohen, a mean Jewish brawler, knocked Mr. S’s two front teeth out, provoked by Sinatra’s having called him a “kike bastard motherfucker” (shades of Dolly’s diction). Mr. S got new caps and, suffice it to say, never played the Sands again nor spoke to his lifelong friend Entratter, whom he accused of having intentionally disappeared from the showdown out of fear of his new boss Hughes. Sinatra signed with Caesar’s Palace the next year, but this man did expect to be a prophet in his own country. When he wasn’t, it was cruel and unusual punishment.
For Frank Sinatra 1967 was a very bad year. His biggest career accomplishment was the throwaway song “Somethin’ Stupid,” the only father-daughter love song ever to hit number one on the pop charts. It was a little incestuous, but, as Mr. S said, “Number one is number one. Take it any way you can get it.” His other big achievement was being named chairman of the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League, “The Dago NAACP,” as he termed it. Now that he was an elder statesman, he would have to can the racist humor. That was a major sacrifice. His being honored by the league made Mr. S feel old. The death of Spencer Tracy made him feel older. Being a pallbearer tagged all his Sicilian superstitious bases. He worried about being “in line.”
But nothing bothered him more than what was happening in San Francisco, and Mr. S wasn’t even there. In fact, he rarely went to the City by the Bay. It was cold and it was damp and it belonged to Tony Bennett anyway. At least it used to belong to Tony until it was taken over by Janis Joplin and Grace Slick and Jerry Garcia and the hippies in Haight Ashbury whose cancer of psychedelia, as Mr. S saw it, was spreading like a stoned contagion across America and the world. Everybody caught it, even the goddamned Beatles, on whom Mr. S would have taken long odds in Vegas that they would have been long gone by now. But here they were with even longer hair and this spaced out Sergeant Pepper album and this other freak from UCLA Jim Morrison and “Light My Fire,” and Mr. S knew exactly what they were all selling. Drugs, drugs, drugs, his most despised commodity. He could sell all the Jack Daniel’s in the world with his music, one more for the road, baby, but drugs, no way. He wished that Sgt. Barry Sadler (“Ballad of the Green Berets”) would come and blow Sergeant Pepper into oblivion. These hippies were body-snatching America’s youth, brainwashing them, poisoning their minds. And worst of all, the most prized body these spaced invaders had snatched was that of his new wife.
Mia Farrow was a poster child for hippiedom. She loved going to San Francisco, she loved wearing flowers in her hair, she had every Beatle record, and would soon inspire some of them herself. There was no Eastern religion she wouldn’t embrace, no astrologer she wouldn’t consult, and no famous rock star, or cult figure, she wouldn’t want to get to know. I never knew her to have cheated, physically if not spiritually, with Mr. S, but the times were loose and anything was possible. She was young and experimental and open to everything, and my job was to babysit her through her coming of age, the Age of Aquarius.
I turned forty in 1967. I didn’t like turning forty any more than Mr. S liked turning fifty. We may not have been part of the “youth culture,” but we both believed we were forever young. Unlike Mr. S, I was excited by the changes in the world outside. I did my share of drugs as well in my off hours. I let my hair grow, bought some bell bottoms and big collars, a chain or two, even got a Harley-Davidson. Mr. S scrutinized every slight change the way a seismologist checks fault lines for the slippage that signals disaster. “What’s with the sideburns, George?” he’d ask. “What’s with the long collar?” “Are those flowers on your tie?” I rolled with the times, but held the line. I never “freaked out,” never went to a love-in, never joined a sit-in, or burned a bank.
Mr. S made a big point about the difference between freedom and license. “Don’t go thinking that by growing your hair or getting high that you’re gonna save the world, save your people, even save your ass,” he warned me. He didn’t go so far as to claim the whole hippie movement was a Communist plot, but he came close, blaming it on those insulated, permissive rich folks he called “Scarsdale liberals,” whose bleeding hearts were about to be broken when they saw the country in bedlam. He suspected a radical, anarchistic element behind the big party America’s youth was having. Mr. S didn’t mind a welfare state, but he insisted on a state of some kind, and not the state of confusion where he thought we were heading.
Even though he had never served, he was a huge supporter of the military as a bulwark of our freedom. He was appalled at the way kids were attacking our soldiers over Vietnam when all the guys were doing was their duty. Once he saw I had an antiwar petition someone had given me to sign, and he gave m
e a long lecture on how, as a veteran, I would be committing a sacrilege by signing it. He warned that the JFK assassination could have been “just the beginning.” In the next year, 1968, when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were killed, I realized Mr. S may have been more than an aging reactionary. He loved America, and he would give his all to protect it. War or peace, Mr. S also really cared about me. He was worried I’d go wrong. If it weren’t for him, I might have indeed gone too far. He was a stabilizing influence. For Mia, however, he was the Bad Daddy.
The unwritten social contract between Frank and Mia had two key points, no career, and no kids. In 1967 Mia was already flagrantly violating one and, from my perspective, calculating how to violate the other. Just to humor her, Mr. S “allowed” Mia to make one film a year. He assumed she would get it out of her system. Was he wrong on that one! She spent months in London and Berlin making her own spy thriller, A Dandy in Aspic, about an assassin hired to kill himself. Mr. S was so down on Swinging London he never went over to visit Mia on the set. He wasn’t seeing anyone else in L.A., other than the occasional call girl, so I’d say he was being faithful. Mia was, too, but not according to the press, which Sinatra hated, and often with good reason for its sensation-seeking inaccuracy. The papers had a field day with Dandy, manufacturing big stories about Mia’s torrid affair with her costar Laurence Harvey. The paparazzi caught them dancing together, in embraces that looked naughty and suspicious. That dancing. Mia should have been a go-go girl, she loved dancing so much. (I came to wish she hadn’t.) The world press’s blow-up of this “scandal” confirmed Mr. S’s dim view of celebrity journalism as just another branch of creative writing. We both knew that the only member of our family that Larry wanted to have an affair with was me. So we let that slide. To appease her husband and thank him for his “permission” to let her act, she brought him home a gift of a black London Austin cab. He hated it. He was a Dual-Ghia guy, a swinging convertible racer. Austin cabs were drab, slow clunkers, for old ladies and square bankers in bowlers. Is that how Mia saw him? A James Bond Aston-Martin maybe, the one with the ejector seat, but an Austin? All the gift did was create more tension.
A far bigger problem was Mia’s next project, Rosemary’s Baby. Mr. S got the heebie-jeebies over that one. He saw the plot line about a waif who gets impregnated with the child of the devil as way too close to his home, a reflection of Mia’s scarcely veiled wishful thinking. The girl envisioned herself, as she often told me, as a master-race breeding machine. How could a great man like Frank Sinatra not give her a child that would be more than a mere child. It would be a national treasure. It would be Rosemary’s Baby. She talked to me about it all the time, saying what a crazy, selfish attitude he had and how she was going to turn his mind inside out. She made me drive her to go browsing at all the maternity boutiques for baby clothes. We’d go to furniture stores where she would imagine how she would decorate the child’s room. If Mr. S ever heard some song on the radio like “Baby Love” he’d just cringe. Mia liked to sing the words to the hit song “If I Were a Carpenter,” “…and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby?” I think Mr. S may have tried to avoid sleeping with her at times for fear that she would get pregnant. She loved the challenge, always thinking of original ways to seduce him. Some “little boy,” as the press tried to make her out. She was a total femme fatale. The only one who knew how seductive she was was Mr. S, the ultimate connoisseur of women. Mia was the equal of the Chairman of the Board.
Mia was a creative genius at starting fights that got Mr. S crazy. She’d push all his hot buttons, long hair, drugs, mysticism, rock, Vietnam, making him feel like the Ancient Mariner for being so out of it to disagree with her. “How can you say that?” was her favorite expression, delivered in a tone of insulting intolerance, the idea being that Mr. S was either an idiot or an animal. But Mia would find a way to bring these arguments or “discussions” around to a romantic resolution. I think what she most enjoyed was getting someone widely considered one of the planet’s coolest ladies’ men so hot and bothered over her. From where I sat, it was the most passionate relationship Mr. S ever had, including the aftermath beddings of his big rows with Ava.
Sometimes Mia could be sweet as sugar, as helpless as a lost choirgirl. And at other times she could outhooker the hookers, trying on some thousand-dollar dress, leaving it half open or unzipped, saying, “Don’t I look ridiculous in this?” So ridiculous that Mr. S would rip it off and have his way with her. Unless she would play hard to get, like saying, not now, I have to meditate, which would make Mr. S even hornier for her. Mia’s favorite outfits were the tie-dyed hippie dresses, which the classically old-fashioned Mr. S was embarrassed for her to wear in public with him. Yet she’d find see-through ones, or wear the rags in such a way as to turn Mr. S on, despite his aversion to the style. Once she got him into bed, she must have declared herself the winner, regardless of what Mr. S thought. I guess in Mia’s case, love conquered all. Still, for all his passion for her, the baby threat concerned him.
Mia had Mr. S in such sexual thrall that love might have conquered all, except for one of Mia’s fatal dancing spells. This one was with the last man on the planet that Mr. S wanted to touch his wife, and it wasn’t someone like H. Rap Brown or Bob Dylan or Allen Ginsberg. It was worse than all of Mr. S’s folk-villains combined. It was the Antichrist himself, Robert F. Kennedy! How Mia could have made such a false step was beyond everyone. Frank Sinatra was the one guy in Hollywood who was backing Hubert Humphrey. Yet given that she knew so little of what her husband was all about, outside of the boudoir, she may well not have even known about his backstory with the Kennedys and how they had nearly destroyed him. That was history, and Mia wasn’t interested in history. She lived in the now, or somewhere in space. Wherever she was, her mind was in the wrong place when she hit the floor over and over with Bobby Kennedy at a Democratic fundraiser at the Factory, the same place Mia had done her thing, the wrong thing, with Anthony Newley. Mr. S was in New York, preparing for his new movie, The Detective, where he had a big role written in for Mia. Although Rosemary was the ultimate New York film, aside from exteriors at the Dakota, most of it was shot at Paramount, hence Mia was here and Frank was there.
Frank was way out there, when he heard the news. He didn’t even call Mia to discuss it. What could she say? Some sins were simply unpardonable. She had already refused to abandon Rosemary, which had gone way over schedule, and start work on Detective. Mr. S was forced to look for a replacement actress. Might as well replace Mia everywhere. This was strike three, four, five…And she, as the umpire would say, was outta there! What was going on in his world, Mr. S wondered. He had just learned his “son,” Sammy, was going to shoot a movie in London with Peter Lawford. It was called Salt and Pepper, and it was supposed to be a hip comedy. Hip my ass, Mr. S sneered. Sammy and Peter, Mia and Bobby, Jesus Fucking God. Acting as judge, jury, and high executioner, Mr. S sent Mickey Rudin to deliver divorce papers on the Rosemary set.
But as another baseballer said, it ain’t over til it’s over. Mr. S and Ava had open divorce papers for years and years, and even a decade after the divorce was official, Mr. S was seriously in love with her. His greatest fantasy was that she would marry him once again. Dreams don’t die. Mr. S’s flirtations on The Detective with Lee Remick and Mia’s substitute, Jackie Bissett, were more retaliatory than romantic. He had no one, nothing. Besides, the 1967 Christmas holidays were approaching. The coven, Mia’s coven of Social Oldies, including Ruth Gordon herself of Rosemary (it was too close for comfort), were coming down to Palm Springs for the Christmas holidays. Mr. S was too embarrassed to spoil his own party. He had turned the compound into a resort, with a new New England-style cottage called the Christmas Tree House, which would be strung up with lights year round, plus another bungalow, a new screening room, and other amenities, including one whole cottage for his vast model train collection, which at the moment was giving him more pleasure than sex.
/> Mr. S had been crazy about toy trains since he was a boy, and his parents never had enough money to buy him more than a small set of Lionels. Mr. S would tell me how he’d go to the biggest toy store in Hoboken to look at the huge train display in the window, and dream. Now this was one dream he could make come true, even if the others were fading. Being married again had given Mr. S more time on his hands, which he devoted to building up his model train empire. There were Japanese Bullet Trains, French TEEs, Spanish Talgos, American Superchiefs. Mr. S would sit alone there all night, drinking Jack and playing Casey Jones. The two shadow careers he had were engineer and concierge. He had me so crazy buying the best sheets and towels and robes and toothbrushes and laundry bags that the Ritz had nothing on us. I started calling him HoJo, for Howard Johnson of the Orange Roofs and 21 Flavors. Frank Sinatra was Hollywood’s Innkeeper.
What was an inn with no guests? So he begged Mia to come back and be his hostess, although she was devoid of all social graces and had no idea who to seat next to whom, pissing off lots of people. After two weeks and the coven had dispersed; however, so had Mia. Mr. S couldn’t take the baby rap. He went off to Miami to sing at the Fontainebleau and to shoot Lady in Cement, which we all said was where he wanted to put Mia, gangland style. Mia went to India to visit the then current guru. She later told me one of his followers tried to seduce her while she was in a trance. So much for prophets. Once Mia left, Mr. S did show occasional signs of life. One night when we were at a Palm Springs restaurant, Ruby’s Dunes, at a dinner with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, the hairdresser Jay Sebring showed up at another table with a stunning, blond, six foot tall, sixteen-year-old “assistant.” Like a homing pigeon, Mr. S dumped Liz and Dick, who were bitching at each other so much they hardly noticed, and joined Sebring’s table.
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