Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Probably not literally true. But a great story nonetheless, and indicative of the disorder that had taken over the shoot.

  In between the bedlam, a movie somehow got made—more’s the pity. With its strangely flat black-and-white cinematography and ham-handed direction, Not as a Stranger looks and plays like an excruciatingly long TV melodrama. Oddly, Sinatra, whose wisecracking (and, indeed, lushly bewigged) intern Al Boone carries a slight echo of From Here to Eternity’s private Maggio, is the liveliest thing in the picture—although he disappears for most of the film’s second half to make way for an uninteresting triangle between Mitchum, an achingly earnest Olivia de Havilland, and Gloria Grahame as the rich bitch who breaks them up.

  If Not as a Stranger was an odd choice for Stanley Kramer, it was no less odd for the third-billed Sinatra. “Why did Frank Sinatra bother to make this movie?” Tom Santopietro asks. “Did he simply want to keep working continuously on A-list productions in order to build upon the success of From Here to Eternity and Young at Heart? Was it his well-known fear of being bored?”

  Yes and yes are the answers, but the third and overarching answer is that he still wasn’t as big a star in the movies as he was in popular music. He had yet to prove he could carry a big film. (He’d won critical raves for Suddenly, by no means a big film, but the picture had died at the box office.)

  In the midst of a career comeback, momentum was everything. He couldn’t afford to sit around and wait for the perfect movie role to pop up.

  And momentum meant visibility. In December, Frank won Billboard’s disc jockey poll for best single of the year, “Young at Heart,” and best LP, Swing Easy! Down Beat and Metronome both named him the top male vocalist of 1954. To trumpet these honors and to boast about the movies he had in release (Suddenly; Young at Heart), in production (Not as a Stranger), and slated to start shooting soon (Guys and Dolls), he placed a full-page advertisement in Billboard, signing the ad “Busy, busy, busy—Frank.”

  He wasn’t exactly whistling in the dark, but he remembered all too clearly what not-busy felt like. He remembered the demons to which idleness had introduced him. And even in the midst of bustle, idleness lurked, like death in Arcadia. Especially on a movie set. Especially on Not as a Stranger.

  On Friday night, November 5, midway through the shoot, Frank and Lee Marvin went to a Hollywood restaurant to join Robert Mitchum and the film’s co-screenwriter Edward Anhalt for dinner. The Villa Capri, just a few blocks from Capitol Records, was a dark, smoky, noisy Italian bistro with straw-bottomed wine flasks hanging from the ceiling; it was run by Patsy D’Amore, who had introduced pizza to Hollywood in the late 1930s and was a great fan of Sinatra’s. By the mid-1950s, the restaurant had become a kind of clubhouse for Frank, who had a special booth in the back. Joe DiMaggio, another regular, was sitting at the bar that night, looking as though he had lost his best friend.

  In fact, the Yankee Clipper was newly separated from Marilyn Monroe—their initial divorce hearing had been at the end of October—and he was as miserable about it as she apparently was not. A great deal of DiMaggio’s unhappiness had to do with public humiliation: he was a retired superstar, his great deeds behind him, and he was just as famous in 1954 for having married the hottest actress in the movies as for his erstwhile athletic achievements. And as a proud, old-fashioned, and furiously private Italian-American male, he suffered at the world’s perception that he was unable to control his mercurial and highly sensitive wife, who had never met a camera she didn’t like.

  After the initial sexual thrill, the marriage had been hollow from the beginning. DiMaggio seemed to want a woman who would have babies and stay busy in the kitchen; had he spoken to Marilyn about this? He was distant, uncommunicative, and pathologically possessive; hating her Hollywood friends, he tried to keep her cloistered. At times, he roughed her up. Worse, once the passion wore off, he bored her deeply: soon after the honeymoon (much of which she spent entertaining the troops in Korea while Joe cooled his heels in Tokyo), she announced to a dumbfounded friend that she planned to marry the playwright Arthur Miller.

  And then there was the last straw, the famous skirt-blowing scene in Billy Wilder’s Seven Year Itch. The scene, shot in midtown Manhattan in full view of a gaping public and press contingent, revealed Monroe’s crotch, in filmy white panties, to the world. DiMaggio beat her up in their hotel room that night; she had to have powder applied to the bruises on her shoulders when she played her scenes the next day.

  Now Joe was moping around Hollywood, trying to drown his sorrow. When Sinatra and Mitchum approached him and asked if he wanted to join them, DiMag was reluctant at first, but after gentle pressure from Frank—he and Joe were old pals from Toots Shor’s joint in New York—and several more drinks all around, DiMaggio admitted he was desperate to find Marilyn but that she was giving him the slip. “A lot of drinks later,” Lee Server writes,

  DiMaggio went off to the men’s room and Sinatra said, “You know, we ought to do something for him. He really is in terrible shape. We got to help him get to Marilyn.”

  “But she’s hiding out,” somebody said.

  Frank said, “I know where she is. We’ll go over there and we’ll tell her that she’s got to talk to him.”

  From here on, accounts vary. Widely. Server had the advantage of interviewing Edward Anhalt, a direct participant in the evening’s activities, but between the volume of alcohol consumed on that night and the number of years that had passed since 1954, it’s safe to assume that elements of myth might have crept into his account.

  Anhalt claimed that Frank knew where Monroe was because “he was balling Marilyn himself, but we didn’t think of that at the time.” DiMaggio’s biographer Richard Ben Cramer never mentions this theory. Instead, he says that Barney Ruditsky, a detective he claims was working for Sinatra,

  had a man keeping tabs on Marilyn as a favor from Sinat [his old Toots Shor’s nickname] to DiMag…If there was one man in the country who understood DiMaggio—understood what it was to be a Dago poor-boy who was (all of a sudden, the very next day) the toast of the nation and the target of a million eyes—that was Sinatra. Frank also understood how it was with Joe and broads. Frank had his own too similar troubles with Ava Gardner.

  Sometime that evening, Ruditsky’s man contacted Ruditsky, who phoned (or was phoned by) either Sinatra or DiMaggio.

  Barney Ruditsky, a Jew born in England, was a legendarily tough and smart New York City police detective who, among other achievements, had helped bring in Louis “Lepke” Buchalter of Murder Incorporated. After retiring from the NYPD, he moved to L.A., where he opened a nightclub called Sherry’s and a private-detective agency that would become the go-to firm for Hollywood. Unsurprisingly, most of his cases involved unfaithful spouses. Frank appears to have hired Ruditsky as a favor to DiMaggio. Ruditsky’s “man” was a twenty-one-year-old rookie operative named Phil Irwin, who’d been tailing Monroe and on the night in question had spotted her white Cadillac convertible—not a hard car to spot—parked in front of a two-story Tudor-style house on the corner of Waring Avenue and Kilkea Drive, in a quiet middle-class neighborhood in Hollywood.

  The house was actually a three-unit apartment, with two entrances on Waring, numbers 8120 and 8122, and one on Kilkea, at number 757. The addresses are key to the story. The building’s landlady, a Mrs. Blasgen, lived at 757 Kilkea; 8120 Waring was occupied by a thirty-seven-year-old legal secretary named Florence Kotz; and the tenant of 8122 Waring was a friend of Marilyn Monroe’s, a young actress named Sheila Stewart.

  Sheila Stewart was a beard.

  Although Kitty Kelley asserts in His Way that Monroe “was supposedly having a lesbian relationship” with Stewart, a relationship that Sinatra and DiMaggio were hoping to uncover as “evidence to use in the divorce [Marilyn] was seeking from DiMaggio,” Monroe had in fact been granted an uncontested divorce the previous week, and Sheila Stewart had lent her apartment to Marilyn to use for an assignation with her voice teacher, who was not a
woman but a man named Hal Schaefer.

  Schaefer, twenty-nine, was a gifted jazz pianist, arranger, and composer who had orchestrated the music for the 1953 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and coached Monroe for her celebrated performance in the film of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” He was the precise opposite of DiMaggio—handsome but physically slight; an artistic, sensitive young man—and at some point, it’s not clear when, Monroe sought him out as a port in a storm. Schaefer later claimed that the two of them fell deeply in love. He and Marilyn might have been spotted together by Ruditsky or Irwin: one account says that while DiMaggio was dining with Sinatra on the night of November 5, a detective told Joe that if he went to a certain apartment house on Waring Avenue in West Hollywood, he’d find Monroe “in the arms of another man.”

  What’s not clear is whether Ruditsky knew the identity of the other man. Nor is it clear what exactly Sinatra and DiMaggio hoped to accomplish when they, along with a sizable group, converged on the Tudor house at the corner of Waring and Kilkea.

  The screenwriter Anhalt played the entire episode for laughs when he recounted it to Lee Server many years later. It had all been a drunken escapade, he claimed—a very drunken escapade. The way Sinatra presented it, Anhalt claimed, Monroe just needed to be persuaded to talk to DiMaggio. “This didn’t make a lot of sense at first,” Anhalt said. “But the more we drank, the more it began to seem reasonable. And we got to the point where someone said, ‘What if she won’t open the door?’ And Lee Marvin says, ‘Well, we’ll break it down.’ ”

  It was decided that the only man for the job was the oxlike Broderick Crawford, who was drinking at another bar. Crawford was fetched, at which point, Anhalt continued,

  We all went back to our cars and drove off to this address Sinatra told us…And we got out. Everybody’s staggering around on the sidewalk trying to stay upright, and we head into the building, Sinatra and his guys, DiMaggio, Mitchum, Lee Marvin, Brod [Crawford], everybody who was there. And I said, “What apartment is she in?” And Frank said, with great authority, “She’s in 3A.” And we all went upstairs, as many as could manage it. And Brod and some other guys leaned on the door and broke it open and went tumbling inside this apartment. And inside was a little old lady who looked nothing like Marilyn Monroe, and she started screaming. So everybody says, “Oh shit! Let’s get outta here!” They’re knocking each other over to get back out through the doorway. And everybody staggered back out on the street and got back into their cars and drove away. Somebody called the police, of course, and they reported it in the papers…and this woman said she had seen all these movie stars come breaking into her apartment, and I think maybe everyone thought she made it up, that she had had an attack of dementia.

  Except that the little old lady in question, Ms. Kotz, was all of thirty-seven at the time, and the “building” Anhalt refers to (which had no apartment 3A) was in fact a nice house on a hitherto quiet street. As the Los Angeles Times later reported, Florence Kotz “was fast asleep about 11 p.m. when five or six men suddenly battered down the back door to her apartment, tearing it from its hinges and leaving glass strewn on the floor…A bright flash of light was shone in her eyes and she was confronted with a number of men, some of whom seemed to be carrying an instrument which at first sight she believed to be an ax.”

  In fact it was a flash camera.

  Who were these men? In the end, the only people whose presence that night was definitely established were Sinatra and DiMaggio, along with Ruditsky and his operative Irwin and—weirdly—Ruditsky’s and Irwin’s wives, who stayed in the car as this mob smashed into Florence Kotz’s apartment (and as, in the apartment next door, a terrified Marilyn Monroe and Hal Schaefer hurriedly dressed and fled into the night). Besides Frank and Joe—and Mr. and Mrs. Ruditsky and Irwin, and Mitchum, Marvin, and Crawford—Frank’s friend, music publisher, manager, and sometime bodyguard, Hank Sanicola, might also have been present, along with the Villa Capri’s maître d’, Billy Karen, as well as, perhaps, Patsy D’Amore himself. And then there was that unnamed photographer, there to catch Marilyn in the act, whatever the act might have been.

  Quite a crowd.

  The incident, which would become infamous as the Wrong-Door Raid, was all very humorous by some accounts—but not to Hal Schaefer, who, after being followed and threatened anonymously for the next six months, would attempt to commit suicide by swallowing sleeping pills and Benzedrine washed down by typewriter cleaning fluid. And not to Florence Kotz, who would pursue the matter with the Los Angeles Police Department until the case was closed for lack of evidence a year later. Nor to Frank himself, who would experience a strange kind of retribution when, as would happen again and again in his life, the world decided to take seriously what he had regarded as a moment of minor misbehavior.

  —

  On the night of November 19, 1954, Sammy Davis Jr., driving his new Cadillac DeVille convertible to Los Angeles from Las Vegas, swerved to avoid hitting a car that was making a U-turn and collided with another vehicle. His head snapped forward into a conical ornament in the center of the steering wheel, and the ornament struck Davis square in the left eye, nearly killing him and destroying the eyeball. As he lay in Community Hospital in San Bernardino, he despaired of ever performing again. Many of Hollywood’s biggest stars made the sixty-mile drive to rally to his side—Jeff Chandler, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor. “For years,” Davis’s biographer Wil Haygood writes, “Sammy had cheered Hollywood on, slavishly saluting stars, sidling up to them, snapping their photos, his adoration shameless. Now it was being returned.”

  The one notable absence was Frank Sinatra.

  Looked at one way, the relationship between Sinatra and Davis was simple: Frank was the sun, and Sammy was the moon. Ten years younger, Sammy had idolized Sinatra from the moment he first heard his voice on the radio. Davis had been a teenager then, but he was already a veteran vaudevillian, having performed since the age of three with his father and uncle in the Will Mastin Trio. He was volcanically talented—as a singer, dancer, and impressionist—but Sinatra was the man he wanted to sound like, be like. He had the Voice, the style, the money, the women. And he was white. “He helped me overcome my greatest handicap, my inferiority complex about being a Negro,” Davis said.

  Practically from the moment they’d met, Frank, who on matters of racial tolerance was fervently liberal (on his own terms), had taken Sammy under his wing. In 1947, when Sinatra headlined at the Capitol Theater in New York, he demanded that the management hire the Mastin Trio to open for him, at five times their usual salary.

  With the Mastin Trio and then as a solo act in the early 1950s, Davis frequently performed in Las Vegas, where his path often crossed with Sinatra’s and their friendship deepened. Vegas was a remote outpost then, not far past the Old West days when cowboys and workers from the newly built Hoover Dam used to roll into town to get drunk, get laid, and gamble away their salaries. “On Fremont Street,” recalled Jerry Lewis, who performed at the Flamingo with Dean Martin beginning in the late 1940s, “they had a place to tie your horse!” Out along Route 91, the two-lane blacktop that would eventually become the Strip, there were wide stretches of desert between the dozen or so casinos, punctuated by little besides tumbleweed and rattlesnakes.

  And being a cowboy town, Las Vegas was also a racist town. When Sammy Davis Jr. performed at the Last Frontier Hotel & Casino, he couldn’t stay in the hotel or eat in the establishment’s restaurants. After his show was over, he had to go back to a rooming house in the black district on the run-down west side of Vegas. It was this way at every casino on the Strip. Frank Sinatra hated it and vowed to do something about it as soon as he was able.

  Frank was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, he thoroughly appreciated Sammy’s whirlwind talents, and yet in crucial ways the friendship was asymmetrical. The stamp had been set from the beginning: Frank was the leader, the Chairman of the Board (the New York disc jockey William B. Williams might already have
bestowed the title on him by 1954); Sammy was the acolyte. This had partly to do with Frank’s age and his unexampled status in show business and partly to do with his domineering personality, but it was a function of Davis’s personality as well. Throughout the civil rights movement and afterward, other African-American entertainers would come along showing pride and even defiance about their blackness, but such pride and defiance were not in Sammy’s makeup. Along with the color of his skin, he was ashamed of his small stature (he was five four) and his crooked teeth. He knew how talented he was, but he was also a chameleon, hence his skill at impressions—which were almost always of white entertainers: Cary Grant, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart. (His worst impression, make of it what you will, was of Frank Sinatra.)

  “Sammy Davis was one of the great, great entertainers of the world,” the comedian Shecky Greene said. “But there was also no Sammy Davis.”

  But it wasn’t the asymmetry of Davis’s friendship with Sinatra that kept Frank away from the hospital. It was Frank’s dislike—fear—of hospitals.

  Finally, a girlfriend at the time, a model named Cindy Bayes who was also a close friend of Sammy’s, laid down the law to him.

  I said, “You don’t understand what you mean in this kid’s life.” He said, “I’ll go tomorrow.” But at five in the morning he comes back [home]. He was drunk. I came running out in a bathrobe. He started sobbing—not about Sammy, but about what a mess he had made of his life. I said, “I don’t want to see you again, because you’re so destructive.” The next day about two hundred flowers arrived. But what did it mean?

  It meant he felt, but would not say he was, guilty. About many things. The next day Frank went to the hospital and told Sammy that he would—not could, would—recuperate at his place in Palm Springs when he got out of the hospital.