by James Kaplan
—
On New Year’s Eve, Frank had dinner at Romanoff’s with Peter and Pat Lawford and Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. As the meal wound down, Sinatra proposed they all drive to Palm Springs to see in 1959. “He always had that kind of thing—hey, let’s go down to the desert,” Wagner recalled. “I’ll get whoever’s down there to fix it up, and we can have a nice weekend.” Then Frank went to the men’s room. While he was gone, “the girls said that it was too chilly to go that night,” Peter Lawford recalled.
They preferred driving in the morning, but then we said, “Who’s going to tell him?” Knowing his temper, Pat out and out refused to say anything, and Natalie didn’t even want to be in the same room when he was told. Finally, R. J. [Wagner] insisted that I be the one to do it, so when Frank got back to the table, I explained as gracefully as I could that we’d prefer joining him in the morning. Well, he went absolutely nuts. “If that’s the way you want it, fine,” he said, slamming his drink on the floor and storming out of the restaurant.
Lawford phoned Frank the next morning, and George Jacobs answered, whispering that his boss was still asleep, not having turned in until 5:00 a.m. Then Jacobs said, “Oh, Mr. Lawford. What happened last night? I better tell you that he’s pissed. Really pissed off. He went to your closet and took out all the clothes that you and your wife keep here and ripped them into shreds and then threw them into the swimming pool.”
—
While Frank was having his tantrum in the desert, a world he had been part of was changing forever. As 1958 clicked over into 1959, the revolutionary forces of Fidel Castro—the barbudos (bearded ones), as they were known in Cuba—entered Havana, ending the Mob-friendly government of Fulgencio Batista and taking axes and sledgehammers to the syndicate-run casinos in the great hotels of the capital: the Capri, the Plaza, the Riviera.
“The greatest indignity of all was saved for the Riviera,” writes T. J. English, a chronicler of the Mob’s rise and fall in Cuba.
In an act of revolutionary audacity, campesinos [peasants] brought into the city a truckload of pigs and set them loose in the lobby of the hotel and casino, squealing, tracking mud across the floors, shitting and peeing all over Lansky’s pride and joy, one of the most famous mobster gambling emporiums in all the world.
In the great movie The Godfather: Part II, the character Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), based on the top gangster Meyer Lansky, is forced to flee Havana amid the highly dramatic events of New Year’s Eve 1958–59. In real life, Lansky flew back to Miami a week after that fateful night, still hopeful that Castro would reopen the casinos, which, besides making millions for the Mob, had employed many Cubans and contributed substantially to the capital’s economy. But in the end, Fidel closed the casinos, and the Mob’s dream of a great gambling Xanadu in the Caribbean died in Castro’s revolution.
Yet organized crime had wisely hedged its bets. Havana’s loss would be Las Vegas’s gain.
* * *
* In its awkward way, the bureau was trying to say that Fischetti no longer lived in Chicago, not that he was no longer a hoodlum.
11
Let’s just say that the Kennedys are interested in the lively arts, and that Sinatra is the liveliest art of all.
—PETER LAWFORD
In the waning months of 1958, Frank had been developing a new movie project: an adaptation of Never So Few, a best-selling novel about OSS operatives in World War II Burma. The film, the next on his three-picture MGM contract, was to be a starring vehicle for himself and a co-production between his production company and the studio that had dropped him in 1950. With his power as star and co-producer, he pressured Metro to sign its other early-1950s reject, Peter Lawford—then starring in the tepidly successful TV series The Thin Man—to co-star at an extortionate salary. (Metro originally offered Lawford $1,500 a week for three weeks’ work; thanks to Frank, he wound up getting ten times that amount.) Sinatra also prevailed upon the studio to put his pal Sammy Davis Jr. into the picture at a salary of $75,000. When an MGM producer objected, “Frank, there were no Negroes in the Burma theater [of operations],” Sinatra said, “There are now.”
—
Frank was due to open at the Sands on January 14 but was once again worried about his voice. Before heading to Vegas, he wired Dean: “Dear Dago, stand by.” Dean wired back: “Of course I’ll stand by, but at least OPEN.”
He opened. Yet—it had become all too predictable—a few days into his two-week run, his instrument gave out. As Mitch Miller once said, “Sinatra had a marvelous voice, but it was very fragile. There were certain guys like Gordon MacRae who could stay up all night and drink and sing the next day—he could sing underwater. But if Frank didn’t get enough sleep or if he drank a lot the night before, it would show up.”
And, of course, all he was doing these days was drinking a lot and not getting enough sleep. On Tuesday the twentieth, he put in a distress call to Dean, who was dining at his Sunset Strip restaurant, Dino’s. Martin caught the 10:00 p.m. flight to Vegas, did a midnight show for Frank, returned to Los Angeles on the 4:00 a.m. plane, and reported to NBC Studios in Burbank at 9:00 a.m. to rehearse for a guest spot on Phil Harris’s upcoming TV show. Apparently, Dean, too, could sing underwater.
Martin himself opened at the Sands on the twenty-eighth. “Dean Martin, another in Jack Entratter’s stable of surefire draws for the Copa Room, is in for a 16-night stand with his trademarked casual approach to songs and comedy,” Variety’s reviewer wrote.
Martin, a heavyweight who appeals to both distaffers and their gaming escorts, sparks casino activity even if he doesn’t double as stage performer and blackjack dealer—which he usually does. First-nighters got an extra added attraction.
Did they ever. A waiter launched the show by walking into the Copa Room holding a sign that read, “Sorry, folks, Frank Sinatra will not appear tonight”—the very sign the Sands used on nights Sinatra’s voice was shot. Frank then came out, wearing a Las Vegas Department of Sanitation jacket, and the place went nuts. Or, as Variety put it, “Frank Sinatra joined his Great & Good Friend onstage, and the pair put on one of the best shows ever seen at the Sands.”
They were on TV together, they were in the movies together, and now they were tearing up Vegas together. They stood astride the world, and the sky seemed to be the limit.
—
From Las Vegas on January 30, Frank sent a brief note, handwritten in pencil on Sands stationery, to his old friend the composer Alec Wilder at the Algonquin Hotel in New York—surely one of the very few pieces of correspondence ever to travel between those two institutions. He was glad Wilder was well, Sinatra wrote; so was he—very much so. The note ended,
Things are going well and I’m at peace with the universe.
Take Care
Frank
—
Ava was in Australia shooting On the Beach, an adaptation of Nevil Shute’s novel about the aftermath of a nuclear war, and she wasn’t having an easy time of it. Though she had freed herself from MGM servitude and managed to extract $400,000 for her role in the independent production from the producer-director Stanley Kramer—Frank’s nemesis on The Pride and the Passion—she wasn’t getting any younger, her facial injury had barely healed, she had always been ambivalent at best about making movies, and this location wasn’t helping matters. It was midsummer Down Under, with temperatures above a hundred and biting flies swarming everywhere. The natives were also swarming. On the Beach was the first major motion picture to be shot in Australia and had created a ruckus around Melbourne. It didn’t seem to matter that Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire, Gardner’s co-stars, were also in town; the city had gone gaga for Ava. She couldn’t go out without being mobbed—not that there were many places to go. Melbourne in the late 1950s was a buttoned-up town; the bars closed at 6:00 p.m. If Spain was heaven for her, this was hell.
Then came the Quote. “On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it,” Ava
said in a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was a great quote, and it got picked up all over the world. The problem was, Gardner never said it. The Herald had sent a reporter to interview her, and she had turned him down, so he simply put a choice bit of dialogue in her mouth. Melbourne didn’t take it well. In short order, she went from idol to pariah.
Moreover, after seeing that her face looked puffy in early rushes, she had gone on the wagon. Ava without alcohol was a different person: shy, self-conscious, and even more easily bored than usual. What was there to do in Melbourne Fucking Australia if you couldn’t drink? An on-set romance didn’t seem to be in the cards: Peck was there with his wife; Astaire was Astaire. She made a play for her young co-star Anthony Perkins and quickly found she was barking up the wrong tree. And so she did her work during the day, and did it well. “She’s avid to grasp every nuance of her next scene,” Kramer would write later. “Her projection really is extraordinary. Swiftly she can go from softness to pathos to violence.” And at night she went back to her hotel and picked up the phone.
—
Mike Wallace and his wife, Buff Cobb, were the original hosts of The Chez Show, a late-night radio-interview program broadcast from the Chez Paree, a popular nightclub on Chicago’s Near North Side. But in 1951, Wallace and Cobb left for New York, and a New York radio personality named Jack Eigen came west to take over. By 1959, the sour-faced Eigen had become a Chicago institution. He was like a rougher version of Wallace: sometimes insulting to his show-business guests, sometimes kindly and paternal. The uncertainty kept interviewees off balance, occasionally making them say things they later regretted. Audiences loved Eigen or hated him, but people paid attention.
On a Friday night in mid-January, Sammy Davis Jr. opened at the Chez Paree, whose regular customers included Sam Giancana and the Fischetti brothers. Not long afterward, Davis sat for an interview with Jack Eigen, who was all sweetness and light. The strategy worked. The discussion ranged widely, and Sammy, perhaps with a drink or two in him, spoke freely. It didn’t take long for the subject of Frank Sinatra to come up. When Eigen mentioned that Sinatra could be a difficult person, Davis said, “I love Frank and he was the kindest man in the world to me when I lost my eye in an auto accident and wanted to kill myself. But there are many things he does that there are no excuses for. Talent is not an excuse for bad manners—I don’t care if you are the most talented person in the world. It does not give you a right to step on people and treat them rotten. This is what he does occasionally.”
“Why is it that most stars when they finally make the big time forget how to be humble?” Eigen asked, provocatively.
DAVIS: They stop being hungry…You don’t care whether a guy asks for your autograph or not. I’ve been with the Sinatras, the [Dean] Martins, all the top stars. I always stop…
In the case of Sinatra, whom I idolize, he can do no wrong…I look at Frank and I think it’s absolutely inexcusable…The whole thing of it is that Frank has a tremendous talent. I don’t think anyone is allowed that particular privilege of abusing the position the public has put him in…
But you got to respect him for his honesty. Because on top of the things that I hear him do bad, I’ve seen him do ninety thousand things that are fantastic.
Davis then told of how Sinatra had gathered celebrities to help pay for the funeral of Tim Moore, the actor who played the Kingfish on TV’s Amos ’n’ Andy Show and who had recently died penniless. Sammy said that this was only one of a hundred such incidents he knew of that the newspapers had never written about.
EIGEN: I was wondering, Sammy—is this guy happy at all?
DAVIS: No! No! Frank is not a happy guy.
EIGEN: What is it, a wife missing there, you think?
DAVIS: I think most important, Jack—the one thing he misses dearly is his family. He loves his children dearly. The relationship that he has with his wife [Nancy] is one that is very pleasant.
It is fantastic that in the last year particularly…Frank has cooled down considerably with his—shall we say—his non-performing activities. He sits at home and works constantly. The man works constantly for one reason. He doesn’t want time enough to sit and think quietly.
This was not all. To put a maraschino cherry on the sundae, Eigen mischievously asked Davis who the number one singer in the country was, and Sammy, having worked up a full head of steam, replied that it was none other than he.
“Bigger than Frank?” Eigen asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Sammy said.
—
Davis would later maintain (“Who’s better than Sinatra? Nobody”) that that last fillip had been a joke. Still, this was bad. Very bad. And Chicago being Chicago, it wasn’t long before Frank got wind of Sammy’s insubordination. Then he got hold of a tape of the interview. “That was it for Sammy,” Peter Lawford recalled. “Frank called him ‘a dirty nigger bastard’ and wrote him out of Never So Few.” Sinatra often descended to ethnic slurs when he was furious, as though recalling the worst slights of his youth. He cast the twenty-eight-year-old Steve McQueen in Davis’s place.
“You wanna talk destroyed,” recalled Lawford’s manager, Milt Ebbins. “Sammy Davis cried from morning to night. He came to see us when Peter was at the Copacabana [where he did a double act with Jimmy Durante]. He said, ‘I can’t get Frank on the phone. Can’t you guys do something?’ Peter told him, ‘I talked to Frank but he won’t budge.’ Sammy never did the picture, never got any money. He could have sued because he had a contract, but he didn’t dare. You don’t sue Frank Sinatra.”
“For the next two months Sammy was on his knees begging for Frank’s forgiveness, but Frank wouldn’t speak to him,” Lawford said.
—
Bored and lonely, Ava called Walter Chiari in Italy and demanded he come to Australia at once. He made the thirteen-thousand-mile journey by air and landed in Melbourne several days later. “But by the time he arrived,” Gardner’s biographer Lee Server writes, “it was too late. The lovelorn mood in which Ava had longed to resume their feisty romance had dissipated. Chiari, desiring a reason for flying halfway around the world other than to be yelled at or ignored, made contact with an Australian promoter who booked him for a performance at the local stadium.”
Chiari, who could also sing a little bit as well as act and do comedy, performed “to a packed house, mostly Italian emigrants,” Hedda Hopper wrote on February 18. “Ava came in dressed to the teeth accompanied by Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, and Tony Perkins.” Chiari’s opening number was “Tenderly,” and he chose to do as close an approximation of Frank Sinatra as he was capable of. “Ava gasped, then fled,” Hopper wrote.
—
In his Variety column of February 26, Army Archerd wrote, “Milton Berle tapes his March 11 show next week, wings to Florida to vacation and to be on hand for Frank Sinatra’s Fontainebleau bow. Yes, Sammy Davis Jr. will be at the Eden Roc same time. Look for a reconciliation attempt between these two.”
It didn’t happen. “Even when they were in Florida together and Frank was appearing at the Fontainebleau and Sammy was next door at the Eden Roc, Frank still refused to speak to him,” Peter Lawford recalled. “He wouldn’t even go over to see his show, which was something we always did when one or the other of us was appearing someplace. He left word with the doorman that Sammy was not to come in. If he did, Frank said he’d walk out.”
As was so often the case, Sinatra’s wrath was stoked by humiliation. Sammy had spoken nothing but the truth (except for that final boast), but he had declared the emperor naked, and worse still, he had done so on the home turf of those Men of Respect, the Fischetti brothers, Sam Giancana, and Tony Accardo. “That was the unforgivable part—to embarrass Frank in front of the Big Boys,” Lawford said. “Those Mafia guys meant more to him than anything. So Sammy was quite lucky that Frank let him grovel for a while and then allowed him to apologize in public a few months later.”
On March 4, Army Archerd wrote, “Both Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. we
re on hand for Judy Garland’s jam-packed finale at the Fontainebleau in Florida. If the boys have made up, Metro hasn’t heard that Davis is back in ‘Never So Few.’ Matter of fact, New Yorkers hear Sugar Ray Robinson was offered the Davis role in ‘Ocean’s 11.’ ”
Once Sammy was able to work his way back into Frank’s good graces, he got his Ocean’s 11 role back. He would play a garbageman.
—
Judy Garland’s Fontainebleau finale might have been jam-packed, but the rest of her second week in the hotel’s fabulous La Ronde Room was anything but. As Variety noted, her opening night had been “one with a ‘we’re with you’ atmosphere that served to swing her into a big reaction wind. Her name held the crowd-pull strong for initial seven nights…But in second week, the talk about a vocal lack as compared to her heyday; the physical factor that dissipated the preconceived image of the Garland seen in tv film revivals, and her by-rote manner of delivery worked their b.o. havoc to the point where the biggery had its ‘softest’ week of the season.
“It took Frank Sinatra to bring the 750-plus seater back into sell-out status.”
The piece went on to note that Sinatra’s stand at the Fontainebleau, which immediately followed Garland’s, left hers in the dust. Frank had attracted five thousand advance reservations, and his first week had broken all records at the hotel, even the ones he’d set the previous March. His shows pulled in over $22,000 a night, with more than sixteen hundred customers springing for the $17.50 prix fixe dinner plus the $5 beverage minimum. The second week was projected to be equally profitable.
Unlike Garland, who rode into town on fumes, evoking a combination of sympathy and horror from her audiences and unable—at just thirty-six—to escape her past, Sinatra was at his absolute pinnacle. Based on his drawing power, the Fontainebleau’s owner, Ben Novack, had expanded the La Ronde’s seating capacity from 450 to over 750; with Frank he filled every seat and then some. Amid the blue haze of cigarette smoke and the tinkle of clinking glasses, the shows in the great circular room were electric, their understated format bespeaking the singer’s supreme confidence and concentrating the excitement.