by James Kaplan
He exerted such power as he could. When Frank was a lonely, spoiled boy in Hoboken, Dolly had bought flashy orange-and-black jackets for the members of his after-school club, the Turk’s Palace, to ensure that his circle stayed close. Now he used a similar strategy to keep his crew (including a visiting Jack Entratter) happy. One weekend, Brad Dexter recalled, Sinatra had several of Rome’s upscale haberdashers bring a selection of their finest goods to the villa—silk shirts, neckties, cashmere sweaters, gold cuff links, alligator belts—and invited Jilly, Entratter, Bakalyan, Dexter, and the publicist Jim Mahoney to help themselves. According to Dexter, everyone but him grabbed eagerly at the swag. “What are you being so generous for?” he asked Frank. “You don’t need to lay it on like this.”
“It means nothing to me, Brad. Take something. Help yourself.”
Dexter said he shook his head and walked out of the room.
Ava was also in Italy, shooting The Bible, again under John Huston’s direction, and in the midst of an abusive relationship with her co-star and fellow alcoholic George C. Scott. She played Sarah; he played Abraham. Scott, an ex-marine, was a great actor and a powerful, glowering presence, subject to drinking binges, blackouts, and towering rages. Of course Ava was no stranger to rage herself. Scott had abstained from liquor for several years until he met Ava; he fell madly in love and off the wagon. The fact that he was married to a pregnant Colleen Dewhurst failed to discourage him. One night, in the village of Avezzano, he and Ava had both been drinking, and she happened to mention Frank’s name. Scott beat Gardner up, dropping her to the floor and punching her repeatedly in the head. The next day he apologized abjectly. The makeup artist covered her bruises, and she continued her work on the movie and continued her relationship with George C. Scott.
As always, she had been in touch with Frank by phone. He had planned to come see her but then called it off: the Italian papers had a bounty out for a photo of the two of them together. Ava never told him about the beating—she was afraid Sinatra would have Scott killed—but somehow he found out. When The Bible’s shoot moved to Sicily, Gardner began to notice three burly men appearing on the set every day. She writes in her memoirs that she assumed Huston had hired them to protect her, but a friend of Jilly’s insisted to Randy Taraborrelli that Frank had sent the three. One night in Taormina, Ava and Scott got to drinking and began to argue loudly. As Scott raised a hand to strike her, the three men appeared out of nowhere, grabbed the actor by both arms, and dragged him to a car. He showed up for work the next morning uninjured but considerably subdued.
Whether out of gratitude or nostalgia, Ava flew to Rome one long weekend to see Frank. Dexter and Bakalyan met her at the airport and drove her to the villa. “Frank was affectionate, sentimental,” Lee Server writes. “There was some of the old talk about them getting back together. But there was a sense of strain in the air. There was no sex that weekend.”
There was a good reason for this, as Brad Dexter recalled. One night when he had dinner with the two of them, Ava, looking haggard and drawn, drank herself into a near stupor and simply staggered upstairs to bed. Frank turned to Dexter. “She’s the only woman I’ve ever been in love with in my whole life, and look at her,” he said. “She’s turned into a falling-down drunk.”
It was painful for him to see, but he might have been equally pained if he’d been able to take stock of himself.
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In early September, the shoot moved on to Spain, where a ridiculous incident occurred: in Torremolinos, on the night before the completion of filming, Sinatra, Dexter, the manager of their hotel, and a few others were having a drink when Frank felt a tap on the shoulder. When he turned around, a young woman embraced him and flashbulbs popped.
She was an aspiring actress, and it was a cheap trick to get a publicity shot with Sinatra, probably with a tabloid story thrown in. Properly furious, Frank threw her off, screaming that nobody was allowed to take his picture without permission. The manager told the photographers to leave.
Meanwhile, the young woman went to the bar and ordered a drink—then threw it in Sinatra’s face, covering him in whiskey and cutting his cheek. The manager had her ejected; when she showed up in the hotel lobby afterward, he called the police. Frank made a report but declined to press charges.
The next morning, the lobby was swarming with police; jeeps with machine guns mounted on them were parked outside. Everyone from the movie company was detained, and two crew members were arrested. Frank and Dexter managed to avoid the police and go to work for the final day of filming.
The following morning, as the two were about to leave Madrid, plainclothesmen from the Guardia Civil stopped them in the hotel lobby and told them they would have to go to the police station for questioning. The young woman had accused them of assault, and under Spanish law they could be detained for questioning for three days before being officially charged. While Dexter phoned the U.S. ambassador, Frank screamed at the cops, calling Spain’s fascist leader, Generalissimo Franco, a “spic faggot.” It did not go down well. The police locked Sinatra and Dexter in separate cells and interrogated them at length. The film’s producer, Saul David, finally came and paid 25,000 pesetas ($416 in 1964 dollars; a substantial portion of a Guardia Civil’s annual salary) to bail them out. The police hustled Frank straight to the airport without allowing him to pack his bags; he got on a plane and flew to Paris, where he stewed in luxury in the Hotel George V.
“I’ll never go back to that fucking country again,” he said. “I hate those dirty Fascist bastards.”
Even Ava was beginning to tire of Spain. But unfortunately not, for the moment, of George C. Scott.
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In October, the filming of Von Ryan’s Express moved to a soundstage at 20th Century Fox. Zanuck had tightened the studio’s belt, firing staff and selling off the back lot, and he was keeping the machine running with lower-budget pictures and increased television production, a strategy that would help Fox get back on its feet. (Both Von Ryan and The Sound of Music, budgeted at $5.7 million and $8.2 million, respectively, were relatively big movies, but nowhere near Cleopatra’s bank-busting $44 million.) Among the TV series being made that fall in the studio complex between West Pico and Olympic boulevards were the science-fiction adventure Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the World War II drama Twelve O’Clock High, and ABC’s new prime-time soap opera, Peyton Place.
The last series was based on Grace Metalious’s steamy 1956 novel about the sordid secrets of a small New England town, and though the TV show toned down the novel’s squalor, its insistent, racy-for-the-early-1960s sexuality made it both controversial and instantly popular. Tough blonde Dorothy Malone starred as Constance MacKenzie, the woman with a dark past who owned Peyton Place’s bookstore; the nineteen-year-old newcomer Mia Farrow played her alienated, virginal, but sexually curious (and secretly illegitimate) daughter, Allison.
Slim, ethereal, and faintly androgynous, Farrow had high cheekbones, huge blue eyes, and a slightly tarnished Hollywood pedigree. Her Irish-born mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, had been a true star in the 1930s and 1940s, most famous for playing Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan in half a dozen pictures but able to branch out to more substantial roles in films like The Thin Man, Anna Karenina, and Pride and Prejudice. O’Sullivan’s movie career declined throughout the 1950s, as did that of her husband, the Australian-born, B-level director John Farrow (A Bill of Divorcement, The Big Clock), a devout Catholic—he wrote a well-regarded biography of Sir Thomas More—and a cold-eyed drunk who cheated on O’Sullivan persistently as he fathered their seven children. “He was an intelligent, talented, unhappy, bedeviled, frequently frustrated, insecure and arrogant man who should have become an actor—only he disliked actors intensely,” the columnist Lloyd Shearer wrote. In 1953, Farrow directed the forgettable Western Ride, Vaquero!, starring a reluctant Ava Gardner, who had a fling with him out of sheer boredom. She remembered him as “a mean and lecherous character, cruel in equal measure to the h
orses and to the whores he flew in from Los Angeles.” In early 1963, Farrow dropped dead of a heart attack at age fifty-eight, mourned by few.
María de Lourdes Villiers Farrow, nicknamed Mia, idolized her frequently absent father and her beautiful mother, who was present but absent at the same time. In the Hollywood style of the era, Mia and her siblings (she was the third child, and the eldest of the four girls) were raised by nannies, but the Farrows went even further: the children lived in a nursery separate from the main house, with its own kitchen. Her childhood was riven: by a case of polio when she was nine; by her glamorous parents’ eroding marriage (they slept in separate bedrooms after O’Sullivan learned of the affair with Gardner); by the death of her adored oldest brother in a plane crash in 1958. She attended a convent boarding school in England and hated it; she developed an active fantasy life, a certain detachment from the everyday. “I was the loner of the family,” she told columnist Bob Thomas. “I was able to shut out the household noises by living with my own dreams.”
Late at night in her childhood home, she writes in her memoir, she used to wander around and watch her family while they were fast asleep: “every once in a while, with my thumb, I’d very carefully open up somebody’s eye, just for a second, to look at the eyeball in there.”
In a way, it was a foregone conclusion that this strange, dreamy, exotically beautiful girl, whose godparents were Louella Parsons and George Cukor, would become an actress.
Spending time with her mother in New York one Christmas—O’Sullivan was starring in a Broadway comedy—the seventeen-year-old Farrow begged for acting lessons and took instantly to the craft. “I discovered that only in drama class could I manipulate people, amuse them, even make them notice me through this marvelous game of pretending, where I didn’t have to be me,” she recalled. Things moved fast from there. When an actress dropped out of a role in a Broadway revival of The Importance of Being Earnest—the cast was all-English—she read for the part, got it, and drew rave reviews. Fox signed her to a contract. With the exception of a bit part in one of her father’s films as a girl, the pilot of Peyton Place was her first time before the cameras.
Her first movie role came just as rapidly: when Britt Ekland, playing the ingenue in a Richard Attenborough adventure called Guns at Batasi, had to drop out because her husband, Peter Sellers, had had a heart attack, Fox flew Farrow to London to fill in. She did a couple of weeks’ work, then returned to the States, where the Peyton Place pilot had already aired, to find herself being proclaimed a new star.
She greeted her instant success with open arms. “I want a big career, a big man and a big life!” she told Hedda Hopper, soon after production began on the series. “You have to think big—that’s the only way to get what you want.”
Mia Farrow on Peyton Place, 1965. Slim, ethereal, and faintly androgynous, she had high cheekbones, huge blue eyes, and a slightly tarnished Hollywood pedigree. Here she bears a striking resemblance both to her late father, the director John Farrow, and to her future son Ronan. (Credit 21.6)
In a way, it was also a foregone conclusion that she would find the biggest man of all.
The plausible pretext for Farrow’s visit to the set of Von Ryan’s Express was that the young English actor John Leyton, with whom she had had a love scene in Guns at Batasi, was working in the picture.
Restless during a long break between takes on Peyton Place, she wandered over to the Von Ryan’s Express set and watched Frank Sinatra filming a scene on a fake train with the beautiful Italian actress Raffaella Carra. Farrow had first met Sinatra eight years earlier at Romanoff’s restaurant, where she was having dinner with her father. She was eleven. “Pretty girl,” Frank had joked. “You stay away from her,” John Farrow had replied, perhaps only half jokingly. Now as she stood on the dark soundstage watching Sinatra act, she thought how beautiful his face seemed, “full of pain and somehow familiar.”
She neglects to mention that her late (high-foreheaded, blue-eyed) father bore a more than passing resemblance to Frank Sinatra. And—strange detail—that the two men wore the same cologne. “I can say it now,” she later wrote. “They had the same identical smell.”
She also fails to note that she had dressed for the set visit in a sheer nightgown from the Peyton Place wardrobe department, and nothing else, and that though she had made much in the press of her sticklike body (she told Life that her measurements were 20-20-20), she had protested too much. Frank looked, and then he looked again.
—
And she visited the set again, and again. Brad Dexter recalled that Farrow was there every day, making “googly eyes” at Sinatra, and that at the end of the first week, as Frank, Dexter, and the cinematographer William Daniels were preparing to leave for Palm Springs in Frank’s jet, she said, “How come you never invite me to come along?”
“Frank did a double take,” Dexter said. “ ‘Huh? Are you kidding? Would you like to come?’ Mia beamed and said, ‘Sure.’ ”
Farrow’s version is considerably more chaste. As she was watching the filming, she writes, she became aware of Sinatra, seated some distance behind her amid a boisterous group of men. All at once, one of Frank’s entourage, a big man with a pleasant face (probably Brad Dexter), came up and said that the group had been wondering how old she was. Mia pulled herself up to her full height—with her long braids and girlish features she looked considerably younger than her age—and proudly told him: nineteen. A short time later, the man came back and asked her to join Sinatra’s group. She came along at once, so nervous that she dropped the contents of her straw bag at Frank’s feet—her retainer, keys, coins, glasses, tampons, bubble gum. She apologized profusely as he helped her pick everything up.
It’s a scene straight out of a movie. The music rises. Their eyes meet. She felt “a column of light” rising inside her, she recalled. Dazed, she finally left to go back to work. Sinatra walked her to the stage door and asked if she’d like to join him at a private Friday-night screening of None But the Brave. She told him she would love to.
Friday night arrived; they met at the Warner Bros. screening room. The lights went down, and she watched the war movie in a fog, dimly aware of American soldiers and Japanese soldiers and skirmishes—but then came the momentous part: Frank Sinatra held her hand.
When the lights came up, he invited her to accompany him to Palm Springs, that very night: There’d be other guests, he told her; it would be fun.
She mumbled something about her cat. He had to be fed, and he ate only baby food. And she didn’t have her clothes, her pajamas, her toothbrush. None of it made sense. She thanked him for the invitation, and apologized.
But meanwhile, a parallel apology to Frank was forming in her mind. She shouldn’t have held his hand, she thought; she’d given the wrong impression. She couldn’t go to Palm Springs with him, or anywhere else. She had no idea what she was doing; she would only disappoint him. She had no birth control, no experience at all along those lines, in fact.
Then he asked her if she could come tomorrow. He would send his plane for her; she could even bring her cat.
His plane? she thought. For her cat and her? “Reality tiptoed out of the room,” she writes.
In truth, both of them have entered exceedingly strange territory. She is a virgin! (We will take her word for it. Had Frank known, would he have been so quick to send his plane?) She has never listened to a Sinatra record or seen one of his movies—except for None but the Brave; even her parents never owned a Sinatra album: they listened to Gregorian chants.
She listens to the Beatles. She smokes marijuana and has taken LSD. She does yoga. She has palled around with Salvador Dalí. This is the girl who examined the eyeballs of her sleeping family with her thumb (shades of Un chien andalou). Who has said, “Sometimes I think I’d like to put my soul somewhere where nobody could get it. I’d have a castle with a moat and a drawbridge and people could never stomp on me and take chunks out of my soul until there’s nothing left.” This is th
e girl who has floated loose in the world for a long time yet also harbors a fiery ambition. Who has a sense of direction so bad that she needs to be driven by others if she wants to get anywhere, but at the same time knows precisely where she’s going. Who has let others take care of her—and has never been taken care of enough—yet also seems strangely capable of taking care of herself. She has a three-room apartment on the second floor of a little house in the flats of Beverly Hills, like a thousand other young actresses, and she’s decorated it with furniture from Sears and wall-to-wall carpet and a fake rock pond with a little waterfall and fake moss all around it for her deaf Angora cat, Malcolm. But unlike the thousand other young actresses, she has the lineage and a will of iron. The big life awaits.
Sinatra is Sinatra, and he will soon be forty-nine, and he has seen this slim girl with the surprising body shake her long blond hair and stare at him with those great blue eyes and stammer charmingly awkward sentences in her soft, trembling voice, and he has conceived a powerful desire to take her, and to take care of her. He saw death in those waves off Kauai, and here is life, in its freshest form.
And so he stares into her eyes with those irresistible electric-blues, giving her the attention that every woman in the world craves, only now it is hers alone, the complete attention that John Farrow never quite gave her. And, with honest audacity, she stares back, unflinchingly, stunned into silence by the power of “all this eyeing”—and struck by a new idea, full of music and light: that she would love to be in Palm Springs, or anywhere else, with Frank Sinatra.