by James Kaplan
Thus she finds herself, the next day, sitting with her cat aboard his jet as it taxis along the desert runway toward a remote corner of the Palm Springs Airport, where she spots Frank Sinatra leaning against his car, arms folded, looking handsome in an orange short-sleeved shirt. She walks down the plane’s steps holding her cat and her straw hat; he walks up to them and laughs.
And both of them have now walked through the looking glass.
—
They began to explore the strange new territory of each other.
Almost in solitude at first, in Palm Springs on the weekends, with a puzzled George Jacobs looking on: “It wasn’t that Mia was a Beatles girl or a Stones girl, as opposed to a Frank girl. She was a nothing girl, a total space cadet…a clueless nineteen-year-old whose main passion was her deaf cat.” Almost always, because Frank needed company, there was a little company—his pals Yul Brynner and Jack Entratter, and Entratter’s girlfriend, later to be his wife, Corinne Cole.
Years later, in a letter to Farrow, Cole reminisced about those autumn weekends when she and Mia sat in the living room trying to learn backgammon while Entratter did casino business on the phone and Frank swam in the pool. At one point Sinatra bobbed to the surface and exclaimed to Farrow, in that biggest of big voices, “I love you!”
“I love you too, Charlie,” Mia called back, softly.
It is weird to realize that she was five years younger than his older daughter. Yet Mia’s calm revealed a deep assurance that Nancy did not own. Her spaciness was real, but it was also a mask, a shield, covering a closely observing ego and that iron will. Despite the braids and the soft voice and the carefully contrived dither, she knew just what she was about and where she was going. Jack Warner’s mistress Jacqueline Park marveled at Farrow’s equanimity in a house filled with photographs of Ava: “There was one of Ava in the bathroom, in the bedroom over his bed, in the living room, and even one in the kitchen, but Mia never said a word about them…I asked her if she was happy with Frank and she said, ‘Yes, we’re going to get married. I just know we are. This is my destiny and there is nothing I can do about it.’ ”
Even though she was doing everything she could about it.
She called him Charlie or Charlie Brown, his ever-rounder head (which she got to see sans toupee) putting her in mind of the Peanuts character. He called her Angel Face or Baby Face. He tried his best to bring her into his world. He put Ralph Vaughan Williams symphonies on the stereo—she loved them; he tried to interest her in golf—she hated it. He bought her a set of clubs in a white leather bag with her name embossed on it in pale blue: it didn’t help. Even worse than trying to play the game, she recalled, was having to watch endless televised golf tournaments along with Frank.
And then there were firearms, a crucial part of the Sinatra courtship ritual ever since Frank and Ava had drunkenly shot up the desert hamlet of Indio in 1949. The update was more sober and practical and, as befitted the mid-1960s, justifiably paranoid: driving home from Frank’s L.A. apartment one night, Mia had found herself being tailed by a car with a couple of men in it. She pulled into a brightly lit gas station and called Sinatra, who appeared within minutes packing heat. The men departed. Frank promptly bought Farrow a pearl-handled revolver and took her out into the desert to target-shoot tin cans. She was an unwilling pupil, she writes, and a terrible shot, even with her glasses on. Finally Frank had to admit it would be safer for her to stay away from firearms altogether.
The desert was also a place for meditation, and education: as they walked the narrow roads near Tamarisk, Frank tried his best to fill in this child of another era on what had made Sinatra Sinatra, spinning the story as might any swain trying to impress his girl. Thus, he had not been a cosseted (and bullied) Fauntleroy in his Hoboken past, but a street-smart kid navigating his way through one of the toughest neighborhoods anywhere. He covered his first marriage in greeting-card shorthand: Nancy, his boyhood sweetheart, was an exceptional woman; they both adored their three children—two of whom were older than Mia. Farrow wondered what Sinatra’s son and daughters might think of her.
As for Ava, she who (while married to Frank) had triggered the destruction of Mia’s parents’ marriage, she of whom “there were many lovely photographs…around the house,” such a pained look came into Frank’s eyes at the mention of his ex-wife that Farrow felt relieved when he switched the topic.
He changed the subject to the subject he always got around to eventually: his Rosebud, his touchstone. But when Sinatra told her how he’d learned the art of phrasing and the science of sneaking breaths from Tommy, Farrow looked blank. “Who’s Tommy?” she asked—not, to her credit, without embarrassment. Patiently he told her about the great Dorsey and his own experience as a boy singer with the band.
Maybe it was he who should have been embarrassed that his conversational arsenal was so threadbare. (As late as 1988, as Jonathan Schwartz recalled, Sinatra was still trying to interest young women—in this case Schwartz’s girlfriend—in his reminiscences about Dorsey.) But now and always, what he had to say was less interesting than what he had to be.
The gulf between the two of them was deeper and wider than either of them knew (though Frank may have had a clue). Yet in the way of all new lovers, they—or at least she—imagined their physical bliss mirrored a spiritual merging. Sometimes, as they strolled silently under the desert stars, Mia felt closer to him than she’d ever felt to anyone. But then, inevitably, came the times when she realized his silence only indicated remoteness. At these moments she would feel adrift and uncertain. Yet, she insists, these early, quiet days, before the world found out about them, were their happiest.
Then, slowly in the beginning, in came the world.
—
First came the Hollywood Old Guard, Frank’s new set now that he was middle-aged and upward aspiring: “that stuffy, older crowd that he cultivated to be more respectable,” Brad Dexter said. “I called them ‘the late show.’ ”
They were Bill and Edie Goetz; Rosalind Russell and her husband, the Broadway producer Freddie Brisson; the film producer Armand Deutsch and his wife, Harriet; Claudette Colbert and her husband, the Beverly Hills ear, nose, and throat surgeon Dr. Joel Pressman. Frank brought Mia to Thanksgiving dinner at the Goetzes’ (where he ordered her to clean her plate), and though at first, as George Jacobs noted, “no one, absolutely no one, took this romance seriously,” Edie Goetz observed that “Mia was a very clever young lady and she knew exactly what she was about and what she wanted. She was crazy about Frank and she intended to marry him.”
And soon, his Late Show friends, the Goetzes and the Brissons and the Pressmans, began to nudge him in that direction, too.
—
In early November, an inconceivable horror: a heavy Los Angeles rainstorm triggered a mudslide in the hills above Burbank that swept through the house of Sinatra’s pianist Bill Miller, seriously injuring him and killing his forty-seven-year-old wife, Aimee. Miller, who had desperately tried to save his wife when she was washed away, was discovered by rescuers three-quarters of a mile away, clinging to an automobile. Frank would find the pianist a new house, pay the part of his hospital bills that weren’t covered by insurance, and personally supervise and pay for the furnishing of the new home, down to the silverware, linen, and clothing. Doing all he could do short of comforting his musical right hand face-to-face.
The great man and the brilliant, gaunt pianist Sinatra teased as Suntan Charlie had always had—and always would have—a complex relationship; now it was more complicated than ever. “Bill didn’t really care for Frank,” Sinatra’s former flame Peggy Connelly insisted. “It was like a valet never seeing the boss as a hero. He said once, ‘What do you see in him? He repeats his stories all the time.’ Bill could’ve had a huge career outside of Frank, but he just wasn’t that sort of person.”
“Bill always took a lot of flak from Frank, but he had a way of getting back at him,” Emil Richards recalled. “If Frank said, ‘Bill, give
me a tone,’ then Bill would just hit one note. One little-bitty ‘boop,’ and that would be it…It’s as if Bill were saying, ‘Come on, bitch, find it! You’ve had it over me all this time, now I got you!’ ”
—
He didn’t take her to Vegas with him—not yet. It could’ve been awkward: on the night after Thanksgiving, he opened at the Sands with Count Basie and His Orchestra; after introducing some friends at ringside, he turned to a nearby table and said, “And now, the mother of my three children, Mrs. Nancy Sinatra.” Two of the three, Nancy Sandra and Frank junior, sat with her. Quincy Jones, who conducted the two-week stand, recalled a Sinatra who was focused and completely on his game, the master of the Honolulu revels nowhere in evidence.
“Jack Entratter said, ‘What do you guys do to Frank? When he’s with the Rat Pack, those guys are in the steam room till 5:30 a.m., drinking Jack Daniel’s, they’re just fuckin’ around all night. But when you guys work with him, he’s here forty-five minutes early with his sheet music and a manila folder, and [vocal exercises].’ You know he was ready to kill. Because after everything else, movies and TV and all that other stuff, he first was a big-band singer, and that’s where his roots are.”
He seemed to have moved on from the Rat Pack. He was in love. Attending the filming of a Peyton Place episode, Sheilah Graham noticed Farrow receiving what seemed a significant phone call. “I can still hear Mia telling me breathlessly in the Twentieth Century Fox commissary, ‘I’ve just had a call from the man I love,’ ” Graham recalled. “I had heard some rumors and queried, ‘Frank Sinatra?’ ‘Yes.’ It was a clear, confident affirmative.”
On November 30, Graham gleefully broke the news in her column, calling Frank and Mia “the maddest, merriest romance of the year.” She added that the couple “have not yet discussed marriage, but it could be very much on the agenda.” For the next twenty-four hours, Farrow’s phone rang off the hook with calls from New York, London, Paris—and Maureen O’Sullivan. “I have been meeting Mr. Sinatra, but only to discuss a film we might do together” was Mia’s response to all and sundry. The ever mother-hen-ish but increasingly out-of-touch Louella Parsons noted the romance rumors but echoed her goddaughter’s denial. “I don’t believe it,” she wrote. “I think Frank’s been talking to Mia about a movie role.” The movie in question was a farce unpromisingly titled Community Property. Farrow was to play Frank’s daughter.
Variety went gaga for Sinatra and Basie’s Sands act, calling it “an obvious blockbuster even before the curtain went up…the kind of dream hip musical which Entratter of course would like to hold beyond its skedded two weeks. There is no chorus line—it’s pure Sinatra and pure Basie. The combination of personalities and talent is overwhelming.”
The review went on to note that Frank, “in good voice [and] good humor,” sang “In Other Words” (“Fly Me to the Moon”), “My Kind of Town,” and a new addition to his repertoire, “Get Me to the Church on Time.”
—
Old habits died hard. Besides Nancy, Nancy junior, and Frank junior, Frank had another special ringside guest in the Copa Room on opening night, as Sinatra’s Von Ryan’s Express co-star John Leyton, who was present with his girlfriend, recalled: Frank “took us over to the table and introduced us to some people, one of whom was Sam Giancana—I called him Sir! Frank said to me to ask him what he did for a living. I wasn’t sure…but Frank insisted with a smile…Well, I asked him…and sure enough he stood up and shouted it out: ‘I own Chicago, that’s what I do for a living!’ He realized that Frank had put me up to it, so it was said with a smile on his face!”
The FBI and the Nevada Gaming Control Board, presumably, having been napping for the evening.
* * *
* The composer of “Sunflower,” Mack David, sued Herman and won an out-of-court settlement.
22
I am a symmetrical man, almost to a fault.
—SINATRA IN LIFE, APRIL 23, 1965
The calendar page had turned with a crash. “America in 1964 was straining to break out of black and white and into color,” the critic Dwight Garner has written. He was speaking of far more than just television—though between 1964 and 1966 color-TV ownership in the United States more than tripled.
The assassination’s deep shadow had begun to lighten. In 1964, while the British Invasion stormed ashore, American boys picked up guitars and started growing their hair. (Even Dean Martin’s son Dean Paul got into the act, forming a rock trio, Dino, Desi & Billy, with his friends Desi Arnaz Jr. and Billy Hinsche.) In 1965, American boys, and a couple of girls, got record deals. Nineteen sixty-five brought the Association, the Blues Project, Canned Heat, the Doors, the Electric Prunes, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Mamas & the Papas, the Sir Douglas Quintet, and the Stone Poneys, with Linda Ronstadt. Hullabaloo, NBC’s new musical-variety show for the youngsters (“in living color”), brought the new acts to millions in prime time, complete with the titillating sight of seventeen-year-old Lada Edmund Jr. go-go dancing in a cage.
Warner-Reprise Records was soaring, lifted not just by Dino (Dream with Dean, including “Everybody Loves Somebody”) but also by Mo Ostin’s new signees the Kinks, whose witty, irresistibly sexy “You Really Got Me,” with its insistent power-chord obbligato—duh-da-da-da-dah—rattled woofers and grown-ups’ nerves, and rang cash registers, across America.
Sinatra wasn’t fulminating anymore about cretinous goons, imbecilic reiterations, and lewd lyrics these days: the Kinks were putting big bucks in the till. “It [rock ’n’ roll] belongs to the younger generation and I’m not going to try to knock it,” he’d told Variety, with diplomatic restraint, in November. But he sensed which way the wind was blowing, and he wasn’t thrilled. In February, he and his boon companion Joe E. Lewis—the sad-eyed old comic who was as close as anyone on earth to an opposite species of human from Mia Farrow—did two weeks at Miami’s Eden Roc, then went straight to the Sands. Scanning the full house in the Copa Room, Sinatra turned to Jimmy Van Heusen and said, “Look at that—why don’t they buy my records?” But Vegas audiences weren’t his problem: it was the rest of the country. He hadn’t cracked the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100 since 1958.
—
They were hiding in plain sight.
“Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra were letting the world know all about their swinging new thing at The Daisy,” Hollywood columnist Mike Connolly snarked on January 22, “and I do mean they were NOT discussing a Partisan Review thesis on whether Hollywood’s western movies are mass myth or mass rite.” The Daisy was the new discotheque in Beverly Hills, even hotter than Whisky a Go Go, for one reason: it was private and exclusive. A $250 one-time membership fee (later raised to $1,000) kept out the riffraff—and sometimes, to the delight of the movie colony, luminaries like Peter O’Toole and Jason Robards Jr., both of whom were turned away that spring for not being members or members’ guests. The club’s owner was Jack Hanson, the inventor of Jax slacks, the slim-lined, derriere-flattering pants made popular by such delectable young things as Jane Fonda and Jill St. John (who was said to own $2,000 worth) and instantly de rigueur on Madison and Worth Avenues and Rodeo Drive. Fonda and St. John, no surprise, were also habitués of the Daisy, which, as Time salivated in an early 1965 piece, “has some of the most eye-filling females in the U.S. frugging and swimming their little hearts out in poorboy sweaters and nothing underwear.”
Hollywood had always paired rich old goats with nubile beauties and always managed to come up with a latest variation on the theme. “One night last week,” the Time piece continued, “Carol Lynley, Jane Fonda, Jill St. John and Jill Haworth shimmered and bobbed beautifully on the tight little dance floor, while Anthony Quinn, Dean Martin, George Hamilton and Eddie Fisher gave the girls something to stare at.” Of course the staring went both ways—“nothing underwear”—and of the four men only Hamilton was under thirty (Quinn and Martin were fifty and forty-seven) and Fonda, at twenty-seven, was the oldest of the young wome
n. Nuzzling on the Daisy’s dance floor, Frank and Mia fit the club’s template perfectly.
Which didn’t mean they fit together perfectly. If his default mode was listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams and watching golf on TV and drinking until dawn in the Sands lounge, hers was most assuredly not. His new lover wanted to go out and dance to her music, and the Daisy wasn’t playing Tony Bennett or Ella Fitzgerald records.
—
In early 1965, Larry King was a brash young Miami broadcaster fortunate enough to have acquired Jackie Gleason as a mentor after the Great One—like King, a transplanted Brooklynite—appeared on his local television show. One night, King was at a party at Gleason’s house when his host, who had a philosophical bent, asked the men in the room, “What in your profession is impossible? What will never happen?”
“We had a doctor there,” King recalled, “and he said, ‘They will never make blood in a laboratory. They will never manufacture blood that you can transfuse into someone. That will never happen.’ Then he went to another guy, and then he came to me. I said, ‘I do my television show and I write my column, but I do a three-hour radio show every night, from nine to twelve, a very popular local radio show. Sinatra is opening at the Eden Roc. Frank Sinatra to do my radio show for three hours.’
“Now, this is 1965,” King continued, “and there’s no bigger person in the world than Frank Sinatra in 1965. Capitol, Reprise, the whole thing; he’s opening at the Eden Roc with Joe E. Lewis. Jackie asked, ‘What night is he dark?’ I said, ‘Monday.’ And Jackie said, ‘You got him next Monday.’
“So I said, ‘Jackie, can I go on the air tonight and say that next Monday I’ll be having Frank Sinatra on my show?’ ‘Go ahead.’ So I go back on the air, I say, ‘Frank Sinatra next Monday night.’ Now the station calls me in. They asked, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘Jackie says so.’ I told the story. Now it’s Friday, and they’re taking full-page ads in the Miami Herald announcing this, but they’re also saying they’ve left messages at the Eden Roc, and nobody’s returning their calls.