Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  The next day, Farrow writes, she put on a white suit, and Bill and Edie Goetz picked her up and they flew to Vegas on Frank’s plane. She was to tell no one about the wedding, he’d commanded; even Nancy and Tina didn’t know. Mia worried about how hurt her mother was going to be—and wondered how the news had leaked to the press. She found Frank in his suite at the Sands, looking handsome in his dark suit. Supercharged with emotion, they burst into laughter—and then were unable to look at each other.

  Sinatra’s primary feeling on the flight from New York to Vegas seems to have been dread. He didn’t drink much aboard the Lear Jet, his valet recalled, but he chain-smoked and “looked grim, as if he were on his way to major surgery, or his own execution.” He hadn’t told his family about the wedding, dreading their finding out before he had a chance to let them know himself but not realizing the news had already leaked.

  He had informed Ava, however. A number of sources, including Gardner’s biographer Lee Server, say that Frank had George Jacobs phone her with the news in London, shortly before the ceremony. Strikingly, though, Jacobs’s memoir, which makes much of the valet’s friendly relationship with the love of his boss’s life, makes no reference to such a call. And equally strikingly, Randy Taraborrelli adduces “a close friend” of Ava’s, one Lucille Wellman—unmentioned in Server’s book—who claimed Gardner had told her that Frank phoned himself, right from the Sands, just before the ceremony, “upset and nervous” and hoping, aloud, that he wasn’t making a big mistake. According to Wellman, Ava advised Sinatra to rethink his decision, and he told her, “It’s too late, baby. The judge is standing right there.” He is then said to have said, “No matter how I feel about this young chick…I will always love you.”

  But on one fact accounts agree: when Ava heard the news, she cried and couldn’t stop crying.

  —

  The civil ceremony, Judge William Compton presiding, took place precisely at 5:30 p.m. in the living room of Jack Entratter’s suite and took all of four minutes. Frank wore his three-piece suit, an unfortunate visual echo from Marriage on the Rocks; Mia wore a short, sheer white dress with caftan sleeves. It was a toss-up whose hair was shorter. Bill and Edie Goetz were best man and matron of honor; Entratter gave the bride away. Adding to the bizarreness of the occasion was the presence of Red Skelton, who was performing at the Sands and who, as Farrow noted without further comment, “had just shot his wife.” (The newspapers reported that early that morning, a .38 pistol in the Skeltons’ suite had “accidentally discharged,” the bullet hitting Georgia Skelton in the left breast. No criminal charge was ever filed.)

  As for the bride and groom, “I’ve never seen such anxiety before,” Edie Goetz remembered. “They were both so nervous you couldn’t believe it. Frank’s face was flushed and he twitched nervously as they repeated their vows.”

  “Mr. S looked nervous and shell-shocked,” George Jacobs concurred. “Mia looked radiant, as if she had won the Irish Sweepstakes. The girl had gotten her man, at last. Now the even harder part was figuring out how to keep him.”

  “This is the happiest day of my life,” Farrow said as she hugged Edie Goetz.

  There were champagne toasts—Mia said “thank you”—and Frank finally broke into a smile. He took his new wife by the hand and led her from the air-conditioned room to the patio of Entratter’s Japanese garden, where—after an aide announced, “Still photographers and reporters only,” barring television crews lest Sinatra’s family find out about the wedding on TV before he had a chance to tell them about it—a crowd of newsmen had gathered in the 107-degree heat. Someone noticed that Mia hadn’t given Frank a ring.

  “How are you, baby,” he asked Farrow. “My bride!” he announced.

  As dozens of shutters clicked and the journalists began to blurt out questions, he held up a hand. “This is a big day, fellas,” he said. “I can’t think of what to say. We just decided to get married last week. We were both out west, it seemed right, and we’re in love, and it was logical.”

  As logical as Lewis Carroll. A reporter piped up. “Will Mia accompany you to London?”

  “Oh, yes, by all means, yes,” Sinatra replied.

  —

  Frank had evidently made another call before the ceremony. At 5:30 p.m. on the nineteenth, Tina Sinatra recalled, she was dropping her friends Deana and Dino Martin off in their driveway when “Uncle Dean beckoned me inside,” she writes. “He took me into his little den, where he’d retreat to watch his golf on TV. He sat me down on his sofa with an Indian blanket, and said, ‘I want you to know that your dad is marrying Mia as we speak.’ ”

  Frank and Mia, the Sands, July 19, 1966. “My bride!” Sinatra announced, as dozens of shutters clicked. (Credit 23.1)

  She was understandably shocked and hurt at having been kept in the dark. Dean told Tina she’d better go home and tell her mother: the news was going to break any second. But by the time Frank’s younger daughter got home, Big Nancy had already received a call from her friend Dorothy Manners.

  “My mother was stunned, and insulted that Dad had failed to confide in us,” Tina remembered.

  It was the first time we’d been excluded from something important in his life.

  An hour or so later, Dad left his reception and called us at Nimes Road…I happened to pick up the phone, and he could hear how angry I was.

  He said, “I want you to be happy for me—I want you to wish me well.”

  I said, “I’m too busy resenting you for not telling me.” I wouldn’t give him my blessing; it was not a pretty conversation. (I’d apologize to him and Mia later.)

  Looking back, I can’t blame Dad for keeping his secret. He couldn’t trust his family because he didn’t want to hear what he already knew: that he was nuts. He could go through with the marriage only by living in denial. “I just didn’t want anyone ruining it for me,” he’d confess to me long afterward.

  He sounds like a sulky child. And he was acting like a child: furtive, impulsive, self-involved. But his child bride, wise beyond her years, was just as complicit as he in this strange liaison, and it was surpassingly strange. A Venn diagram of the marriage would have shown a small shaded intersection representing sex and affection; two large areas outside would have remained blank. And antithetical.

  —

  They cleverly threw the press off their trail, announcing they were flying to New York and going to Los Angeles instead, only not to Frank’s house (he was now renting a big place in his old Holmby Hills stomping grounds, just off Sunset Boulevard), but to the Goetzes’, where their matron of honor and best man threw them a glittering party. “My brother Patrick and his wife came,” Farrow recalled, “and Prudence, Maria [her close friend Maria Roach], and Lenny Gershe, and my godfather, George Cukor, brought Katharine Hepburn; Spencer Tracy arrived separately. Edward G. Robinson was there, and Dean Martin, Ruth and Garson Kanin, Richard Attenborough, and the Billy Wilders. There was a huge wedding cake.”

  There were, however, no Sinatras. And no Maureen O’Sullivan.

  The newlyweds spent their first night as husband and wife at the Goetzes’, then headed to London.

  —

  Stopping in New York on the way to London, the honeymooners were feted by the Cerfs and Leland Hayward at “21” on the night of July 25. As Frank and Mia emerged from the restaurant, a diminutive New York Post photographer named Jerry Engel moved in to get a shot. Wrong move. Sinatra slugged him, knocking his glasses off.

  The next night Frank took his bride to dinner at Marty and Dolly’s house in Fort Lee, an event also left unrecorded in Farrow’s memoir. Dolly had cooked for two days in preparation for the big event: among the blue-collar bric-a-brac, the pictures of the popes and statues of the saints and the artificial cherry tree, the big dinner tables groaned with ravioli, scaloppine, scungilli, lasagna, fettuccine, calamari, osso buco, mortadella, and mounds of cold cuts and sugary desserts. Toots Shor and Joe E. Lewis and Jilly were there, and Roz Russell an
d Freddie Brisson, and Mia’s girlhood friend Liza Minnelli, who smoked little cigars. Farrow ate only salad and, seemingly intimidated by the boisterous company, said as little as Marty Sinatra. Dolly, who had always been crazy about Ava and still was, was underwhelmed. “This one don’t talk,” she told a friend. “She don’t eat. What’s she do?”

  And, taking George Jacobs aside: “She’s a little nothing. Is that the best he can do?”

  —

  She had underestimated her, of course: Mia was formidably intelligent, graceful, and willful—and ambitious. “She was a voracious reader with a sprightly intelligence and an active imagination,” wrote Tina, who was drawn to her as Nancy junior (who felt threatened and competitive, at least at first) was not.

  She was interesting and interested in what was going on around her. If anything, Mia brought something extra to the table: a firm set of [liberal] politics.

  Mia could also be silly, and Dad loved silly. She possessed an intriguing physical dexterity; rather than simply walk through a room, she’d dance through it. And she had a flair for being part of a group—she was both entertaining and easy to entertain. Mia could make you feel like you were the only one in the vicinity worth listening to.

  It wasn’t hard to see how Dad could have fallen in love with her.

  Naturally, Tina Sinatra was speaking not objectively but from the point of view of a young woman three years Mia Farrow’s junior. (And as a middle-aged woman writing a memoir, she was also spinning a political line against her father’s fourth wife, Barbara Marx, who had become her bitter enemy.) And Farrow was not just being wisely political in cultivating Tina but naturally drawn to people her own age.

  —

  Which proved to be an immediate problem when they got back to London. “Mia knew far more people in England than Frank, including half the rock stars on the radio, and she wanted to see all of them,” Jacobs recalled. “Mr. S wanted to see all of them dead, so that was a big conflict.”

  Sinatra now refused to go out, fearing they’d run into Farrow’s hip young friends. While London was swinging like mad, she was under a kind of house arrest. Frank’s Grosvenor Square apartment was a domain of “shiny green silks with lots of tassels, little glass-top tables, and jade ashtrays,” she wrote, with a prisoner’s keen eye for her fuddy-duddy surroundings. The company was just as deadly. When he was on the set, his London friends’ wives would pop by unannounced to look in on her or to try to take her shopping—Mia would hide in the bedroom while her secretary fended them off.

  The couple spent a lot of time in the bedroom, Jacobs recalled, but outside it weren’t as overtly affectionate as blissful newlyweds should be. His boss seemed testy and unfocused, he said. On weekends, to keep Mia from bad influences, Frank jetted her away from London to visit more rich and elderly friends, like Jack Warner (aged seventy-four), business magnate Loel Guinness (sixty), and My Fair Lady composer Fritz Loewe (sixty-five). Aboard Loewe’s yacht, she ate flower-petal sandwiches.

  Mia wasn’t the only one who was bored. Sinatra had gone into The Naked Runner with a reasonable degree of commitment—God knew he needed a movie hit after the consecutive disasters of Marriage on the Rocks and Assault on a Queen (which had been released in mid-June to yawns from audiences and critics alike)—but he had lost interest. He was still furious at Brad Dexter for calling him out on his ill-considered marriage and had grown sick of England. After a helicopter transporting him to a location outside London became lost in a fog, making him forty-five minutes late to the set, Frank went into a rage and demanded the entire production be moved to Palm Springs—a strange idea for a spy film largely set in gray East Germany. When Sinatra stalked off, sulking and refusing to work, director Sidney Furie went him one better, bursting into tears, jumping into his jeep, and speeding away. Dexter had to use all his diplomatic skills to get star and director to finish the U.K. shoot.

  —

  At the end of August, filming of The Naked Runner moved to Copenhagen. Equilibrium had been more or less restored, and shooting was on schedule. After a couple of days’ work, Sinatra told Dexter he wanted to take the weekend off to fly to Los Angeles and host a fund-raiser for California’s governor, Pat Brown, who was running for a third term against the Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan. Frank had known Reagan since the 1940s and had no use for him, or his wife, the former actress Nancy Davis. “He hated the guy, just hated him,” said a former girlfriend of Jimmy Van Heusen’s. “We’d be at some party, and if the Reagans arrived, Frank would snap his fingers and say, ‘C’mon, Chester. We’re leaving. I can’t stand that fucking Ronnie. He’s such a bore. Every time you get near the bastard he makes a speech and he never knows what he’s talking about.’ ”

  Beginning in the late 1930s, Reagan had had a middling career as a movie actor (Knute Rockne All American, Kings Row, Bedtime for Bonzo); like many other movie careers, it faded in the 1950s with the rise of television. Bowing to the tide, he took a job as host of the drama series General Electric Theater in 1954. The sponsors were intensely politically conservative, and soon Reagan, who had been a lifelong Democrat (though in the late 1940s he’d secretly informed to the FBI on Communist sympathizers in Hollywood), took a sharp turn to the right. He was a conservative president of the Screen Actors Guild and a fervent and powerful supporter of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election.

  All this was, of course, anathema to the FDR Democrat Sinatra; he also hated Reagan’s genial, folksy manner (“I couldn’t stand listening to his gee whiz, golly shucks crap”). Frank “swore he’d move out of California if Reagan ever got elected to public office,” Peter Lawford recalled.

  Brad Dexter, who felt similarly about Reagan, freely assented to Sinatra’s rhetorical request for a weekend off. Thus began the bizarre endgame of The Naked Runner.

  Sidney Furie comfortably shot around Frank for several days. Dexter “then received a communication from Mickey Rudin, the star’s lawyer, to the effect that Sinatra would not be returning to Copenhagen,” writes Sinatra film historian Daniel O’Brien.

  His outstanding scenes could be filmed on a Los Angeles soundstage, much as he’d finished off the otherwise Spanish-shot Pride and the Passion a decade earlier. [But] instead of dispatching the existing Runner footage to Warner, as requested by Rudin, Dexter refused to follow Sinatra’s orders. Citing the existing post-production contracts back in England, he and Furie chose to complete the film without its star. Reworking the script to minimize the number of essential Sinatra scenes left unshot, producer and director filmed the required material with a double, subsequently editing in close-ups of the star taken from existing footage. When Rudin showed up in person to reiterate Sinatra’s ultimatum, Dexter declined to comply, opting instead to deliver the finished film to Jack Warner in person two months later.

  When Dexter walked into the Sinatra offices on the Warner Bros. lot, Milt Krasny, the vice president of Sinatra Enterprises, said that Mickey Rudin had instructed him to inform Dexter that he was fired from the picture. He was to pack his things and leave the lot immediately. Saying he would allow only one man to fire him, Dexter phoned Frank in Palm Springs.

  It was 9:00 a.m., and George Jacobs answered, saying Sinatra was asleep. Dexter told Jacobs to wake him. A couple of minutes later, Frank came on the line and in a sleepy voice said, “How are you? How was the flight? You sure took your time in getting back here.”

  Dexter told Sinatra the movie was ready for him to view but that he’d just been told he was fired. “I’m not taking orders from any of your lackeys,” he said. “If you want to fire me, fire me, but I want to get it straight from you—no one else. Do you understand, Frank?” There was a long silence, then a click. Sinatra had hung up.

  Dexter refused to accept his firing, fine-tuning the release print and demanding the $15,000 remaining of his $50,000 producer’s fee. He never got the money. “Questioned about the incident, Sinatra publicist Jim Mahoney argued that Dexter had brought his dismissal upon himself
,” O’Brien writes. “Not only had the novice producer hijacked the film, he wouldn’t even let Sinatra look at the rough cut. Whatever the truth of these various allegations, the net result was a film almost unreleasable.”

  “He was the producer, of course, but he seemed to have forgotten it was Frank who gave him the job,” Mahoney said of Dexter. “Anyway, that was the end of it.”

  And that was the end of Brad Dexter, as far as Frank was concerned. The greatest good deed of all could not go unpunished. “Brad didn’t really save my life,” Sinatra later said of his near drowning in Hawaii. “It was an old guy on a surfboard.”

  —

  On September 7, Frank hosted a fund-raiser for Pat Brown at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. Joey Bishop emceed; Dean Martin, Connie Francis, Rowan and Martin, the Step Brothers, Trini Lopez, and Ella Fitzgerald were also on the bill. Outside the building, “a straggly line of creepy looking, bare foot anti-war marchers schlepped around…making a pathetic attempt at singing some song they didn’t know the words or tune to,” wrote San Mateo Times columnist Barbara Bladen. No such unseemliness troubled the proceedings inside, which were Vegas slick. “Mia Farrow Sinatra, whose close cropped coiffure shone in the spotlight like a bald spot…got a big round of applause, probably for having snagged The Leader,” Bladen wrote.