Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Also unlike Greene, Sinatra usually vented his furies on people rather than objects. “I watched him throw food on the floor,” Greene recalled. “I saw him have Jilly kick people. Once we went downstairs to the Fontainebleau coffee shop. It was four or five o’clock in the morning. Sinatra liked these hot brown rolls they had, so we went down there to see if they were done yet, and they weren’t done. And Frank got mad, and he said something to Jilly, and Jilly kicked the baker and broke his ankle.

  “I said, ‘Are you guys fuckin’ sick? What are you doing?’ I used to see these things, and I didn’t want to be with him. I wanted to quit every two minutes.”

  But he stayed.

  —

  Farrow flew to Miami to spend a few days with Sinatra; he behaved. Then she returned to Germany, and the misbehavior resumed. Joe Fischetti, still nominally connected with the Fontainebleau, found women for Frank. And he drank steadily.

  “We’re sitting in the Gigi Room at the Fontainebleau,” Shecky Greene recalled, “and he says to me, ‘He’s using my name.’ I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’

  “ ‘That son-of-a-bitch is using my name,’ Sinatra says. So I said, ‘Who are you talking about?’

  “ ‘My kid,’ he says.

  “I said, ‘Well, you named him Frank Sinatra, Junior. Isn’t that his name?’

  “ ‘Whattaya mean?’ he says. ‘He’s out there using my name.’

  “ ‘Well, Jesus Christ, what name is he gonna use? Charles Bronson? That’s his name.’

  “ ‘Shut up,’ he said.”

  —

  On March 13, Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin’s horror novel about witchcraft and devil worship in modern-day New York City, was published. The book immediately jumped onto the best-seller lists, and by the end of the month Paramount had bought the film rights for the producer William Castle (House on Haunted Hill, I Saw What You Did) and hired the young Polish director Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water, Repulsion) to helm the movie. The project quickly became one of Hollywood’s hottest, the title role eagerly sought after by every young actress in town.

  —

  “No better evidence of the marital status of the Frank Sinatras than that Mia Farrow jets back from England to see Frank on every possible occasion,” Harrison Carroll wrote in his Hollywood column on March 14. “With two weeks off from ‘Dandy in Aspic,’ she flew straight here. Frank was to fly here from his Florida singing engagement. His movie, ‘Shamus,’ probably won’t start down there until around April 1. Meanwhile, crews are working on the double to complete the redecorating of the pair’s new Bel Air home.”

  But why was evidence of the Sinatras’ marital status needed at all?

  —

  On March 2, Frank had had his best night ever at the Grammys, winning both Record of the Year and Best Male Vocal Performance for “Strangers in the Night” and Album of the Year for A Man and His Music. On the other hand, moviemaking had come to bore him—a fact to which the three flops in a row he’d made (The Naked Runner would be released in July to the box-office fate it deserved) attested. With Marriage on the Rocks and Assault on a Queen, the material, as he’d told Peter Bart, had been the problem. Runner had had more to build on, but then the mad marriage to Mia exploded in the middle of it, and Frank simply checked out.

  Before his partnership with Brad Dexter went down in flames, Dexter had attempted to revive Sinatra’s flagging interest in films with a William Goldman script called Harper, a detective story based on the Ross Macdonald novel The Moving Target. But then negotiations with the owners of the property, producers Elliott Kastner and Jerry Gershwin, fell through, and the movie ended up getting made with Paul Newman instead of Frank Sinatra.

  With its dark, witty screenplay and its superb cast (Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, Arthur Hill, and Janet Leigh co-starred), Harper was an artistic and box-office success in 1966: a tough, cool, cynical story revolving around a flawed hero—Newman at his most winningly roguish—and some not-so-admirable characters. The winning formula harked back to Humphrey Bogart’s detective movies The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep—sex, danger, humor, and a sardonic central character. Following the lead of his old idol Bogie, Sinatra now realized, could revive his film career.

  That career would last just thirteen more years; in five out of six of his starring roles between 1967 and 1980, he would play a detective. As Tom Santopietro points out, “The persona of a private investigator fit Frank Sinatra perfectly…Audiences expect detectives to resemble their idealized version of Frank Sinatra: the man in question has been around the block more than once, is bruised, tough, cynical yet still possesses a small private reservoir of hope. Tough with men, wary with women, the chivalrous knight who has seen it all but still fights the daily fight—it all fit Frank Sinatra like one of his custom-made suits.”

  Still, he was fifty-one and looked it: plumper, balder, puffier about the face, though still rugged. If he couldn’t pull off the Cary Grant trick of playing the swain to much younger women, he could still portray their protector, a father figure with a sexual charge. And a solitary righter of wrongs. Solitude was the key. In his greatest movie roles and in his recording career, the overriding image was of a man alone. And if the man himself was less tough and certain than the image, less wise and witty, the solitude was real.

  —

  Early in the morning of November 27, 1966, the same day that Mia and Frank would appear on What’s My Line?, another legendary loner, Howard Hughes, moved into the ninth-floor penthouse of the Desert Inn. He would remain there for the next four years, secluded in a room with blacked-out windows, as he took over Las Vegas.

  Having just been forced by a U.S. federal court to sell his majority stake in Trans World Airlines, Hughes was now the richest man in America, with cash and holdings worth $1.5 billion. “He had not come to Las Vegas with a master plan,” Hughes’s biographer Michael Drosnin writes.

  He had come only because he didn’t know where else to go and because he had been there before and liked it. He liked the all-night ambiance, he liked the showgirls, he liked the whole tone and feel of the place. In the early 1950s, before he went into seclusion, he used to fly in regularly for a night or a few days or a few weeks, catch the shows, perhaps pick up a showgirl, dispatching one of his lackeys to arrange the assignation, always ordering him to first get a signed release. He rarely gambled, just occasionally dropped a nickel in a slot machine, but he cruised the casinos and was a familiar figure at ringside in the showrooms, and he kept coming back.

  But as the 1950s became the 1960s, the inventor, aviator, and company builder once thought of as a dashing eccentric had descended into madness, his obsessive-compulsive disorder blooming unchecked. He lay naked in his bed in the Desert Inn penthouse in unspeakably filthy conditions, urinating into bottles, cleaning himself with paper towels, which he then wadded and threw aside. He let his hair and fingernails grow grotesquely long. Yet there was a certain cracked logic to all his obsessions, a logic that pivoted on the idea of control.

  Hughes had a vision: he would rescue a town that reveled in its crassness and vulgarity from itself. He would purify Sin City. He would, he wrote in a memo to his right-hand man Robert Maheu, “make Las Vegas as trustworthy and respectable as the New York Stock Exchange—so that Nevada gambling will have the kind of a reputation that Lloyd’s of London has, so that Nevada on a note will be like Sterling on silver.”

  And it didn’t stop there. “We can make a really super environmental ‘city of the future’ here,” Hughes wrote. “No smog, no contamination, efficient local government, where the tax-payers pay as little as possible, and get something for their money.”

  “There it was,” Drosnin writes. “Hughes Heaven—no contamination, no taxes, and lots of class. There was, of course, one other requirement: he had to own it all.”

  And he would have to buy it from the men who currently owned it—the overlords of organized crime.

  Hughes’s tenancy in the penthouse of t
he Desert Inn was a thorn in the side of its owner, tuber-nosed Cleveland Mob boss Moe Dalitz. Dalitz wanted to rent his ninth-floor suites to high rollers, and he wanted Hughes out. Hughes came back with a counteroffer: he would buy the Desert Inn.

  In truth, Dalitz, who like other Mob bosses around the country was under intense scrutiny by the Justice Department, was eager to sell. But he wasn’t about to tip his mitt to Hughes. Three months of haggling ensued, the negotiations carried on by the principals’ seconds, Maheu and the Mob’s ambassador to Vegas and Hollywood, Johnny Rosselli. The two, of course, were old friends and partners in the failed CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. In true cloak-and-dagger fashion, however, neither man scrupled to pull a fast one on the other.

  Finally, after byzantine negotiations, sale terms agreeable to both sides were reached. And on the last day of March 1967, Howard Hughes received permission from the Nevada Gaming Commission to purchase the Desert Inn’s operations for $13 million. The Clark County Gaming License Board also approved a casino license for Hughes. Frank Sinatra’s old rival for the affections of Lana Turner and Ava Gardner had now bested him in the one arena where Sinatra couldn’t compete and taken the first step toward permanently altering the character of the town that Frank Sinatra had lifted to greatness on his narrow shoulders.

  —

  Tony Rome, the first of what would be three Sinatra detective films for 20th Century Fox, began shooting in Miami on April 3. Frank played the title character, a wisecracking, down-on-his-luck private detective who lives on a cabin cruiser; Richard Conte played a police lieutenant; Jill St. John, a sexy divorcée; Gena Rowlands, Tony’s ex-wife; and Sue Lyon, late of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, co-starred as a dissolute rich girl. Frank enlisted Billy May to write the score, and the ever-reliable (and ever-amenable) Gordon Douglas directed.

  During the day, Sinatra made the movie; each night, he did one show at the Fontainebleau, once more with Shecky Greene as his opening act. Frank had also given Shecky a small role in the movie (so that 20th Century Fox, rather than Sinatra, could pay the comic’s Vegas-size salary), as a limping crook named Catleg. He cast some other pals in bit parts, too: Jilly; Mike Romanoff; Rocky Graziano; and, returning to the screen in a surprisingly effective turn as a fat, menacing pawnbroker, Mickey Rudin.

  The movie shoot was brisk and efficient, Douglas displaying a craftsman’s skill at moving the story along (the screenplay, based on Marvin Albert’s novel Miami Mayhem, was by Richard Breen) and an old Sinatra hand’s flair for ensuring, each day, that the set was lit and ready for Frank to do as few takes as possible.

  Sinatra responded in kind, hitting his marks and delivering the most effortless performance of his movie career. Tony Rome was a man who appeared closer to the real Frank Sinatra than any character Frank had ever played. He seemed liberated in every word and gesture—even in his accent; Tony might well have come straight out of Hoboken. The man who portrayed him had almost always been a riveting presence on the big screen, in a sailor suit or a military uniform, sticking a needle in his arm or sweating out a remembered brainwashing. Yet even watching Sinatra’s finest performances, you did a mental calculation: the man emoting so effectively on-screen, the amazingly natural actor, was the same man who grinned as he wore a tux and sang “Fly Me to the Moon.” Of course that was acting, too. There were a dozen (or more) real Sinatras, many of which you never saw in the movies. But Tony Rome—a man alone, a man who chased women or let them chase him; who drank and smoked and loosened his tie; who joked wryly and acted tough but now and then went down for the count—felt real, because Frank clearly felt so comfortable playing him.

  And his comfort with the material and the process ensured the comfort of the rest of the cast and crew. “It was really enjoyable; it was fun,” Gena Rowlands recalled of the shoot. “Everything went just easily and smoothly. Frank came in very prepared; he had no temper towards anyone that I saw.”

  Rowlands, who had never met Sinatra before but had heard the stories, was pleasantly surprised. “I found him to be a wonderful actor; he could do a whole complicated scene in one take, and I never saw him do more than one take,” she said. “He was funny, too. He had a good sense of humor, and he was generous in his behavior with all the actors. There was nothing pretentious about him; he was just awfully nice.

  “He was kind of that old-fashioned sort of Italian who always helped you,” the actress remembered. “We shot a lot on the boat, so we’d have to get from the pier to the boat. He was always right there, giving you a hand, making sure you didn’t knock yourself out on some of those lights that were in peculiar places because of the water and all. Just a very polite guy.”

  —

  Frank as Tony Rome, early 1967. In the most effortless performance of his movie career, Sinatra played a character who seemed closer to his real self than any he had ever portrayed. (Credit 24.2)

  Nighttimes were different. Mia was back in Berlin, and though she and Frank spoke on the phone several times a day, there was a six-hour time difference, and the moment always came when she had to get some sleep, and that was when his night was just beginning. He began drinking when the shoot ended each afternoon, and those who were around him after that saw a very different Sinatra than Gena Rowlands saw during the day. “The air was volatile and violent around him all the time,” Shecky Greene remembered. “We played the same audience every night, and when I was onstage, there was nothing but laughter. Yet when Frank came out, that same audience erupted and people started fighting.”

  In a newspaper story about Sinatra, the syndicated entertainment reporter Dan Lewis portrayed the fourteenth floor of the Fontainebleau, where Frank was staying, as a virtual armed camp, thick with an air of menace, swarming with security men and the bodyguards he called his Dago Secret Service. “Everybody wants to see Frank,” the hotel’s head of security told Lewis. “Everybody wants to talk to him. The toughest time I have is when Frank’s staying at the hotel here.”

  “Frank had so many people sucking around him then, it was sickening,” Greene said. “And those bodyguards would attack on command, so naturally people were frightened. Even if he doesn’t order the beatings, he allows the violence to happen by having those guys around.”

  Sinatra’s mood worsened when, one night as he was coming offstage, one of the bodyguards handed him a newspaper with a publicity photo of Mia dancing with Laurence Harvey. The two were closely entwined, Farrow’s long thin arms wrapped around Harvey’s neck. This was the final straw in a charade that had been going on for a couple of months: in A Dandy in Aspic, Farrow played a photographer who has an affair with Harvey’s character, a KGB assassin, and both the celebrity press and, to a certain extent, Harvey had been making much of their on- and off-screen chemistry. “I have some hot love scenes with Mia,” he’d boasted to Leonard Lyons in mid-April, and at least one newspaper account described one of those scenes in detail as graphic as the journalistic standards of 1967 would allow.

  Frank had become close to Laurence Harvey during the making of The Manchurian Candidate and knew well that he was a closeted homosexual: Sinatra’s nickname for him was Ladyboy. At first he’d been tolerant. “Frank Sinatra has given his approval for Laurence Harvey to escort Mia Farrow around London,” Sheilah Graham had written in March. But then, already detecting chinks in the marriage, the columnist couldn’t help adding kittenishly, “Mia will positively not date anyone unless.”

  Yet this photograph wasn’t a question of reality; it was a matter of reputation. (“His anger was not that she was dancing with Larry,” Graham recalled; “it was the too-friendly picture that he thought would cause gossip. It did.”) Laurence Harvey was thirty-eight years old and, in the eyes of the world, a handsome, heterosexual leading man. And Sinatra had endured enough gibes about his advanced age and the youth of his wife to enrage any man, even one with a far longer fuse than his. He got on the phone, waking Mia in the middle of the night in Berlin, and screamed at her for the better part of an hour. She
got on the next plane and flew to Miami to try to placate him. He was implacable. She turned around and flew back to work.

  —

  On April 15, “Somethin’ Stupid” hit number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That made two number 1’s in two years, with two songs he didn’t think much of.

  He wasn’t thinking too much of himself at this point, either.

  Two nights later, Frank, frequently refilled glass in hand, sat in the television room of Harry Mufson’s house in Miami Beach. Mufson, the owner of the Eden Roc, had originally been Ben Novack’s partner in building the Fontainebleau, but had parted with him on bitter terms, and was now his main—and next-door—competitor. Sinatra bounced back and forth between the two establishments. That night, Frank, Mufson, Mufson’s wife, Shecky Greene, Jilly Rizzo, Joe Fischetti, and several others had gathered to watch the premiere of Joey Bishop’s new late-night talk show on ABC.

  The band played Bishop’s theme song—Frank Loesser’s “Joey, Joey, Joey,” from The Most Happy Fella—and the host came out and did his monologue. Bishop went to commercial. When he returned, he bantered with his sidekick, Regis Philbin, for a moment, then introduced his distinguished first guest: “Ladies and gentlemen, the governor of our state, Ronald Reagan.”

  As Reagan strolled out, grinning, from the parted curtain, Frank Sinatra stood, walked to the television, and kicked the screen with all his might, shattering the picture tube.

  —

  There was Daytime Frank, and there was Nighttime Frank.

  During the days, he made the picture, a model of equipoise and friendly—if brisk—collegiality. During the nights, he made Miami mayhem. He drank; he was rumored to be picking up where he had left off with Jill St. John, even though she was nominally involved with Jack Jones. Meanwhile, Fischetti continued to bring him pretty women, and what happened afterward wasn’t always pretty.