Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  One Saturday night, Shecky Greene recalled, “he got completely crazy.” A girl, he hazily remembered, had been beaten up. And the burly comedian, who had been matching Frank drink for drink, then did a crazy thing: he picked the very drunk Sinatra up, “threw him over my shoulder, and got in the elevator, and brought him all the way up to his suite, and put him down.”

  Greene shook his head at the memory. “I threw him over my shoulder, and he’s kicking like a little kid,” he said. “Richard Conte is with us. It’s Frank, myself, and Richard Conte, and Conte goes, ‘Put him down, Shecky! We’re gonna get killed! Don’t you understand?’ This tough guy in movies. I said, ‘What the fuck is the matter with you? The man’s insane.’ ”

  As drunk as Sinatra had been, though, he remembered something of the incident, and it did not go down well with him. “He kept on saying to me, ‘You’re gonna get it,’ ” Greene remembered. “I said, ‘Get what? What the fuck are you gonna give me, Frank? You want to fight? Well, let’s fight.’

  “ ‘Oh, you’re gonna get it,’ he kept saying. ‘When am I gonna get it?’ I asked him.”

  —

  Tiffany Bolling was twenty-one and blond and gorgeous, a free-spirited California girl from an interesting background: her biological father was the jazz pianist and singer Roy Kral; her mother, who broke up with Kral soon after Tiffany was born, had also worked as a singer and a comedian. Performing came naturally to Bolling, and finding herself in Miami in the spring of 1967, she auditioned for Gordon Douglas and landed a small speaking part in Tony Rome. She played a sexy nightclub photographer, in a Playboy-bunny-style outfit, who takes a picture that Sinatra’s character winds up needing as evidence.

  Frank met Bolling one night a few weeks into the shoot in the Gigi Room at the Fontainebleau, where he was giving a small dinner for a few cast and crew members, serving pasta with his special marinara sauce; he had cooked the meal himself in the restaurant’s kitchen. In time-honored fashion, he had a friend go over to the young actress and ask if she would like to sit at his table. She would, and she did.

  Bolling had done some coffeehouse singing herself, and though her tastes leaned toward Janis Joplin and Linda Ronstadt, she thought Sinatra “had one hell of a great voice,” she recalled. “I told him that—I said, ‘You know, I gotta tell you, man—you got a great voice.’ He cracked up laughing. He said, ‘Who are you?’ ”

  They began an affair. Bolling was one year younger than Mia Farrow and a very different person: a beautiful but unformed girl, feisty yet undemanding. Mia never came up, Bolling remembered; the young actress seems to have been under the impression that Sinatra and his wife were no longer together. “I didn’t ask questions; I didn’t really care,” she said. “I knew he had separated from her, or I wouldn’t have gotten involved with him. I wasn’t that kind of a person.”

  Bolling, who had an apartment in Fort Lauderdale, soon moved into the penthouse at the Fontainebleau. (She also found Jill St. John staring daggers at her. “I don’t think she liked me very much, and she made it plain,” Bolling recalled.) She sat at Sinatra’s table as he performed in the La Ronde Room; during the day, having completed her two short scenes in the movie early on, she read or walked on the beach. One day, a salesperson from the women’s-wear store in the hotel lobby came up to the suite with a large selection of clothing. “What do you want?” the salesperson said. “Mr. Sinatra would like to dress you.”

  “I think Francis was going through a major transformation in his life,” Bolling said. “I think middle age was hitting him very hard. He was having hair transplants put in, and I’m sure they were very painful. I know he was conscious of his looks—Mia was very young; I was very young—and he was trying to hold on to his youth. Didn’t you ever notice that twinkle in his eye? He couldn’t go there. I felt bad for him, ’cause he could never go anywhere. Yet there was this child in him, screaming to get out, to jump up and down and play and be silly.

  “I really did love that man,” she said. “He was a king of men, and he treated me like a princess and a queen all the time. Never, ever, was there any kind of abuse or any kind of weird stuff—except one time, he hired some hooker, and he wanted me to participate, and I said, ‘Eff you, man, I’m leaving’—and I did.”

  One night soon after, as Shecky Greene was about to go onstage in the La Ronde Room, Sinatra said, “Shecky, stick with me and I’ll make you the biggest star in the business.”

  “I looked at him and said, ‘If being a big star means being like you, then I don’t want it,’ ” Greene recalled.

  At four o’clock that morning, as the comedian walked through the lobby, he was attacked by three men: Joe Fischetti and Sinatra’s two bodyguards, Ed Pucci and Andy Celentano. Fischetti hit Greene with a blackjack. Greene, who was literally and figuratively feeling no pain, fought back ferociously. “Fischetti, that fuckin’ moron—I split his whole face open,” he recalled. “I didn’t even know what I was doing. I didn’t even feel anything because I was so drunk that morning.”

  Like Jackie Mason before him, Greene wound up in the hospital, with a concussion and a large gash on his temple. At first, he was furious. “I said, ‘I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna kill that dago son of a bitch,’ ” he recalled.

  But as word filtered out about the attack, both Sinatra and Fischetti begged Greene not to tell the one man they both feared: a fan of Greene’s and an old acquaintance from Chicago, Sam Giancana. Mooney was now living in Mexico, having fled the country to try to elude the FBI’s intense surveillance. And within a couple of days, the old Mob boss phoned Shecky Greene.

  “He said, ‘What happened? Tell me what happened with that asshole,’ ” Greene recalled. “I said, ‘Nothing, I fell down the stairs.’ He says, ‘You didn’t fall down the stairs.’ He said, ‘Shecky, Milwaukee Phil is downstairs.’ He was in Mexico talking to me. I know the FBI is listening. He says, ‘Milwaukee Phil is downstairs; go down and tell him what you want.’ So all I had to say to him was ‘I want this asshole beat up.’ They would have done it. I said, ‘Sam, I’m telling you, I fell down the stairs.’ ”

  The famous joke came later: “Sinatra saved my life in 1967. Five guys were beating me up, and I heard Frank say, ‘That’s enough.’ ”

  “That joke got around the world,” Shecky Greene said, an old man recalling a bad time.

  —

  Nighttime Frank was alienating those who were closest to him, one by one. “Jilly came to me,” Greene recalled, “and said, ‘Shecky, I’m running away from it; I can’t take any more—so I’m going away for three days. I’ll call you; you’ll be the only one who knows where I’m at. I don’t want him to know where I’m at.’

  “So he did have that part of him that wanted to get away from Sinatra. Yet he loved Sinatra. I don’t know why; I don’t know how. That I can’t take away from him.”

  Tiffany Bolling, too, fled. “I flew to New York; I didn’t know where to go,” she remembered. “I just went to Jilly’s, and Jilly was in New York! It freaked me out! I thought, What are you doin’ here, man? You’re supposed to be with Francis in Miami! And he said, ‘What are you doing here, Tiffy?’ ”

  She went back. Jilly went back. Even Shecky Greene went back to Tony Rome once he got out of the hospital. The gash on his temple was written right into the movie.

  The pull of Sinatra was just too strong. And Daytime Frank had a way of patching things over.

  “Francis called me and said, ‘Please come up to my room,’ ” Bolling recalled. “And he opened the door and said, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m really sorry.’ Not only did he say those words to me, but that night he invited me to the show that he was still doing at the Fontainebleau, and before we went down, he honored me with the most beautiful pair of opera-length pearls that I have ever seen.”

  But when Sinatra asked Shecky Greene to do a concert tour with him over the summer, the comedian drew the line. “I said to him, ‘I’m not going on the tour.’ So he stayed up all n
ight to call all of the papers, telling them he canceled me out of the tour. I was never in the tour. I wasn’t going to go with him. Just to see the kind of life he led—I hated myself for staying as long as I did. It was frightening. And I am not absolved from all of the stuff that happened. I mean, I wasn’t exactly sane at the time.”

  This was Miami in the spring of 1967.

  —

  In early May, the American-Italian Anti-Defamation League named Frank national chairman of a campaign to discourage the identification of Americans of Italian descent with the Mafia and Cosa Nostra. It was a curious, almost provocative, move on the league’s part, given how recently, and why, Sinatra had been forced to give up his Nevada gaming license. “The Frank Sinatra–Italian Anti-Defamation League headlines were valid news but how could they have passed up a Joe DiMaggio or a Perry Como?” entertainment columnist Jack O’Brian asked on the ninth.

  Three days later, a nationally recognized authority on the Mafia, former NYPD Central Investigation Bureau detective Ralph Salerno, asked roughly the same question, this time in the pages of the New York Times. Sinatra’s friendship and association with identified members of the Mafia “hardly matches the image the league is seeking to project as representative of the 20 million Americans of Italian birth or ancestry,” Salerno told the Times. “Over a period of years Frank Sinatra has done things which make it a matter of public knowledge whom he chooses to be friendly with in Nevada, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Miami and Havana,” he said.

  “There may be some basic need for the Italo-American community to enhance its image,” Salerno continued, “but I feel the best way to do this is to find some spokesmen who have the stature and can command the respect of a Roy Wilkins [executive director of the NAACP].”

  The league’s president, the civil court judge Ross J. Di Lorenzo, thundered back. “It is this kind of defamatory attack that made it necessary for us to create our organization,” he said. “Mr. Sinatra has associated with many of the world’s great leaders—presidents, governors, heads of state and other notables [and] has done as much, if not more, than any other human being for the causes of minority groups of every ethnic, racial and religious background.”

  It was perfectly circular: an Italian-American defaming another Italian-American for defaming still another Italian-American. And in a further nod to illogic, some saw Frank’s ability to avoid trial as prima facie evidence of his innocence. “It was obvious that Mr. Salerno had not done his homework, since my father had never been indicted for anything,” Nancy Sinatra wrote.

  —

  Mia finished her work in A Dandy in Aspic—the director, Anthony Mann, had unfortunately dropped dead of a heart attack at the end of April; Laurence Harvey completed the picture—and returned to New York, and Frank, and discord.

  She and Sinatra had agreed that she would make one movie a year, yet as Farrow knew well, film parts, especially starring roles, the kind she wanted, didn’t just drop into your lap at the appointed moment; a young actor or actress had to campaign vigorously for work well ahead of time or risk losing out and becoming yesterday’s news. And Dandy had placed her on the map—she appeared on the cover of Life on May 5—but she still needed a breakthrough role to succeed in her own right.

  She knew she could always be news as Mrs. Sinatra, but that wasn’t quite what she had in mind. “There would be no point in having a wife who stayed home and cooked his spaghetti for him,” she told a reporter. “Any number of women could have done that.”

  Nor did co-starring with her husband appear to be in the cards. “I don’t think a man and his wife should act together—at least that goes for us,” Frank said. Mia seemed to agree. “I’ve got to do things on my own,” she said. “If I were his leading lady, too many people would think he just handed me the role.”

  Conflict appeared early. She very much wanted to have children (Frank very much wanted not to) and yet somehow keep working: signals were mixed. “There’s talk that Mia Farrow will retire now that she’s had her taste of stardom in ‘Dandy in Aspic,’ that she’ll settle down to the full-time chore of being Frank Sinatra’s wife,” columnist Marilyn Beck wrote on May 19. “She’s already turned down several attractive offers for films.” Two days later, Leonard Lyons announced at the top of his column that Farrow’s next movie would be The Severed Head, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

  She might have turned down some jobs, but she was lobbying, hard, for others. The producer David Susskind was casting a TV-movie remake of Johnny Belinda, the 1948 film that had won Jane Wyman an Oscar for her performance as a deaf-mute rape victim. Farrow badly wanted the title role, and Susskind didn’t want to go anywhere near her.

  Susskind, a prickly egotist, had history with Sinatra: he and Frank had once had a well-publicized telegram battle after Susskind tried and failed to get him on his talk show. “I don’t want any trouble on this production,” he told Farrow’s agent. “And with the wife of Frank Sinatra, you’ve automatically got trouble.”

  Mia then called Susskind herself to beg for the part. “Please, please, please reconsider me,” she said. “I’d give anything in the world to play that part.”

  Susskind told her that he couldn’t chance it. He knew Frank didn’t want her to work, he said. “And he’s not all that keen on me anyway,” he told Farrow.

  “Mr. Susskind, my career is very important to me,” she said. “I need a role like this. Please listen to me. I’m an actress first and a wife second. Please.”

  She was apparently making the same speech to more than one producer. “Frank Sinatra may have to stamp his foot down,” Sheilah Graham wrote on June 4.

  His young wife, Mia Farrow, was all poised to sign for “Rosemarie’s Baby” [sic], the Roman Polanski–William Castle production at Paramount, when George Cukor requested her for his “Nine Tiger Man” for 20th Century–Fox, which owns her contract. “Rosemarie’s Baby” will be made in New York. “Nine Tiger Man” starts in London, then travels to India with Robert Shaw co-starred. Frankie, who hated it when Mia was in London for “Dandy in Aspic,” might insist on keeping his bride in Hollywood, where the Sinatras have a big beautiful home, or in New York, where they have a big beautiful penthouse, air-conditioned and overlooking the East River.

  Then, on June 8, newspapers reported that Mia Farrow would play the starring role in the ABC TV movie of Johnny Belinda.

  Mia Farrow doesn’t mention Johnny Belinda in her memoir, which strangely juggles the timeline in this critical period of her marriage to Sinatra. She writes of how stressful her long absences for A Dandy in Aspic were to both of them. Now that that picture was done, she recalled, she and Frank were looking forward to some free time at home before beginning to shoot The Detective together at Fox. Farrow wondered how it would be to be in scenes with Sinatra; she fretted that she would disappoint him.

  It was just then, she writes, that Paramount offered her Rosemary’s Baby. Not only would it be her first chance to star in a film but, even more important to her, a chance to make her mark as an actress. If the movie did well, she thought, she would have her choice of plum parts in worthwhile pictures; she’d be able to achieve what she says was then her life ambition: to make one worthy film a year and thus be able to devote herself to being a wife and sometime, perhaps, a mother.

  But contrary to what she has written, in fact there was no solid plan in place that June for Mia to co-star in The Detective, and Paramount hadn’t yet offered her Rosemary’s Baby, though it looked as though both were about to happen. Which was a problem, because Rosemary was set to start shooting in New York in late August, and that would make three movies in a year, not one.

  —

  The telephone operators at the Sands—these were the days when outside calls still had to be routed through a hotel switchboard—routinely listened in on guests’ conversations, not out of a wish to eavesdrop, but as a matter of management policy. In the days when the Mob owned the casinos (Meyer Lansky oversaw the Sands’ operations
from his Miami condo), “We needed to protect ourselves,” the Sands pit boss Ed Walters recalled. With ever-greater pressure on organized crime from the Justice Department, who knew when the skim itself might be imperiled?

  But there were also other considerations. In Vegas’s Mob era, some of the casinos’ biggest customers were men who, for all kinds of reasons, didn’t want it known they were there. Often—identity was a hazier quantity in the precomputer age—they traveled under assumed names. Sometimes these men lost substantial sums of money at the tables: What was to prevent any one of them from falsely claiming he was unable to pay up or from vanishing altogether? In Sin City, all kinds of mischief were possible. For casino management, listening in on calls was an essential means of control.

  Early in 1967, one of the Sands’ telephone operators came to Walters with a dilemma: Mrs. Sinatra, Mia Farrow, had been making numerous early-morning calls to a man in New York who seemed to be her agent and discussing work, all kinds of work. And Mrs. Sinatra kept telling the man in New York, over and over, that Mr. Sinatra must not, under any circumstances, know about any of this. Should she, the operator asked Walters, tell Mr. Entratter about these calls?

  If Entratter found out, he never told Frank: stirring him up was just too risky.

  —

  “I’m not sure when I got the first inkling that Dad and Mia might be in trouble,” Tina wrote.

  Maybe it was the afternoon I dropped by their new place on Copa d’Oro, the English Tudor-style house they would barely have time to decorate before parting company. Dad was out, no doubt working, and I found Mia in the loft over her dressing area. It was a bright, beautiful day, but she was content to stay inside reading a book, cuddling her puppies at her side.

  Here, I thought to myself, was a woman who could live very quietly.

  When she wasn’t on the phone with her agent. Or listening to the just-released—“groundbreaking, earthshaking,” Mia called it—Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which would quickly change the whole world, thrusting Frank Sinatra and his musical generation to an even farther shore.