by James Kaplan
Five o’clock came, the horn tooted, and the guests, all of them in on the big surprise, trooped out the door, followed by Frank and Mia, tugging his arm. But Frank was grumpy—he didn’t like being told what to do—and so he told her what to do: it was cold out, she should go back inside and put on a sweater. She tried to jolly him along, but he was getting mad; he wouldn’t budge until she put on that sweater.
The guests had gone silent; all eyes were on Sinatra and Farrow. She blushed hotly; her smile stuck to her teeth. She ran back indoors, fetched a sweater from her dresser, threw it around her shoulders, and ran back out. Frank was still annoyed, and still in command mode. He told her to put the sweater on. She obeyed, buttoning every button. Only then could they proceed down the path to the taxicab. The guests stood aside. Brynner, in livery, bowed and handed Sinatra a scroll while Jacobs beamed and saluted. The company applauded as Frank and Mia stood there, staring at the shiny automobile.
It was an Austin, black and square and hopelessly duddy. He hated it. Yes, he was fifty-two; yes, he hung out with rich Republicans. But he was Frank Sinatra, for Christ’s sake—he drove a Dual-Ghia! How could she have ever thought he would like such a thing?
Of course it didn’t help that they weren’t talking about much of anything these days.
Another thing they had failed to talk about was just what was going to happen with the two of them after this holiday idyll. On New Year’s Eve, Frank transported the whole contingent, “dressed to the nines and already tanked up,” as Farrow remembered, to L.A. for a party. The lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and the director Joshua Logan were there; they told Mia they’d already seen some dailies of Rosemary’s Baby and that she was fantastic—would she consider starring in the film they were preparing, an adaptation of the Lerner-Loewe musical Paint Your Wagon?
She was transported by the respect they were showing her. Sinatra was silent. A couple of hours later, Frank told her he was leaving. Could she come too? she asked, running along after him. He drove her to their house in Bel Air and said he was going to Acapulco.
He was going to visit Merle Oberon and her husband, and his plans did not include his wife.
* * *
*1 See Stephen Sondheim’s wicked takeoff, “The Boy From…,” from the 1966 Off-Broadway revue The Mad Show.
*2 Strikingly, both the Portuguese and the English lyrics to Jobim’s greatest song, “Águas de Março” (Waters of March), were written by the composer himself.
*3 Ed Walters maintained that Caesars stayed under organized crime’s dominion longer than any other Las Vegas casino.
*4 Jilly! Sinatra’s Right-Hand Man, an oral history of Rizzo, maintains that Mia lost $20,000 at the tables, and Frank lost the $50,000 trying to win it back.
25
He’s the king, isn’t he?
—HUBERT H. HUMPHREY, WATCHING SINATRA IN CONCERT ON MAY 3, 1968
While Frank stewed in Mexico, Mia languished in the big house on Copa de Oro Road, lying exhausted on the new king-size bed. The house was cold, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask the housekeeper or the Japanese cook how to turn on the heat. At night, she would creep down to the refrigerator for comfort food (Sara Lee chocolate cake), passing Frank’s favorite room, with its bar and big TV and orange furniture. “ ‘Evening, Mrs. S.,’ said the guard, no matter what,” she recalled. “He had a gun.”
She writes that in her fog of despair, she unwrapped a Wilkinson razor blade that lay by the bathroom sink, then carefully rewrapped it. She couldn’t concentrate, even on suicide. She had no idea where to go, what to do.
Then Frank himself arrived in a dark suit and shiny shoes, redolent of the aftershave John Farrow had also worn, bringing her a present, the nicest thing he had ever given her: a beautiful antique music box. He showed her how to crank it; they listened to it play seven songs, she writes.
Reality, or a dream?
Or perhaps just another juggling of the timeline. Unmerciful reality brought another visitor to her front door, the ever-charming Mickey Rudin. Sinatra had phoned him from Acapulco, the lawyer told her, and said that Farrow could stay anywhere she wanted—he would pay for it—but she couldn’t be in the house when he returned. Rudin said he was sorry, but she would have to leave.
She threw a few things in a small suitcase, got into the yellow Thunderbird he’d bought her, and drove, sobbing, to a hotel.
—
“The New Year’s reconciliation of Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow seems to have taken,” the syndicated columnist Florabel Muir chirped in her Hollywood column of January 12.
They’re back from Palm Springs and everything is hunky-dory.
Mia has agreed to give up her acting career and concentrate on being Mrs. Frank Sinatra, housewife. And that’s a full-time career for any gal!
She has also given up her proposed pilgrimage to India to meet with the Beatles’ guru. The next thing you know, she’ll let her hair grow, put on some weight and stay out of the spotlight.
It was, of course, the sheerest fiction. Muir—a former crime reporter whose claim to fame was once having been shot in the behind while covering the gangster Mickey Cohen—was nearly eighty, close to the end of a long career; God knows who had fed her the story. A few days later, Frank phoned Mia and said that he couldn’t get her off his mind, but it was over between them. He would give her all the money she wanted, he told her; she wanted nothing, she said, except him. It was the one thing he was powerless to give. The next day, Farrow flew to New York to join her sister Prudence to travel to the foothills of the Himalayas to meditate with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
“I want to be a better person,” a shy and nervous Mia Farrow told the Associated Press as she prepared to board a plane to India. With the fur-trimmed hood of her winter coat pulled close around her face, she resembled an eager space traveler or a child in a snowsuit.
The blonde actress, estranged wife of singer Frank Sinatra, made the brief statement at Kennedy Airport while seated next to the smiling, bearded Indian guru.
Miss Farrow’s departure for India apparently was a last-minute decision.
The guru said she spoke to him Monday night about “higher spiritual experience which is common to the youngsters today” and indicated she wanted to go to India with him.
“She will make a good disciple,” the guru said, adding, “she is a good person—good human material. I will guide her to higher spiritual experience…”
He…was asked if Miss Farrow mentioned her husband during her brief talk with him.
“She didn’t speak of him,” he answered. “Maybe hearing of her experience, he will come along.”
In the meantime, though, Frank was headed back to the Fontainebleau.
He was booked for an unprecedented six weeks in the La Ronde Room, two shows a night, six days a week. Once again, he planned to shoot a movie during the daylight hours: a Tony Rome sequel called Lady in Cement, like its predecessor heavy on sex, violence, and tough-guy jokes and light on deep meaning. The same production team—producer Aaron Rosenberg, director Gordon Douglas, director of photography Joseph Biroc—was in place. The reliable Richard Conte returned as Miami police lieutenant Dave Santini; Bonanza’s Dan Blocker played a giant heavy named Waldo Gronsky, and the eye-candy quota was filled by the twenty-seven-year-old Raquel Welch, who on the strength of her breakout role in 1966’s One Million Years B.C. (in an animal-pelt bikini she looked ready to break out of any second) had become an instant international sex symbol. Welch, so intimidated by the prospect of acting with Sinatra that Gordon Douglas had to rehearse her separately for their first big scene together, had been given second billing.
This was a last-minute development. Sammy Davis was to have played Tony’s sidekick, a Miami cop named Rubin, but then, practically as soon as he was in, he was out—“forced to bow out,” in the dire words of a Variety item. Frank’s warm-up comic Pat Henry, who had done a deft job with a small part in The Detective, replaced Sammy, at a considerably lower salary.
Davis’s ejection from Lady in Cement was part of a chain of events that began in early February, when Sinatra postponed his Fontainebleau opening—which he’d originally set for Friday the ninth, in honor of his parents’ anniversary—and then postponed it again. Something volcanic was bubbling in Frank.
Whatever chaos rumbled through Sinatra’s life that February had its roots in the previous summer, when Mia had first gone to work on Rosemary’s Baby and his marriage had begun to fall apart. As furious as he might have been at her, he was also reeling. He was always far more sensitive than he liked to let on, her running off to India had thrown him for a loop, and as had happened often before when relationships blew up, he took ill.
His world was out of balance. Not only had his wife flown the coop, not only had he fallen out with Sammy for the umpteenth time, but he was, Earl Wilson reported, “causing talk in Miami Beach. There was a rumor he’d rapped Eddie Fisher in the mouth. Also other people. And that he’d been refusing calls from Mia Farrow. Probably all untrue. Who’d want to rap a nice guy like Eddie Fisher and who’d want to turn down calls from Mia? Frank’s opening at the Fontainebleau postponed from today (Feb. 9) to next Friday because Frank has been in bed…with a 102 degree flu.”
Sinatra’s displeasure radiated out from the penthouse suite. Earl Wilson rapidly found himself in retraction mode—for himself and others. “It wasn’t true at all that Frank Sinatra rapped Eddie Fisher in the teeth in Miami Beach, as was rumored down there,” he wrote, awkwardly, on February 14.
Fact is, when Eddie had to drop out of his Fontainebleau show one night, sick, Frank, who was also sick, got Pat Henry to go on for him. And then Frank lent Eddie & Connie Stevens his jet so they could go off for a few days’ rest. Eddie said he never had had such great respect for Frank before.
The broadcast rumor that Frank Sinatra divorced Mia Farrow in Mexico was denied instantly by Sinatra’s publicist, Jim Mahoney.
A front-page Variety story on the same day also cited other rumors, including one claiming “Sinatra wasn’t ill, just mad at one thing or another. His physician, Fontainebleau medic Dr. Ralph Robbins, says no, the singer has pneumonia.”
In truth, the singer was both ill and mad. At Sammy, for unspecified reasons (though his running off to London a few months earlier to make some crappy movie called Salt and Pepper, with Lawford, didn’t help); at the comedian Jack E. Leonard—with whom he almost came to blows in the Fontainebleau’s Club Gigi—for continuing to do Mia jokes. And at Earl Wilson, his oldest and most steadfast friend among the columnists, who’d betrayed him twice within the space of a week.
—
Finishing Mayerling, Ava got a call from Florida. Frank had pneumonia, the caller said; he was very sick. He was asking for her, saying her name over and over. She flew to Miami, arriving with her maid, Reenie Jordan, a secretary, and twenty-nine pieces of luggage. “She was taken by private elevator to his inner sanctum at the top of the Fontainebleau, behind sprawled layers of hangers-on, yes-men and three-hundred-pound gorillas—Frank’s mouth-breathing cuadrilla he now took with him wherever he went,” Gardner’s biographer Lee Server writes.
“You glad to see me, baby?” Frank said.
“They told me you were dying, Francis,” she said. “I’ve been traveling for 24 hours to get here.”
He’d had a virus in the lungs, it was bad, not quite bad enough to go to the hospital and lose his penthouse view. But when Frank got sick he needed a lot of people at his bedside, praying. She remembered that time in Lake Tahoe when the stooge, with tears, told her Frank was at death’s door and she had to turn around and rush back from Los Angeles at dawn. In Miami, stressed from worry and jet-lagged, she screamed at him for being a selfish prick.
A witness recalled, “She walked right into Frank’s room, took one look at him, and said, ‘Jesus Christ, you’re not dying, are you? Here we fucking go again. What the hell is really wrong with you? You got a cold or what? What am I doing here, anyway? Do you know what I had to go through to get here?’ ”
She left the next day.
Yet he truly was sick—too sick to open on February 16 or 23; ill enough, George Jacobs maintained, that he had to be briefly hospitalized. “I was very worried about his health,” the valet recalled. “I assumed he was indestructible, and here he was, at the mercy of the place he hated above all others, a hospital. His skin was sallow, greenish. He was too weak to insist on wearing a hairpiece. He seemed to have given up. He looked frail and old and helpless, as well as furious at himself, and the heavens, for letting him get this way.”
“Frank Sinatra remains weak—and unusually quiet—from his pneumonia,” Earl Wilson noted on the twenty-eighth, “and the boss of the Miami Beach Fontainebleau, Ben Novack, is unable to say whether he’ll open there Friday as announced.”
Then he was better. “The Jet Set rush to Miami Beach’ll be on this weekend with Frank Sinatra definitely opening at the Fontainebleau Friday,” Wilson wrote, breathlessly, on March 1.
The columnist and his wife, Rosemary—whom he’d immortalized in print as his BW, or Beautiful Wife—packed their bags “for a fast weekend trip to Miami Beach to catch the long-delayed opening of our friend, Frank,” Wilson wrote in his memoir.
But when he arrived, he was told that Sinatra wouldn’t go on if Wilson was in the audience.
“It was like being hit in the stomach,” the columnist recalled. “In my whole life, I had never suffered such shock.”
And it was true. “Frank Sinatra refused to open engagement at Fontainebleau here Fri. (1) if columnist Earl Wilson was in audience, according to spokesman for singer,” Variety noted on March 4.
Same source reports Sinatra learned there was a reservation for Wilson and notified captain he would not entertain if scribe was permitted in. Wilson wasn’t, and show went on.
According to Sinatra’s spokesman, performer has taken exception to two recent items in Wilson’s pillar anent the singer.
“Pillar”: Variety-ese for “column.” But it wasn’t just the two recent items that had gotten under Sinatra’s skin; once again, his simmer had come to a boil. Months earlier, Jim Mahoney had told Wilson, “Frank didn’t like the way you handled the story of the fight.” Meaning the Carl Cohen fight.
The columnist was amazed. “ ‘Did he like the way anybody handled it?’ I asked Mahoney. Could he have been pleased at anything written about such a display? Should I have defended his outrageous conduct?”
In Frank’s mind, he should have. Earl Wilson had been covering Sinatra since the Tommy Dorsey days, and though he stopped short of fawning, over the years he had been so reliably friendly in print that a friendship had formed, and in truth a journalistic line had been crossed. Every gossip columnist had to work out the uneasy equation for him- or herself: agreeableness, however disingenuous, was the price of access. If it went too far, though, credibility was lost. Some writers, like Kilgallen, played it tough, but then they often had to make do with secondhand reports and blind items. Earl Wilson had tried to have his credibility and his friendship too and in the end—buffeted by the force of Frank’s raging—had found it impossible.
He was devastated. “I surrendered to Sinatra’s decree in what was one of the saddest moments of my career,” he recalled.
I cannot describe the shame I felt, the dejection and the hurt of the rejection. After trying to be an honorable newspaperman with a reputation for getting along with big personalities, to get this slap in the face made me crumble spiritually.
The word barred is a degrading one in my business, and it had never been used against me before. A thicker-skinned columnist might have taken it as a compliment, but I could not be flippant about it; I was hurt.
“It’s finally happened to me,” I said, “the thing that’s always happened to his other friends, and I never believed it did.”
What had made him think he was any different?
—
A little pale, a little thin, Frank bounded back
from his sickbed and gave ’em hell. When he took the stage in the La Ronde Room—with a new, kind of hippie-inspired look, a white turtleneck sweater and a pendant, instead of a tux—he made the crowd forget there was anyone else.
Under the headline SINATRA COMES ON WITH THE OLD GUSTO, George Bourke wrote in the Miami Herald:
Fourteen pounds and several shades of suntan lighter than normally, Sinatra belted out an hour and ten minutes of song, most of which was as good as he ever did it, albeit with a throatiness not too distracting to the ear with decades-long tuning to his style.
Sinatra didn’t stack the deck with easy numbers either. There were some songs that stood for no faking, and it seemed Sinatra undertook them defiantly, aware that a guy who’d had pneumonia shouldn’t be expected to handle them and that there were some people who’d be making bets he couldn’t.
All the while, his waif of a wife was in India, seeking purity and truth.
The mountainside ashram was cold and hard and austere in the dead of winter. She lived in a small room with a hard bed, a chest of drawers, and a dim lamp; ordered to meditate twelve hours a day, she did her best, she recalled, but rarely came close (unlike her sister, who rarely emerged from her room). Instead, she read and thought her thoughts and walked by the rushing Ganges. Nearly every afternoon, the maharishi summoned her to his bungalow for a private talk; he gave her mangoes. She responded, she said, with wary resentment: Why was he singling her out?
Up till now, Farrow recalled, the ashram had been a cold, hushed, monotonous place, with practically every waking hour devoted to meditation. Then one afternoon, the Beatles arrived.
The group had turned to transcendental meditation—and said they’d given up drugs—the previous August; they had planned to travel to Rishikesh in October, before the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, threw them into disarray. Led by George Harrison, the one of them who truly believed in the maharishi’s discipline (“Whenever I meditate,” John Lennon complained, “there’s a big brass band in me head”), they finally made it to India in February and arrived at the ashram like a traveling circus, disrupting the solemn atmosphere with their music and jokes.