Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  She and Mickey Rudin were the only passengers aboard the Lear Jet, she recalled; she sat as far away from him as possible in the aircraft’s small cabin. From the Juárez airport, they were driven at top speed to the courthouse, where a crowd of paparazzi waited. Once in the building, she went to the bathroom and threw up.

  At a well-lit desk in the center of a courtroom filled with reporters and photographers—it reminded her, illogically, of a boxing ring—she was handed a pen. As flashbulbs exploded, she signed the divorce papers. The floor itself seemed to be shaking, she remembered.

  Farrow’s account more or less jibes with the wire-service stories. “Dressed in slacks, Miss Farrow appeared tired and nervous during the 30-minute proceeding in the civil court of Judge Lorenzo Holguin Seniceros,” UPI’s Vernon Scott wrote. “She told the jurist her life with Sinatra had been unbearable, and said she had not lived with him as man-and-wife since December, 1967.” The Associated Press reported that Mia looked “lean and sleepless” and that “she appeared so nervous she could hardly hold the pen. Her hands trembled as she signed the papers.”

  Back in Los Angeles, Frank was on a soundstage at CBS Television City, wearing a white corduroy Nehru jacket and love beads as he taped a TV special with Don Costa, Diahann Carroll, and the Fifth Dimension. Nancy Sinatra recalled going to the studio to watch the dress rehearsal, which went smoothly—and which, as was the custom, was taped, in case any slipups in the final performance had to be covered. When Frank came off the set, Nancy remembered, Jilly took him aside and told him that Mickey Rudin had called to say the divorce proceedings had been completed. Sinatra asked Don Costa if the dress rehearsal had gone satisfactorily for the orchestra. It had. Frank was silent for a moment, then he said, “Let’s go with the dress. I can’t do it again now.” “It was as if someone had turned out the lights in his eyes,” Nancy recalled.

  The wire services reported that Frank flew to the East Coast, and Mia went directly back to the Bel Air house, where her mother awaited her. Farrow writes that after she and Rudin returned to Los Angeles, they got stuck in traffic on the freeway, and as the lawyer chatted a blue streak to the driver, she simply stepped out of the car and hitched a ride to the house that was no longer hers, where Frank awaited her.

  When she arrived, she writes, she found Frank furious about her hitchhiking escapade. Finally she reminded him that they weren’t married anymore, so she could do as she pleased. This seemed to calm him; still, she recalled, she was careful not to stay too long.

  The stories don’t exactly line up, but the ending is the same.

  She refused any financial settlement, leaving the Bel Air house with just the jewelry he had given her, their forty-eight-place set of silverware, and her stuffed animals.

  That was the weekend. The following week got worse. On Monday morning, August 19, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story about Sinatra by the investigative reporter Nicholas Gage. “Frank Sinatra is rather sensitive about his baldness,” it began, unpromisingly.

  Only his closest friends are permitted to remain in his presence when he changes hairpieces. Among those select few is Joseph Fischetti, a cousin of the late Al Capone, and, enforcement officials say, a veteran Mafia man.

  It comes as no surprise to those who know the mellifluous actor-singer well. For nearly 30 years, some of Mr. Sinatra’s best friends have been—to put it bluntly—gangsters. Not just two-bit hoods, either: Mr. Sinatra hobnobs with the Mafia’s elite.

  Mr. Sinatra is nothing if not loyal to those he considers his friends. His associations at several times have threatened his business interests. They cost him his amiable relationship with the late President John F. Kennedy. Still Mr. Sinatra has stuck by his pals. He refuses even to talk about them with a reporter.

  Ordinarily a man’s friendships are nobody’s business but his own. But Mr. Sinatra once again is back in public affairs—in politics, and Presidential politics at that.

  Frank, in Nehru jacket, taping the CBS special Francis Albert Sinatra Does His Thing, August 1968. With the ink on his divorce papers with Mia Farrow barely dry, Sinatra was so distraught he could barely make it through the dress rehearsal. (Credit 25.3)

  Frank’s indiscreet associations had been in the news before, but as his daughter Nancy writes (often), he had never been indicted for anything, and the court of public opinion usually let him off with a wink and a warning: his talent and charm seemed to redeem him at every turn, as did popular envy of his large living and authority-flouting exploits.

  But he’d hankered to get back into the kingmaking business, and back in it he was, and he had somehow imagined he could broker power as he did nearly everything else—on his own terms. The Journal piece, a transparent attempt by the paper to undermine Humphrey, dictated new terms.

  After allowing Jim Mahoney a brief rebuttal—“These reports are rumors and vicious, unnecessary attacks. Mr. Sinatra has associated with Presidents, heads of state and hundreds of personalities much more interesting and copyworthy”—Gage went into considerable detail about Frank’s friendships with the copy-worthy personalities Willie Moretti, Lucky Luciano, the Fischetti brothers, and Sam Giancana. He recapped Sinatra’s adventures with the Nevada Gaming Control Board and his forced departure from the casino business, unearthing a new tidbit, Frank’s involuntary exit from the racetrack business.

  “Before Mr. Sinatra sold his interest in the Cal-Neva, he was forced also to sell an interest in Berkshire Downs race track in Massachusetts,” Gage wrote.

  He and singer Dean Martin had become directors of the track in 1963. Their interest ran afoul of a Nevada regulation forbidding casino owners in the state [Martin held shares in the Sands] to hold gaming interests elsewhere.

  Other, though secret owners of Berkshire Downs at the time were Raymond Patriarca, the New England Mafia boss, and Gaetano (Three Finger Brown) Lucchese, the late head of one of New York’s five Mafia “families,” or organizations.

  As a final fillip, the reporter noted that while Frank had seemingly kept clear of gangsters in recent months, he’d consorted with them privately: “Last October, Mr. Sinatra came to New York to make a speech [a benefit for the American-Italian Anti-Defamation League at Madison Square Garden]. According to police reports, he also drove up to Turnbull, Conn., to visit the home of Dave Iacovetti, a member of the Mafia’s Carlo Gambino family in New York.”

  Nancy junior called it slander. Gage had managed to link her father’s name to every mafioso and every Mafia incident in America, from the early 1940s to the present, she harrumphed, hyperbolically. But writing much later, after her father’s death, Tina Sinatra spoke more temperately—and realistically—about Frank’s persistent attraction to highly placed hoodlums whose names ended with a vowel. “My father had known people like Willie Moretti and Johnny Formosa all his life,” she admitted. “He’d come of age at a time when politics, show business, and the underworld formed an overlapping triumvirate. The people in them had a lot in common; they were all looking for money and power.”

  And now the times had changed, suddenly and radically. The JFK assassination was the line of demarcation, separating the old days from the new. The flowering of the counterculture, in no small part a reaction to the war in Vietnam, quickly generated a reaction from the Right. And in 1968, Richard Nixon, for all his talk of a secret plan to end the war, was running as a law-and-order candidate. In a season of assassinations and fury over Vietnam, tension was rising between the Right and the Left, and Hubert Humphrey, now the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, was caught somewhere in the middle. The Republicans were prepared to take him down by any means necessary, and Nicholas Gage’s Wall Street Journal piece gave them ammunition.

  Reaction to the piece was swift and widespread. “There is a good chance we will all be ‘law and ordered’ to death in the campaign about to get underway,” Miles McMillin, a columnist for the Madison, Wisconsin, Capital Times, wrote on August 21. “The way Nixon is tal
king you’d think he was Matt Dillon running against Billy the Kid. And now the groundwork is being laid to fry Humphrey about the part played by Frank Sinatra in his campaign.”

  In 1951, a young attorney named Joseph Nellis, a counsel to Senator Estes Kefauver’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, had taken a secret deposition from Frank on his ties to the Mob. Now Nellis wrote a private memo to Humphrey, warning the candidate that little had changed with Sinatra. He cited Frank’s visit to Washington with Allen Dorfman in May and his involvement with the American-Italian Anti-Defamation League, whose leadership included at least one man with Mafia ties. When Humphrey’s special counsel Martin McNamara discovered that Sinatra was part of a new investigation by the Justice Department into connections between the entertainment industry and the Cosa Nostra, McNamara, too, wrote a memo. Soon Humphrey stopped returning Frank’s calls.

  —

  Sinatra was furious, and not just at the Wall Street Journal. The night of the divorce, the syndicated gossip columnist Rona Barrett, who also did a segment on KABC-TV’s eleven o’clock news, made a brief, insinuating on-air mention of Mia Farrow’s dance at the Daisy with George Jacobs. When Jacobs went back to the Palm Springs compound, Frank wouldn’t speak to him.

  “The maid came to me and said, ‘Mr. Sinatra wants you to get out of the house,’ ” the valet recalled. “Frank had locked himself in his room and wouldn’t come out. I banged on the door and said, ‘What’s wrong? What’s going on?’ He wouldn’t open the door. ‘Mickey will tell you. Mickey will tell you,’ he said. ‘Call Mickey.’ ”

  Mickey Rudin told Jacobs that the Barrett item had upset Sinatra and that Jacobs had better move his belongings out of the house until things cooled off. Things didn’t cool off. “Everyone around the old man—Jilly and all of them—poisoned his mind until he actually believed that his valet was sleeping with his wife,” Jacobs said. It was a kind of coup on the part of Jilly, who had long felt competitive with Jacobs for Frank’s attention. And it was a firing offense.

  “After fourteen years together he dropped the net on me just like that and he couldn’t even look me in the face to do it,” the valet said incredulously.

  I had been so close to that man. I even signed his name better than he did. In fact, I did all the autographs. “Just give it to George,” Frank would say whenever someone wanted a signed Sinatra picture. I went everywhere with him. I nursed him through his suicide attempt in Lake Tahoe. I helped him get through Ava, who was the only woman he ever loved. I was even the nurse after his hair transplants…I drove all the girls to Red Krohn for their abortions, and I treated each one of those dames like a queen because that’s what he wanted me to do. The women that man had over the years! I still remember Lee Radziwill sneaking into his bedroom. How do I know? I heard her. I always had a room next to Frank so he could slap the wall for me if he needed anything.

  In the wake of his dismissal, Jacobs was so angry at Sinatra that he threw away everything his boss had ever given him: expensive watches, clothing, shoes, cameras. “I didn’t want anything from the bastard around,” he recalled. “I got twelve thousand dollars in severance pay and blew it, and then I sold all my shares in Reprise Records.”

  But toward the end of his own life, years after Frank’s death, Jacobs forgave his former boss. “Oh, man, I had a life with that poor man,” he said. “I miss him so fuckin’ much.” The ex-valet, elderly and almost blind, was sitting and reminiscing in his little house on the wrong side of Palm Springs, the fierce desert sun blazing outside the windows.

  “Oh, God—I think every day about him,” Jacobs said. “He was like a father to me. The motherfucker, every time he left the house, it was, ‘You got any money in your pocket?’ Didn’t matter what I said. ‘Here’s two more hundred,’ he’d say.

  “I can see him standing there—‘Well, it’s about time you got here.’ I’d say, ‘Mister S, I have a lot of things to do; you know that, sir.’ He’d say, ‘How much do you have to do for somebody else that you don’t do for me?’ I’d say, ‘Well, there’s a lot of things.’ Because I had families. I had to support families. But he gave me the money, so I had to do the work. And I worked my ass off.”

  Did he seem lonely? I asked.

  “Many times I thought so,” Jacobs said. “He didn’t have to feel alone. Everybody in Hollywood tried to fuck him. Pat Lawford—anybody. Oh, man. This guy, all he had to do was snap his fingers, and the room would be full. I’d go to wake him up for breakfast, and five chicks come out of the room.

  “But he and I used to sit talking all the time. He was on his couch in the living room, foot up on the table. We’d sit and chat. And then, when he’d sit out in the sun, I’d bring him a drink or something and put oil on his back or his legs. He had attention, because I was right there with him all the time.”

  What did they talk about?

  “He always wanted to know what was going on in the town before he went in there,” he said. “I had to go make a circulation. It’s so funny how he trusted me, with anything. And when Sam and those guys came out there from Chicago, them motherfuckers thought I was the leader. I knew about everybody in town. I knew everything. So they figured, ‘Ask George, he knows. Shit, if he don’t, he’ll find out.’ ”

  I asked Jacobs if he ever dreamed about Sinatra.

  “Quite often,” he said. “I’ve had some midnight fuckin’ dreams. I wake up and I can’t go back to sleep. It’s always about something, and me and him. ‘Hey, Spook.’ That was my nickname. I’d take his fuckin’ Dual-Ghia, go in town, and get laid every fuckin’ night. ‘Hey, Spook. Do you ever leave the car for me to drive?’ I’d say, ‘I didn’t know you wanted to use it, sir. I’ll let you have your car.’ He’d laugh! Oh, could he laugh.”

  And had Jacobs forgiven the woman who was the cause of his firing?

  The old man shook his head. “Oh, God, she was a child,” he said. “I couldn’t stand that little bitch. Mia put me in the middle of things. If she did something wrong, she’d say, ‘George must have done that.’ It was like minding somebody’s child.

  “She was a make-believe,” Jacobs said. “She always had these little stories and things that she would bring up, and Frank would look at me and say, ‘Boy, she should write movies instead of be in them.’ She had a great imaginary mind.”

  —

  Sinatra was scheduled to emcee and sing at a luncheon for Muriel Humphrey and two thousand female delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and to appear at a gala for Mayor Richard Daley—but then, suddenly, he wasn’t. On the Sunday before the convention, he announced that a “pressing recording commitment” would keep him in California for the entire week.

  There was no recording commitment, pressing or otherwise. In truth, he had nothing more pressing going on that week than halfheartedly romancing the twenty-six-year-old Carol Lynley, who was shooting a picture at Warner Bros. by day and dancing at the Daisy by night.

  As it turned out, though, he missed a hell of a convention. Amid violent clashes between antiwar protesters and the Chicago Police Department—abetted by Mayor Daley, who had intended the convention to showcase his status as a Democratic power broker and felt personally affronted by the disorder—the Democrats nominated Hubert Humphrey as their candidate for president. Sinatra would continue to campaign for him, less out of love for Humphrey than hate for Richard Nixon, the man with the secret plan to end the war.

  —

  Between mid-August, the time of his divorce, and early November, Frank was very little in evidence. He did not record, and though he was scheduled to start shooting a 20th Century Fox movie called The Only Game in Town, with Elizabeth Taylor and the director George Stevens, in Paris in early September, he abruptly dropped out of the project after Taylor, who’d had another of her innumerable health crises in August, announced she needed to postpone the start of shooting.

  He doesn’t seem to have agonized over the decision, despite th
e rich income stream that moviemaking brought him. “Frank Sinatra, who receives a million dollars and a percentage for each of his movies, also gets to own the negative after seven years,” Sheilah Graham wrote in her column. “The only other actor I know who receives this bonus is Cary Grant.” She then added a perceptive postscript: “I doubt whether Frankie is rich. He splashes his money all over the place.”

  Sinatra’s excuse for quitting the movie was scheduling conflicts—the conflicts in question being a benefit concert for the Teamsters in St. Louis on October 30 and his November 22 opening at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. One would think a determined man could have worked around these two events, but even at $1 million per picture Frank was not especially eager to have his schedule dictated by Liz Taylor, nor to work in Paris—nor, on balance, to work with George Stevens, a stickler famed for demanding many takes of his actors. The role went to Warren Beatty; the movie was a flop.

  What Sinatra seems to have been most determined about that fall was erasing the memory of Mia. He was dating again: along with Carol Lynley, there were—on the radar screen, anyway—such exotic (and young) actresses as the Shanghai-born twenty-three-year-old Irene Tsu (Flower Drum Song) and the Edinburgh-born twenty-seven-year-old Quinn O’Hara (The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini). And then there was the most exotic-sounding and youngest of them all. “Frank Sinatra’s name is being linked overseas with that of a Swedish blonde, 20-year-old Ingalill Klippinger, whom he met in a London gambling joint,” Chicago Tribune columnist Robert Wiedrich wrote on September 27.

  Ingalill Klippinger?

  The name sounds phony because it was, as fake as everything else about her. In reality, Ingalill Klippinger was Diane McCue, a lost girl who’d run away from her dysfunctional family in Pittsburgh and become a stripper in the notorious tenderloin of Baltimore known as the Block. In the summer of 1968, a Baltimore club owner named Sammy Goldstein, a friend of Jilly Rizzo’s, sent McCue to New York City as a gift for Frank Sinatra. A man named Nick the Pig met her and a friend, a present for Rizzo, at Kennedy airport and drove her to Jilly’s, where introductions were made. On the day Diane McCue met Frank, she appears to have been just about, but not quite, fifteen.