by Kitty Kelley
Yet there was also the Frank Sinatra who rushed to the hospital bed of Lee J. Cobb after he nearly died from a heart attack in June 1955. He was felled by a massive coronary shortly after divorcing his wife. Having named people as Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Cobb had few friends left in Hollywood. There was no work for him and he was trying to support himself and his two children while on the edge of bankruptcy.
“I was in a low mental state then,” he said. “I was sure my career had come to an end. Then Frank called and in his typical, unsentimental fashion, moved into my life. He flooded me with books, flowers, delicacies. He kept telling me what fine acting I still had ahead of me, discussing plans for me to direct one of his future films. He built an insulated wall around me that shielded me from tension, worry, and strain.”
Frank paid all the hospital bills not covered by Cobb’s insurance and then moved him to a rest home in the hills above Los Angeles for six weeks, again paying all expenses. He called him every day and visited regularly.
“That’s where I first met Lee,” said Cobb’s future wife, “and he was so grateful to Frank, so surprised, and so very touched. It was the kind of instant generosity you rarely see. The amazing thing is that Frank and Lee were not close friends at the time. They knew each other, but that was it.”
The two men had met as co-stars in The Miracle of the Bells in 1949. Both were gamblers and shared the same kind of liberal politics. Frank admired Cobb’s acting talent and said that he should have won the 1954 Academy Award for his performance as Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront.
“After the rest home, Frank moved Lee into his own home in Palm Springs, and then he moved him into a beautiful apartment in Los Angeles,” said Mrs. Cobb. “It was one of those places that very rich people live in—clean and beautiful, with walls that are all quilted and comfortable. I don’t know if Frank picked it out, or someone on his staff, but he paid for everything. He was wonderful during those critical months, and yet very elusive. He was never there to be thanked or hugged or shown any kind of gratitude. He didn’t seem to like that or want that.
“He and Lee had long talks about life and death because Lee was so close to dying at one point. Frank seemed to understand how hard it was sometimes to keep on going, how elusive the will to live can be. He said that you really had to scrape bottom before you could appreciate life and start living again. Frank had been through bad times, too, and I think he sensed a soulmate in Lee. Maybe he was so grateful for having made a comeback that he extended himself to someone in need—the kind of need he himself had once known. I don’t know, but it was a felicitous life-saving moment for Lee, and maybe in its way it was for Sinatra, too.”
Frank’s comeback seemed to produce generosity in him that was not unlike his mother’s garnering votes by distributing food baskets to the needy while making her political rounds in Hoboken.
When Sammy Davis, Jr., lost his eye in an automobile accident in 1954, Frank drove seventy miles from Los Angeles to San Bernadino Community Hospital to see him, and insisted that Sammy use his house in Palm Springs to recuperate.
When Charlie Morrison, owner of the Mocambo in Los Angeles, died in 1957, leaving his widow with a stack of debts and no insurance, his creditors threatened to close the club, forcing his wife into bankruptcy.
“Charlie had thousands of friends, but we had about four dollars,” she said. “Then Frank called me up. He said, ‘Mary, I don’t have anything to do for two weeks. How about me coming into the Mocambo with Nelson Riddle’s orchestra?’ He had never sung at any club in Hollywood, and it was like New Year’s Eve every night. We took in over $100,000 in those two weeks, and I gave old Charlie a millionaire’s funeral. It kept me going for a year besides. Celebrities were shoving against celebrities, and the waiters were able to pay off the mortgages on their homes.”
When Bela Lugosi committed himself to a hospital because he was an addict, Frank wrote him a sympathetic note, accompanied by a huge package of delicacies. “It gave me such a boost,” said Lugosi in 1955. “It was a wonderful surprise. I’ve never met Sinatra, but I hope to soon. He was the only star I heard from.”
Even close friends had trouble understanding the extremes in Frank that could drive him to physical brutality one minute and sweet generosity the next.
“To this day Frank doesn’t know how to express affection,” said Phil Silvers. “He does it with expensive gifts.”
Frank’s psychiatrist analyzed his generosity as the need to dominate people as his mother did. “His generosity means that he himself is the ever-bountiful, giving person,” said Dr. Ralph Greenson.
“He was real good to his girls,” said his makeup man, Beans Ponedel. “He gave them all parts in his movies. He did it for Gloria Vanderbilt in Johnny Concho, but she walked out; he did it for Shirley MacLaine (Some Came Running), he did it for Joi Lansing (A Hole in the Head); he did it for Natalie Wood (Kings Go Forth).”
Some people saw Frank’s generosity as a means of making amends for past wrongs. “I remember Frank reaming out his manager, Bobby Burns, in front of everyone one night—screaming and yelling and cursing him up one side and down the other,” said Mitch Miller. “He never apologized because Frank cannot say Tm sorry,’ but the next day Burns found a brand new Cadillac in the driveway from Frank. Is that generosity, or simply extravagant reparation? I don’t know.”
At one movie location, Frank used generosity to make amends for an outburst. “That prop boy I yelled at a few minutes ago—I understand his wife is sick,” he said to Beans Ponedel. “Send her flowers and make sure that we pay all the medical bills.”
Some thought Frank’s generosity stemmed from his need to be respected by people he. respects, like an old Italian padrone, but one old friend dismissed it as nothing more than showing off.
“He’s just like Lucky Luciano—always having to play bigshot,” said the friend. “When Lucky was in prison, he had all the money in the world to buy favors, and no inmate ever had to want for a few dollars as long as word of his need reached Luciano. You can imagine all the fawning and kowtowing that went on over those donations. It’s the same thing with Frank.”
“There are times when Frank behaves despicably,” said former reporter Kendis Rochlen. “He’ll be nasty, rude, inconsiderate, uncooperative, and ungrateful. Then he’ll turn right around and quietly do something generous and considerate for someone without even expecting thanks. … In fact, he seldom makes known some of the nice, generous things he does for people he happens to admire. I guess he’s too busy alienating reporters, hating cops, and sneering his way onto the cover of Time magazine.”
Frank’s spontaneous acts of kindness laid the foundation for his reputation as a generous, giving man and provided his press agents with what they needed at other times to cover his atrocious behavior.
17
Frank wanted the role of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront so that he could return to Hoboken as a conquering hero. The producer, Sam Spiegel, wanted Marlon Brando to play the part. “I wanted Frank to play the priest, but he wanted to play the Marlon Brando role,” said Spiegel.
Smarting over losing the lead to Brando, an actor he despised—Sinatra called Brando “Mumbles” and “the most overrated actor in the world”—Frank sued Sam Spiegel for $500,000, claiming breach of contract. He and Spiegel later settled the lawsuit amicably, without any exchange of money.
In 1954 and 1955 Frank made more movies than any other star in Hollywood. He played a psychopathic assassin in Suddenly; a saloon pianist in Young at Heart; a physician in Notas a Stranger; a theatrical agent in The Tender Trap; the proprietor of “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York” in Guys and Dolls; and a drug-addicted card dealer, Frankie Machine, in The Man with the Golden Arm, which was his favorite movie and the one that earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor.
“I’m in demand—fortunately, yes,” he said in 1955. “All these wonderful roles came together
—Guys and Dolls, The Tender Trap, Golden Arm—and I have got five (Johnny Concho, High Society, The Pride and the Passion, The Joker Is Wild, and Pal Joey) planned ahead, including two for my own company—a pretty even split between straight parts and musicals, but I don’t call it a comeback. I wasn’t away anywhere.”
Frank resented the press for writing up his current success as a “comeback,” thereby implying that he had returned after a long period of failure. At the Guys and Dolls premiere in Hollywood, he opened the program prepared by the studio advertising department and found his show business career described “with ups and downs matching the steepness of a Himalayan mountain peak. After soaring to what was almost national adulation a dozen years ago, a combination of poor roles, a bad press, and other things sent his career zooming downward. He was reputedly washed up. Today his ‘second career’ is in high gear.” Frank was furious.
The next day, he screamed about the program’s summary of his career. “Where do they get that stuff—‘He was reputedly washed up.’ ‘My career zoomed downward.’ ‘My second career.’ Maybe I didn’t make movies for a couple of years, but I bet I made more money on TV, in nightclubs, and making records than half the stars in Hollywood.”
Still, Frank couldn’t ignore his meager record sales in the bad years, and he was embarrassed by some of the recordings he had made at Columbia Records. “Nowadays I hear records I made three or four years ago and I wish I could destroy the master records,” he said. “It was all because of emotion. No doubt about it.”
When Columbia reissued those records to cash in on his new success, Frank retaliated by denouncing the company, saying that he had been forced to record music licensed by Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), in which Columbia’s parent company, CBS, had an interest. He gave scathing interviews to the press and sent telegrams to senators and congressmen, demanding antitrust action against Columbia to bar broadcasters from owning music publishing and recording firms.
The focus of his anger was Mitch Miller, director of artists and repertoire, whom he accused of ruining his career by selecting inferior songs with cheap musical gimmicks such as barking dogs and washboards for accompaniment.
“Before Mr. Miller’s advent on the scene, I had a successful recording career which quickly went into decline,” said Frank. “It is now a matter of record that since I have associated myself with Capitol Records, a company free of broadcasting affiliations, my career is again financially, creatively, and artistically healthy.”
Mitch Miller was outraged by Frank’s attack. “His career went down the drain because of his emotional turmoil over Ava Gardner,” he said. “I had nothing to do with him losing his movie contract, losing his television show, losing his radio show. I had nothing to do with him losing his voice. He should look to himself as the cause of his own failure and stop trying to blame others. Besides, his contract gave him total control over all his material. He didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do. And as far as gimmicks go, let me tell you that the microphone is the greatest gimmick of all. Take away the microphone and Sinatra and most other pop singers would be slicing salami in a delicatessen.”
Despite the angry telegrams, no congressional action was taken against Columbia Records or Mitch Miller, but Frank became obsessed with hating Miller and refused all entreaties by friends to make up. When Erroll Garner recorded “On the Street Where You Live,” he called Frank in Las Vegas and played the recording for him.
“Wonderful, wonderful,” said Frank. “Whose orchestra is that with you?”
“Mitch Miller,” said Garner.
Frank hung up the phone.
Years later, Miller was in Las Vegas staying at the Sands, and Jack Entratter dragged him over to Frank to shake hands. “It’s time you two became friends again.” he said. Miller very agreeably extended his hand and said, “Hi, Frank, how are you.” Frank, who was sitting with a large table of friends, looked up and said, “Fuck off.”
“It was very embarrassing,” recalled Miller, “and it’s kind of crazy because I never really did anything to him except record some great records.”
Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen experienced the same kind of rage after her 1956 newspaper series entitled “The Real Frank Sinatra Story” appeared in the New York Journal-American, detailing, among other things, Frank’s romances with Anita Ekberg, Gloria Vanderbilt, Kim Novak, Jill Corey, Jo Ann Tolley, Melissa Weston, and Lisa Ferraday.
“A few of the women, like Ava and Lana, were public idols themselves and priceless examples of feminine beauty,” she wrote. “Many more, of course, have been the fluffy little struggling dolls of show business, pretty and small-waisted and similar under the standard layer of peach-colored Pan-Cake makeup)—starlets who never got past first base in Holly wood, assorted models and vocalists, and chorus girls now lost in the ghosts of floor shows past. Others belonged to the classification most gently described as tawdry.”
Frank sent Miss Kilgallen a tombstone carved with her name. Then he incorporated her into his nightclub act, ridiculing her as “the chinless wonder.” At the Copa he said, “Dorothy Kilgallen isn’t here tonight. I guess she’s out shopping for a new chin.” At the Sands, he held up one of his car keys and said, “Doesn’t that look like Dorothy Kilgallen’s profile?” He continued his unstinting vitriole for the next nine years, refusing to relent until the day she died. Informed of her death in November 1965, he said, “Well, guess I got to change my whole act now.”
After directing Not as a Stranger, during which Frank went on a drunken bender with Robert Mitchum and Broderick Crawford, tore down the walls of his dressing room and ripped out phones, Stanley Kramer swore he would never use him again, even if Kramer had to go begging with a tin cup. Yet, months later and against his better judgment, he signed Frank to play Miguel, the Spanish peasant boy in The Pride and the Passion which began with sixteen weeks of filming in Spain in April 1956. Spain was tantalizing to Frank because Ava was there, living a few miles outside of Madrid, but he later regretted signing the contract as much as Kramer did.
His contract specified that “no other artist is to receive better living accommodations than those provided for Sinatra; that he is to be paid ten thousand dollars per week and supplied with twenty-five dollars per day for tips and incidentals, plus reasonable baggage allowance.”
Sinatra refused to stay on location “in the sticks” with Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, and the rest of the cast, insisting on his own suite at the Hotel Castellana Hilton in Madrid. He also insisted on having a car at his disposal and demanded that Kramer pay five thousand dollars to transport his Thunderbird from Los Angeles to Madrid. Kramer offered him a fifteen-thousand-dollar Mercedes with a chauffeur instead. Frank wanted a convertible, and refused to work until he got one; the transatlantic negotiations between his agents and the director’s lawyers over the car went on for weeks.
“His entrance to Spain was preceded by this controversy,” said novelist Richard Condon, who was a publicist at the time. “Kramer prevailed on the transportation, but Francis would not forgive him. They argued through intermediaries also over a stereophonic record player for Frank’s hotel suite, and on the first night of shooting in a village south of Madrid, Frank summoned Kramer to him before the assemblage of the extras, crew, and players, and said that if Kramer didn’t get him out of there and back to the hotel by eleven-thirty that night that Frank would piss on him. That got things off to a lame start.”
The director became alarmed about Frank’s heavy expenses after the first week and cabled company lawyers in Los Angeles about his $644 bill for long distance calls and cables, one of which went to his Chicago bookie.
“The ten thousand pesetas cash were spent entertaining Sinatra’s various friends and hangers-on,” wrote the director’s assistant. “I hope to be able to resolve this problem in some reasonable manner with Sinatra, but will be careful not to take a stand so equivocal that it is difficult to back out of.”
Yet, the next week, Frank flew Peg
gy Connolly in to stay with him and gave the twenty-four-year-old singer the right to charge anything to his account, including her beauty salon bills, jewelry from Loewe’s, gloves, a key ring, dolls, flowers, caviar, and an $850 handbag. Peggy was a beautiful brunette who had been dating Frank for a few months. When reporters asked her about the possibility of becoming the next Mrs. Sinatra, she said, “Nothing is impossible. You never know when you’re going to get married.”
A few days after her arrival, Frank was sitting in his hotel suite with Richard Condon and others when Ava called. Frank sauntered to the phone to talk to her.
“You goddamned jerk,” she yelled so loudly that everyone in the room could hear. “You’ve been here how many days and you don’t even call me.”
“I’ve been busy,” said Frank.
“What’s happening?”
Peggy Connolly walked into the room and listened to Frank’s end of the conversation. A few minutes later, he hung up.
“Was that Ava?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Are you going to see her?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, I won’t like it at all. I didn’t come here so you could see Ava.”
Frank looked at her for a few seconds and then very calmly told her to go back into the bedroom, pack her bags, and leave. Weeks later, he sent her a twenty-thousand-dollar grand piano and begged her to return. She did, but not even Peggy Connolly could make Spain tolerable for Frank. He complained to everyone. “Who found this creepy place, a drunken helicopter pilot?” he asked Kramer, fuming about the primitive state of telephone service in Franco’s Spain. He had mailed 143 letters to the United States and on the back of each envelope he had written “Franco is a fink” in English.