His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  “He was somewhat jealous of Frank,” said Lauren Bacall many years later. “Partly because he knew I loved being with him, partly because he thought Frank was in love with me, and partly because our physical life together, which had always ranked high, had less than flourished with his illness.”

  This was the closest Bacall ever came to admitting her passion for Frank during the time that her husband was dying. “It was no secret to any of us,” said playwright Ketti Frings, who visited Bogart at home during his last days. “Everybody knew about Betty and Frank. We just hoped Bogie wouldn’t find out. That would have been more killing than the cancer.”

  On Monday, January 14, 1957, Humphrey Bogart died, three weeks after his fifty-seventh birthday. Frank was performing in New York at the Copa when he got the news. He canceled his next two appearances, telling his agents, “I can’t go on. I wouldn’t be coherent.” He called Lauren Bacall in California and offered her his house in Palm Springs for two weeks, then canceled three more shows. But he still couldn’t bring himself to fly to the West Coast for the funeral.

  The rest of the Bogart Rat Pack was there in full force, with David Niven, Swifty Lazar, and Mike Romanoff serving as pallbearers. Adolph Green and Betty Comden flew in from New York. Nunnally Johnson flew in from Georgia. Frank remained in Manhattan. He pleaded laryngitis, but close friends suspected that he had developed a crippling case of what George Evans once called “the guilt germs.”

  18

  Frank made front-page headlines in February 1957 with a Hollywood scandal that lasted for months.

  WITNESS SAYS SINATRA LIED blared the Los Angeles Mirror-News.

  SINATRA AND “PRIVATE EYE” TO FACE PERJURY QUIZ roared the Los Angeles Examiner.

  At issue was Frank’s honesty in relating what had happened the evening of November 5, 1954, when he and Joe DiMaggio were suspected of staging a raid on an apartment in which Marilyn Monroe was supposedly having a lesbian relationship. Sinatra and DiMaggio were attempting to get evidence to use in the divorce she was seeking from DiMaggio, but they never caught Marilyn because the wrong apartment door was broken down.

  After Confidential published a story entitled “The Real Reason for Marilyn Monroe’s Divorce from Joe DiMaggio,” which detailed the break-in, the California State Senate Investigating Committee began probing how stories about movie stars were leaked to exposé magazines. Frank was subpoenaed to testify about his part in the midnight raid. At first he refused, saying he didn’t have any information relevant to the case. Then he threatened to sue the chief of police of Los Angeles, the police captain in charge of intelligence, and the two police detectives who served the subpoena on him in bed at four A.M., claiming that the service was improper.

  “It was a good thing I was asleep,” said Frank, “or I might have gotten a gun.”

  “It seems to me that somebody is attempting to take the spotlight away from the real issue in this matter,” said the police chief, dismissing Frank’s threat.

  Finally forced to testify, Frank swore under oath that he had simply driven DiMaggio to the scene of the raid, where they were met by Philip Irwin and Barney Ruditsky, the two private detectives they had hired to gather evidence on Marilyn. Frank claimed that while he stood by his car smoking, DiMaggio; Billy Karen, the maître d’ of the Villa Capri; Hank Sanicola; and the two detectives crashed into the apartment of Florence Kotz.

  DiMaggio later claimed that he hadn’t broken into the apartment either; Billy Karen said he didn’t remember what happened; Hank Sanicola said that he and Frank stayed at the Villa Capri restaurant all night; and Barney Ruditsky was excused from testifying because of a heart ailment.

  Philip Irwin testified that “almost all of Mr. Sinatra’s statements were false.” The twenty-four-year-old detective said that he was afraid to say much more because of his fear of Sinatra and the possibility of physical violence.

  “Do you still fear him?” asked the committee counsel.

  “Still very much so,” said Irwin.

  “What do you fear?”

  “I’m afraid of being beaten up again.”

  “Aside from being beaten up, have you no other fears?”

  “Yes,” said Irwin. “I have other fears.”

  When asked why he was so frightened, the young man said that he had been beaten up after he sought out Frank to tell him that he had nothing to do with leaking the story to Confidential.

  “And why did you seek out Mr. Sinatra?”

  “Because I feared him—from rumors I had heard; I didn’t want what happened [later] to happen.”

  The detective “told of being badly beaten by men he had never seen before, and his story was corroborated by State Investigator James J. Callahan, who said: “Irwin had a black eye. I don’t think his nose was broken, but it was very badly bruised. He had severe welts from his shoulder to the belt line. His arms and legs had been kicked. He was pretty thoroughly worked over.”

  The detective testified that Frank had accompanied the men into Mrs. Kotz’s apartment after Ruditsky had broken down the door. He said that Frank had turned on the light, causing the woman to scream. When Frank saw they were in the wrong apartment, he ran out with his friends and drove to the Villa Capri restaurant.

  The landlady of the building also testified that she had seen Frank enter the building and run out of Mrs. Kotz’s apartment a few minutes later.

  With so many conflicting testimonies, the county grand jury decided to investigate the “wrong door raid,” and hearings were set for March. Although Frank was represented by Martin Gang and Mickey Rudin of Gang, Kopp & Tyre, he called the Mafia’s lawyer, Sidney Korshak, in Chicago for help. Korshak was renowned among gangsters as a man who could get just about anything accomplished with a couple of phone calls. Frank later hired Fred Otash, a private detective, to try to prove that he did not perjure himself before the State Senate Committee. By the time the grand jury convened, Frank and his friends had their previously divergent stories straight. Frank testified for fifty minutes, sticking to the story he had given the State Senate Committee. When asked how jurors could possibly reconcile his testimony with that of the detective Philip Irwin, he said, “Who are you going to believe, me or a guy who makes his living kicking down bedroom doors?”

  Frank escaped indictment, and perjury was ruled out by the district attorney, who said: “There is definitely a bald conflict in the testimony. But the transcript falls short in its present form of showing the complete elements of a perjury.”

  DiMaggio and Monroe divorced several months later, but the friendship between Joe and Frank ended when Sinatra started dating Marilyn and passing her around to his friends. Joe never forgave Sinatra or Peter Lawford for allowing Marilyn’s affair with Robert Kennedy to take place. He was bitter about them after her suicide and barred both men from attending her funeral in 1962.

  In 1957, Frank was just beginning to test the effectiveness of litigation as a means of punishment. His first target was investigative reporter Bill Davidson, who had published a three-part biography of Frank in Look magazine, which earned Davidson the University of Illinois’s Benjamin Franklin Award for the best article depicting a person living or dead in an American magazine for general circulation.

  “I think the turning point of Frank’s antipathy to the press—and that’s the mild word—began with Bill’s article,” said Richard Condon. “Because we were in Spain shortly after that, and Frank was just rabid about the press at that time, just wild, and he mentioned Bill.”

  The first article, “Talent, Tantrums and Torment,” appeared May 14, 1957. Infuriated, Frank sued Davidson and Look magazine for $2,300,000, claiming that he had been libeled as a “neurotic, depressed, and tormented person with suicidal tendencies and a libertine.” His sixteen-page complaint charged that the article was “lewd, lascivious, and scurrilous, containing innuendos and references of the same nature and type as are contained in articles published in what are popularly known as scandal magazines.”
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br />   He specifically denied the story of his appearance at the Democratic Convention in Chicago the summer before, when he sang the national anthem, and then rebuffed the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, who put his hands on his arms, and said, “Aren’t you going to sing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ for us, Frank?”

  Sinatra supposedly looked at Rayburn coldly and said, “Take your hands off the suit, creep.” Speaker Rayburn sent a telegram denying the incident, but Davidson had an eyewitness source to the contrary.

  The second article in Look appeared a week later, concentrating on Frank’s vendetta with newsmen and why he was so afraid of personal publicity. It dispelled the legend of him as a poor little kid from the slums who ran with street toughs in Hoboken. Instead, he was depicted as a spoiled Mama’s boy, who was dressed in Little Lord Fauntleroy suits as a baby, and fussed over by his grandmother, who raised him while his mother took care of political business. The article quoted neighbors who remembered him as the richest kid on the block and far too frail to have ever been in the many fights he later bragged about.

  There was one major omission from the article. Davidson wrote that there had been an abortion mill in the Sinatra neighborhood and alluded to Dolly’s role as a midwife, but made no connection between her and the abortion business that Frank wanted to keep hidden from everyone, especially his children.

  The third installment. “Blondes, Brunettes and the Blues,” detailed the women in his life, from Nancy Barbato and Ava Gardner to unknown secretaries and starlets like Joan Blackman who, when asked her identity, was introduced by Frank as “Ezzard Charles.” The next day the Los Angeles Mirror-News reported: “Ezzard was an eyeful in shocking-pink gown, shoes, coat, and lipstick.”

  Seven months later Frank dropped the lawsuit and replaced it with a new one that charged Davidson and Look with invasion of privacy. He said that he wanted to directly challenge the right of the press to report the personal lives of celebrities.

  “I have always maintained that any writer or publication has a right to discuss or criticize my professional activities as a singer and an actor. But I feel that an entertainer has a right to his privacy, and that his right should be just as inviolate as any other person’s right of privacy.”

  Admitting that it was a test case to change existing law, Frank asked only for “damages proved in excess of three thousand dollars.”

  Look magazine welcomed the challenge.

  “The press has not only the right, but a duty, to publish facts pertaining to public figures and, in so doing, to examine them to see what makes them tick, how they stack up on analysis, and what they are, not simply as professional performers but also as persons,” said the magazine’s counsel.

  The suit never went to trial because Frank dropped it, but not before sending a message to publishers, editors, and writers that anyone who dared to write about him in depth and without his permission could be subject to costly litigation.

  “Mickey Rudin told me later that he had not wanted to file that lawsuit,” said Bill Davidson. “He said: ‘We all advised Frank to forget it, but he wouldn’t let go.’ Sammy Davis, Jr., said that Frank hated me because he thought I had called his mother an abortionist. Sammy tried to tell him that I’d simply reported an abortion mill in the neighborhood, but he wasn’t able to pacify Frank at all.

  “Three or four years later, my wife and I were having dinner at Romanoff’s on the Rocks in Palm Springs, and Frank was in the back room at a private party. He must have been tipped off that I was there because he charged out of the back room and came barrelling towards our table, absolutely purple with rage. I thought he was going to kill me. Dean Martin ran out and bodily dragged him back, saying, ‘Get back in here, Frank. Don’t start anything.’ ”

  Unable to accept the fact that his life was not off base to the press, Frank tried to control what was written about him by refusing interviews to reporters who asked personal questions.

  “He was making Pal Joey at the time Bill’s articles were published, and he hit us with a long list of press people who were not allowed on the set,” said a publicist for Columbia Studios.

  One writer was threatened. Movie actress Gloria Rhoads wrote a book involving Frank that she submitted to him for approval before publishing.

  “The book wasn’t intended to embarrass Mr. Sinatra,” she said, “but evidently they thought it was. When I brought it to them to get Mr. Sinatra’s approval, one of his closest advisors told me: ‘If you pursue this, you will never work another day in Hollywood. We are very powerful, and we don’t hesitate to use this power. We can call up any top studio and tell them not to use you, and they will not.’ And I haven’t worked a day since then.”

  Zealously guarding his privacy, Sinatra built a wall of secrecy around the women in his life. He was humiliated when his affair with Shirley Van Dyke became public in 1957 after the thirty-two-year-old film actress took an overdose of sleeping pills. Recovering in General Hospital after being revived by police, she said that she had known Frank for fourteen years. “I’ve dated him on and off since I met him,” she said.

  Frank admitted that he had obtained bit movie parts for her since she came to Hollywood, but he refused to comment on the contents of her suicide note, which said, “The one I’ve really loved, Frank Sinatra, you’ve done me wrong. You’re so big and I’m so small.”

  During 1957, Frank was being seen with Lauren Bacall, escorting her to premieres, dinner parties, and weekends in Palm Springs.

  “Frank and I had become a steady pair,” she said. “We flew to Las Vegas for The Joker Is Wild opening—he took me to the Pal Joey opening in town—at all his small dinner parties, I was the hostess. People were watching with interest. It seemed to everyone—to his friends, to mine—that we were crazy about each other, that we were a great pair; that it wouldn’t last; that Frank would never be able to remain constantly devoted, monogamous—yet that maybe with me, he would.”

  Bacall galloped toward marriage while Frank tried to rein her in, calling friends and asking them to get him out of the relationship. One night, Jule Styne invited them for a quiet dinner.

  “Well … you know … going with Betty … I’d like to make it more than a quiet dinner,” said Frank. “I’d like to have someone else talking, or else it gets too serious between her and me.”

  To please Frank, Jule invited Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor. And to please Mike, he invited Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds because they were having marital troubles.

  “So there we were at the Beachcomber’s,” said Jule Styne. “First there was a great confrontation between Sinatra and Bacall. In the middle of it, my girl turns to Frank and says, ‘You’d be lucky to marry her.’ Well, that’s the last thing Frank wants to hear, and I give my girl a nudge, but immediately Frank hates me and my date. Next thing, there’s a big hassle between Eddie and Debbie, and they’re carrying on across the table from each other. And Mike, trying to settle it down, says, ‘Come on, Debbie, Eddie’s a nice kid.’ In the meantime, Liz is irritated because she’s being ignored and sitting in the middle of this battlefield, and she tells Mike to mix out. Mike turns to me in a stage whisper and says, ‘Thanks, Jule, this is a wonderful idea. We ought to make it a regular weekly event.’ ”

  It was months of what Bacall described as an “erratic” courtship. Frank would be “wildly attentive” one minute, and sullen the next. “He’d had so many scars from so many past lives—was so embittered by his failure with Ava—he was not about to take anything from a woman,” she said. “ ‘Don’t tell me—suggest.’ God knows how many times I heard that. But I didn’t know how to suggest.”

  Deeply in love, she wanted nothing more than a wedding ring from Frank, but he vacillated until the evening of March 11, 1958, fourteen months after Bogart’s death, when he finally proposed.

  “I must have hesitated for at least thirty seconds,” she said later.

  That evening, they went to the Imperial Gardens on Sunset Boulevard to celebrat
e with Swifty Lazar. A young girl came to their table asking for autographs. Frank said, “Put down your new name.” After “Lauren Bacall,” Mrs. Bogart wrote “Betty Sinatra.”

  “I was so happy, I wanted everyone to know that we were getting married, but I kept my mouth shut,” she said.

  Frank left the next day for Miami, and Lazar took Bacall to the theater. During intermission, a columnist asked her if she and Frank were going to get married. “Why don’t you telephone Frank in Florida?” she said before admitting the truth, which Swifty confirmed minutes later. That night, she saw the headlines on the early edition of the morning paper: SINATRA TO MARRY BACALL.

  Not knowing how he would react, Bacall phoned Frank in Miami to tell him what had happened. He didn’t call her back for days. When he did, he said, “Why did you do it? I haven’t been able to leave my room for days—the press are everywhere. We’ll have to lay low for a while, not see each other for a while.”

  That was the last Lauren Bacall ever heard from Frank Sinatra. He didn’t speak to her again for six years, and then only in rage. When reporters asked him about the marriage report, he said, “Marriage? What for? Just so I’d have to go home earlier every night? Nuts!”

  That night, Ava called Frank from Spain. “I hear you called off the marriage,” she said.

  “What marriage?”

  “The marriage to Betty Bacall.”

  “Jesus. I was never going to marry that pushy female.”

  Ava gleefully related the story every time the Sinatra-Bacall affair was mentioned to her. Not so gleeful was Lauren Bacall, who wrote in her autobiography years later how devastated she was by Frank’s rejection. “To be rejected is hell, a hard thing to get over, but to be rejected publicly takes everything away from you,” she said. “But the truth also is that he behaved like a complete shit. He was too cowardly to tell the truth—that it was just too much for him, that he’d found he couldn’t handle it.”

  Frank resented her book. “I think it was unfair, because there is another side to it,” he said, “but I’m not going to give it. Some things should rest.”