His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  19

  Frank’s three-year contract with the American Broadcasting Company for three million dollars in upfront cash, plus a share of the profits, was one of the most phenomenal television deals ever signed. Known in 1957 as “the third network,” ABC-TV sweetened the deal by buying stock in Frank’s motion picture production unit, Kent Productions, which gave him handsome capital gains tax advantages. The company also agreed to let him film his thirty-six half-hour shows and keep sixty percent of the residuals. With the shows on film, Frank figured they would be shown again and again, with his corporation, Hobart Productions, collecting most of the money.

  “This guarantees me seven million dollars, and most of that will go into a trust fund for the children. For years, I’ve been looking to get into a position to set aside money for them, and this is the one way I can do it.”

  The network gave Frank complete artistic control, allowing him to develop each show in his own way, a degree of freedom that was unheard of in television. “If I flop this time, it’ll be my own fault—and that’s the way I want it,” Frank said.

  In 1952, he had signed with CBS, the biggest television contract to date, but his ratings had been so low that the show lasted barely a year. Afterward, he had blasted the industry.

  “Television stinks,” he had said then. “Except, of course, if you can do a filmed show. That way, you avoid a lot of the panic and no-talent executives who get in it from merely writing an essay on fire prevention in the first place. The only time any of these bums have even been in the theater was when they bought a ticket.… My blood boils when I see the mediocrities sitting on top of the TV networks.”

  Now. five years later, with his records selling in the millions and his movies (Johnny Concho, Meet Me in Las Vegas, High Society, Around the World in 80 Days) box office successes, he was the number-one star in Hollywood. His weekly series was being hailed by ABC-TV as the smash entry for the new fall season.

  Yet, loath to rehearse, Frank dashed off eleven shows in fifteen days, sailing through with little attention to detail. At CBS, one show would have taken seven days to film, and the star would have been required to rehearse. At ABC, Frank made his stand-in, Dave White, do the rehearsing while he simply jumped in at the last minute to do the filming.

  “It was a brutalizing experience for actors who take their work seriously, let me tell you,” said actor Maurice Manson. “I only lasted one day with that man, and one day was too much for me.

  “We were doing a four-person skit—a light comedy bit with me as the producer, Frank as the talent scout, and Kim Novak as the girl who is discovered and taken to a drama teacher, played by Celia Lovsky. As the movie producer, I was sitting at my desk going through scripts. Frank was supposed to knock on the door and then walk into my office. When I heard him knock, I said, ‘Come in.’ Frank opened the door and then fell to his knees, and started barking like a dog. I thought he’d had an epileptic fit or something, but when all his stooges on the set laughed uproariously, I realized that it was his idea of a joke. I didn’t think it was a bit funny myself and was quite unnerved. We started again, and this time he got through the door. As the camera came in for closeups, I said the lines from the script: ‘Well, what do you think of the girl?’ The film was rolling as Frank said, ‘Don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to feel her up yet.’ Again his stooges screamed and hollered as though that was the funniest thing in the world, so Frank kept it up all day. We finally got something in the can after a few hours of nonsense, but it was awful, and Celia and I looked horrible, probably because we were both so done in by Frank’s antics.

  “I’m sure that he wasn’t being malicious and trying to make us look bad. It’s just that he didn’t care about the acting or the ensemble. He wouldn’t take the time to rehearse. He wouldn’t even learn his lines. He just read them off the TelePrompter. He was forty-two years old at the time, but he acted like a stupid teenager. It was a case of arrested adolescence.”

  The series made its debut on October 18, 1957, with the New York Herald-Tribune hailing it as “a triumph in almost all departments,” while The New Yorker criticized it as “under-organized and a little desperate; and that for a show described as ‘the most expensive half-hour program in history.’ ”

  By November, Variety had dismissed the series as “a flop, rating and otherwise.” The New Republic said it was suffering from that “terrible disease that afflicts television variety shows. It has no name, but the symptoms are superficial smoothness, lack of emotion, cheerful banality, and something that can only be called intentional dullness.”

  Dean Martin was Frank’s guest star the next month, which the Chicago Sun-Times found regrettable. “They performed like a pair of adult delinquents, sharing the same cigarette, leering at girls, breaking up on chatter directed to the Las Vegas fraternity, plugging records, movies, and the places where they eat for free, and swigging drinks at a prop bar.” Some critics objected to Frank’s use of such words as “broads” and “mother grabbers,” and others found Dean so nonchalant as to be indifferent. The chemistry between the two men, who were close friends, did not ignite ratings.

  Even Frank’s Christmas show with Bing Crosby was condemned by Variety as “static, studied, pretentious, and awkward.… Even discounting the often sloppy production … the absence of central theme or point of view, the fact is that Sinatra never seemed at his best or at his easiest, and the attitude infects his guests.”

  Network executives were panicked by Sinatra’s low ratings, which placed the show a sorry third to M Squad and Mr. Adams and Eve, which starred Ida Lupino and Howard Duff. But Frank remained calm and confident. “Those guys in the gray flannel suits—I just don’t dig ’em,” he said. “You’d think they’d give a show a chance to build. But no. The show wasn’t on two weeks before the complaints started coming in.”

  In February 1958, TV Guide described the show as “one of the biggest and most expensive disappointments of the current season,” and by March Frank was starting to say that he was too busy with movie commitments to continue the series. It was dropped after twenty-six weeks, and the post mortems blamed his arrogance.

  “Mr. Sinatra, the artist whose best we have tasted and enjoyed, was simply making a fast buck,” wrote Harriet Van Home in the New York World Telegram. “He didn’t just walk through his show, he shambled, shrugged, and could [not] have cared less.”

  “It would be charitable to suggest that the shows were unrehearsed,” wrote Paul Molloy in the Chicago Sun-Times. “It would also be an indictment of sloppy performance. For I couldn’t escape the feeling that Sinatra’s thinking was something like: ‘Let’s give the peasants out there a few songs and jokes and get this nuisance over with.’ There is effrontery about this attitude that has no place in show business.”

  Jack Donohue, Frank’s director, said he was temperamentally unsuited to a medium that demanded careful rehearsals. “There are quite a few performers who have no business on television each week, and Sinatra is one of them,” he said. “I just feel that nobody—Frank included—can race through three shows a week. He hates to rehearse, and he was always late for rehearsal. He’d show up late and say, ‘What do I do, Jack?’ and I’d tell him we had a run-through, then a dress rehearsal, and he’d say, ‘Oh, no! Do we have to do this twice?’ So I’d say: ‘No, Frank, you don’t have to, but the rest of the cast does. Maybe you know your lines, but the rest of the cast doesn’t, so we’re going to do this my way.’ I have actually played his part in the run-through and dress rehearsal, and the first time Frankie had a whack at it was when we were on the air.”

  Although the series was canceled, ABC recouped some of its investment the following year when Frank hosted four one-hour specials, but he was never again able to make his mark in television. “I hate the fric-frac of it all,” he said. “I’ll do a special now and then but no more of this series crap. Lucy [Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy] can have it.”

  He threw himself into a killing pace o
f movie-making (Some Came Running, Kings Go Forth, A Hole in the Head, and (Never So Few) and nightclub appearances (the Fontainebleau in Miami, the Copa in New York, the Chez Paree in Chicago, and the Sands in Las Vegas). All of Frank’s work catapulted him to number one among the ten biggest money-making movie stars in 1958, who included Glenn Ford, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, Jerry Lewis, Rock Hudson, William Holden, James Stewart, Yul Brynner, and Marlon Brando.

  Yet his attitude toward work—especially his unwillingness to rehearse—irritated people. Director Billy Wilder, a good friend of Frank’s, refused to work with him, saying: “I’m afraid he would run after the first take—‘Bye-bye, kid, that’s it. I’m going, I’ve got to see a chick.’ That would drive me crazy.” Asked if Sinatra was unprofessional, Wilder said, “I think this: if, instead of involving himself in all those enterprises, nineteen television shows and records by the ton and four movies all at once and producing things and political things and all those broads—his talent on film would be stupendous. That would be the only word. Stupendous. He could make us all, all the actors that is, look like faggots.”

  Shirley MacLaine, who had been given her part by Sinatra in Some Came Running, agreed. “His potential is fantastic. The only thing … The thing is, I wish he would work harder at what he’s doing. I don’t think that when you polish something you can help but improve it. He won’t polish. He feels polishing might make him stagnant. He doesn’t even like to rehearse.… Some people say he behaves the way he does because he isn’t sure of himself, or because he hates himself. With this man, it’s nothing as simple as that. Maybe it’s something like this: he won’t extend himself all the way because he’s such a perfectionist.… What I mean by that is that if he shows anybody he’s working hard and it doesn’t come off, he’s got no excuse. If he’s not working hard, they can’t point at him and say it’s not right, because he can then say, to himself at least, ‘Well, I wasn’t working up to my peak.’ I do think he works at singing. But at acting, the way he goes, he always knows that people will say, ‘My goodness, think of what that man could do if he really worked.…’ Now that I think of it, maybe he is afraid. Maybe he’s afraid to see what might happen if he worked up to his whole potential. It might destroy everything he’s done by playing it casual.”

  Still, Frank was the hottest property in show business, and, as such, he fully expected to win the first annual Grammy of 1958 for best male vocal and for his new album, Only the Lonely, which he and Nelson Riddle believed to be their finest work to date. But the new award, voted on by members of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences, went instead to Domenico Modugno for best male vocal (“Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu—Volare”), and to Henry Mancini for best album (The Music from Peter Gunn). Ali Frank got was an award for the best album cover.

  “He was so upset about not winning a music award that he refused to let any of the photographers take our picture that night,” said Sandra Giles, the actress who accompanied him to the Grammys. “He wasn’t nasty to me, but he was very moody and drank a lot afterwards. I was very young then, and didn’t know how to handle him. Looking back, I guess I should’ve been grateful that Elvis didn’t win anything!”

  The musical arrival of the former truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, had appalled Frank. Elvis Aaron Presley, the gyrating crooner who wiggled and shimmied as he sang his rockabilly songs, was driving young females into screaming paroxysms of delight with his jumping guitar and long sideburns. Elvis’s clamorous shouts and sexual moans unleashed a frenzy in teenage girls unmatched since The Voice himself had hordes of bobby-soxers shrieking at the Paramount. Yet Frank viewed the twenty-four-year-old singer as a degenerate redneck and musical abomination.

  “His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac,” he said.

  So incensed was he by Elvis the Pelvis that he wrote a magazine article in Western World denouncing rock ’n’ roll and all its practitioners: “My only deep sorrow is the unrelenting insistence of recording and motion picture companies upon purveying the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear, and naturally I’m referring to the bulk of rock ’n’ roll.

  “It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people,” he said. “It smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact—dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.”

  Frank excoriated Elvis for appealing to music’s lowest common denominator. He hated his glittery suits and blue suede shoes. While Frank clung to slow, yearning ballads, he condemned the hillbilly interloper for taking these same traditional rhythms and changing them into something blatantly sexual. Perhaps most of all, he resented Elvis for carving a new place and direction in music that had the potential to challenge his own. And that is exactly what Elvis did. By 1956 he had been acclaimed as the king of rock ’n’ roll, and although Frank felt that rock music had no place on the Top 40 charts, Elvis dominated the number-one position for three decades.

  Even after his death, Elvis remained on top of the all-time sales list, with The Beatles and Stevie Wonder as runners-up. Perry Como captured the twenty-second spot, while Frank ranked near the bottom at thirty-fourth.

  Despite his personal feelings about Elvis, Frank was pragmatic enough to recognize Elvis’s phenomenal appeal. As a way of cashing in on it, he decided to welcome Elvis home from a two-year stint in the army in 1960 by paying him $100,000 for a ten-minute appearance on his last ABC-TV special.

  “You should make in a year what Frank is losing on this show,” said Sammy Cahn of the “Welcome Elvis” telecast. “But he wants to prove he can go big on TV.”

  After years of trying, Frank finally proved it. Thanks to Elvis, Trendex gave his ABC special a whopping 41.5 rating, the highest of any show in five years.

  Presley, who wore black leather jackets and white socks that went unchanged for days, was not a man Frank could ever feel comfortable with. He was not “cool” in the sense of the members of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, who wore snap-brim hats and sharkskin suits from Sy Devore’s Hollywood men’s store. The group Sinatra formed after Bogie’s death consisted of Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, and Shirley MacLaine as mascot. It was as dedicated to drinking as Bogie’s—Bogie’s principle was that the whole world was three drinks behind and it was time to catch up. But in Frank’s Rat Pack, personal homage to their “leader” was all important: Frank was addressed as “the pope,” “the general,” and “el dago.”

  The new Rat Pack developed its own vocabulary, in which all women, except Mother, were “broads.” God was “the big G” and death “the big casino,” as in, “Did you hear that so-and-so just bought the big casino,” meaning that so-and-so had just died. “Dullsville, Ohio” was anywhere but Vegas and “a little hey-hey” was a good time. “Bird” was the male organ, and the term was constantly used as a jovial greeting, as in, “How’s your bird?” At a party, when Frank was bored, he’d say, “I think it’s going to rain,” which meant that he wanted to go someplace else, and everyone had to leave. “Clyde” was an all-purpose word that could mean anything, but when applied to Elvis Presley and his guitar, it meant “loser, a shmendrick.”

  They called themselves the Clan for a while, until that became politically embarrassing, and they hastened to. make it known that they had nothing to do with the Ku Klux Klan.

  The Rat Pack satisfied Frank’s lifelong absorption with male company and met his craving for attention. The group’s slavish devotion to “the leader” seemed humorous until the day Sammy Davis, Jr., gave an interview to Jack Eigen in Chicago, acknowledging Frank’s need to belittle others.

  “I love Frank and he was the kindest man in the world to me when I lost my eye in an auto accident and wanted to kill myself. But there are many things he does that
there are no excuses for,” said Sammy. “Talent is not an excuse for bad manners. … I don’t care if you are the most talented person in the world. It does not give you the right to step on people and treat them rotten. This is what he does occasionally.”

  “That was it for Sammy,” said Peter Lawford. “Frank called him ‘a dirty nigger bastard’ and wrote him out of Never So Few, the movie we were starting at the time. He had originally had the part created so that Sam could be in the movie, but now he had it rewritten again for Steve McQueen. For the next two months Sammy was on his knees begging for Frank’s forgiveness, but Frank wouldn’t speak to him. Even when they were in Florida together and Frank was appearing at the Fontainebleau and Sammy was next door at the Eden Roc, Frank still refused to speak to him. He wouldn’t even go over to see his show, which was something we always did when one or the other of us was appearing someplace. He left word with the doorman that Sammy was not to come in. If he did, Frank said he’d walk out.”

  Sammy had not only criticized Frank, but he had done so in Chicago, where it was broadcast over the radio and later picked up by all the media, and where Frank’s Mafia friends would hear it. Chicago was home to his close friend, Joe Fischetti, whom he’d made his talent agent at the Fontainebleau; to Sam Giancana, the chief of the Chicago Mafia, who wore Frank’s sapphire friendship ring; to Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo, the former Chicago syndicate boss for whom Frank had given a personal home recital the year before.

  “That was the unforgivable part—to embarrass Frank in front of the Big Boys,” said Lawford. “Those Mafia guys meant more to him than anything. So Sammy was quite lucky that Frank let him grovel for a while and then allowed him to apologize in public a couple of months later. It could have been a lot worse, given Frank’s temper. You have no idea of that temper. He can get so mad that he’s driven to real violence, especially if he’s been drinking, and I’m not kidding. I know. I’ve seen it. One time at a party in Palm Springs, he got so mad at some poor girl that he slammed her through a plate glass window. There was shattered glass and blood all over the place and the girl’s arm was nearly severed from her body. Jimmy Van Heusen rushed her to the hospital. Frank paid her off later and the whole thing was hushed up, of course, but I remember Judy Garland and I looking at each other and shivering with fright at the time. I did everything I could to avoid setting off that temper, but sometimes it was impossible. Look what happened when he heard I’d gone out with Ava. He threatened to kill me and then didn’t speak to me for five years. He got over it one night at Gary and Rocky Cooper’s dinner party. I had married Patricia [Kennedy] by then, and she was his dinner partner. I think we were very attractive to Frank because of Jack [Kennedy], who had been elected senator from Massachusetts and was getting ready to run for president. Anyway, that night at the Coopers got us back together again, and we started seeing Frank all the time. We went around the world together, we named our daughter after him [Victoria Frances], we set up corporations to produce each other’s movies, and we went into the restaurant business together, but even Pat, who adored Frank, was still scared of his temper.