His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  “I caught a glimpse of the beach far in the distance and saw four heads in the ocean coming towards us. I don’t remember how long it took for them to reach us, but the time seemed endless. Someone later said that it was forty-five minutes. It seemed like forever until those lifeguards reached us with their surfboards and lashed Frank and Ruth on top with ropes to hold them in position. Then they slowly reversed their course and paddled them back to land, leaving me to fend for myself. I rolled over to float, and to try to regain the strength I needed to swim back, but I was nearly done for. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I fought that deep fatigue, knowing that if I gave in to it, I’d be finished forever, and for what? For two people who wanted to die? Who had given up trying to save their own lives and could[n’t] have cared less about mine? That thought inflamed me, and I swam like a crazy man with an extravagant passion to live, defying the waves to take me under. By some miracle that I don’t understand to this day, I reached the beach before the life-saving party. I hit the shore and ran down to the point where Frank and Ruth were still in the ocean. I went in to help carry them out. Both were unconscious.

  “I stretched Frank out on the sand and gave him artificial respiration. Once he started vomiting the water out of his lungs, I turned him over to the lifeguards, July Rizzo ran up to me and shouted, ‘You’re a hero, Brad. You’re a hero. Without you, Frank would be dead.’ ”

  Dexter walked back to his hotel room and passed out for a few hours. When he returned to Sinatra’s house, it was overrun with people—newspaper reporters, photographers, island officials, friends, members of the cast and crew, and representatives of the Red Cross. The first news bulletins that flashed worldwide reported that Frank had drowned. When Dexter walked into the room, Sinatra was sitting in an easy chair, talking to his daughter, Nancy, who was on Oahu, the main island, with Tommy for the weekend. Frank, in his bathrobe and slippers, was trying to comfort her and assure her that he was alive and well.

  “He looked up at me when I entered the room and I observed that he was still in a state of shock,” Dexter said. “His eyes were bloodshot, and he had the expression of a felled ox. When our eyes locked, it seemed that he didn’t know what to say. He was embarrassed. He hung up the telephone and said, ‘My family thanks you.’ It was such a strange remark, almost as if I had put him in the uncomfortable position of having to thank me for saving his life. He never thanked me then or later, and I realize now that my rescue efforts probably severed the friendship right then and there by depriving him of the big-benefactor role which is the one he liked to play with his friends. The Chinese say when you save a life it belongs to you forever. Frank would have much preferred performing the grand dramatic gesture himself and saved my life so that I would be the one who owed him and would be indebted to him for life, not vice versa. I didn’t see the love-hate relationship all that clearly at the time, but it certainly became obvious later on.”

  Although Frank never thanked Brad Dexter, he drew him closer, bringing him into his immediate circle of friends, and giving him a place of honor alongside the writer, Harry Kurnitz, whom he idolized. Frank seemed to turn to the rugged actor for protection, much as a small boy relies on his strong brother; he confided in him and for a while the two men seemed inseparable. Frank affectionately nicknamed him “Serb” because the actor was Yugoslav and spoke Serbo-Croatian. Frank told him that he was haunted by terrible nightmares of the drowning, and admitted his fear of going to sleep because he’d wake up in the middle of the night, shaking and sweating, unable to free himself from the crushing waves that were pounding him. He talked about his fear of dying but never wanted to know the details of the extraordinary rescue effort that kept him alive and for which the Red Cross awarded Dexter a citation of honor. Frightened by his own vulnerability, Frank refused to discuss his brush with death publicly, and dismissed it nonchalantly, saying, “Oh, I just got a little water on my bird. That’s all.”

  The night after the near tragedy, Jilly Rizzo called Brad to say that “the boss” wanted him to come to the house for dinner because George Jacobs was preparing spaghetti pomodoro, Frank’s favorite, and Patsy D’Amore, who owned the Villa Capri in Hollywood, had flown over some fresh Italian bread and prosciutto.

  “Frank appeared uptight and depressed when I arrived,” said Dexter. “I didn’t realize how angry he was until we sat down to dinner and George started serving the spaghetti. Frank took one forkful and then started yelling that it was not prepared properly. George stood there quaking in his boots, not saying a word as Frank seized the platter and threw the spaghetti in his face, screaming, ‘You eat it. You eat this crap. I won’t.’ George didn’t flinch. He just peeled the spaghetti off his face and went back to the kitchen. I was so stunned by what Frank had done that I could barely speak. Finally, I said, ‘That was unkind, Frank. A very unkind thing to do.’ He yelled ‘Goddamn it. That bastard doesn’t know how to cook al dente, and that’s the only way I’ll eat it!’

  “George Jacobs was a terrific guy with a great sense of humor who took care of all Sinatra’s needs. He was his valet, chauffeur, cook, bartender, social secretary; he did everything for Frank, everything. He was totally devoted to him, traveled around the world with him, and was always at his beck and call. To see him so humiliated by Frank was quite disturbing. I thought maybe Frank was suffering from the aftershock of almost drowning and just wasn’t quite himself. We were scheduled to shoot early the next morning, so I excused myself at that point and returned to the hotel, but I couldn’t help thinking what bizarre behavior that was for a man who was at death’s door twenty-four hours before. How important could a plate of spaghetti be? After what Frank went through, why wasn’t he grateful just to be alive? I asked myself that question over and over until I realized that he was unconsciously lashing out at me for putting him in the awful position of having to be grateful for his own life. He couldn’t deal with his feelings toward me, so he took it out on poor George, a black man who would never fight back and whom Frank treated like chattel or a piece of property that he owned and could discard at will.”

  In the next three years, Dexter would often see that sudden searing anger overtake Frank like a violent squall, plunging him from gracious charm into malevolent cruelty. “After a while, I got so I could see it coming,” he said. “I could tell in Frank’s eyes when that horrible mood change was about to happen. There is some emotional conflict deep inside him that is triggered off by God knows what, and when it comes rushing to the surface, he explodes and hurts someone either physically or psychologically. Frank is a true manic-depressive and careens from great waves of elation to bouts of morose despair. It’s always in the depressed state that he gets ugly and vents his rage, like the time he urinated on Lee Mortimer’s grave. Afterwards, he screamed, ‘I’ll bury the bastards. I’ll bury them all.’ ”

  In his manic phase, Frank seemed like the greatest Italian host since Lorenzo de Medici. He spent money lavishly, wining and dining his friends with unstinting generosity, flying them around the world in his private plane, and swamping them with expensive gifts. He tipped waitresses and hatcheck girls with handfuls of hundred-dollar bills, an act of largess that worried his lawyer, Mickey Rudin, who often counseled him to be more careful about spreading around so much cash.

  Frank’s casualness about money jolted Dexter one night in 1964 when the two men met to have dinner at LaRue’s. Later, they climbed into Frank’s Dual Ghia and headed for the Sunset Strip to have a nightcap in the old Scandia restaurant. Then they drove back to Frank’s apartment on Doheny, where they went inside to discuss their next movie project.

  “That’s when he remembered the briefcase which was on the backseat of the car,” said Dexter. “I hadn’t even noticed it, but I went out to the garage and brought it into the apartment. ‘Open it up,’ he said, and when I did, I nearly had a cardiac arrest. That damn briefcase was Filled with cash—stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills. I don’t know how much money a briefcase holds, but th
is one was filled to the top. I couldn’t believe he’d been driving around all night with that valise lying so visible on the backseat, where parking lot attendants, or anybody else for the matter, could’ve easily taken it.

  “ ‘God in heaven,’ I said. ‘Someone could’ve swung with this.’

  “ ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Frank. ‘There’s more where that came from.’ ” Dexter dropped the subject.

  During the filming of Von Ryan’s Express in Rome, Dexter was dismayed to see his friend spend money so recklessly. One weekend when he was bored and wanted company, Frank summoned the city’s best haberdashers to bring their most luxurious items to his villa. They spread out a dazzling array of men’s accessories—silk shirts, ties, beautiful cashmere sweaters, eighteen-carat-gold cuff links, scarves, alligator belts, handkerchiefs, and slacks. Throwing open the door, he invited everyone in—Jack Entratter, Jim Mahoney, Jilly Rizzo, Dick Bakalyan, and Dexter.

  “Help yourselves, fellas. I’m gifting today,” he said.

  Swarming into the room, the men grabbed the opulent items like little boys diving for baseball cards. Everyone loaded up, except for Brad Dexter. “What are you being so generous for?” he asked. “You don’t need to lay it on like this.”

  “It means nothing to me, Brad. Take something. Help yourself.”

  Dexter shook his head and walked out of the room.

  At the age of forty-nine, Frank was still buying friendship the way he had growing up in Hoboken when he took the neighborhood boys to Geismer’s and let them use his charge account.

  “I saw so much of that in Frank,” said Dexter. “It made me sad. His father, Marty, was also bothered by all the hangers-on who exploited him. I met his parents in Palm Springs and Marty and Dolly thanked me profusely for saving Frank’s life. ‘I trust you because of that,’ Marty told me the next morning when we had breakfast together. ‘I don’t trust these other bums. Why is my son always surrounded by freeloaders? Please take care of him, Brad. I feel better when you’re around him. Promise me. Like you did in the water.’ The old man really got to me, and I promised him that I’d do my best. For that reason, I always felt protective towards Frank and did my damnedest to keep him out of trouble.”

  Having accepted a role in Von Ryan’s Express, Dexter had traveled to Europe with Frank for location filming in 1965. Sinatra had picked him for the part of the heroic captain, while he played the lead, Colonel Ryan, a man so feared and hated that his soldiers called him Von Ryan. Frank was making the film because Harry Kurnitz had told him the war story was more worthy of his talents than the “home movies” he’d been making with the Rat Pack.

  The studio had leased an eighteen-room villa for Frank in Italy, complete with helipad. It was situated outside of Rome because he refused to come into the city.

  “He was mad at the city then,” said Howard Koch. “They gave him a hell of a bad time a few years ago—1953, was it? Don’t know exactly when, but I guess he was kind of on his ass and doing a concert tour. Anyway, something went wrong, and they booed him—booed him. I guess he’s been sore ever since.”

  Refusing a limousine, Frank made Twentieth Century Fox charter a helicopter each day for his personal pilot, Don Lieto, to fly him from the Villa Apia to Cortina D’Ampezzo, high in the Dolomite Alps, so he could avoid the Italian paparazzi. The rest of the cast and crew traveled by car, an hour each way. He insisted that the director, Mark Robson, revise the shooting schedule to film all Sinatra’s scenes consecutively so that he wouldn’t have to wait for setups and angle shots. On the set, the tension between Frank and Robson was excruciating as the director tried to explain the folly of shooting according to Frank’s whims.

  “I know all that,” said Sinatra. “I didn’t tell you how to schedule the picture. I just told you what I wanted, and you told me, in front of witnesses, that you could do it. That was the deal. So now do it! You hear?”

  The cast held its breath waiting for Robson to explode, while Frank’s friends egged him on with contemptuous asides.

  “For them, Sinatra seemed a kind of loaded gun which they would point at the director’s head,” said Saul David, the producer.

  “Sinatra never seemed to be alone,” said his co-star, Trevor Howard. “There were always four men with him. Fellows who never took their hats off, even in nightclubs. It’s all a bit like a gangster film. A few days before Sinatra arrived on location in Cortina, the bodyguards flew in. They found there wasn’t a single Sinatra record on the jukebox, so they took it apart and stocked it with nothing but Frank’s songs. All part of the service, I suppose.”

  Given the director’s methodical style and the star’s extreme impatience, an eruption was inevitable. It occurred a few weeks into shooting, when Frank stomped off the set and refused to return. The studio tried to appease him by putting a yacht at his disposal for a ten-day cruise.

  “We went to Portofino and Santa Margherita and Rapallo and then came back,” said Dexter. “The most memorable moment was pulling up alongside Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, the Christina, and seeing Jackie Kennedy, the president’s widow, on board. I pointed her out to Frank, saying that she was an attractive woman with a good background—the kind of woman he should be interested in. He looked over at her and shook his head. ‘It would never work,’ he said. ‘Never.’ I sensed that he felt Mrs. Kennedy was unobtainable to someone like him.

  “He’d already been paid a visit by Ava Gardner, who was the greatest love of his life. She was in Sicily making The Bible with George C. Scott and flew up to see him after a big fight with Scott. She stayed at the villa for a couple of days. I came over one night to have dinner with them and she was lovely. Frank was still trying to revive the relationship, but she started to hit the bottle and … It was painful for Frank to see the woman he adored destroying herself with booze. He never got over her. Ever.”

  After a few weeks in Italy, Von Ryan’s Express moved on to Spain. The night before filming was completed there, Brad and Frank attended a dinner party at the Belgian consul’s home in Malaga. They returned to the Pez Espada hotel in Torremolinos and stopped in the bar after midnight for a drink. Minutes later, an aspiring young actress sat down and tapped Frank on the shoulder. As he turned around, the young woman threw her arms around him and the flashbulbs popped as Frank pushed her away.

  Furious with what he saw as a ruse, he screamed that no one was allowed to take his picture without permission. A Stuntman who was with them grabbed the photographer, lunged for the camera, removed the film, exposed it, and smashed the camera on the floor. The hotel manager threw the couple out, and Sinatra and his party finished their drinks and left. As Brad and Frank passed a big painting of Francisco Franco, Spain’s Fascist dictator, they spat on the floor.

  Hours later, the police arrived looking for the assailants the girl had described after filing charges against Frank and Brad, alleging they had tried to kill her. Under the Spanish system of denuncio, any person could accuse another of a crime and it became the burden of the accused to prove himself innocent. Furthermore, police could detain anyone for questioning, without official charges, for a seventy-four-hour period. So the Guardia Civil (Spanish police) arrived at the hotel, armed and unsmiling, to arrest Sinatra and Dexter. They took them to Malaga, booked them, and threw them into separate cells.

  Dexter insisted on phoning the U.S. ambassador in Madrid, and Frank vented his rage on the police.

  “What the hell is this?” he yelled. “You cops are just like the gestapo. I’ll be damned if I’ll be treated like a criminal because some broad throws a glass in my face. Get the goddamned ambassador on the phone.”

  They were released after being questioned over and over again about the incident at the bar. When the police prefect demanded 25,000 pesetas ($416), Dexter objected strenuously, but Frank said he’d pay any amount of money to get out of that jail. When producer Saul David paid the fine, they were released.

  Forbidden to return to the hotel to pack their belongings,
they were escorted by the police directly to the airport, put on a jet, and flown to Paris, where they checked into the George V Hotel.

  “I’ll never go back to that fucking country again,” Frank said. “I hate those dirty Fascist bastards.”

  The next day, they flew to New York and stayed in Frank’s apartment on the East Side. To celebrate his return home, Frank invited a few friends, including Brad and Jimmy Van Heusen, to dinner at the Colony restaurant, where Gene, the captain, always gave him the best table in the house. After a few drinks, Frank started glowering at the Portuguese waiter, who he thought was Spanish. A few more drinks and he was convinced that the waiter was from the Malaga police force. He turned to Dexter.

  “Look at that son of a bitch,” he said. “He looks just like the prefect of police. Look at him.”

  Dexter agreed that the waiter possessed the same saturnine features that came out of the Spanish Inquisition, but he wasn’t convinced he was part of Spain’s secret police force.

  “What are you talking about?” Frank yelled. “This guy is from Malaga and he’s spying on us. Look at the way the son of a bitch is looking at me. Look at him watching our every move!”

  In full fury, Frank flagged the captain and said, “I don’t want this bastard around here. I don’t want him serving this table. I want him out of here. This guy is no good. He’s a spy. Get him out.”

  To emphasize his point, Frank stood up and tipped the table over, splashing drinks and crashing plates and glasses to the floor, which sent shards of china and crystal flying. Food splattered in all directions. A squad of waiters hustled to hunt down the rolls scattered around the room, while the captain solicitously assured Frank that he would replace the waiter immediately.