by Kitty Kelley
“Poor Gene shunted everyone out of the room and sent in a whole new crew to take care of our table,” said Dexter, laughing as he recalled the incident. “Sometime later, when we were back in California, I read in the paper that Spain was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the benevolent reign of Francisco Franco. I showed the article to Frank, and we both laughed about it. Then he called his secretary, and said, ‘I want to send a telegram. Send it to Francisco Franco in Spain with a copy to the Secretary of State in Washington, D.C., and the American ambassador to Spain, Robert Forbes Woodward: ‘Congratulations on the twenty-fifth year of your benevolent regime in leading the people of Spain. Now drop dead. Frank Sinatra.’ ”
The cast and crew of Von Ryan’s Express returned to Hollywood in October 1964 for thirty days of interior shooting at Twentieth Century Fox. A bewitching nineteen-year-old girl with long golden hair appeared every day at the door of the sound stage in a gauzy nightgown that fell to her ankles. The sun streamed through the sheer gossamer of her gown, outlining her slender form. Half waif, half siren, she brightened considerably as Frank walked on the set, but she remained standing at the door, backlighted by the sun.
“He arrived, and I thought, ‘What a super looking man,’ and that’s how it began for me,” said Mia Farrow, the innocent-looking waif who ushered in the most violent period of Frank Sinatra’s life.
25
Of the seven children born to director John Farrow and actress Maureen O’Sullivan, their first daughter—Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow—was a true child of Hollywood. Born in Beverly Hills on February 9, 1945, her godfather was the famous director George Cukor; her godmother was Louella Parsons, movieland’s most powerful columnist; and her best friend was Liza Minnelli, daughter of Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli. Her decision to become an actress surprised no one.
“I discovered that only in drama class could I manipulate people, amuse them, even make them notice me through this marvelous game of pretending, where I didn’t have to be me,” she said.
After graduating from Marymount High School, Mia went to New York and landed an ingenue role in the off-Broadway revival of The Importance of Being Earnest. Excellent reviews led to her discovery by television talent scouts, who chose her to play Alison Mackenzie, the brooding, bewildered heroine of Peyton Place, which was to become one of 1965’s top three television shows.
Back in Hollywood before the televising began, she boldly announced her ambitions. “I want a big career, a big man, and a big life. You have to think big—that’s the only way to get it.… I just couldn’t stand being anonymous. I don’t want to be just ‘one of the Farrows,’ third from the top and fifth from the bottom.”
No man in Hollywood at the time was bigger than Frank Sinatra, and from the minute she saw him, she was mesmerized. “I liked him instantly,” she said. “He rings true. He is what he is.” She had already declared her preference for older men after flirtations with Yul Brynner and Kirk Douglas: “I love older men. I feel much more comfortable with them. They’re exciting, they’ve lived. They have marvelous experiences to share. I don’t have boyfriends or girlfriends my age. They frighten me.”
So she visited the set of Von Ryan’s Express every day in the transparent gown she had borrowed from the wardrobe department.
“We were doing some pickup shots at Twentieth Century Fox and Mia would invite herself on the set every day to look at Frank and admire him,” recalled Brad Dexter. “At the end of the first week, Frank and I and Billy Daniels, the cinematographer, were leaving for Palm Springs in Frank’s little French jet. Mia was standing there looking up at him as we were walking out, so he said, ‘See ya later. We’re going to grab the jet and hit the desert for the weekend.’ She nearly knocked him over when she said she wanted to go with us. ‘How come you never invite me to come along?’ she asked. Frank did a double take. ‘Huh? Are you kidding? Would you like to come?’ Mia beamed and said, ‘Sure.’ He explained that there was only room for the three of us, but that if she was serious, he’d send the plane back. He did, and that’s how she came to spend her first weekend with Frank in Palm Springs, which started the romance.”
Frank took her to a screening of None but the Brave, and she told him he was a better director than her father, who had died a few years before. He took her to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Bill and Edie Goetz and told her to clean her plate. For Christmas, he gave her a solid gold cigarette case in which he’d inscribed, “Mia, Mia, With Love, from Francis.” She filled it with joints of marijuana that she rolled herself. He called her on the set of Peyton Place every day, and she told reporters, “I’m so happy. Someone I love just called me.”
Standing five-five and weighing only ninety-eight pounds, she mocked her spindly little figure: “My measurements are 20-20-20.”
She looked as delicate as a porcelain doll, with moon eyes, snow-white skin, and coltish legs. Her voice trembled with breathlessness as she talked about mysticism, Zen, yoga, and extrasensory perception. She frequently made statements about her soul: “Sometimes I think I’d like to put my soul somewhere where nobody could get it. I’d have a castle with a moat and drawbridge and people could never stomp on me and take chunks out of my soul until there’s nothing left. Or maybe I’ll have a house with a garden that runs wild, and when I go outside I’ll wear long black boots so that the snakes can’t bite me. The world is full of them, you know.”
With her long blond hair streaming down her back and her wide innocent blue eyes, she seemed pure and fresh and ingenuous. In her little smocks and tights, she was a universe away from the sequined décolletage of Jill St. John and Angie Dickinson and the hardened slickness of the rest of the women in Frank’s life. Although Mia was shrewd, ambitious, and extremely manipulative for such a young woman, she appeared naive and helpless to Frank, and he wanted to protect her, to provide for her, to pet her.
“Men had an instinctive desire to protect Mia,” said her mother. “That’s the secret.”
When Mia told Frank the story of going to the prom and not being asked to dance by any of the boys, he gulped. He told her she was beautiful, but she didn’t believe him, she said, because all her life she’d been called “Mouse … I was a skinny, runty thing,” who had suffered a bout with polio. He was moved by the bare little apartment duplex she lived in with her deaf Angora cat, Malcolm, and he wanted to shower her with luxuries, but Mia didn’t seem interested in material things. She later accepted a nine-carat diamond ring, a mink coat, and a diamond bracelet as big as a manacle, but she said she never cared about money.
She called him “Charlie Brown” for the sweet, round-faced character in the Peanuts comic strip, and he called her “doll face.” She entered his life at a time when middle-aged America was trying to be young again, to disprove the buttons and banners of the flower children proclaiming: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” He was almost fifty years old; she was nineteen.
In the beginning of their relationship, Frank and Mia spent many quiet weekends together at his house in Palm Springs. His men friends dismissed her as just another one of Frank’s “broads,” but the women knew better.
“Mia was a very clever young lady, and she knew exactly what she was about and what she wanted,” said Edie Goetz. “She was crazy about Frank, and she intended to marry him.”
“Jack and I spent a weekend with them in Palm Springs,” said Corinne Entratter, “and when I saw her standing by the mantel petting her great big white long-haired cat and being completely aloof and indifferent to everyone around her like she was on the third ring of Saturn or something, I thought, ‘Yep, Frank’s going to marry this one.’ She was just kookie enough.”
Jack Warner and his mistress, Jackie Park, also spent a weekend in Frank’s house in Palm Springs, which was still filled with photographs of Ava Gardner.
“There was one of Ava in the bathroom, in the bedroom over his bed, in the living room, and even one in the kitchen, but Mia never said a word about them
,” said Jackie Park. “I told her that I had known her father and was amused when she said, ‘Oh, Daddy was so pure and holy, he should have been the pope.’ I was kind of taken aback by that one because I’d had a rollicking sexual relationship with John Farrow and I certainly didn’t remember him as pure and holy! I asked her if she was happy with Frank, and she said, ‘Yes, we’re going to get married. I just know we are. This is my destiny, and there is nothing I can do about it.’ I thought at the time that she was seeking a replacement for her dad, whom she adored.”
During these weekends in Palm Springs, Frank entertained friends like the Goetzes, Rosalind Russell and her husband, Freddie Brisson, Claudette Colbert and her husband, Dr. Joel Pressman—“that stuffy, older crowd that he cultivated to be more respectable,” said Dexter. “I called them ‘the late show.’ ” Mia tried her best to act as Frank’s hostess on these occasions, but she had not mastered all the niceties. Once, he asked her to do the seating for a dinner party, but she stumbled, trying to seat men next to women without putting them next to their wives. Embarrassed, Frank told her to sit down and did it himself. The next day, she sent him a letter apologizing for her lack of finesse, and saying that she was simply not sophisticated enough for him. She also said that she would understand if he never called her again. He called the next day.
Frank’s involvement with a nineteen-year-old was a source of great amusement to many of his friends. “I’ve got Scotch older than Mia Farrow,” said Dean Martin.
“If Frank marries that girl, his kids are going to call her Mamma Mia,” said “Fat” Jack Leonard.
“Frank didn’t have to buy Mia a diamond ring,” said Eddie Fisher. “He gave her a teething ring.”
Although younger than two of Frank’s children, Mia dismissed the thirty years between them. “I know there’s a big age difference, but it doesn’t really matter to me,” she said. “Frank is exciting and fascinating. He’s the most captivating man I’ve ever known. I’ve never encountered anyone sweeter or more considerate. He is everything a girl could want.”
For his part, Frank said, “I really like this one.… I’m pushing Fifty, but what the hell? Let’s say I’ve got five good years left. Why don’t I enjoy them?”
Some friends observing the romance between the hipster and the hippie remembered how outraged Frank had been by the 1957 film Love in the Afternoon, starring Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn, and how he had scolded the director’s wife about what he thought was a degenerate story.
“He was quite vehement about it,” said director Billy Wilder. “So vehement that he made my wife cry. He said he didn’t like the picture because he thought it was immoral for an elderly man to make love in the afternoon to a young girl.”
In August 1965, Frank chartered the Southern Breeze, a one-hundred-sixty-eight-foot glistening white yacht with a crew of twenty-three, to cruise the waters off New England. At $2,000 a day, he paid $60,000 in advance for the month, and invited nine guests: Bill and Edie Goetz, the Freddie Brissons (Roz Russell), the Joel Pressmans (Claudette Colbert), Sears, Roebuck heir Armand Deutsch and his wife, Harriet, and Mia Farrow.
When the television starlet took leave of Peyton Place to make the trip, the screenwriters did not know whether she was going to get married, so they wrote her character into a four-week coma, figuring if she returned, the character could recover; if she married, the character would die. All this gave rise to speculation that the cruise would be a honeymoon for Frank and Mia, and reporters pursued them everywhere the yacht dropped anchor. Photographers snapped pictures of them shopping ashore hand in hand, eating clams together, laughing, whispering, and hugging as though oblivious to the headlines they were creating across the country.
Mia’s mother as well as Frank’s mother seemed incredulous, and when reporters asked whether marriage was in the offing, the mothers denied it.
“Marry Mia?” laughed Maureen O’Sullivan. “If Mr. Sinatra is going to marry anyone, he ought to marry me!”
“My son is just helping this girl become a star,” said Dolly Sinatra. “How many times has Frank helped somebody to the top? This is what he is doing now. He has done it before. He is doing it now. And he will do it again. This Mia, she’s a nice little girl, but that’s all. Remember, Frank’s children are older than this girl. I’m going to spend the next two days in New York City with-my son in his apartment. I’m sure I have some influence left with him. If there is any truth to these rumors—which I personally know there is not—I will use my influence to discourage any marriage.”
In 1962, Frank had broken his engagement to Juliet Prowse because she would not give up her career to be his wife. She had changed her mind later and telephoned Frank with the happy news, but, according to Nancy, Jr., “when Juliet called my father, he said, ‘Forget it, baby,’ and hung up.” He had sworn that he would never again share a wife with her acting career as he had done with Ava Gardner. He had recently told Mia the same thing, and repeated it in an interview with Life magazine in April 1965: “I don’t say marriage is impossible, but if I would marry, it would have to be somebody out of show business, or somebody who will get out of show business. I feel I’m a fairly good provider. All I ask is that my wife looks after me, and I’ll see that she is looked after.”
Mia was not ready to give up her career. “I want to go on to do good things, make good movies, do good things on the stage. Peyton Place is making it all possible. And the wonderful thing about all this is the feeling it gives you of being wanted. When you go to a party or walk into a room, everywhere, everyone looks at you differently and they treat you differently. It’s a lovely feeling.
“I want to marry Frank,” she said. “I love him, but I know if I do, my career is over and it really hasn’t even begun. I like being what I am. Wanting the career is as much a part of me as my mind and heart. If I marry, something of me will be lost and I just won’t be the same person. That wouldn’t be fair to either of us. I think I’ll wait, but. …”
In Newport, Rhode Island, as Roz Russell left the yacht, reporters swarmed around her to ask whether Frank and Mia were married yet.
“I can assure you they are not getting married here,” she said. “Not on this voyage. There is no suggestion of it.”
The yacht stopped at Hyannisport so Frank could go to the Kennedy compound and visit with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who was still unable to talk because of his stroke. Frank took Mia with him anyway, knowing that the sight of a pretty nineteen-year-old blonde would cheer the aged patriarch immensely. In Edgartown, Massachusetts, Mia and Frank refused to answer reporters’ questions about any plans for marriage. Claudette Colbert was shocked by the queries. “Good gracious, no. As far as I can determine, Mia and Frank are simply good friends,” she said. “Mia is a charming girl and Frank does like her an awful lot, but it doesn’t seem like Frank would marry such a young girl.…”
Next day’s paper carried the headline: MIA NOT MRS. YET.
At Martha’s Vineyard, tragedy befell the cruise as the yacht’s third mate drowned after heroically saving another crew member.
“Sinatra was shocked and appalled by this event, which put an end to the vacation,” said the yacht’s captain.
“It had been the most closely observed cruise since Cleopatra floated down the Nile to meet Mark Anthony,” said Time magazine.
Mia had ingratiated herself with all of Frank’s friends, from the patrician Edith Mayer Goetz to the publican Jilly Rizzo. But his family was less than enchanted, especially Nancy, Jr., who cringed every time she saw pictures of her father with the actress who was five years her junior.
Nancy and her mother were planning a celebration for Frank’s fiftieth birthday in December and had invited hundreds of people, including the President and Vice-President of the United States, who had both declined, but the two Nancys were in a quandary wondering what to do about Mia. They didn’t want to invite her, but they were afraid not to. For months, this birthday, which also commemorated Frank’s twenty-f
ive years in show business, had been assuming the dimensions of a royal celebration, with CBS-TV News filming a special on Frank’s life to be shown in November, NBC-TV televising a Sinatra spectacular for the same month, and Billboard publishing a one-hundred-page issue entitled “The Sinatra Report.” Life magazine published a double cover with a twenty-two-page spread on Frank. It was the biggest layout accorded an entertainment figure in the magazine’s history, and Reprise Records released one of his best albums, the hauntingly beautiful September of My Years, which won a Grammy.
“It was the CBS special that started causing a few problems,” recalled Laurence Eisenberg, one of Frank’s publicists with Jim Mahoney and Associates. “Frank had insisted that Walter Cronkite not ask any personal questions and Don Hewitt, the producer, agreed that the program would show only the ‘professional’ side of Sinatra—that meant no personal questions about Mia or the Mafia. Well, there was at least one question about whether or not he planned to marry Mia and maybe a couple about some of those ‘alleged relationships.’ ”
Two weeks before the show was to be aired, Mickey Rudin sent CBS a letter demanding to review the program before it was broadcast. When CBS declined to make the show available, Rudin fired off another letter charging the network with a “breach of understanding.” Rudin said Frank expected treatment similar to that accorded cellist Pablo Casals, violinist Isaac Stern, and contralto Marian Anderson in previous CBS-TV portraits, and withdrew his permission to use material that he had already furnished for the news special. The network also received five identical telegrams from Dean Martin, Alan King, Sammy Davis, Jr., Soupy Sales, and Trini Lopez demanding that CBS delete them from the program, as well as wires from Nancy, Sr., and Nancy, Jr., saying the same thing. But CBS refused to alter the show, and the resulting publicity about “Sinatra: a CBS News Documentary” made it sound as though the public could look forward to the biggest exposé in television history at ten P.M. on November 16, 1965.