His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  “I was threatened four times that week by friends of Sinatra who came to my dressing room and said I’d better stop talking about Frank and making cracks about him in my show, but I didn’t think much about it. Since Las Vegas, I was no longer mentioning Mia Farrow, and the jokes about Frank were harmless. Like I’d say: I see Sinatra has another girl. Boy, the way he goes from one girl to another … well, any psychiatrist will tell you that this denotes a basic insecurity—I should be so insecure!’”

  At five A.M. on Monday, February 13, 1967, Jackie Mason was sitting in a car in front of his apartment in Miami with Myrna Falk, a receptionist, when an unidentified man yanked open the door on the driver’s side and with a fist wrapped in metal smashed into Mason’s face, breaking his nose and crushing his cheekbones.

  “We warned you to stop using the Sinatra material in your act,” Falk heard the attacker tell Mason.

  Although he could never prove any involvement and tried to make excuses for Frank at the time, Mason remains convinced that Frank was responsible.

  “I know it was his doing,” he said many years later. “He’s a vicious bastard, and yet people act like fawning idiots around him. Look at Alan King. Frank pushes him around and Alan takes it. He never made it big, so he wants to be with the biggest and will do anything to be in Frank’s company. Ordinarily, he struts around like a putz, but then Sinatra walks in, and Alan goes duh, duh, duh. Cowering to Sinatra makes him feel important, I guess. It just makes me sick.”

  Everywhere Frank went during his faltering marriage to Mia Farrow, especially when he was in Miami and Las Vegas, violence seemed to erupt. Shortly after they were married he had agreed to let her pursue a movie career, saying, “I love her and I must be fair. She has talent.” Later he resented her being away from him, and the longer she was gone, the more violent he became, throwing furniture out of his penthouse window or lobbing cherry bombs.

  Compounding his marital problems was a subpoena from the federal grand jury in Las Vegas seeking evidence that casino owners had skimmed profits from their receipts before taxes and then diverted those funds to underworld figures with hidden interests in the casinos. The grand jury wanted to question Frank about his relationship with Sam Giancana and his ownership interest in the Sands and Gal-Neva. Sinatra fought the subpoena and tried to get out of testifying, but was finally forced to appear on January 26, 1967. “We wouldn’t let him out of it,” said William G. Hundley, former chief of the Justice Department’s organized crime section. “He was very unhappy.”

  At the same time, Frank was being subpoenaed for a deposition by the Miami Herald in a ten-million-dollar libel suit brought by the Fontainebleau Hotel for a two-part series in which the hotel was reported to be deeply involved with Mafia figures. The newspaper asked Frank about his underworld friendships with Sam Giancana (“I’ve met him”) and Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo (“I just ran into him”) and Meyer Lansky (“I met him many years ago”). Frank claimed he saw Joe Fischetti only “occasionally” and knew of no connection between Fischetti and the Fontainebleau, although Justice Department files show that Fischetti was paid $1,080 a month for helping arrange Sinatra’s appearances at the hotel. “Through Sinatra [he] brought other big name entertainers to the hotel. As a result, Fischetti achieved a position of prominence at the Fontainebleau and gained considerably along financial lines,” stated one FBI document.

  Under oath, Frank denied knowing Charles and Rocco Fischetti. He also said he had never stayed at the Fontainebleau when Giancana was there, although many people, including former D.C. police inspector Joseph Shimon, knew differently.

  Although Frank was forced to give one deposition, he refused to cooperate when the newspaper’s attorneys called him back for further questioning. Circuit Court Judge Grady Crawford ordered him to appear for a second deposition, but Sinatra left town. He also refused to testify at the trial and threatened to boycott his own performance at the Fontainebleau to avoid being subpoenaed. Under no circumstances was he going to talk about the incidents of violence that had taken place at the hotel during 1967 when his beefy bodyguards had left bruised and bloodied bodies in his wake.

  “I remember the first time I saw that side of him I was shocked,” said Mrs. Tony Bennett. “We had come to Miami to have dinner with him. Afterwards, a group of us went into the Fontainebleau coffee shop, where this little old guy grabbed Frank’s hand and started shaking it. ‘Oh, Frank Sinatra,’ he said. ‘You are my idol. You are the greatest.’ He was a janitor or somebody who worked there and he was in awe to see Frank Sinatra walk in, but Frank must have been in pain from arthritis or something because he grabbed his hand back and said, ‘Get away from me, you creep. Get away.’ The poor man was so bewildered, he didn’t know what to do. Suddenly, two of Frank’s goons went over to the guy; one held up his jacket as a shield so the rest of us couldn’t see the other one bashing in the guy’s face. When the jacket came down, the little man was on the floor and his face was bleeding and torn. I heard a woman crying, ‘He loves you. Why did you do that? He loves you.’

  “I was so insulted that this kind of barbarity would happen while we’re sitting there, and no one would say a thing. Here we are, respectable people, and this is happening right in front of us, and we don’t do anything about it. ‘I want to get of here,’ I said, and we left, but none of us said anything to Frank. That’s what upset me so. I thought Tony was a coward for not saying something, and I was furious at him, but he’s always been indebted to Sinatra for turning his career around, so he wasn’t going to say a word against him. Frank had told Life magazine in 1965 that Tony was the best singer in the business, which renewed national interest in him, so he just looked the other way when Frank’s goons started beating up on that guy. He [Tony] was such a coward. Then I read in the paper the next day that some sailor had been robbed and beaten up in New Orleans and that when Frank had read about the incident, he’d arranged to pay the sailor’s hospital bill and given him a few hundred dollars to make up for what he’d had stolen. That doesn’t square with what his goons had done the night before, but then Frank is a very complex guy.”

  The bodyguards protecting Frank were huge, hulking men like Ed Pucci, Andy Celentano, and July Rizzo. They bulled passage through crowds and intimidated with their bulk and menacing demeanor. Referring to them as “my dago secret service,” Frank equipped each with a walkie-talkie radio and a custom-made enamel lapel pin similar to those worn by the Secret Service agents protecting the president.

  “I know all about his goons,” said Shecky Greene. “I was appearing with Frank at the Fontainebleau at that time when he put me in Tony Rome, the movie he was making in 1967. Both of us were drinking too much in those days and neither one of us was the world’s nicest drunk. I had to get dressed standing in the grease with the busboys. I told him I couldn’t work where I had to dress in the basement. He told me to take his dressing room, which was right off the stage, of course, so I took it and was getting ready to open. Frank came down and finished dressing with me. A minute before I was to go onstage, he said, ‘Shecky, stick with me and I’ll make you the biggest star in the business.’ I looked at him and said, If being a big star means being like you, then I don’t want it.’ Frank Sinatra is not my idea of show business. George Burns, yes. Cary Grant, yes. Bob Hope, by all means, but not Frank Sinatra. I walked onstage that night and did my performance. Later, things got a little bloody.

  “At four in the morning, my head was split open by Andy ‘Banjo’ Celentano, Frank’s bodyguard. Joe Fischetti came at me with a blackjack three feet long, and I broke his nose. Then he begged me on his hands and knees not to call the boys in Chicago, which is where I’m from. I’ve still got scars all over my head from that fight, and if you put a nickel in them, they will all play Sinatra’s songs. Now, I didn’t hear Frank order that beating, so I can’t swear that he did, but I can tell you what was happening during that time and you tell me. The air was volatile and violent around him all the time. We p
layed the same audience every night, and when I was onstage, there was nothing but laughter. Yet when Frank came out, that same audience erupted and people started fighting, drawing guns, and swearing to kill one another.

  “Frank had so many people sucking around him then, it was sickening. And those bodyguards would attack on command, so naturally people were frightened. Even if he doesn’t order the beatings, he allows the violence to happen by having those guys around. He wanted me to go on tour with him, but I couldn’t kiss his ass, so that was the last time we worked together.”

  Even Mia grew exasperated with the rude humor of his entourage. “All they know how to do is tell dirty stories, break furniture, pinch waitresses’ asses, and bet on the horses,” she said.

  One night at the Sands, Frank threw a box of cupcakes at one of his friends, splattering frosting on the expensive gown of a woman at an adjoining table. Mia was embarrassed. “Oh, Frank, you’re so childish,” she said. Momentarily stung by the rebuke, Frank scooped up two handfuls of ice cubes from the ice bucket in the middle of the table and pelted the guests around him. Again, Mia scolded him. “That’s not only childish, it’s dangerous,” she said. “You could knock someone’s eyes out.” Without a word, Frank stalked out of the room.

  Normally, Mia was proud to sit at the Sands or the Fontainebleau listening to the audience rustle with excitement when her husband walked onstage.

  “He rocks a room,” she said. “Nothing I could ever do in films would make me as proud as I am of him then. He gets away with the squarest lines, and he worries about his lyrics, but he’s an artist. He’s groovy, he’s kinky and—above all—he’s gentle. Nancy is writing a book about her father, and she’s calling it A Very Gentle Man. That’s him.”

  Mia was ambitiously pursuing her own career soon after their wedding and she had flown to London to be in A Dandy in Aspic with Laurence Harvey, telling reporters that it was all right for Sinatra to be married to a professional actress.

  “There would be no point in having a wife who stayed home and cooked his spaghetti for him,” she said. “Any number of women could have done that.” She said she would not make movies with her husband because she did not want to live off his famous name. “I’ve got to do things on my own. If I were his leading lady, too many people would think he just handed me the role,” she said. Frank agreed. “I don’t think a man and his wife should act together,” he said. “At least, that goes for us.”

  In 1967, Mia signed with Paramount to make Rosemary’s Baby and begged her agent to call David Susskind in New York for the role of the mute in Johnny Belinda, which was being made as a television movie for ABC. Susskind said absolutely no. The agent asked why, and the producer gave him four reasons: “She can’t act, she’s too thin, she’s Frank Sinatra’s wife, and she has the sex appeal of Spam.”

  “Be reasonable, David,” said the agent. “She doesn’t need sex appeal to play a deaf mute, does she?”

  Susskind conceded that point, but said his mind was made up. “I don’t want any trouble on this production, and with the wife of Frank Sinatra, you’ve automatically got trouble,” he said.

  The next day, Mia called him herself to plead for the part. “Please, please, please reconsider me,” she said. “I’d give anything in the world to play that part. Please reconsider me for it.”

  “I can’t chance it, Mia,” said Susskind. “I know your husband doesn’t want you to work, and he’s not all that keen on me anyway. It just won’t work.”

  “Mr. Susskind, my career is very important to me,” said Mia. “I need a role like this. Please listen to me. I’m an actress first and a wife second. Please.”

  After several days of negotiating, the producer relented and cast Mia in the role that had won an Academy Award for Jane Wyman in 1948.

  Rehearsals started in California, but midway through, Mia was hospitalized.

  “I started to worry because we only had a week or so to go before airing and I needed to make a decision about replacing her,” Susskind said. “So I flew out to the Coast, and she showed up for work with black welts all over her body. She was bruised from head to foot, with mean red gashes and marks all over her arms and shoulders and throat as if she’d been badly beaten. She looked like she’d been roughed up pretty bad. I sat down with her and said, ‘Mia dear, I don’t think someone wants you to do this role.’ She lowered her eyes and said that she still wanted to do it. She begged and pleaded with me and said she would be fine. She pointed out that most of the damage was done below her face, so we could cover her up with makeup, which we did, but in certain lights you could still see those awful welts. I felt so sorry for that poor kid.”

  Months later, Susskind and his wife were sitting in one of their favorite New York restaurants, where they had come to know the mistress of Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, a member of the Vito Genovese Mafia family, and through her, the mobster himself.

  “Mary, the Mafia mistress, called me one night and insisted on seeing me on urgent business,” said Susskind. “She was so uncomfortable about what she was trying to tell me that she couldn’t get it out for at least an hour. Finally, she said, ‘David, someone doesn’t like you … someone wants to hurt you and hurt you bad. Nothing fatal. He doesn’t want to kill you. Just break an arm and a leg.… It’s Sinatra. He’s put the word out to get you. You used his wife in a movie when he didn’t want his wife to work. He’s mad, and he’s going to get other gangsters to do it for him. My guy says that no one touches anyone in the East without his okay, and that if anyone touches you, he won’t be alive the next day. But he says that you’re not to go to Las Vegas or Miami. He can’t control what goes on there.’

  “I said I would never think of going to either place, but I sure as hell didn’t want to be told I couldn’t go,” said Susskind. “But I saw how serious she was, so I said that I would stay out of those places for the next year or so. Naturally, my opinion of Frank Sinatra is biased as a result. I think he’s an ill-bred swine who operates on the level of an animal, with no sensibilities whatsoever.”

  Frayed at the edges, Frank’s marriage began unraveling because he thought that Mia enjoyed being a movie star more than being his wife. He now resented her ambitions and retaliated with a couple of brief sexual escapades during the making of Tony Rome in Miami while she was in London. Mia called him every day from England and made two transatlantic flights to spend weekends with him, but she refused to exchange her career for the full-time role of Mrs. Frank Sinatra. She did agree to work with him in his next movie (The Detective), which was to be filmed in New York in the fall, and she arranged her schedule to accompany him to Las Vegas for his two weeks at the Sands over the Labor Day weekend.

  Howard Hughes had bought the hotel in July 1967, adding the Sands to his long list of casinos, including the Desert Inn, the Castaways, the Frontier, and the Silver Slipper, prompting Johnny Carson to greet his audiences: “Welcome to Las Vegas, Howard Hughes’s Monopoly set. You ever get the feeling he’s going to buy the whole damned place and shut it down?” Frank, too, poked fun at the eccentric billionaire’s 1967 buying orgy of casinos, hotels, airports, and television stations. “You’re wondering why I don’t have a drink in my hand,” he said to his audience one night. “Well, Howard Hughes bought it!”

  Frank’s animus toward Hughes stretched back to 1945, when the billionaire first courted Ava Gardner with extravagant presents, putting limousines and chartered jets at her disposal whenever she wanted to go shopping in Mexico or see bullfights in Spain. Frank remembered bitterly how Hughes had hired detectives to follow him and Ava in 1950, but he seemed to have forgotten that when MGM had dropped him, Ava had gone to Hughes to get him movie work at RKO, Hughes’s studio.

  Expecting to make a killing, Frank made it part of his contract renewal with the Sands that Hughes buy the Gal-Neva Lodge from him, which he had leased to Warner and others for the last four years because he was prohibited from running it himself. But Hughes was not interested in the L
ake Tahoe property and refused Frank’s calls to discuss the matter. Unaccustomed to such a rebuff from the Sands, where his every whim had been indulged for the past fifteen years, Frank began negotiating with Caesars Palace, the newest, most luxurious casino in Las Vegas. Still, he considered the Sands his domain, and no one—not even the richest man in America—could dismiss him so casually.

  Frank exacted retribution over Labor Day, the casino’s largest-grossing weekend, by pleading “desert throat” at the last minute, claiming that he was unable to perform. He flew to Palm Springs with Mia, and Sammy Davis, Jr., substituted for him. He returned a few days later, but by the weekend he was in a frenzy, lashing out at pit bosses, cursing at cocktail waitresses, and frightening other employees, including the security guards.

  “I built this hotel from a sandpile, and I can tear the fucking place down, and before I’m through that is what it will be again,” he said.

  Hughes’s top aide, Robert Maheu, wrote a memo to his boss about Frank’s behavior: “Last night, he drove a golf cart through a plate glass window and was disgustingly drunk. In an effort to protect him from himself, Carl Cohen [the Sands’s executive vice-president, in charge of the casino,] stopped his credit after he had obtained thirty-thousand-plus in cash and had lost approximately fifty thousand dollars. Sinatra blew his top, and late this afternoon called me to tell me that he was walking away from the Sands and would not finish his engagement. One of the reasons Cohen cut off his credit is that this SOB was running around the casino stating in a loud voice that you had plenty of money and that there was no reason why you should not share it with him since he had made the Sands the profitable institution it is.”

  Frank signed a three-million-dollar contract with Caesars Palace on September 11, 1967, that guaranteed him $100,000 a week—the highest salary then paid a performer in Las Vegas. He returned to the Sands and went on a drunken rampage at five A.M., slamming his fist on the bell clerk’s desk and demanding to know Carl Cohen’s room number. The clerk refused to divulge it. This further incited Frank, who grabbed a house phone and demanded to be connected with Cohen’s room. The terrified operator connected him with her supervisor, Frances Scher, who decided to put the call through. Cohen was asleep and did not answer. Ten minutes later, Frank called the operator again, asking for Jack Entratter, who had left a Do Not Disturb notice on his phone. The operator told Frank, who yelled: “You had better get him and tell him I will tear up this goddamn fucking place and I’ll jerk out every wire in the phone room, too.”