by Kitty Kelley
Accosting a security guard, Frank demanded to be taken to the switchboard room, but the guard refused. Frank screamed at him, but the guard said that he did not take orders from him. Thrusting his finger at the guard, Frank said, “You’re pretty tough with a gun, aren’t you. Well, I’ll take that gun away and shove it up your ass.”
Finding the phone room on his own, Frank pounded on the doors and threatened to kick them in. “Open up this fucking door,” he screamed. The three telephone operators inside became so fearful that they called the security office and pleaded for someone to come to their aid.
Accompanied by Jilly Rizzo and a man named Stanley Parker, Frank returned to the hotel lobby and called Carl Cohen, demanding to see him at once. Cohen agreed, and at five forty-five A.M. he appeared in the Garden Room and sat down at a table with Frank and Parker. He asked Parker to leave, saying the conversation was private. “You son of a bitch, he can hear anything I have to say to you,” said Frank.
“What did you call me?”
“You heard me, you son of a bitch. What are you so nervous about?”
“You just got me out of bed.”
Frank kept repeating his question. “What are you so nervous about?”
Cohen rose from the table and said, “I’m tired of this one-sided conversation. Fuck you. I’m not going to listen to this bullshit.”
Getting ready to leave, Cohen backed his chair away from the table, but when Frank saw that he was actually going to walk out, he threw a handful of betting chips in his face. Then he lifted the table and spilled the contents in Cohen’s lap.
“I’ll get a guy to bury you, you son of a bitch motherfucker. You kike,” Sinatra screamed.
The ethnic slur galvanized Cohen. He smashed his right fist into Frank’s face, splitting his upper lip and knocking the caps off two front teeth.
“You broke my teeth,” Frank screamed. “I will kill you, you motherfucker son of a bitch.”
Frank lunged toward Cohen, who calmly stepped aside as a security guard intervened.
“Get him, Jilly. Get him,” Frank yelled to his friend, but Rizzo remained immobile.
Thrashing about in rage, Frank grabbed a chair, but instead of hitting Cohen, he missed and hit the security guard, opening a gash in his scalp that required two stitches. Apologizing to the man, he continued screaming at Cohen, who was leaving the room. “I’ll get a guy to bury you, motherfucker.”
Nevada Governor Paul Laxalt ordered an investigation, and the district attorney, after reading the sheriff’s report, considered filing charges against Frank.
“I don’t feel he should have the right to tear apart a hotel or run wild,” District Attorney George Franklin said. “If he gets out of control, he should be handled like anyone else.”
At the Sands, Cohen was being treated like a conquering hero, especially by employees who had suffered Frank’s wrath over the years. Some even considered giving him a testimonial dinner, and one wrote a letter to the editor of the Las Vegas Sun citing incidents of the dehumanizing treatment employees had been subjected to by Frank. According to the letter, Frank once threw a hamburger against a dressing room wall because it was not prepared to his liking and then had the employee who brought it to him fired.
“Now, after a few days and a few drinks,” the letter said, “this sheer genius of a man staggers into the office and as he blurringly gazes about decides the phone on his desk doesn’t match the new orange sweater he’s wearing. He calls you and demands an orange phone immediately. But you don’t respond quickly enough. He calls you some choice words, and the filth of them pleases him so much, he directs them to the female help as well. His reasoning is, no orange phone, no phone at all, and he proceeds to tear all the phones out before he sets fire to the office and breaks the windows.”
The employee, who asked that his letter be published without his name, stated that there were many more Sinatra tantrums that were even more brutish than those recounted.
Frank had his defenders. Among them was Hank Green-spun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, who had chastised the Nevada Gaming Board for revoking Frank’s license in 1963. This time, Greenspun defended Frank’s actions on the front page of his newspaper: “Not everybody in the world of theatricals can be Ronald Reagan or Shirley Temple … [Sinatra’s] value to Las Vegas is legendary, for every night he performs here is New Year’s Eve. So should he be condemned for celebrating a Happy New Year even if the calendar doesn’t justify the occasion?”
Frank’s former wife, Nancy, chimed in, saying that he was justified in wreaking mayhem on the Sands and its employees.
“I don’t blame him,” she said. “What else could he do when they shut off his credit in the hotel that he practically built up from the ground.”
Pointing out that Frank could have been prosecuted for disorderly conduct, assault and battery, and malicious destruction of property, D.A. George Franklin said that Frank’s conduct was reprehensible.
“You don’t go running around a hotel screaming four-letter words and breaking windows,” he said. “He did nothing but a disservice to this community by that kind of behavior.”
But the district attorney could not prosecute because no one would press charges.
Frank blamed his friend of thirty years—“Where was Jack Entratter when Carl Cohen tried to kill me?”—and walked out on the rest of his engagement.
Carl Cohen became famous in Las Vegas when posters of Frank with his teeth knocked out sprang up around town with the captions: “Hooray for Carl Cohen,” and “Elect Carl Cohen Mayor.”
27
Shortly after Governor Pat Brown’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1966, Frank made an overture to the Vice-President of the United States, Hubert H. Humphrey.
“It was in the Waldorf [Astoria] Towers, where the Vice-President and his wife were staying at the time,” said Norman Sherman, Humphrey’s press secretary. “The phone rang, and someone said that Frank Sinatra would like to make a courtesy visit as an admirer of Mr. Humphrey. The Vice-President agreed to see him, so Frank stopped by on a Sunday afternoon with Mia, who was quite kittenish and curled up on the couch beside him, but didn’t say a word. She just listened as Sinatra and Humphrey reminisced about the big bands in the 1930s in South Dakota. Hubert was a nut on boxing and knew all sorts of trivia about who weighed what and which contender won what crown, so they shared that as well. There was an instantaneous bonding between them, an immediate good feeling that led to a nice friendship. Humphrey thought highly of Frank, but then he thought highly of everyone. And let’s face it, friends were not that easy to come by then, especially in the entertainment industry, which was so violently opposed to President Johnson’s Vietnam policies.”
The cheery politician from Minnesota enthusiastically supported the United States involvement in Vietnam. Frank, in turn, supported Humphrey and became a hawk on the war as well, while his flower-child wife stood with the doves, who deplored the bombing and bloodshed. Mia could not understand her husband’s zest for napalm and defoliation, and neither could his liberal friends, who were appalled by his support of the Johnson-Humphrey ticket. Opposing Vietnam, they supported Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, an eloquent antiwar candidate.
The war in Vietnam would continue to haunt Frank for many years, causing dissension at the Academy Awards in 1975, when he was sharing the honors as master of ceremonies. When producer Bert Schneider won an Oscar for the best documentary for his searing antiwar film, Hearts and Minds, he read a telegram from Dinh Da Thi, chief of the Viet Cong delegation to the Paris peace talks, thanking “all our friends in America for all they have done on behalf of peace” and expressing “greetings of friendship.”
Backstage, Bob Hope and Frank sputtered with indignation. Together they hastily scribbled a statement, which Frank later revised and read, disavowing all responsibility for the reference and apologizing that it had taken place.
Hearing Frank’s disclaimer, Shirley MacLaine, also one of the evening’s hosts, explo
ded. Accosting him backstage, she demanded to know who sanctioned such a statement on behalf of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Jolted by this attack from a former lover and member of his Rat Pack, Frank disavowed any responsibility.
“Bob and Howard (Koch) made me do it,” he said. “They handed me this piece of paper, and I read it.”
After the ceremony, Bert Schneider said, “As a member of the Academy’s Board of Governors, I resent Frank Sinatra taking this as an Academy point of view. He’s a gutsy guy. Why didn’t he come out and say he helped write it and it was his own point of view?”
But at the height of the controversy over the Vietnam War, Frank did not have a point of view that he could articulate sensibly. He took his directions from the politicians he supported. In 1968 he called Vice-President Humphrey’s office in Washington and spoke to his administrative assistant, William Connell.
“There is a great deal of misunderstanding and confusion about the Vietnam situation,” he said. “People are asking me questions that I cannot answer. I don’t think the questions they ask are being answered in a way that they can accept.”
He went on to say that he didn’t know how to respond to the administration’s critics. Connell suggested sending the critical questions to Humphrey in a letter so that the Vice-President could provide him with some useful answers.
Instead, Frank sent a letter to several hundred people, saying that he was writing “at the special request of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.” He asked for a brief outline of “those points of our country’s present policy in Vietnam you find most puzzling and confusing and about which you have not as yet found satisfactory or clear-cut answers.” He assured everyone that he would transmit their questions to the Vice-President and that “he, in turn, will forward the compilation to President Johnson.”
Days later, Mr. Johnson was horrified to read in the New York Post that Frank Sinatra, “at White House request,” was canvasing intellectuals on what measures to take in Vietnam. He summoned his national security advisor, Walt Rostow, and then called the Vice-President, who called Connell, who then wrote an apologetic memo to Bill Moyers: “Sinatra was trying to be helpful. He wants to help the President and the Vice-President, and he can be especially helpful in raising money for the party. He just got carried away by a casual conversation.”
The debate over Vietnam seemed to exacerbate the differences between Frank and Mia: He drank Jack Daniels; she smoked marijuana. He got drunk; she got stoned. He gave her diamonds; she wore wooden love beads. He enjoyed nights out at July’s; she liked disco dancing at the Daisy. He relished boxing; she studied transcendental meditation. He liked eating Italian; she picked at yogurt and bean sprouts. He gambled; she did needlepoint. He thrived in Las Vegas; she flourished in India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
The final rupture in the marriage came in the fall of 1967 when Frank, who was in New York, called Mia in California to say that she was to start work with him in The Detective. She said she couldn’t because she was still working on Rosemary’s Baby. Frank ordered her to walk off the set and report to work with him. She refused. He then called Bob Evans at Paramount and demanded her release, but Evans said the director, Roman Polanski, needed her for another month. Frank insisted that his wife be released at once, but Evans said, “While she’s working for us, she’s Mia Farrow, not Mrs. Sinatra.”
Frank again called Mia and repeated his order that she walk off her movie, but she remained intractable. She went to the Factory discotheque that evening in a group that included Senator Robert F. Kennedy, with whom she danced most of the night. Reading about his wife dancing with his enemy enraged Frank as much as Mia’s refusal to obey him. Without a word to her, he called his lawyer, Mickey Rudin, and instructed him to draw up divorce papers. Then he sent Rudin to Mia’s trailer on the Paramount lot the day before Thanksgiving to serve notice on her that he was filing for divorce. Minutes later, his publicist, Jim Mahoney, announced the couple’s “trial separation.”
“We were just ready to roll when Sinatra’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, turned up,” recalled Roman Polanski. “He said he had some important papers for Mia, so I called a break.… After a few minutes, Rudin emerged [from her dressing room] and left without a word. When it was time to resume shooting, no Mia. I knocked on the door. No response. When there was no answer to my second knock, I just went in.
“There she was, sobbing her heart out. She managed, haltingly, to tell me that Rudin had come to inform her that Sinatra was starting divorce proceedings. What hurt her most was that Sinatra hadn’t deigned to tell her himself, simply sending one of his flunkies. Sending Rudin was like firing a servant. She simply couldn’t understand her husband’s contemptuous, calculated act of cruelty, and it shattered her.”
Leaving the studio in tears, Mia fled to the $300,000 English Tudor house that Frank had bought for her in Bel-Air. He had filled it with new furniture and forty-eight place settings of Gorham’s “Chantilly” silver in hopes that she might want to be a hostess instead of an actress.
“I had nothing I wanted to live for,” Mia said later. “That kind of lostness, that kind of unhappiness can be so destructive, and so bewildering.… When my marriage was over, I believed it just wasn’t possible.… You see, that marriage was terribly important to me. That promise. I believed and trusted in that commitment as I’ve never believed or trusted in a commitment before.”
Reflecting on why the “gentle, quiet man” she had married had walked out on her, she said, “Maybe it bothered him not being young. He felt things getting away from him. My friends from India would come into the house barefoot and hand him a flower. That made him feel square for the first time in his life.”
A few weeks later, Frank invited Mia to spend Christmas with him and twenty of his closest friends in Palm Springs.
“He called and asked how everything was,” she said. “Without even realizing that I was saying it, I blurted out: ‘Frank, may I come back?’ He told me that he had invited a lot of people to spend the holidays with him in Palm Springs and that if I didn’t mind a crowd, he would be happy to have me there too. I would have taken him up on the offer if the crowd had been big enough to fill the Colosseum.
“All our friends were there [the Deutsches, the Goetzes, the Brissons, the Cerfs, Harry Kurnitz, Bubbles and Arthur Hornblow, Pamela and Leland Hayward, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin], It was a fun crowd. Every night at eleven P.M., Frank had two movies just flown in from Hollywood for the guests to watch if they didn’t want to drink or play cards or talk. … I never had such a marvelous time. Frank was surrounded by the people he likes best, me included. And he was so relaxed and happy. I have never seen him so happy.”
Mia said this to a reporter shortly after her holiday with Frank in Palm Springs, but she soon realized how transitory that Christmas interlude had been when Frank never called. So she flew to the Himalayas to meditate with her guru.
“I had nothing, just the remnants of a marriage,” she said. “So I latched on to what seemed to be the nearest hope. It wasn’t just a whim; my life was crumbling, it really was. My marriage was gone.”
The trauma of divorcing his young wife hit Frank hard early in 1968 when he was filming Lady in Cement in Florida during the day and performing at the Fontainebleau at night.
“He was real upset,” recalled Al Algiro, who worked as an extra. “I remember Pat Henry messed up his lines real bad, and after three takes Frank got so mad he went over and slapped Pat in the face a few times and told him to shape up. Also, when Lainie Kazan played her scenes too close to his lips, he got pissed off and said, ‘Are we supposed to kiss in this scene?’ That was a real putdown for Frank to say in front of everyone. This was Lainie’s big chance at a movie career, and she was trying so hard.”
Refusing to do more than one take and ripping out handfuls of the script to save time, Frank treated the director, Gordon Douglas, like a lackey who was on the film simply to accommodate him. At Frank’s insistence
, Douglas scheduled his scenes so that he never had to come to work before noon; the sets were pre-lit, and his double plotted every move so that by the time Frank arrived, he could complete action on one set and proceed to the next without delay. The film was finished within six weeks and the post-production details fell to Michael Viner, the twenty-one-year-old assistant to the producer.
“At the end of the film, there were a couple of problems involving Sinatra,” he said.” One night, he was so mad at the scriptwriter, he ripped a fire ax out of its casing and chopped down the door to his room, which cost us a few hundred dollars. Then there was a prostitute who complained that Frank and his pals had not treated her quite right. She said that after an all-night party, Frank had invited her to stay for breakfast and called for an order of ham and eggs, which he then ate off her chest with a knife and fork. She threatened to sue Twentieth Century Fox because of that incident, but we settled before it got to court.”
Bolstered by hormone shots of testosterone regularly administered by a nurse, Frank indulged himself sexually with a variety of women and most were thrilled to be in his company.
“I was just a little twenty-six-year-old secretary from Chicago when I met him at the Fontainebleau,” said Nancy Seidman. “He invited me to spend the weekend with him, which was incredible, even though he came down with pneumonia, and was very, very sick. He ran a temperature of 104 degrees, and I stayed up and took care of him, changing his pajamas, which would get soaked every few hours from his fever.… Mia Farrow kept calling the suite, but Frank wouldn’t take her calls. Then Eddie Fisher came in to ask if he should marry Connie Stevens.… Jilly was there all the time.… People were so reverential … I was very taken with the whole scene. It was quite exciting. …”