by Kitty Kelley
Hearing that Frank was ill, Mia flew to Florida to be by his side, but she left a few days later, looking wan and pathetic. Frank then summoned Ava Gardner, who arrived with a maid, a secretary, and twenty-nine pieces of luggage. She stayed only briefly. “During the night there was one of those wild parties, and a piano got pushed out of an upstairs window,” she said. “That was too much for me. Next day, I left.” Dolly and Marty Sinatra arrived a few days later.
“All I need is for Nancy, Sr., to arrive, and all the people close to me will have checked in,” Frank said.
“The Mia thing was hard,” said Nancy, Jr. “I don’t care who you are, or what age you are, you suffer through something like that just like everybody else.”
“If we could make it through Mia, I guess we can endure anything,” said Frank, Jr.
Gathering his family around him, Frank tried to ease his anguish, but the impending divorce disturbed him. He offered Mia generous alimony, but she refused any kind of financial settlement, saying all she wanted was his friendship. She kept the jewelry he had given her and the forty-eight place settings of silver, but she moved out of the home in Bel-Air, taking only her clothes and her stuffed animals from the bedroom.
“When I got married, all that sudden money I never used at all, you know? It wasn’t my money, after all,” she said. “That was his money. We kept separate bank accounts, although I didn’t really have any money to speak of… there was no fear about being broke.”
Agreeing to a quick divorce in Juarez, Mexico, Mia refused to charge Frank with mental cruelty, saying the only acceptable ground would be incompatibility. “I didn’t seem to be able to please him anymore,” she said. She asked the court to restore her maiden name.
The night before the decree was granted, Mia was in Hollywood at the Daisy when George Jacobs walked in with his date, and Mia grabbed him for a dance. Since it was the eve of her divorce, that dance with her husband’s handsome black valet became a gossip item on Rona Barrett’s television show. When George returned to Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, where he was living, Frank refused to speak to him.
“The maid came to me and said, ‘Mr. Sinatra wants you to get out of the house,’ ” said Jacobs. “This was the day of the Mia divorce. Frank had locked himself in his room and wouldn’t come out. I banged on the door and said, ‘What’s wrong? What’s going on?’ He wouldn’t open the door. ‘Mickey will tell you. Mickey will tell you,’ he said. ‘Call Mickey.’ So I called Rudin and waited an hour for him to get back to me.
“He told me that the stuff Rona Barrett reported really stirred Frank up, that I’d better take a few days off and, in the meantime, move all my belongings out of the house. I tried to explain that I didn’t do anything. All I did was walk into the Daisy with my date and see Mia, who was sitting there getting stoned. She wanted to dance, so we danced a couple of times. That was it, but everyone around the old man—Jilly and all of them—poisoned his mind until he actually believed that his valet was sleeping with his wife. I couldn’t believe that he’d ever think I’d do something like that to him. After fourteen years together, he dropped the net on me just like that, and he couldn’t even look me in the face to do it. He couldn’t fire me in person. He had to have his prick lawyer do it for him.
“I was so mad afterwards that I threw away everything he’d ever given me—two-thousand-dollar watches, suits, sweaters, shirts, shoes, coats, cameras, radios—everything. I didn’t want anything from the bastard around. I got twelve thousand dollars in severance pay and blew it, and then I sold all my shares in Reprise Records.
“I had been so close to that man. I even signed his name better than he did. In fact, I did all the autographs. ‘Just give it to George,’ Frank would say whenever someone wanted a signed Sinatra picture. I went everywhere with him. I nursed him through his suicide attempt in Lake Tahoe. I helped him get through Ava, who was the only woman he ever loved. I was even the nurse after his hair transplants from Dr. Sammy Ayres, who had done Joey Bishop first and then Frank. I drove all the girls to Red Krohn [Dr. Leon Krohn] for their abortions, and I treated each one of those dames like a queen because that’s what he wanted me to do. The women that man had over the years! I still remember Lee Radziwill sneaking into his bedroom. How do I know? I heard her. I always had a room next to Frank so he could slap the wall for me if he needed anything.
“Yeah, I was at Cal-Neva with Giancana, and I was with him a lot when he visited Frank in Palm Springs. The guy was great with tips. I knew them all—Sam and Joe Fischetti. I even knew Moe Dalitz when he was calling himself the entertainment director of the Desert Inn. Don’t that beat everything? The entertainment director!”
Devastated by the firing, Jacobs reminisced about the years he worked for Sinatra, saying that what he missed most was the riotous merriment.
“We had some funny, funny times together because Frank was always doing numbers on people. He loved practical jokes. Like the time he walked in when Milt Ebbins [Peter Lawford’s personal manager] was shaving and said, ‘Let me see that, Milt.’ Wham! He threw the razor out of the window. ‘What time is it, Milt?’ He’d take Ebbins’s watch off his wrist and throw that out the window, too. He was always doing crazy stuff like that. Years later [after the break with Frank], I thought I’d write a book about those funny times and I sat down with Joe Hyams. We got about thirty-two pages written before the word got out and oh, God! Rudin hit me with a letter you wouldn’t believe. I told him I’d never hurt Frank. I loved the guy. I just wanted to write about the good things. Not the bad stuff; nothing about the Mafia, none of that stuff. I even said they could have the galleys and if there was anything they wanted to take out of the book, it would be cut out, but Rudin wouldn’t hear of it. Man, when that word got around, I couldn’t get anybody to hang out with me. They all thought they’d be shot in the knees because Frank was mad.”
The night the divorce was granted, Johnny Carson announced the news to his Tonight Show audience by saying: “Hear about the trouble at Frank Sinatra’s house? Mia Farrow dropped her Silly Putty in Frank’s Poligrip.”
During this time, Sinatra was seriously involved in Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign. Lyndon Johnson had announced that he would not seek a second term as President. Senator Robert F. Kennedy declared his candidacy, which only caused Frank to intensify his efforts for Humphrey.
“Bobby is just not qualified to be president of the United States,” Frank said.
Kennedy’s candidacy rekindled Sinatra’s hatred for the man who had put Sam Giancana in prison and sent Jimmy Hoffa, another good friend, to the penitentiary for mail fraud and jury tampering.
“I remember Frank saying if Bobby Kennedy got elected, he will point his finger at all of us and say: ‘You are under arrest,’ ” said Mrs. Ted Allen, wife of one of Frank’s favorite photographers.
In May 1968, Frank flew to Washington with his Chicago Mafia friend, Allen Dorfman, to attend a party for Humphrey in columnist Drew Pearson’s Georgetown garden. Seeing Dorfman, a mob-connected associate of Jimmy Hoffa, socializing with Sinatra and the Vice-President made a Washington Post reporter curious about the relationship among these three men. Approaching Dorfman, the reporter asked if he was there to make a deal: Humphrey’s pardon of Jimmy Hoffa in exchange for helping get Humphrey elected. Dorfman replied bluntly. “Yeah … we’re here to buy everybody in town who’s for sale.” After the party, Frank met Mrs. Jimmy Hoffa and Teamster Vice-President Harold Gibbons for dinner.
The next night, following a Big Brothers benefit, Drew Pearson and Humphrey took Sinatra to the White House for a late night visit with Lyndon Baines Johnson. Frank’s animosity toward Bobby Kennedy was the only thing that made him partially acceptable to the President, who had never forgotten Sinatra’s rebuke to his fellow Texan, House Speaker Sam Ray bum, at the 1956 Democratic National Convention, nor his idolatry of John F. Kennedy in 1960. Johnson showed his disdain when Sinatra was ushered into the Lincoln bedroom well past midnigh
t.
Lady Bird was already in her nightgown and the President was lying on a table getting a massage. Humphrey stopped by the canopied bed to talk to Mrs. Johnson while Frank walked over to the famous mantelpiece on which Jacqueline Kennedy had placed an inscribed plaque before leaving the White House. He looked closely at the inscription: “In this room lived John Fitzgerald Kennedy with his wife Jacqueline—during the two Years, ten months and two days he was President of the United States—January 20, 1961-November 22, 1963.”
President Johnson watched him examining the plaque. He then jumped off the massage table, grabbed an old souvenir booklet about the White House dating back to the Kennedy administration, and thrust it in Frank’s face.
“I don’t suppose you read, but this has lots of pictures. Here’s something else,” he added, handing Frank one of the presidential souvenirs he gave to his women visitors. “It’s a conversation piece,” he said of the lipstick with the White House seal on it. “It’ll make a big man of you with your women.”
Reeling from the insults, Frank turned and walked out of the room in a quiet rage, not realizing that he had seen his mirror image in the coarse Texan. Both men needed to be the focus of other men’s eyes, and they dominated their own worlds by the sheer force of their personalities. Both were unscrupulous, admirable, treacherous, devoted, and mean. Both were adored by their mothers, supporting Sigmund Freud’s thesis that “a man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real successes.” The thirty-sixth President of the United States and the country’s most popular singer were so alike that they circled each other warily. Both were naturally attracted to the ebullient Humphrey, who flattered each of them unashamedly.
“I will appear in ten major cities stumping for the Vice-President,” Frank told the press. “We’ll start in Oakland, California, and then hit Minneapolis, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, and Chicago, among others.”
But Frank was unable to attract any of his celebrity friends to the Humphrey cause. Shirley MacLaine and Sammy Davis, Jr., were campaigning for Bobby Kennedy. Sammy Cahn wrote the Kennedy campaign song to the tune of “My Kind of Town.” Bill Cosby, Nancy Wilson, Andy Williams, Gene Kelly, Jack Lemmon, Gregory Peck, and Rod Steiger also campaigned for Kennedy. Paul Newman, Robert Vaughn, Dick Van Dyke, and Carl Reiner supported Eugene McCarthy. Frank was the only major Hollywood star to support Hubert Humphrey, and he was of inestimable worth to the Vice-President because his concerts attracted thousands of devoted fans who would pay hundreds of dollars to watch him enwrap his soul in song. He enlisted the support of his daughter, Nancy, who had started singing after her divorce from Tommy Sands in 1965 and had become a pop sensation with her hit song, “These Boots Were Made for Walking.” That song, plus the recording of “Somethin’ Stupid,” which she made with her father, had been number-one songs in America and England in 1967.
“I’m trying to help draw crowds who will contribute to the campaign,” said Frank. “I won’t make any speeches. I’ll leave that to the politicians. I’ll just sing. And I hope that the Vice-President will be with me on all ten of those appearances. I think all Americans should get out and contribute to the candidate of their choice. It’s getting so expensive, it is almost impossible for candidates to campaign properly.”
Frank worked harder for Humphrey than he had for any other political candidate. Records in the Vice-President’s Minnesota archives show frequent phone calls and regular correspondence between the two men and their staffs. In addition to his concerts, which raised thousands of dollars, Frank advised the candidate on the best makeup to wear for television. He recommended special lighting for Humphrey’s political commercials and even suggested dying his hair to look a. little younger. He called Bennett Cerf at Random House, who agreed to lead an effort to place an advertisement for Humphrey in The New York Times signed by leading editors and publishers. At his own expense, Frank made a sixty-second videotape soliciting funds for the campaign, and he spent his own money on voter registration drives.
The rioting that followed the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 convinced Frank that the black vote would be decisive in the election. He opened his home to Black Panther groups from Watts and other parts of the country, trying to persuade them to vote for Humphrey.
Ironically, his concern for civil rights did not extend to his nightclub performances, which were filled with crude racial jokes and bigotry. Appearing with Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald one night, Frank tried to amuse his audience:
“The Polacks are deboning the colored people and using them for wet suits,” he said.
Looking at Basie’s all-black band, he said, “I’d publicly like to thank the NAACP for this chess set they gave me.”
He called Johnny Mathis the “African Queen,” and used Sammy Davis, Jr., as a foil, complaining about the watermelon rinds in his dressing room and commenting that in a top hat Sammy “looked like a headwaiter in a rib joint.” Sammy Davis would sometimes cringe, but he would never say a word to Frank.
Although grateful for Frank’s public support and his immense fund-raising ability, some people close to Humphrey worried about his friendship with the singer. Washington attorney Joseph L. Nellis, the former Kefauver committee counsel who had interrogated Frank in 1951 about carrying money to Lucky Luciano in Cuba, wrote the Vice-President a private memo warning him about Sinatra’s Mafia connections. He mentioned Frank’s Washington meeting in 1968 with Allen Dorfman, a Chicago mobster who was trying to get teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa out of prison. He also cited Frank’s 1967 chairmanship of the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League on whose letterhead was at least one man connected to organized crime. The group, which sought to improve the image of Italians in the United States, drew heated criticism from The New York Times for selecting Frank as their national leader.
“I concluded my memo by saying: ‘It’s true you need support from every segment of the population, but surely you would agree that you don’t need support from the underworld, and Frank Sinatra is unquestionably connected with the underworld,’ ” said Nellis. “Hubert later told me that he would be careful about the friendship, but he couldn’t set Sinatra aside because Frank was too powerful a supporter in Hollywood and the money he raised was just too great to discard him. ‘You just don’t turn your back on that,’ he said.”
Another Humphrey stalwart, Martin McNamara, former assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, D.G., was concerned enough about Frank’s involvement in the campaign to contact Henry Peterson, head of the organized crime section in the Justice Department. He sent a memo about this meeting to Bill Connell: “[Peterson] said that there is presently under way an investigation which has arisen out of IRS investigations into the relationship between the entertainment industry and the Cosa Nostra. That as far as Sinatra personally is concerned, there is a three months’ old investigation in their division which will probably extend for another two to three years. In other words, there is no likelihood of any criminal charge situation arising in the immediate future.
“For our own guidance,” McNamara continued, “we should be aware of the fact that Joe Fischetti and Ben Novak of the Fontainebleau are regarded as being fronts for substantial investments of hood money. The same is true of Paul D’Amato, who runs the 500 Club in Atlantic City. Another name mentioned was that of Sam Giancana, the head of the Chicago syndicate, now in Mexico City, who is one of the ten most important racketeers in the world. All these names are individuals with very close personal relationships with Sinatra and, in essence, Sinatra is their pawn and in their debt for having picked him out of the entertainment doldrums a few years back.”
In August 1968, a week before the Democratic National Convention, The Wall Street Journal ran a long front-page story entitled “Sinatra’s Pals—Gangster Friendships Cause Singer Trouble/But He Isn’t Fazed.” It said that for nearly thirty years some of Frank’s best friends had been mobst
ers. “Not just two-bit hoods, either; Mr. Sinatra hobnobs with the Mafia’s elite,” wrote Nicholas Gage, detailing Frank’s relationships with Willie Moretti, Lucky Luciano, Joe Fischetti, and Sam Giancana. Gage cited Frank’s ownership of an interest in the Berkshire Downs racetrack in Massachusetts, saying that Frank and Dean Martin were directors of the track in 1963 and that it was secretly owned by Raymond Patriarca, the New England Mafia boss, and Gaetano “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese, the late head of one of New York’s five Mafia families.
“In recent months, gangsters have not appeared conspicuously in Mr. Sinatra’s entourage, but he is known to have seen them privately,” said Gage. “Last October, Mr. Sinatra came to New York to make a speech. According to police reports, he also drove up to Trumbull, Conn., to visit the home of Dave Iacovetti, a member of the Mafia’s Carlo Gambino family in New York.”
These stories of his Cosa Nostra connections so infuriated Frank that he canceled his scheduled appearance at the convention luncheon for Mrs. Humphrey, where he was to be the master of ceremonies and sing for two thousand women delegates. He also canceled his appearance at a gala honoring Mayor Richard Daley.
Hypersensitive to press criticism, Frank worried about reflecting negatively on the Vice-President. “He’d say to me: ‘Should I do this? I don’t want to embarrass him,’ ” recalled Nick Kostopolous, one of Humphrey’s advance men.
After the convention, Frank continued to campaign hard for the Democratic ticket, saying, “I’ll do anything to defeat that bum Nixon.”