His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  Despite the carefully orchestrated special, the ratings were poor and the reviews disappointing.

  “Not much of the voice remains, but the showmanship of Frank Sinatra is still enough to carry an hour special,” said Variety. Still, Frank was jubilant to be performing again and he followed his television special with the album, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back, ignoring critics like the one from the Toronto Globe and Mail, who called him “a vocal has-been, ripping off those who care about his music rather than his personality.”

  Proud of the album, Frank played the master tape one night for a few friends, including Ed McMahon, Tom Malatesta, Peter’s brother, and Vic Gold, who recalled McMahon’s unsettling observation of his friend.

  “When Sinatra walked into another room, Ed, who was sitting on the floor, said, ’Whenever I see Frank, I think of that poem, “Richard Cory,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. “So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head.”

  Weeks later, Frank stunned everyone by announcing his return to Caesars Palace. His mother, who had threatened to return to New Jersey if he ever went back to Las Vegas, was angry, until she learned that Sanford Waterman, who had pulled a gun on Frank in 1970, had been arrested for racketeering and was no longer at Caesars. George Franklin, the district attorney who had wanted to prosecute her son, had been defeated for reelection, and the sheriff, Ralph Lamb, now was ready to welcome him back to town.

  With Caesars Palace under new management and willing to pay Frank $400,000 a week in addition to providing free bodyguards “to avoid any unpleasant incidents,” Dolly Sinatra agreed to go back to Las Vegas for Frank’s opening night, an event that sold out every hotel in town and packed 1,300 people into the casino’s Circus Maximus showroom.

  To mark the occasion, Caesars Palace presented each guest with a medallion that was inscribed: “Hail Sinatra, The Noblest Roman Has Returned,” making January 25, 1974, an opening night unmatched in Las Vegas history, with an unprecedented number of stars in attendance, rounded up by the hotel’s publicity staff. Everyone from Eddie Albert to Leslie Uggams showed up. The Sinatra family, including Nancy, Jr., and Hugh Lambert, and Tina with her husband, Wes Farrell (a marriage that was to last only eleven months), sat ringside with Dolly and Big Nancy. The only one missing was Frank, Jr., who pleaded a previous engagement.

  Frank insisted the press coverage be limited to a select group of reporters and refused entry to The Washington Post. Jim Mahoney explained: “It’s nothing personal, but The Washington Post is not welcome wherever Frank Sinatra performs.”

  His obvious enthusiasm about being back before a live audience heightened the excitement of the evening and infused his performance with an electricity that brought the audience to its feet several times.

  “I hope you’re as pleased to see me as I am to see you out there,” he said in his opening remarks. “When you get out of show business, it’s a little dangerous because all of a sudden you’re out of touch.… Also, it was a little tough to wake up and find out that Rodney Allen Rippey [the black child actor who became famous for a hamburger commercial on television] had replaced me. … I only saw him once. He was in an alley giving Sammy Davis some of his old clothes.… Sammy gave me this jacket—a present for the opening and I said, ‘Gee, it’s so soft. What’s it made of?’ He said, ‘My Uncle Webb.’ ”

  Frank gave his usual performance of exceptional vulgarity and exquisite taste, a swine one minute as he lashed out at female columnists, and particularly graceful the next as he sang his soft, sad ballads, playing the audience like a sweet harp. Applauding the old insouciance, Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times praised his astonishing gifts of phrasing, control, and feeling, which he said proved beyond doubt the still youthful tenderness of his voice. “The night was not an unmitigated triumph, though,” Champlin wrote. “Midway along, Sinatra paused to sip a glass of wine … and revive his animosities towards the ladies of the press.… Whatever the distant provocations, the savagery of the attacks invited sympathy for his victims and put gall in a winy evening.”

  To trumpet his comeback, Frank launched an extensive ten-city concert tour, his first in six years, to benefit Variety Clubs International. Every performance sold out weeks in advance as he made his triumphant march across the country, leaving spellbound audiences in his wake. The only criticism arose when he stopped singing and started talking. Skewering the press, he criticized Edwin Newman of NBC-TV, sneered at Eric Sevareid of CBS-TV, and ridiculed Barbara Walters, calling her “the ugliest broad on television.”

  His most searing remarks were directed at Rona Barrett, who had recently published her autobiography. In it she wrote that she felt Frank, Jr., had staged his own kidnapping to get his father’s attention. She also observed that anyone seeing Frank with his daughter, Nancy, “would quietly walk away with a funny, gnawing feeling: If they weren’t father and daughter, they could certainly pass for lovers. …”

  Frank’s rage could not be contained: “Congress should give Rona Barrett’s husband a medal just for waking up beside her and having to look at her.… She’s so ugly that her mother had to tie a pork chop around her neck just to get the dog to play with her.… What can you say about her that hasn’t already been said about—(pause)—leprosy. … I promise not to say anything about Rona Barrett tonight. I really mean that. A lot of my friends were upset about the fact that I was even bothering about her, so I’m not going to mention her name. I’m also not going to mention Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Adolf Hitler, Bruno Hauptmann, or Use Koch—she’s the other two-dollar broad—the one who made the lampshades.”

  The success of his U.S. tour led to a five-country tour through Europe, his first since 1962. But Frank canceled his appearance in West Germany because of what he called “scurrilous attacks” by its press, and then flew to London, where he lambasted the Germans from the British stage.

  “What gives with these Germans anyway? I’ve done nothing to them,” he said. “I could have answered and told reporters to ‘look to the sins of your fathers.’ I could have mentioned Dachau, the concentration camp. … I don’t understand the German press. They call me a super-gangster. What’s that? Al Capone? He wasn’t one. It’s ridiculous, who the hell needs it anyway?”

  The British audiences gave him standing ovations, while the British press wrote rave reviews, but Prince Charles, the future king of England who had met Frank twice, said he was distressed by the “creeps” and “Mafia types” Sinatra surrounded himself with.

  “He’s a pretty strange person,” said the prince. “He could be terribly nice one minute and … well, not so nice the next.”

  In France, they referred to Frank’s bodyguards as “gorilles.”

  The tour ended with an international incident in Australia when Frank insulted the country’s press corps. Darting past reporters in Melbourne, he spat at the reporters waiting to interview him before his rehearsal at Festival Hall. One newsman had managed to reach him by phone earlier in the morning to ask what he had eaten for breakfast and Frank slammed the phone down without responding.

  “The idiot,” Frank said. “What the hell does he care what I had for breakfast? I was about to tell him what I did after breakfast.”

  He refused to be interviewed after his rehearsal, and when he returned to his hotel and found more television cameramen waiting for him, he exploded, a signal for his bodyguards to fly into action.

  According to one of the cameramen, one of Frank’s bodyguards wrapped an electric cord around his throat and warned, “Things are going to get physical.”

  Reporter Hilary Sexton emerged from the fray with cuts on her face.

  “Sinatra’s goon squads blocked the way and then attacked the newsmen,” said Jim Oram of the Sydney Daily Mirror.

  That evening, Frank appeared at Melbourne’s Festival Hall before a sold-out house of eight thousand people, who clapped, cheered,
and stamped their feet with approval.

  “Too much booze, too many smokes, too many long, long nights have taken the glow from his voice, but no one gave a damn,” wrote the Sydney Daily Mirror. “For Sinatra still has the phrasing which cannot be surpassed, the timing, the splendid arrogance of remarkable talent.”

  During his “tea break,” Frank sat on a stool to talk to the audience and castigated Australia’s reporters.

  “They are bums and parasites who have never done an honest day’s work,” he said of the men. “Most of them are a bunch of fags, anyway.” He called the women “broads and buck-and-a-half hookers.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a little tired tonight. I had to run all day because of the parasites who chased us.… They won’t quit. They wonder why I won’t talk to them. I wouldn’t drink water with them, let alone talk to them. It’s the scandal men that bug you and drive you crazy, and the hookers—the broads of the press are the hookers. I hope I don’t have to explain to you the word hooker,” he said, “but I’m not particular, I’d give them a dollar fifty.… We who have God-given talent say to hell with them. …”

  The next day, the country was in an uproar. “Who the hell does this man Sinatra think he is?” demanded Neville Wran, leader of the Labor party in New South Wales.

  A member of the National Parliament reproved Frank’s “goon squads masquerading as security guards.”

  Jim North of the Australian Journalists Association said, “I will call on 114 affiliated unions and ask them to blackball Sinatra unless he apologizes for calling our women journalists whores.”

  The Stagehands Union refused to work, so Frank’s $650,000 Australian concert tour was canceled.

  The Waiters Union refused to serve him, so room service at his hotel was cut off.

  The Transport Union workers refused to refuel his Gulfstream jet, blocking his departure until he said he was sorry.

  Refusing to apologize to members of the press, Frank demanded that they apologize to him “for fifteen years of abuse I have taken from the world press.” Then he retreated to his hotel while Mickey Rudin called the president of the Australian Labor Party, Robert Hawk, to ask whether the singer would be allowed to leave the country.

  “If he can walk on water,” said the labor leader. “There will be no boat and no plane leaving until your man apologizes.”

  With Jim Mahoney playing golf in Scotland—an absence that would cost the publicist his job a few weeks later—Rudin was forced to handle the press himself. He called a press conference to say that his client was regretful but unrepentant, and wanted him to investigate the possibility of taking legal action against the unions.

  “I’d like to believe this is not Fascist Spain or Germany in Hitler’s time,” said Rudin. “We are astounded that the decisions of a few union leaders can apparently deprive a man of his living, can stop him leaving a country, or possibly even stop him being fed.”

  Rudin spent the next three hours negotiating with the Labor leader Hawk over a public statement that would satisfy the Australians while preserving Frank’s pride. He said that the singer “accepts that working members of the Australian media would be doing less than their professional duty if they did not make every effort to keep the public informed about the visit of an international celebrity.” The union leader recognized “the unique international stature of … Sinatra and his understandable desire to be protected therefore from an uninhibited exposure to the media.”

  The final result was a joint statement that without an explicit apology said Frank “did not intend any general reflection upon the moral character of working members of the Australian media. …”

  U.S. editorials cheered the Australians for forcing Frank to his knees.

  “Americans by now are pretty well inured to the antics of their elderly, ill-mannered and foul-mouthed matinee idol, Frank Sinatra,” said the Washington Star. “Australians, to their credit, are not.… [They] … have a refreshingly direct and forthright manner of handling such things, and we heartily applaud their actions in this case. If American unions—and audiences—showed the same resolution, we might spare ourselves a great deal of unnecessary unpleasantness.”

  “The Aussies, being the nice people they are, passed up their golden chance, which was to find a nice, slow freighter and send [Frank Sinatra] to sea with ample time to reflect on the ingratitude of people who refuse to accept wealth and fame as reason to excuse pigpen manners,” said the New York Daily News. “They let him continue his tour and so he will come back to his homeland under his own momentum, where nearly everybody understands what an honor it is to be kicked in the groin by so famous and talented a man, and where bulky henchmen can help Frank impart the wisdom to any who may need persuading.”

  Bob Hope regaled audiences with his account of the episode: “They finally let Frank out of the country right after the head of the union down there woke up one morning and saw a kangaroo’s head on the next pillow.”

  Back in the United States, at a nightclub engagement at Lake Tahoe, his first since the Gal-Neva days with Sam Giancana, Frank offered a mock apology to the prostitutes of the world for putting them in the same category with female journalists:

  “I want to apologize to all the hookers, who are the Madonnas of the Evening, for comparing them to news-women,” he said. “Newswomen sell their souls. Who’d want their bodies?”

  Proceeding to New York, where he performed on live television before a capacity audience at Madison Square Garden, he again spewed hateful venom at the press, but held himself in check until the commercial breaks.

  “A funny thing happened in Australia,” he said. “I made a mistake and got off the plane. You think we’ve got trouble with one Rona Barrett, but they’ve got twenty in Australia and each one’s uglier than the other.… Those nickel-and-dime garbage dealers make Rona Barrett look like a nun.”

  The audience screamed its approval, but the ratings were abominable. Frank’s show, ballyhooed as “a once in a lifetime event ‘live’ at Madison Square Garden,” fell to number forty in the week’s ratings, an indication that most of the country preferred watching Kojak and reruns of Father Knows Best. Even the critics were disparaging, especially Rex Reed, who said that Frank was sloppier than Porky Pig, with manners more appalling than a subway sandhog.

  “All of which might be tolerable if he could still sing,” wrote Reed. “But the saddest part, the hardest part to face about this once-great idol now living on former glory, is that Frank Sinatra has had it. His voice has been manhandled beyond recognition, bringing with its parched cloak only a painful memory of burned-out yesterdays. Frank Sinatra has become a bore.”

  Berating him for “spitting libelous insults at the female members of the press when he should be arrested,” and telling offensive racial jokes “so old they were hairy,” Reed scolded Sinatra for “making apathy and arrogance a lifestyle.”

  With that syndicated review, Rex Reed earned Frank’s undying enmity, and his animosity scraped new depths. He had never forgiven the critic for once saying that Nancy, Jr., dressed like a pizza waitress, and Sinatra now unleashed his fury in attacks that were usually too crude to be printed.

  Since his comeback, it seemed that Frank’s strained relationship with the press had suffered even greater stress, as if he were blaming reporters and critics for the shortcomings of his aging voice.

  He seemed to think that if he flung enough acid, journalists and critics would see the error of their ways and pay him homage the way they had done in earlier years. Nothing less than adulation would suffice. Criticism of any kind produced attacks that were unsparing in acrimony and, at their worst, alarmingly irrational.

  He barred Women’s Wear Daily from covering him after its critic savaged one of his performances: “The Voice is now the Void … a performance of self-destructive vulgarity. The ego-infested arrogance of a man who has made the sentiment of ‘My Way’ stand as his musical epitaph has totally surrendered any musical relevance by
catering to the coarse and useless windbag within.”

  When an entertainment writer in Reno, Guy Richardson, expressed a lukewarm attitude toward Sinatra, he was flabbergasted to receive a telegram from Frank calling him a “bigot,” and saying that he was “yellow from top to bottom.” He was even more stunned when Frank warned Harrah’s Club that he would walk off the stage if anyone from the Reno newspapers dared to attend one of his shows. When the publisher and editor of the Reno Evening Gazette and the Nevada State Journal appeared for one of his performances, they were barred.

  In Toronto, Frank made the critics pay for their tickets to review him, an extremely rare thing for a performer to do. When one of his bodyguards punched a free-lance photographer from the Toronto Star, the newspaper wrote about it, causing Frank to roar onstage that evening, waving a copy of the paper, which described his “squad of menacing bodyguards.”

  “I have only two uses for newspapers—to cover the bottom of my parrot’s cage and to train my dog on,” he told his audience.

  He was incensed at Mike Royko of the Chicago Daily News for writing about his “army of flunkies” and “full-time police guard” while in the Windy City. He called the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist “a pimp because you are using people to make money just as [pimps do].”

  So he used his concert series in Chicago to berate the columnist. “At least, we didn’t invite Jerko or whatever his name is,” he told one audience of six thousand. “Do you know he was our lookout at Pearl Harbor? I’d like to hire Chicago Stadium and box him for charity. We’ll pay him a thousand dollars for every round he lasts. He won’t make two dollars.”

  Violence had accompanied Frank for years, but most people were reluctant to fight back. One who did was Frank J. Weinstock. An insurance agent from Salt Lake City, he sued Sinatra for assault and battery, claiming that Frank had ordered him beaten up by Jilly Rizzo and Jerry “The Crusher” Arvenitas in a Palm Springs restaurant. In his complaint, he said he had been in the men’s room of the Trinidad Hotel on May 5, 1973, when Frank entered with his bodyguards and said, “There’s the wise ass and smart son of a bitch who’s going to intercept my woman.” Frank had been having dinner with Barbara Marx and others. Weinstock was in the restaurant with his wife and some relatives. His complaint described what happened next.