The two had it out with one another. In the heat of the argument, Sinatra threatened to walk away from the Sands forever. In fact, he said, he wasn’t even going to finish out the present engagement. That was fine with Cohen. “The sooner you leave, the better off we’ll all be around here,” he said. “See ya, Frank! Nice knowin’ ya. Schmuck!”
Frank rapidly left Cohen’s side and, with Mia following him and trying to calm him down, began stalking through the casino like a wild animal. He happened across the hotel’s telephone department and, much to the horror of operators there, walked in and started pulling out all of the wires from the switchboard, thereby rendering service in the entire hotel inoperable. Then he came upon a golf cart in the hallway used to transport VIPs and the handicapped throughout the premises. He pushed Mia into the golf cart, then got behind the wheel and took off.
“Suddenly, without any warning, he pressed the gas pedal down as far as it would go; we were headed straight for the shiny plate-glass window,” recalled Mia. “I knew it was pointless to say a word. In the final instant, we swerved and smashed sidelong into the window. By the time I realized we were both unharmed, he was already out of the cart and striding into the casino as I trotted after him, clutching my little beaded evening purse. He threw some chairs in a heap and with his golden lighter he tried to set them on fire. When he couldn’t get a fire started, he took my hand, and we left the building.”
“During the tantrum, no one, no guard, no clerk, dared to interfere with him,” recalled George Jacobs, who witnessed the fracas. “They still treated him as if he owned the place and had the right to destroy it if he wanted to.”
Just as quickly as it had erupted, Frank’s anger subsided. He went from furious to apathetic in record time and no longer cared about any of it. He performed his shows that night without incident. However, Mia—still shaken from the dangerous golf cart ride—spent the evening in her room, crying about what she later called “Frank’s personality disorder.” The next morning, she hightailed it out of Vegas and went back to Los Angeles. That same day, Frank and Carl Cohen had another showdown, this time in the hotel’s Garden Room restaurant. By this time, Frank’s mood had ricocheted from apathy back to fury.
“I’m never playing this hotel again,” Frank shouted at Cohen. “You tell Howard Hughes that, why don’t you? I’m done here.”
“You know what?” Cohen said. “Fuck you, Frank. How about that? Fuck you!”
Enraged, Frank gathered a fistful of chips and with all his might hurled them right at Cohen’s face. Then he tilted the dining table, spilling food and drinks all over Cohen’s lap. “You son of a bitch,” he shouted at him. “How do you like that?”
Cohen very calmly rose, brushed off his suit, and then, in one quick and surprising move, let loose with a powerful right hook that landed squarely on Frank’s jaw. Sinatra went down like a sack of potatoes, the caps on his two front teeth dislodging and flying clear across the room. The two men started in on each other, throwing kicks and punches and rolling around on the floor, all to the horrified astonishment of everyone else in the restaurant. At one point Frank threw a chair at Carl, but it missed him and hit a security guard on the head, which would require stitches.
After the fight, Frank went up to his room and sealed himself off in there. Now he was deeply depressed. He didn’t perform that night and, as he had threatened, canceled the rest of the engagement. When he should have been onstage, he was on the phone with Mia telling her what had happened.
“His speech was unclear,” Mia recalled, “but I soon made out that there had been a fight; the caps had been punched clear off his teeth, some other guy had been hurt, headlines were sure to follow, and his dentist was on the way with new teeth. It didn’t much matter what started the fight; they always had to do with his powerful Sicilian sense of propriety. He sounded bewildered and upset as he said he loved and needed me, and with my whole being I loved and needed him too.”
“She had so merged into him by this time, where he left off and where she began was a blur,” said one of her best friends of that time. “It’s not that she felt he could do no wrong, she was just too afraid to think about it at all. She was just trying to hold on to what she knew was her only identity.”
The next day, as well as everyone else he blamed for the incident, Frank decided that the Sands’ boss, Jack Entratter, who had been a close friend of his for many years, was also responsible for the melee. Phyllis McGuire recalled, “After Carl Cohen punched him out and Frank left the Sands, Sinatra never spoke to Jack again. Not ever. And Entratter lived right next door to him in Palm Springs!” (In fact, it would be nearly a year and a half before Frank would play Vegas again—this time at Caesars Palace, in November 1968.)
Later, when Kirk Douglas asked Frank about this incident, Frank dismissed it with a joke: “Kirk, I learned one thing. Never fight a Jew in the desert.”
Rosemary’s Baby
I just don’t see it,” Frank was saying. He was sitting at the breakfast table with Mia as George Jacobs served their meal. They were reviewing the script to a movie Mia had just been offered called Rosemary’s Baby. “You giving birth to the devil? I don’t like it,” Frank said. “It’s like some strange voodoo shit. My mother will flip if she sees you doing this shit.”
“But it’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” Mia enthused. “It’s Roman Polanski, and he’s so hot right now. And the book [by Ira Levin] is a huge bestseller. And it’s Paramount! I really want to do it.”
“But what about our movie?” Frank said, not looking at Mia but still skimming over the script. It was true, the couple had just agreed to make a film together called The Detective for Fox, a cop thriller based on the bestseller by Roderick Thorp. It was set to begin filming on October 16, 1967.
“It’s just three months,” Mia said. “All of it here in L.A, except for one week in New York. Then I’ll be back and we can do our film.” Frank could see that she really wanted to make this “strange voodoo shit.” Because it would be her first starring role, he really couldn’t deny her the opportunity. “As long as you promise that this won’t interfere with our movie,” he said, “then . . . okay.” With that, Mia jumped from her chair into his lap and smothered him with kisses.
Filming Rosemary’s Baby would be tough for Mia. Roman Polanski would prove himself to be nothing if not eccentric, requiring, at one point in the filming, Mia to eat liver take after take even though she was a vegetarian. She almost threw up just from the smell of it. She weighed only ninety-eight pounds, but Roman insisted she lose more weight for the scenes when she is sickly pregnant with the devil’s spawn. Twenty, thirty, forty takes was nothing for Polanski—even though it drove Mia and her costar John Cassavetes mad.
Soon after Rosemary’s Baby started, Frank began working on The Detective in Los Angeles. But then things started to go awry in New York with Rosemary’s Baby. The movie was four weeks behind schedule. Now Mia wouldn’t be able to start work on The Detective on time, and Frank might have to replace her.
It just so happened that at this time Tina Sinatra took a vacation to New York to hang out there with Mia in her East Side apartment. Some speculated that she was on some sort of espionage mission for her father, but it wasn’t true. It was just to be a fun trip for “sisters.” During her few days there, Tina became even closer to Mia as they discussed their life stories and their relationships with their parents. Tina more than ever realized that Frank was a father figure in Mia’s life, and this realization did little to encourage her that the marriage would last.
When Mia told Tina that she was thinking about reneging on her agreement with Frank relating to The Detective, Tina was quite concerned. She suspected the marriage was nearing its end, but still, she had hoped it would be civil. However, she knew her father well and recognized the trouble Mia was going to be in with him if she bailed on him and his film. She told Mia that Frank would never accept it. She added that Mia didn’t know him the way she did, and that �
��this will not go down well.”
In her defense, Mia said she didn’t know what else she could do. She most certainly wasn’t going to walk off the set of Rosemary’s Baby, that much she knew. She felt it wouldn’t be fair to her, the crew, the other actors . . . the studio. She reminded Tina that her father had been a director, her mother an actress. She said she had better manners than to leave a set in the middle of production unless it was a dire emergency. Tina sympathized with Mia, of course, but for her the bottom line was quite simple: She knew her father, and if Mia didn’t show up for work on his movie, “I’m telling you, it’s gonna be really bad.” But, Mia asked, would Frank really want a woman as a wife who would walk off the set of a movie? Tina said, “Probably not. But he also might not want a woman as a wife who welched on a deal with him. So this is a big decision,” she cautioned her friend. “I’d be very, very careful with this one.”
Several days later, Mia made the telephone call that, as it happened, would change the course of her life. She told Frank that, unfortunately, she would not be able to appear in The Detective for a couple of more weeks.
“But you promised,” Frank said. “I need you here. Now!”
“What can I do?” Mia asked.
“Quit!” Frank hollered into the phone.
“But how can I do that?” she responded, now angry herself.
Frank couldn’t understand the problem; he’d walked off plenty of pictures when they went overtime. For instance, in 1956, producer-director Stanley Kramer ran behind schedule with The Pride and the Passion in Spain. Frank just took off, telling him, “I’ve had it, pallie. I’m jumping out. So, sue me.” One time, he just took a stack of pages out of the middle of the script, threw them onto the floor in disgust, and told the director, “There. Now we’re on time. And I’m outta here.”
“Look, Mia. You need to choose,” Frank said. “It’s either me. Or the film. I’ve had enough. Choose!”
“But I can’t . . .”
“Just ankle the fucking film,” he insisted.
“No!”
He hung up on her.
Frank then telephoned the movie’s producer, William Castle. “He was very pleasant about it but asked when Mia would be finished with Rosemary’s Baby. I told him the truth, that we were behind in our schedule. Sinatra said, ‘Well, I’m going to call off your picture. [He meant that he was going to force Mia to leave, thereby shutting down the production.] I said, ‘Frank, that’s silly.’ And Frank said, ‘No, that’s the way I feel. I’ve waited long enough.’ ”
Frank then called Robert Evans, the new head of production at Paramount. Coincidentally, he was also the man who had held the rights to The Detective and who had sold the book to Sinatra to make as a film. But Paramount was also making Rosemary’s Baby, so Evans was in a tight spot. When he talked to Frank, he said he understood the problem and he would work to solve it. As far as he was concerned, Mia should just leave Rosemary’s Baby rather than have everyone incur the wrath of Frank Sinatra. “I wanted out,” he recalled. “An actress is an actress is an actress . . .” However, it was just impossible. Mia had done so much work on the film, there was no way she could leave it at this late date. Sinatra didn’t take the news well when Evans gave it to him, or, as Evans recalled it, “By dictate of the Chairman: ‘No negotiations. Total capitulation.’ ”
Frank could try, but he wouldn’t be successful in canceling Mia’s movie, and he must have known as much. He was starting to understand that Mia was not going to capitulate.
For her part, Mia knew that she needed to stand up for herself. Frank would just have to understand that she had always wanted a career in films, and she wasn’t going to sacrifice it for him. She had never been a pushover, and she wasn’t going to start being one now. He had passion for his own career, she reasoned, so surely he could understand hers.
Divorce—Sinatra Style
A couple of days later—the day before Thanksgiving—Mia was on the set of Rosemary’s Baby working with her costars when Frank’s attorney, Mickey Rudin, showed up. “I need to see Mia,” he said as he quickly walked over to her, ignoring Roman Polanski’s efforts to stop him. “We’ve got business.” Rudin pulled Mia to a corner in the kitchen of the set and presented her with a brown manila envelope. “This is for you, from Frank,” he said, his expression blank. She opened it and pulled out some documents. As she read them, tears came to her eyes. They were divorce papers, all filled out in her name. She was filing for divorce from Frank Sinatra? “But this isn’t what I want,” she said. “Who filled these out?” Rudin seemed surprised. “Wait. You didn’t know about this, kid?” he asked.
“No,” she answered, bewildered. “I don’t know anything about this . . .”
“Well . . .” Rudin was at a loss for words. “I don’t know what to say.” Now even he was confused. “Frank’s instructions to me were to have you sign these papers,” he continued. “What can I tell you? Sign them, Mia,” he concluded, pulling a pen from his vest pocket and displaying the pages on the kitchen table. “It’s for the best.”
“But . . .” The words seemed caught in her throat. “He needs me . . .” she managed to say.
“Just sign them, Mia,” Rudin repeated, now looking at her with a little more compassion. “You will be fine. Frank will be fine. It’s for the best.”
Mia took the pen and—not crying, not really showing any emotion—put her signature “here . . . and here . . . here. And . . . here.”
Frank and Mia had never once discussed divorce, and suddenly she was signing the papers. It was eerily reminiscent of the way he had treated Betty Bacall. Mia couldn’t help but remember that when she’d heard about the terrible breakup with Bacall, she felt sure that Frank would never do such a thing to her. She was wrong.
Mickey Rudin quickly gathered the documents, put them back into the envelope, and made a hasty departure. “When it was time to resume shooting, there was no Mia,” Roman Polanski recalled. “When I knocked on the door, she didn’t respond. So I went in and I found her sobbing. She told me what had happened, that Sinatra had sent his attorney to tell her that her marriage was over. It was so cruel, it just shattered her. I felt terribly for her. But what could you do? She got caught up in Frank’s world. Who could survive that, other than Frank himself?”
The very same evening Mickey Rudin served Mia with divorce papers, Frank Sinatra’s publicist, Jim Mahoney, made it official, even if hedging a bit: “Frank Sinatra said today that he and Mia Farrow, his wife of little more than a year, have agreed to a separation.”
Frank Fires George Jacobs
For the next seven months, as they waited for the divorce to be finalized, Frank and Mia were still off and on. Mia was heartsick. It would be almost impossible to count how many press interviews she gave at this time telling reporters how devastated she was, how she didn’t want the marriage to end. “I will do anything to save this union,” she told one writer in Los Angeles. “I took my vows seriously and I not only want Frank back, I want to have his children. I do! I have begged him to take me back! Begged him!” She was even asking reporters for advice on how to save the marriage; she seemed more than a little unhinged about things.
Meanwhile, though he had filed for divorce, Frank was delaying things. He still wasn’t sure what he wanted. “He wasn’t sleeping,” said George Jacobs. “He was letting himself go, biting everyone’s head off, impossible to be around. It was Ava all over again.”
Speaking of Ava . . .
In July 1968, Frank got word that Ava would soon be in town. She was thinking of moving from England to the States and would be staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a few days. Of course, she wanted to see Frank. This wasn’t a good time for him, though. He just couldn’t take any more angst in his life, which usually ensued from any time he spent with Ava. “I need you to drive out to Beverly Hills and babysit Ava for a night,” Frank told George Jacobs. This was fine with George. He liked Ava; they had a very good relationship and had known
each other since Jacobs first went to work for Frank in 1953. It would be fun to see her.
That evening, George made the two-hour drive to Los Angeles. Ava was to attend a Count Basie concert in town with friends; she and George would meet afterward in her bungalow at the hotel. Arriving in town early enough to enjoy some nightlife beforehand, Jacobs went to a nightclub in Beverly Hills called the Candy Store, always a mad scene. While he was enjoying himself with a drink in one hand, a smoke in the other, who should he see dancing across the large floor but Mia with John Phillips of the pop group the Mamas and the Papas. As soon as Mia saw him, she motioned him over. “Come dance with us, Georgie Porgy,” she said; she seemed to be in a happy place. She introduced Phillips to Jacobs, they shook hands, and then the musician disappeared into the crowd, leaving just Mia and George. They were such good friends, it meant nothing to them to be sharing one dance after another—not slow dances, of course. This was a discotheque, after all; the music was all upbeat. The lights were flashing, people were happy—many were high on drugs—and it was just a typical night on the town in Hollywood for George, who was about thirty-seven at the time. It was good to have the opportunity to blow off a little steam. After a couple of hours, he hugged Mia goodbye and was on his way to the Beverly Hills Hotel.
When he got to the Beverly Hills, he found another of Frank’s wives in a very good mood. “Ava was lit,” he recalled later. “Very happy, having already had a few cocktails after the Basie show. She looked wonderful, though. We went down to the Polo Lounge, ordered margaritas. Ava and I ordered guacamole and Fritos at the bar, and after a couple more margaritas, I felt I had enough information to report back to Mr. S. that she was all good—no change there. I left her and then made my way back to the Beverly Hills mansion. I hit the sack, woke up the next morning, got in my car, and headed back to Palm Springs.”
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