B009HOTHPE EBOK

by Paul Anka

  One night, Carson went to Jilly’s, either thinking Sinatra was going to be there or because he wanted to be in that kind of buzz. Carson was fascinated by anything to do with Sinatra, but Sinatra never paid any attention to him at all. He went in there on occasion; he’d play drums or drink at the bar. When Carson got blitzed, he was a real bird dog with women. So there he is this one Friday; he’d been drinking heavily prior to going there, and he spotted some girls at the bar and started pinching them on the ass. Unbeknownst to him, these women, known in the parlance of the day as side dishes, were the girlfriends of mob guys—who, as it happened were in the back room of the club. When they caught wind of Carson hitting on their women they came out, yanked him off his bar stool, and threw him down a small flight of stairs and started kicking the living daylights out of him. They probably would have injured him really badly if Jilly hadn’t run downstairs and called the guys off. Jilly probably saved Carson’s life that night.

  The crowd Sinatra hung with were a bunch of wild guys. They’d laugh and drink and throw cherry bombs under the table, they’d explode and the women would be screaming. Games, games, games.

  Frank had a very interesting double side to him. When he was with people like Anne and I he was well behaved and really nice. When he was with his mob-type friends, he was a more rough and tough. You never knew which you were getting with him.

  I was with Frank and a bunch of guys one night in Florida. We were hanging out and at some point decided to go up to his room. Frank was sitting there; a dark cloud came over him. Something pissed him off. I knew what it was. The FBI was bugging Frank’s room. He’d go in his suite and there’d be holes all over the walls and the floorboards because the feds were bugging him. Frank would have a guy there to redo the phones. Soon there were holes all over the place from disconnecting phones and installing new ones, planting bugs, and so on. He said, “Jilly. Get rid of this shit.” Jilly starts taking all the furniture from the penthouse and throwing it onto the beach. This is all happening in the middle of the night. The next day a couple of little old Jewish ladies are walking along and see all this stuff—tables, carpets, chairs, lamps all over the beach and they’re asking, “What happened here, Sadie? There was a storm we slept through, maybe?”

  There was a great old-time doctor named Max Som out of New York. He was the doctor’s doctor for throats. He looked after me and Sinatra and everybody. A dear guy from New York. He always said to me, “Paul, whatever you do, do not smoke. It is the worst thing for the throat.” All of the guys I knew that were singers who smoked ultimately got cancer.

  I’ve never been a smoker, and after a couple of exposures to the anatomies of heavy smokers I’m glad I never developed the habit. My innate curiosity from time to time drove me to watch operations and autopsies on cadavers. Dr. Michael Hogan and his wife Margo were dear friends of Anne and mine. On one occasion he let me go to New York Hospital with him and gown up. Here I am, all five feet six inches of me, wrapped up in a gown that doesn’t fit, watching a cancer operation. They’re cutting someone open for lung cancer. When the bodies were cut open the smell was awful and I would see the black lungs of heavy smokers. I saw with my own eyes what smoking could do and, if nothing else, this stopped me from ever smoking.

  Max Som also taught me to get as much steam as you can get on your vocal chords. That became a part of my regime from 1960 on. Steam, steam, steam and no smoking. It puts moisture on them and shrinks them. If there’s no steam room you used to boil some water in a steam kettle and put a towel over your head. You have to take care of those vocal chords. I used to say those two square inches on my neck—that’s my business. I travel with steam kettles that don’t turn off, throw a towel over my head, and suck in the steam, keeping my vocal chords moist.

  The other thing about steam rooms is that they’re great for detoxing, getting the poisons out. The Vegas Rat Pack were all jammed out of their brains with the booze and the cigarettes, and the steam oozed the booze out. I’ve been doing that since 1960—I’m as steamed as a Great Neck clam.

  When I first got to Vegas, Sinatra used to tease me that I had too much hair. Little did he know how long pop singers’ hair was going to get when the British Invasion came along. I think Frank was just jealous because he didn’t have any hair—he wore a toupee. He was always very opinionated about your appearance; unruly hair and scruffy clothes and all of that would enrage him. He hated sloppiness. At his record label he demanded that everyone’s shoes be polished to a high shine. Frank always projected a tough-guy image but he was actually very vulnerable. He was in a lot of pain after he broke up with Ava Gardner. Now, Frank could be very blunt. He would tell you straight out if he did not like something. For instance, he hated strong smells, especially perfume.

  Case in point—he was in Europe filming the movie The Pride and Passion with Sophia Loren and Cary Grant. There he was on a set pining for Ava, in a pair of tights pulling a cannon up a hill. He wanted off the film as quick as he could get out. Ava, in Spain, was madly in love with a bullfighter and Frank was not happy. One night at a bar with the group, he met a beautiful German girl, who was living with her mother. So it obviously became very difficult for him to get together with her. He got her phone number.

  When he got back home to the U.S. after the film shoot, all of his buddies planned a trip to go to Hawaii. Frank remembered the girl from Germany, gave Jimmy Van Heusen the phone number and he arranged to fly the girl over to meet them in Honolulu at the Kahala Hilton. They flew her from Germany to New York. One of the guys took her shopping, bought her new luggage, jewelry, perfume and decked her out. After they got her trousseau together they flew her to Hawaii. Everyone is up in the suite playing gin—Frank is by the window waiting like a little boy. Sarge Weiss, who worked with Frank, is in charge of picking up the German girl and bringing her to the hotel. The bellman calls us to say that she has arrived; she is on her way to the room. There is a knock on the door and she walks in with her luggage. Frank looked at her and his eyes lit up. Keep in mind he hated strong smells. She came up to him, hugged him, said hello Mr. Sinatra, I am so glad to see you again. He looked at her and sniffed her like a dog. “What is that?” he said. Between the smell of her body odor from the long trip and the strong perfume she had on—it was wicked. “Get her the fuck out of here” he said—and that was that. My friend Jerry Weintraub was there, and said she was off the island in three hours.

  Sinatra was notoriously unpredictable: You never knew where you would end up; you always went with what he was doing. If you went to dinner with Frank, you took your passport. You never knew what was going to happen. If he sat in the car too long, he would turn around and go back. At a stadium, the audience would be drifting in, a thousand people still coming in and finding their places, but the show had to start. Frank wouldn’t wait till they sat down, he would just start the show. It was like he was running an airline, this guy.

  There was a guy over at Warner Bros. Records, Stan Cornyn, who wrote great liner notes, almost poetic, and on one of Frank’s albums he came up with the phrase, “Old Blue Eyes” and it stuck. That came later in his career, when he was a legend. But Frank went through bad periods. He was counted out more than once. During one of those bad spots he was suffering a serious bout and then, as I said, the Ava Gardner breakup wrecked him. That was a very turbulent time in his life. Then came the Mia Farrow period. He went very “flower power” during that phase. That was an interesting transformation for someone as cool as he was but it ended pretty quickly. He has had some major women, but at the end of the day he said he never understood them. He was just as happy going to bed with a hooker or whoever Jimmy would get him. And, to be honest, it is very hard understanding women. Frank never got it. But then again why would he? When Sigmund Freud was asked on his deathbed was there anything in his life of studying human nature he hadn’t solved, he said “Yes, I could never figure out what women want.”

  Frank and his women—that was always a big mystery
. There was a huge buzz when Sinatra got engaged to Juliet Prowse in 1962. Nobody could figure it out. They were at the opposite end of the pole and no one got the fit. Jilly would tell me he never understood it, especially since she was pretty ballsy and aggressive, not exactly Frank’s type. In the ’60s, I’d see her often and hear the stories and when I was performing at the same clubs as Frank, such as the Fontainebleau in Florida, another mob stop, I’d hear Sinatra’s side.

  In 1967, Frank was down in Florida filming Lady in Cement during the day and working at the Fontainebleau at night. He was uptight about breaking up with Mia Farrow. She was into all that yoga and Zen Buddhism and he wanted nothing to do with that. I remember one dinner we all attended at the Fontainebleau with Mia Farrow when it was obvious their marriage was coming to an end—you could tell they had been fighting from morning to night and you could feel the tension at the table. Then she just left town. They were divorced in August 1968, the year that Sam Giancana fled to Mexico.

  Jilly Rizzo told me about the Jacqueline Onassis connection with Frank. In one of our hangs at the bar Frank told me he hated the way Onassis treated her. Frank always had a hot nut for Jackie O and apparently they started a dialogue in the summer of 1975. He invited her to his opening show in New York. Jilly, in his cute little way, told me he had to bring her to the Uris Theatre—what happened between Frank and Jackie we’ll never know. Frank never would kiss and tell, but flying back with him to Philly on his Learjet I could see it was going nowhere with Jackie. I remember sitting around drinking at Patsy’s or Jilly’s with Frank, and it always came out how much he loved Ava Gardner.

  He started dating Barbara Marx, who had been a showgirl at the Riviera and had married Zeppo, one of the Marx brothers. I believe it was in 1976 that he proposed to Barbara Marx, a match which we all celebrated because it brought some stability into his life. You could see a change in Frank at age sixty—not slowing down exactly, but wanting more of a peaceful existence. But his mother Dolly was not thrilled about her future daughter-in-law, and from what I understood, neither were his children. Barbara unfortunately fell into that gold-digger category as far as they were concerned. Later that same year they announced their wedding and got married in July 1976.

  By the early ’80s those of us around him realized his marriage to Barbara was strained. Frank’s lawyer Mickey Rudin, one night at dinner, told me every time they would fight Frank would spend a lot of money on Barbara by giving her jewelry. He began to name his tours after the big jewelry houses. There was the Tiffany Tour, the Cartier Tour, the Van Cleef Tour, etc. Throughout the ’80s, Frank kept on smoking, kept drinking. Moderation was not the way for Frank and Sammy.

  I’ve seen Sinatra with the greatest women in the world and he was never happy. I was with him one night in Atlantic City. This was after his show at Steve Wynn’s Golden Nugget, and everybody was sitting around the restaurant, drinking, talking, congratulating Frank on a great performance. He was married to Barbara Sinatra at the time. She had just bought one of these new Gucci purses. It was egg shaped and all gold, like a football, and was all the rage then, but she was having trouble opening it because the clasp was very precisely fitted. “Francis, I can’t open my purse,” she said. Frank leaned over and said, “What the hell’s the matter with you?” “Francis,” she repeated, “I was just saying I’m having a problem opening my purse; can you give it a try?” This went on for a while. Keep in mind he’s been drinking—and that was always a powder keg. Eventually, he said, “Give me the fucking purse.” He picked it up over his head and went bang! He slammed it on the table, the clasp opened and everything in the bag flew all over the restaurant. He could be a tough guy to hang with.

  There were a few unusual things about Frank’s character that are surprising given who he was and the way people saw him as the supreme swinger. Sinatra was sophisticated and educated in a way you wouldn’t expect. He was a big reader, for one thing. And beneath all the swagger, he was insecure. He always felt inferior to all the socialites he went out with. He wanted to educate himself so he could keep up with people he knew, like Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House. Frank was very different from someone like Elvis. Elvis just read self-help and spiritualist books, and had no real curiosity about the world. But as I said, Frank was a big reader. He socialized. He wanted to better himself even though he felt inferior to those people. He read as much as he could so that he could participate and get involved. He wanted to learn. He was very conversant with whatever was in the air. He was a lot more social than Elvis; he liked to go out. Frank starved for an audience. He was a totally different creature from Elvis, although the ironies and the paradoxes of life prevailed, and Elvis was always fascinated by Frank—even by Frank’s rejection of him.

  In January 1977, I remember one night around five o’clock getting a call from Sid Gathrid, the head of entertainment at Caesars, saying Frank Sinatra’s mother, Dolly, had been in a plane crash. She’d been flying in to see him. Dolly so hated Sinatra’s new wife, Barbara, she had refused to fly in the same plane with her. Frank never blamed Barbara for this freak accident, but he tormented himself over it for the rest of his life.

  The jet company that we all used picked up Dolly in Palm Springs, but that night they were using two rookie pilots and these guys lost their bearings—it was bad weather—and the plane crashed right into the mountains, and she and her companion were killed. Gathrid called me and said, “We’ve got problems. Frank thought you could help out, do the show?” I told Gathrid I would do anything for Frank and his family. The answer was yes. They sent a plane for me and I flew down that night and filled in for Sinatra. I’ll never forget the somber feeling in the place. The next day Frank wrote me a lovely little note which closed with, “At the slightest provocation just call me and I’ll be there. If anybody ever hurts you, just call me, kid.”

  Sinatra clung to his tough-guy image, but he was a soft man when you sat down and talked to him because many of his insecurities came out. It’s hard, I know, to believe in such a thing as a soft Sinatra, but that’s the way he was. At times.

  Bobby Darin and I were lucky we got to hang with these guys. There was nothing else like it; that was the scene. The way Sinatra sang and what he represented was exhilarating and intimidating. Ever since he got up in front of a swing orchestra he made it difficult, everybody came second. He knew how to do that thing. It’s true he abused his power, he could be downright nasty. When Frank started drinking, and if things didn’t go his way he could be mean. The combustible mixture started with Jack Daniel’s, then he’d move on to red wine, and when he got to the martinis—watch out! Get out of town. You were dead. He could be a moody drunk; insulted people. He did it to Sammy, he did it to any number of other people, but he never did it to me. He was a man’s man, and if he liked you, you put up with the bullshit. Frank stood up for civil rights, and all of that, too. We were all dead against any kind of racial prejudice from the early sixties on. We all fought to get the black performers equality.

  Frank liked to drink and smoke a little weed but he never got into cocaine or any of that stuff. Still, for a guy who frequented hookers and hung out with gangsters, he could get on his high horse about other people’s behavior.

  A famous French movie star checked into the Sands. He was a good-looking guy; I’d met him a number of times in Paris but he was very arrogant and obnoxious. He’s bragging what a big cocksman he is. At one point, he had two showgirls from the Sands sent over to his villa to feed his ego and he started getting abusive. Word got out. Frank heard about it and something about this guy got in Sinatra’s craw. “This cheap, lousy French actor and two of our beautiful broads!” The two showgirls were quite capable of taking care of themselves, however. In the Frenchman’s villa they’d gotten so mad with the guy, they’d tied him up, tied his arms and his legs to the bed. Then they called down and told the manager what had happened. For good measure, Frank had the bellmen come up and take the Frenchman and the bed with the guy in
it and throw it and him into the shallow end of the pool.

  * * *

  We lived in Vegas for eight and a half years and Anne mostly hated it. One of the few things she liked was Elvis. She had such a crush on Elvis, they got to be friends. She would put the kids to bed, get dressed up, go with her girlfriend, and see Elvis’s show twenty-five times in a row or something. Elvis was sweet to her. He would always come up to her table and say, “Hello, there!” and smile and give her a hug and a kiss. Then we would go backstage and hang out with him, so that was fun for her. Other than that she hated it. The vulgarity, crassness. She felt she just didn’t belong. Just very out of sync with the whole routine.

  You wouldn’t see Elvis in a public restaurant the way you’d see Frank almost any night of the week holding forth at a table full of friends. Ever. That kind of thing didn’t interest him. Elvis was scared to death to do that. He thought he had to be Elvis all the time and he wasn’t always sure who that was. You can’t do that—you can’t be Elvis twenty-four hours a day. If you are smart about it, you separate your persona from all the other stuff so that you can have some kind of a life.

  There was one way in which Elvis and Frank were similar: they were both very generous. Frank never took a penny for his charity work; many other performers who say they do benefits actually get paid, some up to a million bucks, but not Frank. It’s been estimated that over his career Sinatra helped raise more than $1 billion for charitable organizations around the world.

  I only really got to know Elvis well near the end of his life. You only had to hang out with him for a few minutes to know he was out of control. It’s like the theory of chaos; you can apply it to the atom or you can apply it to human behavior. When one link drops in the chain, the domino effect of chaos takes over. It’s the same in life. You have to prevent any semblance of chaos in your life for too long because it just has an incredibly destructive impact. If it’s out of control it’s going to wreck everything. And I saw it happen so graphically right before my eyes after he came into Vegas. I’d met him prior to that because we were on RCA Victor together. He would show up, this incredible God-like figure. He had everything. And the voice—what a great voice he had!