B009HOTHPE EBOK (29 page)

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.

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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!

In Vegas, we’d meet and we’d talk. We’d talk about everything: music and girls and movies. You’d sit there with him drinking and there’d be all these guys around him, so it was mainly small talk: bullshit, songs, music,
buh buh buh buh buh
. Slowly he started coming over to see my show; he’d sit up there and I’d come back after the show and we’d talk music. And then all of a sudden he started growing out of his skin. There seemed to be a different Elvis; you saw this guy gradually becoming disfigured. What I’ve discovered is that all of us have our natural face and when you go too far with weight, you stretch your skin to the point where you no longer have your real face anymore. If you’re a little overweight it’s livable—most of the world’s overweight—but Elvis was way beyond that.

And his whole thing near the end with me was very disturbing, with all his graciousness and all he was going through. “My Way” meant so much to him as a song, he was going to do it. And I’d say, “Elvis, it’s not really your kind of song.” And he’d say, “Nooo, Paulie, but those words, they mean so much to me. Boy, I want to do that song one day.” It was one of the last songs he recorded. In the end, that song and those words had resonance for him but not in the way I intended. Basically, given Elvis’s pathetic state at the end, it was in the opposite sense that the words had had for Sinatra. There was nothing defiant or heroic about Elvis at that point.

It was the same way he lived his life—he destroyed himself. Just went too far. He became another statistic. Life is about construction and destruction. It’s all in that balance, everything we see when we can look far enough. When you lose track of that, you self-destruct. And that’s what happened to my talented friend.

I was in Vegas, got up, turned on the news. Elvis Presley—gone. I cried that day. He was a cool guy, a nice man, but was too young to go. Really blew it.

I got to know Elvis pretty extensively when he first started coming to Vegas. He would come over to Caesars Palace, see the show, come over and visit, sit backstage. Through that whole evolution, from when he hit town to when things started going bad for him, and where he started losing control, I would sit with him and just try to tell him, “Man, you’ve got to get it together, you can’t live this twilight half life. Get ahold of this situation or it’s going to pull you under.” But he couldn’t—would usually only see me in his suite.

His social terror was extreme. I’d say, “Elvis why don’t we just go out to dinner, go for a walk?” “Oh, no!” He was terrified of that. You’d go over to his hotel—we both worked the Hilton—and he’d have aluminum foil on the windows; he never wanted to see the daylight. He’d go up to Vail, Colorado, and I’d be up there with my family skiing—in the daylight. Elvis wouldn’t get up until the sun went down, and only then would he go up on the mountain with the floodlights turned on, to snowmobile. He was that kind of creature. Nice guy, but so locked in that prison of celebrity, of who he was, and his image, the person inside shriveled up. Sometimes you sat and talked to him and it was as if he were already gone. You couldn’t save him.

Elvis imprisoned himself, and lived in a perpetual night. And then there were the guns. He hated Robert Goulet, and every time he was on TV, Elvis would shoot the television. There were bullet holes all over the room. He was shooting at ghosts and in the end became one himself.

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It must have been something about the air in those casinos that kept affecting Sinatra now and then that got him doing crazy stuff well into the ’70s. He never learned. Frank was King Frank and he thought the rules simply didn’t apply to him. I was there the night this casino boss Sandy Waterman pulled a gun on Sinatra in the casino. After the incident, in the Sands coffee shop with Carl Cohen, I thought I had seen it all.

A few weeks earlier Sinatra and his neighbor Danny Schwartz won $2 million at Caesars’ baccarat table. This particular night Sinatra, gambling on his own, was playing $8,000 a hand and ended up in debt to the casino to the tune of $400,000. Although he still had a handful of white $500 chips, he demanded another $25,000 worth of markers, but was refused. Sinatra flew into a rage, became abusive, insulting the dealer with vile language and threatening them with losing their jobs.

The pit boss called Caesars executive vice president Sandy Waterman, who tried to reason with him: “C’mon, Frank, you and Dan just won two million a few weeks ago. You took it with you. Now you owe us. The boys want their money.” Frank threw his white chips in Waterman’s face and slapped him across the forehead. At that point the generally cool Waterman lost it. He went to his suite and returned with a loaded gun which he pointed at Sinatra’s head. “Listen, you! If you ever lay a hand on me again, I’ll put a bullet through your head.” Frank dismissed it, saying that playing with guns went out with Humphrey Bogart movies. Sinatra’s sidekick Jilly managed to knock Waterman’s gun to the floor. Waterman, afraid for his life, ran to the cashier’s room to escape from Sinatra’s rage. Frank tried to push his way through the door, but Sinatra’s left arm—in a sling from a recent vein surgery—got crushed in the door and blood started spurting everywhere. Sinatra was rushed to his third-floor suite, where a doctor was sent for.

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I’d done the theme for
The Longest Day,
I’m doing Vegas, touring Europe, I’ve got “A Steel Guitar and a Glass of Wine” and “Love Me Warm and Tender” in the charts—I’m feeling good about myself. Okay, I have to figure out what I’m going to do next. I’m at a critical juncture here. Sure, I was working steadily, but I knew it could all go very wrong—because when hard rock hit, the venues all changed again. I still had my Vegas base, thank God, and I was still getting gigs out there. But a few years, 1962 to 1966, were hard. Everybody was waiting for that next something from me, and that only came with “My Way” in 1967. What I was writing wasn’t all that different from all the other stuff I’d written and I knew it. I hadn’t really crossed over that line into new territory. “My Way” changed everything, the whole feeling about me shifted. It gave me a new prestige and respectability. Everyone started saying, “Okay, there’s some legs here, this is something entirely different, this is Anka Mach Two.”

As I got to know Sinatra and hung out with him through the years, he’d always joke with me about writing him a song. I was always very intimidated by that because I didn’t have the balls to give him “Lonely Boy” or whatever else I was writing at the time—what would he do with that stuff anyway? I’d heard him when we were hanging, ranting on about mindless rock ’n’ roll and moronic rock ’n’ rollers. How was I going to write something for him that he’d conceivably want to record?

*   *   *

The first time I met Sinatra was at Trader Vic’s, it must have been 1958; he was sitting at the next table. Sinatra hated rock ’n’ roll, and dismissed it as “written for the most part by cretinous goons” and went on to say that by means of its “almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.” But Frank liked me—and I wasn’t exactly a hard rocker, either. Maybe my clergyman’s answer to rock ’n’ roll was less threatening to him than the guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll of Elvis and Chuck Berry.