Mr. S (10 page)

Maybe for Mr. S, life did begin at forty, for this was about the time he started sending me down to Tijuana on cherry bomb runs. I would go south of the border and bring back entire trunkloads of
explosives and fireworks, which he would set off in his friends’ shoes, in their toilets, under their beds, whenever and wherever they would least expect it. “The Hoboken Bomber strikes again!” he would exult with as much glee as if he had connected with one of the many girls of his fevered dreams.

Mr. S’s problem, if you could call it a problem, was that he was like a hyperkinetic kid. Today they’d give him Ritalin. He couldn’t sit still, and he couldn’t be alone. Thus he always needed a girl, and she didn’t have to be famous. First he’d go for his leading lady. If she wasn’t free, he’d try some famous ex, like Lana Turner, whom he’d dated in the forties, for old times. Then he’d work his way down the food chain, starting with the starlets, then the hookers, and, if all else failed, he’d call Peggy Lee, who lived down the block. The name of the game was Dialing for Pussy, and Mr. S played it every night, except when he was “in training” for an album. Then he was a monk. Movies didn’t count. He’d astonish his costars by showing up on the set at seven
A.M
. straight from some all-nighter, dressed in his tux, his tie undone, and his whisker stubble starting to show, duck into makeup, and come out an hour later fresh as a daisy and in perfect control of his part. Just don’t ask him to do a second take.

Mr. S got his one-take philosophy of acting from Boris Karloff. Boris Karloff? Frankenstein? Yes. Sinatra had been a huge Karloff fan as a kid in Hoboken and was deeply honored to have “the Mummy” as his friend. In the thespian department, Mr. S put Karloff up there with the Barrymores. The only stars in Hollywood he may have admired as much were Bogart and Fred Astaire. He had met the horror icon on a studio lot in the late forties and had been bowled over by what an English gentleman he was. Karloff’s real name was William Henry Pratt and his two great passions in life were cricket and gardening, not torture and murder. Whenever Karloff came over to visit Sinatra and to mentor him on roles he was considering by
having Mr. S read lines for him to see how they sounded, he’d bring the most beautiful bouquets of freshly picked flowers. Mr. S never suggested this act of hospitality was a “fag thing,” as he would have if any other male had made the same gesture. Karloff’s acting philosophy, in a nutshell, was simple: “Say your lines. Hit your mark. Get out.” But Sinatra embraced this as the oracle of a legend and took it to heart. No multiple takes for him. In time, he became considered an efficient, naturalistic, often excellent actor. Whenever he was praised and asked how he learned to act, he didn’t say Lee Strasberg or Stella Adler or Stanislavsky, but gave all the credit to Old Frankenstein.

I was never in the bedroom with Frank and his ladies, but I heard from a lot of them afterwards, though rarely from him. He was a true gent and didn’t kiss and tell, unless it was really bad—or really good. One actress, Jeannie Carmen, got so annoyed on a would-be romantic weekend in Palm Springs that she insisted that she go back to L.A. a day early. A disappointed Mr. S dispatched me to drive her, and, man, did I get an earful. Jeannie Carmen was a classic blond starlet and pinup girl with one of the most perfect figures in Hollywood. Ava Gardner once described her as “a pale [as in blond] imitation of myself,” which Jeannie took as an enormous compliment. She also had an unusual skill, as a trick-shot golfer. She would travel around the country and appear on television, this gorgeous girl doing these impossible shots. Hole-in-one-Jeannie, we’d call her. With a skill like hers, she was naturally in hot demand in golf-crazy Palm Springs. Sinatra only played at playing golf, but he really liked Jeannie, whom he dated both when he was down, and after he was up again. He appreciated her loyalty so much he bought her a Chrysler convertible, which wasn’t that unusual a gift for him to give once he was rich again. He was the master of the grand gesture.

Jeannie both loved Frank and hated him. “All he does is whine
about Ava,” she whined, echoing a complaint by many other lovers that, once the deed was done, the postcoital pillow talk was a never-ending obsession about the one who got away. Otherwise, she enjoyed going to bed with Mr. S, whom she rated as one of the lords of foreplay, a great kisser and an even better cuddler and hand-holder, sentiments that many other of Sinatra’s conquests repeated to me over the years. Jeannie Carmen worshipped Mr. S’s hands, which were always perfectly manicured and baby soft. He wasn’t exactly doing heavy lifting, other than skirts, with them. His “equipment” was, with her and others, a conversation piece. “I thought he was bending down to scratch his
knee,
” she marveled. He had no fetishes in particular. “The only place he liked lingerie was on the floor,” Jeannie told me. He did enjoy being woken up, at any hour, with a surprise blow job, but woe betide any woman who disturbed his precious sleep for any other reason. I can’t tell you how many calls I got from him in the middle of the night, screaming, “Come and get this bitch outta here.” Among his other cardinal sins were wearing too much perfume, of almost any brand. His own cologne, Coty’s “Jungle Gardenia,” he wore in the tiniest amounts. Jeannie and others would tell me how Mr. S liked to talk gangster slang in bed, “smack this one, smack that one,” “put the arm on,” “get it in the neck,” “ass is grass,” “cement shoes,” Godfather stuff, narrating the grisly tortures he had in mind for all his enemies. I would have liked to hear what he had dreamed up for Sam Spiegel.

This particular weekend, Mr. S had gotten very drunk. When that happened, he could get both nasty and self-pitying, and Jeannie couldn’t take it. But she would come back, and he would take her back, and they stayed sexually friendly for many years. When he would train those hypnotic blue eyes on her, or anyone else, there was that magic moment when a woman was
the
woman, the only
woman, and that was irresistible. In the early sixties, Jeannie, Marilyn Monroe, and I all ended up in the same apartment complex on Doheny Drive and had a different set of adventures.

By far the most exciting thing that happened in the Alejo house during my early tenure, the thing that made me realize I truly was not in Kansas anymore, occurred when Mr. S wasn’t even there. As with Ava, my boss was ultragenerous with his possessions. He would readily lend his house to anyone, even if he barely knew the object of his largesse. The case in point here was Minna Wallis, the fiftyish homely sister of mega producer Hal Wallis, who as production chief at Warners had been responsible for such masterpieces as
Casablanca
and
The Maltese Falcon,
and as an independent had produced the Martin and Lewis comedies and would produce all the Elvis Presley films. Because of her brother’s success, Minna Wallis was A-list, part of the Goetz charmed circle and someone Mr. S, who was admittedly a social climber, wanted to cultivate. Mi casa, su casa. And my valet, your valet. He sent me down to Palm Springs to prepare the house for her and whomever she happened to bring. Boy, was I unprepared when Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo showed up. Both women were in their fifties, and neither had made a film for years. As far as celebrity sightings could be rated, Garbo, who had “wanted to be alone” for over a decade, was by far number one, and Dietrich wasn’t far off.

The two European superstars couldn’t have been more natural, no makeup, no airs, no frills. Garbo had some weird dietary requests, no dairy, no animal protein, just exotic organic grains and stuff (now the regimen is known as “vegan” and very popular among star and model types). These edibles she had learned about through her friend, Beverly Hills’s first celebrity nutritionist, Gaylord Hauser, but at that time no grocery store in Palm Springs had ever heard of them. I had to make a mad run back to L.A. and Jurgensen’s, which had
everything, to keep the ladies happy. When I returned that evening, they couldn’t have been happier. Greta and Marlene were in the pool, completely naked, and Minna Wallis was lying on a chaise in a Moroccan caftan, drinking champagne and watching them like a hawk. They were oblivious to her, and to me. I slipped into the house and into my room so as not to spoil their party, though I couldn’t resist peeping through the blinds. What mortal could? I rarely heard Garbo talk, but I did hear Garbo laugh. She was having a wonderful time, giggling, splashing Minna, dunking Marlene under water. Then fun turned to heat. Marlene pulled Greta into what seemed like a playful embrace, which ended up in a kiss. They got out of the pool, but didn’t dress. They savored the privacy, the freedom, the nighttime desert warmth.

Marlene lit up a cigarette, which she passed to Greta. They each took long drags, intercut with long, pregnant looks at each other. Then Greta sprawled out on a chaise, and Marlene lay down beside her, looking up at the constellations in the crystal-clear desert sky. Minna wouldn’t leave them alone, but they didn’t seem to care. If she liked to watch, let her watch. Marlene was the aggressor. She kissed Greta’s lips, she stroked her, she began to slither down Greta’s long slender frame. And then a coyote began to howl. The ladies jumped in fright and retreated into the house, and the best I could do was to serve them yogurt, steel-cut oatmeal, and organic honey for breakfast the morning after. But at this point, even before Mr. S made the cover of
Time
a few months hence, I had no doubt that I had the coolest job in the world.

I
F
I thought that winning the Oscar was the ultimate for Mr. S, I was wrong. Getting on the cover of
Time
was an even higher pinnacle of accomplishment. That
Time
cover, combined with his being featured on the prestigious Edward R. Murrow television show
Person to Person,
was the
Good Housekeeping
seal of approval in American life in 1956. The Oscar,
Time
, and Murrow formed a magical anti-vampire crucifix that would do more than protect Mr. S from the bloodsuckers of Hollywood; this figurative talisman would also convert the naysayers into idolators. In the highest echelon of American life, Frank Sinatra was now a made man, in the best sense of the term. Yet, strangely enough, just when he had a free pass to the halls of power and prestige, he sought the company of a different sort of “made men,” the folk heroes of his youth and, to be fair, the only people
who had not forsaken him when he was so recently down and nearly out. Now he was high and mighty. He could consort with anyone he wanted. Like any conquering hero whose most triumphant journey is back to his roots, to “show ’em” what he had accomplished against all odds, in the mid-1950s Frank Sinatra’s favorite journey was not around the world whose imagination he had captivated but back to Hoboken.

To go with his new life, Mr. S had bought a new home up on Bowmont Drive, off Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills. The early 1956 Murrow interview was a sort of public housewarming at this sprawling Japanese-style estate, which Hollywood people called “the Teahouse,” after the hit Broadway play
The Teahouse of the August Moon,
and those who really knew what was going on called it the Whorehouse of the August Moon. But that wasn’t Ed Murrow stuff. And neither was I. I was all excited about getting my fifteen minutes, or more likely fifteen seconds, of fame as valet to the Biggest Star in the World. I got a special white jacket, got my hair cut, was looking quite sharp, if I might say so myself.

But when all the television cameras began to arrive that day to do the live shoot (Murrow stayed in the studio in New York, smoking his cigarette; this was all high-tech for the period.), I saw two Asian guys, also in white butler coats, arrive at the house. They looked as though they had come from Central Casting, and I was close to right. Gloria Lovell had hired them from some domestic agency for the day. One was Filipino, the other from Japan. I assumed they were there to serve drinks and food to the
Person to Person
crew. Then Mr. S took me aside and broke the bad news. I wasn’t going to be on the show. What? I was crushed. I felt as bad as Sinatra did when he lost the Terry Malloy part. “Are you ashamed of me, boss?” I couldn’t stop my hurt self from blurting out.

“Just the opposite, George,” he said. He chuckled at how badly I
had misread the situation. “If you’re on that show tonight, you’ll be working for Jules Stein tomorrow. I can’t risk losing you.” Valet snatching was a crime that was rife in Beverly Hills. If I was on national TV, I would instantly achieve major status as blue-chip help, and Mr. S didn’t want to lose me to some blue-chip mogul like Stein, the head of MCA and a social lion on the same level as the Goetzes. To salve my wounds, he doubled my salary, to $300 a week. He also gave me an envelope containing ten brand-new $100 bills. It was a small fortune in 1956, though I still would have preferred saying hello on the air to the great Ed Murrow.

Even if the show were live, it somehow seemed as fake and staged as the Asian houseboys. There was the signed photograph from Franklin D. Roosevelt and the award from the Al Jolson chapter of B’nai B’rith and the comment from Mr. S that, in terms of stage fright, the toughest number he ever had to do was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Polo Grounds. Then again, I shouldn’t have expected Ed Murrow zooming in on Mr. S pouring Jack Daniel’s for Sam Giancana with Judy Campbell draped over the couch. In plain and simple terms: Frank Sinatra
loved
gangsters, or at least the world they lived in, just as most Americans have had a fascination with this world from
Little Caesar
to
The Godfather
to
The Sopranos.
The big difference was that Mr. S could get a lot closer to the flame than the rest of us. In fact, aside from the so-called gangsters that were Sinatra’s friends and at least honorary Godfathers, many of his close pals in show business were also somehow gang-related.

Humphrey Bogart
looked
and
sounded
like a hoodlum even if he wasn’t one. George Raft, a dear Sinatra ally, the guy who gave me his dancing shoes, went way back with the mob, as far back as Al Capone. Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. had been working in mob joints for years. Where
else,
as Sinatra would wonder, was a guy supposed to sing? If anything, Dean embraced the mob even more
strongly than Mr. S, and Sammy embraced anything Mr. S embraced, maybe even harder. For all his genius and all his courage, when around Mr. S, Sammy would act like the Stepin Fetchit of the footlights. That’s not really fair, because the one thing Sammy never played to was any kind of black stereotype. In fact, he was just the opposite. If he were performing in London Sammy would develop an aristocratic British accent that was more perfect than the Duke of Edinburgh’s. He sounded like Noël Coward. But that was what bothered me. Sammy was always
trying
so hard to please everyone, he was like a court jester, even more of a servant than I was. He may have been the most exciting, entertaining servant in the world, but still a servant. By playing the jester, Sammy made Mr. S feel even more the king than he already did, and maybe this was all part of a Machiavellian plan to someday usurp the throne. Yet while Sammy played this “yes, master” game, until I got to know him better and saw that it may have been an aspect of his brilliant act, he was the only person in Mr. S’s world who made me aware of being black, and made me feel second-class for it. Actually, Joseph Kennedy, JFK’s father, made me feel black, too—like a Black Panther, who wanted to kill that racist bastard. But later about him.

Sammy was even more insecure than Mr. S about his lack of education. He basically begged people to teach him what they knew, whether singing from Sinatra, jokes from Rickles, boozing from Dean, acting from Eddie Robinson. He was a little hangdog acolyte. His personality cried out, “Help me!” Nobody who met him could resist. And nobody who ever taught him anything ever had a smarter student. He was the quickest study I’d ever seen. He could do dead-on imitations of anyone, from Cary Grant to Jimmy Cagney to Marilyn Monroe to Judy Garland. He actually would have made a great female impersonator. The only person Sammy was more solicitous of than Mr. S was Sam Giancana. Sammy would literally kiss the ring of
this top
capo,
though it may have been more out of genuine respect and gratitude for the gigs Giancana had gotten him than the fear he seemed to feel for Mr. S. I say fear, but I must also say love, for Mr. S had helped save both Sammy’s life and his career after his accident, and Sammy would have eternal gratitude for that. But Sammy was no saint. He could be a naughty boy, as we saw in his self-promotional episode with Ava Gardner in
Ebony.
Sammy may even have had designs on Ava, for he was the horniest of guys and Ava was crazy about him. I think Sammy felt secretly guilty that he fantasized about replacing Mr. S as the King of Entertainment, and his obsequious behavior was compensation for his massive ambition.

You might have thought Sammy and I would have bonded as brothers, but we didn’t. He was always polite, but distant, as if there was a certain pressure for him to get down with me. I think I made him uncomfortable. One black in the Clan was enough. I was much closer to Sammy’s valet, a black guy from Watts we all called Murphy. I’m not sure whether that was his first name or his last. He was just Murphy, like Liberace or Fabian or Valentino. His job made mine look laid-back. Even if Sammy were just doing a weekend in Vegas, he’d carry seventeen or eighteen big suitcases of clothes. Mr. S, on the other hand, liked to travel light, one suitcase, one hanging bag, one briefcase. That was it.

Sammy was the most fabulous dresser. He was always totally turned out. He didn’t know the meaning of “casual.” Even his lounge wear was theatrical, the silk robes, the Chinese pajamas, the ascots. Whenever Sammy would sit down and talk to me, I felt as if I was with the pope, or rather the chief rabbi of Jerusalem. Sammy took his Judaism very seriously. He observed every holiday, every ritual. He said it gave him the grounding, the moral center that he needed. It was Sammy who eventually got me interested in my long-lost Jewish roots. Whatever Sammy talked about, whether religion or golf, he
could turn you on to it. He was a real pied piper. He was so on, so brilliant, even alone with me. If he had you in his presence for ten minutes, he’d have you for life.

As for Dean, he knew what he owed the mob guys, if that’s what they were, but he was cool about it, just as he was cool about everything else. Dean simply Didn’t Give a Shit about anything, except maybe golf. He was completely relaxed, which may have had something to do with his massive consumption of alcohol, far, far greater than that of Mr. S, who was a teetotaler by comparison. But Dean never got nasty; he got sleepy. He had a mobster’s coolness, the laid-back nonobliviousness of a seasoned hit man. One thing that did make Dean a little nervous was race jokes. His natural inclination was to be about as subtle as Governor George Wallace, but he knew that was wrong and didn’t want to hurt the “little guy’s” feelings, be he a “Nig” or a “Hebe.” Jerry Lewis had put Dean off Jews for two lifetimes, and he was naturally suspicious of anyone with anything vaguely Jewish about him, a name, a nose, a career, like agent or jeweler.

As for blacks, Dean used me as a sounding board for jokes, almost always written by someone else. Dean’s forte was his delivery, not his originality. “Nothing could be bigger. Than to play it with a nigger. At the Copa.” This was to “Carolina in the Morning.” I think Sammy Cahn wrote this as Dean’s intro to Sammy at the Copa Room of the Sands in Vegas. I thought it could piss some people off. Dean at first didn’t get it. He saw it as a “tribute,” and done with
amore.
And the “n” word? “Niggers don’t go to the Sands,” was his attitude. I eventually talked him out of it, though not out of a joke after Sammy’s marriage to the Swedish actress May Britt: “What’s black and white and has three eyes?” “Niggers won’t care about this one, just blind people,” was Dean’s defense. If Dean would get upset with Sammy, the worst thing he could say was that Sammy was “Jerry turned inside out.” Dean wasn’t sensitive to any of this because he saw himself as an equally oppressed
minority. Wops, nigs, hebes, what the fuck was the difference? We were all up against the wall and fucking well better stick together.

Because of the later Rat Pack, Mr. S is most usually identified in Hollywood with Sammy and Dean (Peter Lawford was strictly fair weather and was basically a bridge to the Kennedys, one that turned out to be a bridge too far). In actuality Frank Sinatra was, in the mid-fifties, closer to Eddie Fisher than to the others. If anyone could give Mr. S a run at bedding famous women, or any women, for that matter, it was Eddie. Once the money began rolling in for Mr. S, he took a penthouse apartment in New York in a cul-de-sac at Seventy-second Street and the East River. Good views, better privacy. Eddie Fisher had the penthouse next door, and even Mr. S was impressed by the sheer volume of Eddie’s conquests. In truth some of the conquests were triumphs of the checkbook. In the high rise right next door to us lived dozens of fancy call girls. It was one of the highest concentrations in Manhattan. Because of the dead-end location of the block, limos could double park while celebs and politicians could pop in for quickies. Or the “girls next door,” as we’d call them, could pop out. Eddie, like Mr. S, was so horny that it didn’t matter if he had just had Liz Taylor. If there was a fuckable girl around, he had to have her, cost be damned.

Eddie proudly described himself as the Jewish son Sam Giancana never had. He’d also fill in for Mr. S at the Copacabana in New York or in Miami or Vegas if Mr. S would ever get sick or go chasing Ava or something crazy. Eddie wrote his own book on girl crazy, so he’d always understand. Luckily for their friendship, Mr. S claimed never to be attracted to Liz Taylor. He thought she was too high maintenance, higher than Ava. He also thought her legs were too short, and he was definitely a leg man, though I think it was his high regard for Eddie that stopped him far more than Liz’s gams. Assuming you don’t count Sammy Davis Jr., Eddie Fisher was one of the rare Jews in
Mr. S’s entourage. Another was Jack Entratter, whom Mr. S knew from the forties, when Entratter was a bouncer at the Stork Club. The tall, handsome, dapper Entratter would rise through the club world to become manager of the Copa. In the early fifties, the mob dispatched Entratter to Vegas to run the Sands. The Sands would be Mr. S’s Vegas headquarters for more than a decade and Jack his favorite “businessman” until they had a violent falling-out that saw Mr. S smash a golf cart into the Sands’s glass doors. Then his best Jewish buddy became “that scumbag kike.”

Not that Mr. S was antisemitic; he simply felt most comfortable with guys from his same background. As with Eddie and Jack, if the Jewish guy had ties to gangland, that somehow gave Mr. S that extra measure of trust. Trust was something that was in short supply for Mr. S where the Jews of Hollywood were concerned. No man could hold a grudge longer than Mr. S, and no grudge was bigger, not even his loathing for Sam Spiegel, than the one he held against Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein, his former agents at MCA who had dumped him in the early fifties. He blamed them for trying, and almost succeeding, to kill his career, and him. Murdering Jews, he called them, the real gangsters. He was complaining about them any chance he could get.

At his forty-second birthday roast at the Villa Capri in Hollywood in 1957, his friends were still making jokes about his hatred for these powerful Jews. Yet among these friends were other powerful Jews, Jack Benny, Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis, Mike Romanoff, Sammy Cahn, who sang a ditty to “All the Way,” making fun of Frank’s Italian dining habits at the Villa: “Every meal’s a bleeder. When you’re eating with the leader. This life’s not for Jewish stomachs. Pass the bicarb, I say…” Dean Martin, to “You’re the Top,” sang “He’s a wop, Records sell like Nestlé’s, He’s a wop, But they don’t top Presley’s.” Dean’s jab about the hated Elvis showed how Mr. S needed all the business help he could get. Help from Jews. Hence Eddie Fisher serenaded the
birthday boy with “Bert’s His Papa,” a tribute, to the strains of Fisher’s trademark song, to Sinatra’s William Morris agent Bert Allenberg. “All roads lead to Jerusalem,” Mr. S conceded. When in Dean’s number he tried listing rhyming Italian Hollywood names, Tommy Leonetti, Annie Alberghetti, Tony Franciosa, Pori Rubirosa, the drunken table pointed out that Rubirosa wasn’t Hollywood, nor was he Italian. “Shows how hard up we are,” Mr. S shouted.