Mr. S (11 page)

There was one song-and-dance man, probably Mr. S’s biggest idol, who probably didn’t know who Sam Giancana was. That was Fred Astaire. Once we were on the Warner lot, and we saw Fred Astaire walking by. Mr. S was as excited as the schoolgirls used to get excited by him. He insisted we follow Astaire around the lot, hiding in the shadows to make sure he couldn’t see us. They must have met at the Goetzes or somewhere, but Mr. S didn’t think he was worthy to go up to him. “Look at how he moves. Just look at him,” Sinatra would whisper to me. “I feel like a klutz.” Sinatra may have had total self-confidence as a singer but very little as a hoofer. His nonmob friend Gene Kelly had taught him his steps in
Anchors Aweigh
and
On the Town,
but Mr. S claimed he forgot the moves as fast as he learned them. “It’s not natural for me,” he’d lament. That’s why Astaire was a god to Sinatra, because for him it
was
natural, just as being cool was natural for Bogart. Astaire never spotted us that day at Warners, but if he had, I’ll bet Mr. S would have asked him for an autograph. He was that starstruck.

I was pretty starstruck myself when I got to meet some of my own idols traveling with Sinatra on the concert circuit and to Las Vegas. I loved going on the road with Mr. S. I began our road trips in 1956, and he treated me royally on them. He was totally dependent on me, and I loved this kind of responsibility, like in the Navy. It feels great to be the right hand of a king. I’d make calls, book appointments, arrange dinners and parties, entertain waiting friends and digni
taries, coordinate everything. I was beside Mr. S twenty-four hours a day, always ready to jump to any occasion and please him. It was a pressure cooker, though he never blew up at me, probably because I never fucked up. He made me feel a key part of his life and work and introduced me to
everybody.
“This is George Jacobs,” was all he had to say. He didn’t need to explain what I did, because I did it all. Explaining would have taken way too long for Mr. S, who wasn’t one to explain things, anyway.

Almost until the sixties, I was one of the only blacks allowed to stay in the Sands in Vegas and other hotels where Sinatra played. As Dean said, “Niggers don’t go to the Sands.” There was generally no room at the inn for blacks even if they were performing there. Even a star like Sammy Davis Jr. had to stay at the Moulin Rouge, which was the only black hotel, if you don’t count the cabins on the outskirts of town, which were about as inviting as the Bates Motel in
Psycho.
And at one hotel, when Dorothy Dandridge went for a swim, guests demanded that they drain the pool so they wouldn’t get some rare black infestation. Sounds like something Swifty Lazar would have come up with. Vegas was a Wild West, cowboy town back then, and these cowboys didn’t cotton to colored dudes. Eventually Mr. S was the key man in getting these barriers dropped, so he could share stages, as well as floors, with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, whom he called Sassy. My favorite was Billy Eckstine, who was so sharp that the second he saw me and saw how much we looked alike, he embraced me and cried, “My son!” On second thought, I bet Mr. S put him up to it, just to give me a thrill.

For all his Amos and Andy humor, his “yo mama” jokes, Mr. S genuinely loved his fellow black musicians and kept that humor to his largely Dago best buddies. He only saw talent, and I only saw stars. Both Frank and Sammy were very tight with these fellow performers, though their styles were different. Sammy liked to clown around, do
impromptu numbers, show off. Frank was much more serious, though he would never talk about music with these great singers. He might talk about movies, or even politics, but never music. He figured they had enough of that on the job. Black or white, he rated Tony Bennett as his chief rival. He felt Tony’s voice was every bit as good as his. He also admired the ease and charm of Tony’s delivery. Then again, Tony was a much easier guy than Mr. S, and certainly no party animal. He was very quiet and loved to paint. In his down time, he’d go out by the lake at Cal-Neva or to the desert in Vegas and bring his sketch pad. Because Mr. S liked to paint as well, this was what he and Tony would talk about most. In New York, Tony would come drinking with us at Toots Shor’s or, later, Jilly’s, but he’d be long gone by the time we closed these places. In 1962, Mr. S decided to cut his own version of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” but after making and releasing the single, he listened to it next to Tony’s classic, then ordered it withdrawn from the market. Such was respect.

Back to the Sinatra circle, after Jimmy Van Heusen, Mr. S’s closest music friend (and his music friends, like his music, were more essential to him than movie friends and movies) was Hank Sanicola, a physically big boxer-turned-roadhouse-pianist who became Sinatra’s bodyguard in the Tommy Dorsey screaming-bobbysoxer 1940s and had graduated to being his Manager, with a capital M. The way to becoming a success in the Sinatra organization was often through your size, or brute force. Sinatra liked guys who could save his life, if necessary. Burly Hank was a protector, as were Jilly Rizzo and others like Brad Dexter, whose lifesaving skills elevated him from bit actor to big producer.

Rarely did any of these guys actually lift a fist for Frank. Jilly, who had an even crazier temper than Mr. S, did a few times, often with disastrous results. Once he did save Sinatra from a stalker who got into Mr. S’s hotel bedroom in Melbourne, Australia. Jilly beat him
over the head with a large standing ashtray and nearly killed him. Brad Dexter’s bluff was far bigger than his bite. We used to call him “Superman” because he walked around with his chest all puffed up and out. Sanicola, on the other hand, was the real thing. He would break your legs if you even said anything bad about Sinatra. And if the adversary were bigger than Hank was, he had lots of friends whose specialty was “talking to people,” which was Hank’s euphemism for their distinctly nonverbal approach to handling problems. Sanicola had Sicilian roots, which Frank found
simpatico.
He called him “Dag,” as in Dago. It was the same name he used for Dean and others of his Italian friends. (They called him “Sinat.”) It was pronounced like “Day-Glo,” not like Dag Hammarskjöld, the head of the United Nations, though Sinatra and company got the biggest kick mispronouncing his name, turning the distinguished Swedish diplomat into an Italian homeboy. Sometimes he’d even call me “Dag.” I was thrilled to be included as a
paesano
.

Another beloved “Dag” had nothing to do with the entertainment business at all. Not if he could help it. Yet he couldn’t help it, and it ruined a great deal of his life. He was married to the biggest movie star in America, and he was the biggest sports hero in America. It was a guaranteed recipe for disaster. The Dago in question was Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, the Pride of the Yankees, Mr. New York, long before he was reduced to Mr. Coffee. He was the only Italian in the country bigger than Frank Sinatra. Mr. S was deeply honored to be his friend; it was a measure of how far the kid from Hoboken had come that he could hang with a hero, who was the Fred Astaire of America’s pastime. One of the most Old World Italian characteristics of Mr. S was his deeply superstitious nature. Mr. S put great stock in the fact that DiMaggio’s name and that of the character who had restored his career, saved his life, were the same. He saw it as an omen, a miracle.

I, too, was in awe of the guy, and I knew zip about baseball. At first he seemed arrogant, barely acknowledging my presence, but I came to see that he was painfully shy and private. Marrying Marilyn Monroe was suicide for a guy like that, but that’s why she was Marilyn. The more Joe drank, which was a lot, the nicer he would get. He’d even try to turn me on to baseball by telling war stories about Babe and Lou and his own glory years, which was unusual for a guy who hated to brag. It wasn’t so much boasting, but rather disbelief that I knew and cared so little about the national pastime, “What?! You don’t know about my fifty-six-game streak?” And I was so out of it, I said something like “Was that really good?” And all the guys would roll their eyes, like what planet was I from. The answer was planet New Orleans, which was no baseball town. The people there were too busy eating and fucking, I’d defend my position. Once I mentioned Ted Williams, and Joe dismissed him with “He throws the ball like a girl.” That surprised me, that Joe would put a fellow superstar down like that. I guess he liked being the Greatest and didn’t want to hear about the competition. Joe was no jokester, but he thought he was being a real rib-splitter when he started calling me “the Commie,” as in Communist. The idea was that only a Communist didn’t dig baseball. Don’t forget, these were still McCarthy times.

Mr. S and the Clipper had met at Toots Shor’s restaurant, a famous booze, meat, and potatoes men’s club of a joint thick with cigar smoke and filled with sports stars, gossip columnists like Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson, and musicians from the nearby jazz clubs of the West Fifties. Talk about mob ties. Toots, whom Mr. S also called “Dag,” was a tough Philadelphian who had run speakeasies for Lucky Luciano and never met a mobster he didn’t like. Toots never gave Sinatra a bill, not when he was down, and not when he was back up, either. Not that Mr. S was trying to get off cheap. At the end of an evening, Sinatra
would hand out c-notes to every waiter, busboy, and bartender who had crossed his path. Beside that, the lure of having Frank Sinatra in the restaurant was worth a fortune in itself. Toots was no fool.

Toots Shor’s was one of Mr. S’s favorite New York hangouts, but he preferred being with all Dagos, all the time. There were too many tourists who might bug him in Little Italy, and Jilly’s place was still in his future. So his hangout became a joint called Patsy’s on West Fifty-sixth Street. It was a red-checked-tablecloth, red-clam-sauce kind of place with an upstairs dining room that Mr. S joked was “headquarters for Murder, Inc.” He enjoyed being close to the action, particularly that kind of action. I had no idea who the clientele was, just a lot of heavy-set guys with big cigars, bigger pinky rings, and still-bigger-breasted companions, “floozies” was the word.

The first time I went to Patsy’s, with Sinatra, Sanicola, Van Heusen, and some of their own floozies (Mr. S liked to travel in a pack), some big guy said “Who’s the nigger?” I’d never seen Mr. S give a look that could kill like that before. By the time we reached our table, I looked up again and that guy was
gone.
His whole table was gone. And I never heard the “n” word in Patsy’s again, though I never saw any other brothers, other than Sammy, in there until the sixties.

In Los Angeles, Mr. S’s favorite hangout was another Patsy’s (no relation). This was Patsy d’Amore’s Villa Capri in Hollywood, one of the rare Southern California outposts for authentic New York / New Jersey red-sauced Italian food, the food Mr. S had grown up on in Hoboken. Patsy d’Amore (they mispronounced it “dee-amor,” Hoboken-style) had a genuine New York wood-fired pizza oven. What’s more, he delivered, and we used him all the time to cater parties. And the fancy,
real
dishes I had learned to make in Italy? Fugged-abboudit! Same with Romanoff’s, which Mr. S might use for dates with movie stars and moguls, but which he felt was way too hoity
toity for normal wear and tear. He and Mike Romanoff, while cordial, would bond only after Humphrey Bogart died. The Villa Capri was the scene of the fiasco that ended Mr. S’s friendship with Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. Perhaps the biggest thing the two men had in common, bigger than their Italian-ness, bigger than their stardom, bigger than their gargantuan cocks (Joe was supposedly the Milton Berle of swat), was their amorous travails at the hands of their goddess wives. Frank had been there first with Ava. He knew precisely the hell that the Clipper was going through with Marilyn. He also knew how insanely, murderously jealous these women could make their men, precisely because there were always
other
men, thousands, millions of other men waiting, drooling in the wings. Not that either guy would ever mention his amorous problems to the other. Each was way too macho to whine about love. Whenever I was around them, they’d only talk about sports, usually boxing and never baseball. That was a cornerstone of the Sinatra conversational philosophy: never talk to a pro about his
job
when he was off duty. So he wouldn’t talk to Lionel Hampton about vibes and he wouldn’t talk to Joe DiMaggio about Louisville Sluggers.

So here they were in 1954 at the Villa Capri, Frank still mooning over Ava, Joe in a state of shock over Marilyn just divorcing him on grounds of “cruel indifference” though neither actually referring to their tribulations. Yet Mr. S liked to talk about Joe’s Marilyn problems with
me.
It seemed to make him feel better that he wasn’t the only Dago superstar in the doghouse of love. The charge of “cruel indifference” was a laugh, Mr. S had told me. The Dago Slugger was anything but indifferent. He was blind with rage at the way his wife was being used as national cheesecake, what with that porno shot of the subway gust blowing her skirt over her head in Billy Wilder’s
The Seven Year Itch.
Wilder had described the scene to Sinatra, said you
could see Marilyn’s pussy through her white panties. Mr. S arranged a prerelease screening at a friend’s house, not the Goetzes, they were too square, looking for Marilyn’s pussy. It sounded like the
Basic Instinct
of its day, but it was all quite innocent. No pussy made it to the screen, barely a flash of panties. But Joe was still bent out of shape. And for all their awful fights and all the whispers that Joltin’ Joe was a wife batterer, the man was deeply in love. He wanted her back, and he believed she would come back if he fought hard enough. This man was the ultimate champion; he was not a quitter.

Mr. S knew and liked Marilyn, and he would come to love her, well,
almost
love her himself, but right now he was there for his hero. Mr. S indirectly pushed Joe to go and get her. He did this by hiring a private eye buddy (he had more than a few) to track Marilyn as a gift for Joe. That was the present for the star who had everything, his own private eye. That night at Villa Capri (I wasn’t there, but I heard it all from Mr. S later) the dick called and said he had hit paydirt. Marilyn was shacking up with her drama coach. Acting lessons, my ass! Frank and Joe plus Hank Sanicola, who apparently were totally looped at this point, were going to stand up for Marilyn’s honor, which was more than she ever did. These Old World Dago men of respect were going to throw this clown out, show Marilyn the error of her ways, show her how much the Clipper cared about her. However, when they joined up with the dick and his aides and the whole gang descended on the love nest and kicked down the door, all they found was an old lady in bed by herself. They got the wrong apartment. The right apartment was the one directly upstairs, the home of another member of Marilyn’s drama class, who was letting Marilyn and her coach do a “cold reading” there. The old lady went on to sue Sinatra and DiMaggio.