Mr. S (18 page)

M
R.
S’s philosophy was that bad things only happened to good people. If someone was bad enough, he somehow had a natural immunity to disaster, at least in this lifetime, which is the only one Mr. S could count on. There was no day of reckoning for the bad guys. The meek would inherit nothing, and Sam Spiegel and Lew Wasserman would live forever. Thus it was a terrible shock to Mr. S’s system when the baddest guy of all, the guy who had taken all the marbles, his way, was felled by a massive stroke on the golf course in Palm Beach. It was 1961. Old Joe would live another eight years, but he would never speak again. Mr. Ambassador had become a vegetable. Mr. S found out from Peter Lawford by phone. He was shocked, as I said, but he wasn’t sad. He was just amazed, for he thought Joe Kennedy was beyond the long arm of God. He called the
president with his condolences, sent flowers to the hospital in Palm Beach, but he didn’t go to visit. Yet in time, a short time, he would come to regret the incapacity of Joe Kennedy. Without the dictatorial restraint of his father, little Bobby, “the weasel” as Mr. S contemptuously referred to him, was now free to unleash the rabid contempt he had for Mr. S.

Bobby wasn’t the only Kennedy who didn’t approve of Frank Sinatra. Jackie couldn’t stand him. She hated him without really knowing him, refusing to visit Palm Springs out of hand, though I’m sure Jack was relieved, so he could have his fun. Jack hardly ever mentioned Jackie to me, except in regard to big family gatherings. She was pretty much a ceremonial figure to him. Jackie’s dislike of Frank may have been on account of her natural suspicions that Mr. S was leading her husband down the primrose path to perdition. Or it may have been that she believed that her own sister, Lee Radziwill, had fallen prey to the crooner’s charms during the campaign. Mr. S did flirt with Lee; he might have nailed her just to get prissy Jackie’s pedigreed goat, but I’m not sure if anything transpired. Sinatra was outraged by what he regarded as Jackie’s anti-Italian (specifically poor Jersey Italian) prejudice, and he had a big thing against prejudice. “I’d like to fuck that bitch,” he’d say whenever he’d see her on TV. Given Sinatra’s innate courtliness to women, that was as nasty a comment as he could make. He’d have
never
said that about any woman he
liked.

Jackie felt Mr. S was beneath her dignity and that of the White House; Bobby felt Mr. S was beneath the dignity of the
country.
Jackie’s repulsion was that of an uptight socialite; Bobby’s was that of a holier-than-thou crusader. Bobby was out to get Mr. S in a big way. He saw Frank as Al Capone, all sex and crime, and he saw himself as Cotton Mather, all fire and brimstone. His liberal, Puritan, Yankee zeal was made more poisonous by his own weakness for and attrac
tion to the carnal pleasures of Hollywood that Mr. S embodied. There was going to be a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

The troubles for Mr. S started even before Bobby went on the attack. The “tragic decade” that the sixties were for Sinatra actually began for him in late 1959 with the death, at forty-four, of Billie Holiday, who had been a tremendous influence on him. Mr. S didn’t cry for Joe Kennedy. He didn’t cry for Humphrey Bogart. He didn’t cry for much. But he cried for Billie Holiday. Mr. S had tried to save her life, or at least to help her with her pain. We had been in New York, and had gone to visit her on her deathbed uptown in the run-down Harlem Metropolitan Hospital. There was a line of picketers outside with placards reading
LET LADY LIVE
. There was a huge controversy going on over Lady’s right to take illegal narcotics in the hospital.

Lady was dying
of
cirrhosis; she was dying
for
heroin. The New York police had raided her room and found heroin in her pocketbook. The attitude of the hospital, and the law, was how can we cure this patient if she’s shooting up. But Billie Holiday didn’t care. She wanted her smack more than she wanted to get well. She had been on it for years, done time for it. She wasn’t about to quit now. Three cops were stationed at her door when we arrived. A beautician was doing her hair and nails, and she was smoking outside her oxygen tent and begging the nurse to get her a beer. She’d say catchy things like, “Don’t trust that bitch. She can take the gold outta your teeth while you’re chewin’ gum.” While Lady’s spirit was ever feisty, her body was defeated. Her once plump frame was wasted away. She was skin and bones, and barely that. The hard life that made her music so great and true had literally eaten her alive. All the booze had rotted out her insides. Still, she was thrilled to see Mr. S. He was very positive, telling her how much he loved her last year’s album,
Lady in Satin
, and kept trying to get her to talk about future projects. He told her, showing her off for my benefit, how much he owed to her for teaching him
how to phrase when he was starting out with Harry James. “I may have showed you how to bend a note, Frankie, that’s all,” Lady said. Then she leaned over to him and whispered so the cops couldn’t hear, “Will you cut the shit, baby, and get me some dope?”

Lady Day begged Sinatra to get her a fix of heroin. Begged him. As much as he hated drugs, and hated what they had done to this genius of the blues, Mr. S tried to get her what she wanted. Mr. S offered money to the top doctors at the hospital, but they were terrified that Mayor Wagner, who was on a campaign to rid New York City of drugs, would cut off their funding if they got caught. He made some calls to try to get to the mayor, but struck out. Frustrated at the front door, he tried going through the back. Sinatra went out and used all his connections to find the biggest dealer in New York. He gave him a big wad of cash, and put him to the task.

But the cops were staking out Lady Day’s room night and day. The dealer couldn’t get through to deliver Mr. S’s gift of mercy. As he was trying, Lady Day’s liver failed, she went into a coma, and died. Mr. S beat himself up for letting her down. What good was all his power if he couldn’t help a friend? He locked himself in the Seventy-second Street penthouse and wept for two days, playing her songs like “Autumn in New York,” drinking, and crying. I had never seen him hurt so much, even for Ava, but, then again, who else could match this horrible waste? Mr. S told me something she had said, that you don’t know what enough is until you’ve had more than enough. Now she knew, but it was too late, and it killed him a little bit as well.

Billie Holiday’s death intensified the midlife vulnerability Mr. S had been starting to feel. He was forty-four, the same age as she. And she was dead. Mr. S was awash in fame and now power, but what, he asked himself, did he really have? Aside from myself, there was nobody even there to comfort him when Billie died. What about the basics of life, the stuff that mattered to a real guy, a guy like his father?
He had a family, whom he rarely saw. He had more sex than Hugh Hefner, more than Casanova, but where was the love? He hadn’t been in love since Ava, but Ava was a lost cause. Most of his crew were now married. Even Sammy had bitten the dust. Now it was just him and Jimmy Van Heusen and their legions of hookers. Oh, he had plenty of dates, but he wasn’t crazy about anyone, and Mr. S had to be crazy to be alive. His most recent consort was Dorothy Provine, a blond rising star on a show called
The Roaring 20s.
She was gorgeous, but not exciting. Mr. S called her “Deadwood,” after her birthplace of Deadwood, South Dakota. The only woman Mr. S had any real interest in was Pat Lawford, though that was probably as much a political fantasy as it was a romantic pipe dream. After JFK was elected, the notion that she and Peter would break up proved to be nothing but wishful thinking. Although she and Peter were estranged by now, there could be no cracks in the perfect façade of America’s First Family. Pat had learned about the hookers and the drugs and had retreated to her own room. But they were forced to “play house” for the world, and that house was a worse prison for Pat than it was for Peter, who was a master of façades. “Brother-in-Lawford” could have his whores, just as did Pat’s father and brothers, but taking the cue from endlessly suffering Mother Rose, the unbreakable rule for the Kennedy women was Stand by Your Man.

The big problem for Mr. S was that there wasn’t anybody good enough for him. Mr. S, beneath all the tough guy Jersey stuff, was as big a snob as Old Joe. He was the King. He felt he was entitled to a Queen. A sparkling commoner like Dorothy Provine, adorable as she was, didn’t have the right stuff. There was someone, however, who just came back on the market after the election. She was as big as Frank, larger than life, the most famous woman in America, probably the world. And she loved Frank Sinatra with all her heart. On paper, at least, Marilyn Monroe was the perfect match for Mr. S. After the
debacle of
The Misfits,
Marilyn, because of her endless takes, lateness, and fuckups on the set, was blamed for giving Clark Gable the heart attack that killed him. In turn Marilyn blamed her distress on her imperially detached husband, Arthur Miller, who, she would tell me, made her feel like “the stupidest woman in the world” and thereby destroyed the self-esteem she was seeking by marrying a genius. Marilyn divorced Miller and returned “home” to Hollywood and to Mr. S, who stepped up to the challenge that had defeated such previous champs as DiMaggio and now Miller.

While a Monroe-Sinatra match would have been a bigger royal wedding than when Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier, bigger than Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Mr. S had a ton of misgivings about Marilyn. She was a total mess. She was usually drunk, which he could deal with. She was also usually filthy, which he couldn’t. She was frequently too depressed to bathe or wash her hair, she ate in bed and slept among the crumbs and scraps, she would wear the same stained pants for days. She was too miserable to care. Furthermore, she was usually fat, twenty pounds overweight, which she would lose on mad crash diets right before starting a film, like drugging herself into a near coma for a week at a time so she wouldn’t eat.

The image was glorious; the reality was squalid. Mr. S claimed he didn’t even want to sleep with her. Of course, that rarely stopped him from doing it. If Marilyn Monroe wanted sex, and she did constantly to make herself feel desirable, Mr. S would play Sir Galahad and rise to the occasion. He would rarely turn a good friend down. He called them “mercy fucks,” and it fit in with his
padrone
self-image to give rather than receive. Aside from Marilyn, Peggy Lee was the occasional beneficiary of Mr. S’s largesse. So was Judy Garland, who, at her lowest depths, made major sexual demands on Mr. S, showing up on Bowmont Drive at all hours of the night for a shoulder to cry on and his manhood to pacify her. We wanted to rename the street
Blow
mont. Frank had had an affair with Judy in the late forties, when she was one of the biggest stars at MGM and he was just getting started. Then she was adorable. By 1958 she was not.

Judy had just returned from a London engagement that was a sellout triumph, except for the vicious English press attacking Judy’s appearance as pudgy, dumpy, chubby, bloated, how many ways can you say fat. Judy was also having money troubles as well as hubby troubles with former test pilot turned horse-breeder/producer Sid Luft. Whenever she and Sid were separated, which was often, she would descend on Bowmont, drunk as a skunk. (Like Billie Holiday, Judy would get cirrhosis of the liver.) She wanted Mr. S to hold her, to love her, to make her feel beautiful again, and he did. Sinatra had the highest regard for Judy and her talent. She had one of the biggest personalities in the business, all charisma. That had turned Mr. S on, even if her physique hadn’t. But now he loved her the way he had come to love Big Nancy. Judy, however, was not self-effacing like Nancy. She would never settle for “just friends.” She had to have sex, and even when Mr. S couldn’t force himself into the mood, she’d unzip his pants right on the orange couch in the den where they’d listen to records and create the mood she so desperately needed. These confidence-building sessions would continue for years, until the early sixties.

Because of Marilyn’s nasty habits, such as never using sanitary napkins or tampons and bleeding all over her bed, Mr. S did not take her into the Bowmont house to live with him, as she would have liked. Instead of a ring he gave her a poodle, which she promptly named “Maf,” short for Mafia, just to annoy him for not loving her enough. And instead of spending the time with her she madly desired, he dumped her on me. He put us both into an apartment house at 882 North Doheny Drive, between Sunset and Santa Monica on the border of Beverly Hills and an area then known as Boys Town, and now as West Hollywood. The building was called “The Sinatra
Arms,” because in addition to Marilyn and me were Sinatra’s secretary Gloria Lovell and his longtime on-off bedmate Jeannie Carmen, who became Marilyn’s best girlfriend.

Mr. S would sometimes live there himself between houses and women. I was living there because after a decade of marriage, my wife Sally and I were splitting up. Given the job I had, both of us were amazed we lasted so long. I could blame the divorce on Mr. S, but I’ve tried not to. But the beginning of our end came just as his romance with the Kennedys started. We had kept our personal lives completely separate. I was there for him, he paid me handsomely, that was that. I wasn’t trying to be part of the Clan. One weekend, however, he insisted I bring my wife and kids down to the desert. He had just bought the new compound on Wonder Palms, off the fairway of the Tamarisk Golf Club. There was lots of room, and he was one of the most generous men alive. But his eyes popped out when he met Sally. She was good-looking, in a Nordic way, but I probably had taken her for granted by then. “Hey, hey, hey, George,” he said when she put on her bathing suit and got into the pool. “What the hell did you do to deserve
that
?”

“I work for you, boss,” I joked. “All good things come to those who stand and wait.”

“You’ve been holding out on me, playboy.”

“I had to marry the dame to get her, Mr. S,” I told the truth. “Ain’t no play in this boy.”