Mr. S (19 page)

“You spooks are such fucking studs. You kill me, George.”

“If all men are created equal, we have to even it out somewhere, Mr. S.”

From that day on, he would insist Sally and the boys come down whenever they wanted, which turned out to be about once a month in the season. And he treated us like all the guests, inviting us to the table for dinner with the Lawfords, Van Heusen, even David Niven and his family. Instead of the servant, I would be served, by Sinatra’s
other maids and houseboys. Mr. S, who was big on a man’s dignity, wanted me to look good in front of my wife and family. He had one maid there just to look after our kids. I only began getting suspicious when he would send me on long errands, like to Vegas to pick up financial documents from the Sands or back to L.A., to get clothes or art, whenever Sally came down. When Sally began listening to Sinatra music all the time, and reading fan magazines, which she never before had done, I got even more suspicious.

I knew Mr. S’s mentality when it came to the spouses of some of his friends, Lawford, Bogart, Romanoff. He liked their wives, plain and simple. In his religion, he was capable of suspending the commandment about thy neighbor’s wife. As the King, his subjects owed him more than total loyalty; they owed him their families. Yet what was I going to do, accuse my wife of fucking my boss, or vice versa? Lie in wait and try to catch them in the act? I was getting jealous of my employer, which is about as bad an occupational hazard as you can have. I tried to put it out of my mind, and I tried to limit Sally’s visits, but I couldn’t do it to my boys who had this fabulous country club for themselves. Mr. S was great to the boys. He bought them all BB rifles, and they immediately proceeded to shoot out half the windows of the Palm Springs house. Mr. S didn’t get mad; he thought it was hilarious. That was
his
kind of prank.

Maybe I was being paranoid, being unfair to Mr. S, who had been nothing but good to me. I had done enough damage of my own to Sally by being gone so much. I was married more to Sinatra than I was to her. Nevertheless, the poison had gotten into the system. As did Sally’s conversion to becoming a Jehovah’s Witness. She’d stand on street corners handing out
The Watchtower
and other religious propaganda, and she had our little kids out there with her handing out the stuff. That got me crazy. I wasn’t pushing for them to be Jews or anything else, but I didn’t want my kids out in the street pushing,
be it faith or drugs. Within a year or so we got separated, then divorced. Sally met a rich white businessman, not a Witness, dropped the religion bit, and took the kids to live with him in Hawaii.

Our divorce was extremely ugly. Even though she had found a cash cow in Honolulu, Sally decided to milk me as well. She found a lawyer who dragged me into court looking for big support payments. Their claim was that I was making thousands monthly in undeclared tips from the friends of Frank Sinatra. So here I was up on the stand, being bombarded with questions about how much money has Sam Giancana given you. I didn’t like
my
name being dragged out in public. I could imagine how Mr. Sam felt. I was worried I’d get a bullet in my head to keep me from testifying, but Mr. S assured me not to worry. After the press, Mr. S’s least favorite group of people were lawyers, and he stood in my corner, got me a top lawyer, though he avoided coming to court. Every day, if they weren’t nagging me about Giancana, it was Dean, Ava, Sammy, Bob Wagner, Sam Goldwyn, Yul Brynner. Mentioning Yul showed how ridiculous the whole thing was. Yul wouldn’t tip a scale. The truth was
none
of them gave me tips. That would have been insulting both to me and to Sinatra, who, his friends all knew, paid me plenty. I wasn’t a bellboy. I got so mad that, after court one day, when a press photographer was hounding me, I picked up a big trash can and threw it at him. The picture made all the papers. Mr. S loved it. “Who do you think you are, Spook?” he asked. “Frank Sinatra?” In the end Sally got nothing more than the normal support I had offered to pay her. Mr. S took me to Romanoff’s to celebrate the court victory.

My consolation prize was to move in with Marilyn Monroe. Well, it was next door, but we were together a lot of the time. Not “together” together, mind you. I was a caretaker for Mr. S, so I tried to be professional. But Marilyn didn’t want a servant, she wanted a friend, needed a friend. I could have stayed with Mr. S at the Bow
mont house. I had my own room there by the pool. But I needed a little space all to myself, and if I had stayed there, there would have been no such thing as off-duty. So it was off to Doheny.

Marilyn’s apartment was hardly the lair of a superstar. There were three rooms, one bedroom, with hideous white, Maf-stained shag carpet that must have been there since she first rented the place in 1953 while DiMaggio was courting her and her star burst onto the screen in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
There was a badly out-of-tune piano, a few ratty chairs and couches, a fireplace that took me a week to clean out so “we can live like Connecticut,” as she had with Arthur Miller. This place was a long way from Connecticut. There were no posters, few books, a small television, a lot of records, Sinatra records, which made me sad about my wife. One of Marilyn’s few big luxuries were thick curtains, a double set on each window, so she could sleep all day. She was a much worse night owl than Sinatra. I used to call her “Drac” because she kept vampire hours. Her other indulgences were full-length mirrors in every closet, every room, “so I can see how disgusting I am.”

Marilyn may have been a space cadet about many things, but she was an absolute virtuoso about projecting her own sexuality. Bloated, pimply, filthy hair, broken nails, Marilyn could still get any man and she knew it. That’s why she had those mirrors, to flaunt herself, half naked, or fully naked, to whoever happened to be around. In a way, she was like Mia Farrow in reverse. Mia would always say I’m so skinny and flat, who would look at me? Marilyn would say, I’m such a fat pig, who would look at me? Marilyn, however, was masochistic. She would
get
fat just to see if men would still like her, just as she would put on black wigs and glasses and go down to the bars on Santa Monica Boulevard, just to see if she could fail to be picked up. When she did fail, she would come home and get drunk and cry for hours, or worse, she would pop a bunch of sleeping pills. That’s why Mr. S put me there, to prevent
these bouts of self-loathing from turning into self-destruction. Mr. S instructed me to look in on her (he gave me a key) before I went to sleep—to make sure that if she were asleep she was breathing normally, and if she was awake that she wasn’t drugged out to a danger point. If possible I should sit with her until she went to bed safely.

“Nobody even looked at me. Not once all night,” she moaned to me after an abortive bar hop.

“What do you expect? They’re all queers where you went,” I told her.

“Oh.”

“Why didn’t you just go to Chasen’s?” I asked her. “Play some Ping-Pong.” They had a table in a back room that was one of the town’s best pickup spots.

“No, George. They’d know me there.”

“Are you looking to get laid or to get rejected?”

“I’m looking for love. I’m looking for someone to like me for
me
, not some stupid movie poster,” Marilyn said, popping open a split of champagne. Her refrigerator was full of them, and little else. “Here’s to love, George. True love.”

We clinked glasses. “Who’s gonna like you in that ugly wig? You look like a cross between a witch and a telephone operator.”

“That bad, huh?”

“I think you’re going overboard not to be you.”

Marilyn ripped off the wig, took off the glasses, unzipped the dowdy cocktail dress. As usual, she had nothing on underneath. I went to get her a robe. “Aw, do I
have
to? It’s so hot.”

“I’d better be going,” I said.

“Chicken!” she taunted me and put on her robe. “What if you didn’t work for Frankie?”

“Then I’d be on welfare.”

She started to laugh. “What’s our boy doing tonight? Does he have a date?”

“With his Vicks Inhaler,” I told her. Mr. S had a cold. Jimmy Van Heusen had sent him an additional remedy, a redhead sinus clearer. I didn’t tell Marilyn this. Mr. S had given me strict orders, under penalty of God knows what, to tell Marilyn nothing of his private life. He knew any other woman would make her insanely jealous and potentially self-destructive.

“Do you think he’ll ever settle down, George?”

“Do you?” I tried to avoid all diplomatic confrontations by letting her answer her own loaded questions. If I said what I thought, that Frank wouldn’t settle down, not now, it might have extinguished Marilyn’s hopes and made her suicidal.

“Don’t you think he and I should both throw in the towel and get married? He doesn’t want any more kids. I’m perfect for him.”

“You’re bigger than he is.”

“Not in his elevators.” Marilyn giggled.

“I mean your career. Look at Ava. Two stars under the same roof…”

“Frankie can be the star. He can be two stars. He’s so sad these days. All I want to do is make that poor boy happy. Help me, George, pretty please…”

Who could say no to Marilyn Monroe? Then again, who could say
anything
to Frank Sinatra? Even if Marilyn cleaned up her act, I knew she was as unlikely to give up her career for love as Mr. S would be. She had fought like a dog, fucked like a dog, to get to the top, suffering the grossest indignities Hollywood could throw at her. She had posed for cheesecake, turned tricks, slept with studio ogres, did bad movies, got bad money, yet she had made it to Queen of the World, just as Mr. S was King.

Marilyn talked the talk of standing by and behind her man, but she wouldn’t walk the walk. Also problematic for Mr. S was that there was another famous man (and no one loved famous men more than
Marilyn) she was interested in standing by, and possibly two, and they were both named Kennedy. Thus Mr. S was in the awkward position of being in a romantic
mano a mano
with the last man in America he wanted to compete with, President Jack Kennedy (whom Mr. S began calling “TP” after he became the president), and with the man in America who hated him the most, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Only that master strategist Old Joe could tell Frank how to sort this out, but by now Old Joe wasn’t talking. What a can of worms!

Marilyn would tell me breathlessly about Jack, though she never mentioned Bobby. Most of the stories involved how sexually obsessed Jack was with her, how many times and where they had made love, from suites at the Plaza in New York to broom closets at the Sands. I knew how horny Jack was, so nothing she said surprised me, except her belief in his promises that he would leave Jackie and that she would be his First Lady for his second term. That guy would say
anything
to score!

Marilyn may have been talking about JFK to make Mr. S jealous. When it came to men Marilyn was a shrewd card player. Yet I didn’t go gossiping back to Mr. S. You know what they say about killing the messenger. Nor did I want to burst Marilyn’s bubble about how mad about her the president was. I had spent enough time with the man to know that no woman, not even his wife, was sacred to him. His need was like that of Alexander the Great, to conquer the world. To him, Marilyn was one more conquest, a trophy, maybe the Great White Shark of Hollywood, but still a record, not a romance. Marilyn did concede that the president was not a great lover. His biggest problem, she told me, was premature ejaculation. She tried to take it as a positive, evidence of how she drove the president out of control. “Jesus, George, he’s got a
country
to run. He doesn’t have time for that mushy stuff,” she said, further rationalizing JFK’s amatory haste. Frank Sinatra, on the other hand,
made
time for the “mushy stuff.”
“He’s the best,” Marilyn frequently swooned. “Nobody compares to him,” she would say, then wink. “And
I
should know.”

Marilyn’s L.A. sessions with the president would never take place in the apartment, but at the Lawfords’ beach house in Santa Monica. In the “Gold Coast” strip of mansions on the Pacific Coast Highway, near where Cary Grant and Barbara Hutton lived when they were married, the Lawford compound was redubbed “High Anus Port” by one of the Rat Pack wits, probably wordsmith Sammy Cahn, because of all the wild sex that went on there. “Poor Pat’s so out of touch,” Marilyn commented. “She probably thinks we’re playing football.” I’m sure Pat was not clueless. She was just resigned. One person who did not party, at least sexually, at the Lawfords’ was Mr. S. He had too much respect for Pat. Which was more than her own brother had. Peter told me Pat knew exactly what was transpiring between Jack and Marilyn. Pat must have hated feeling that her house was being used as her brother’s brothel.

Moreover, while Marilyn liked the idea of Frank being jealous, she didn’t want him to see what she was doing with JFK. Mr. S may not have cared what the president was doing with Judy Campbell. Marilyn Monroe was a different story. Mr. S may have played Cupid in getting them together. He was doing it to show off. But he felt like a pimp. He also felt jealous, but maybe not in the way Marilyn intended, which was to make him sweep her away to the altar, away from the competition. If he were actually thinking about marrying Marilyn, how could those thoughts not be clouded by his lover’s escapades on the Gold Coast, at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, wherever the leader wanted to swing on a star. When they played “Hail to the Chief,” what was Mr. S thinking?

In the first year of the JFK presidency, 1961, Mr. S felt that giving his girl to the Chief was the price you paid to be that close to power. To that same end, he spent most of the year redoing the Palm
Springs compound clearly with the president in mind, new cottages, new phones, new furniture, walls of photos of Frank, Jack, Peter, and Pat, even a plaque in the bedroom where Jack had screwed so many whores reading
JOHN F. KENNEDY SLEPT HERE
. This was going to be Jack’s West Coast crash pad, White House West, and Frank was going to be Host with the Most, for all the world to see. But when Joe Kennedy had his stroke in late 1961, the tune changed overnight. Bobby, the Puritan, and Jackie, the snot, took over and decreed that Mr. Sinatra was Not Our Kind. All of a sudden, the Irish eyes stopped smiling. And Mr. S went from being the First Friend to just another greaser from Hoboken.