Mr. S (2 page)

So if on the surface Mia seemed like one of the million hippie drug chicks you would see on the Sunset Strip in those days, she was anything but. She knew she had the right stuff, but part of her come-on was pretending she didn’t. She was so confident that even though Mickey Rudin was preparing the divorce papers, and had even had her served with them on the set of
Rosemary,
Mia thought she could get Frank back if she wanted to. She also thought she could get him to give her a child, which is what she wanted more than anything else, and what Frank, who already had all the children he could barely handle, wanted least. Mr. S always had felt bad about his life as an absentee father, particularly after the nightmare of Frank Jr.’s. 1963 kidnapping. He surely didn’t want a new baby to feel bad about.

Mia didn’t care what Frank thought. Motherhood was, only after stardom, the most powerful imperative for her. At times, she’d sit with me and go down her list of all the great and famous men she wanted to have children with after Frank. She knew the relationship would end sometime, but she assumed it would be at
her time,
and only after she had created one of what would be her master race of offspring. She was talking some major names, on her wish list: Leonard Bernstein, who was gay, Picasso, who was almost dead, J. D. Salinger, who had disappeared, and Bob Dylan, who was badly disabled from his motorcycle accident and underground. The girl thought big. She was that focused, and maybe if the Candy Store fiasco hadn’t occurred, Mia might have even gotten her way with Frank and stopped the divorce at the eleventh hour.

But it did occur, and the rest is history and Woody Allen. Mr. S was down in Palm Springs. The tension in the Bel Air house had gotten so bad that even the big mansion was too small for him when Mia was there. Out in the 115-degree desert, he holed up watching television, which he never normally did, except for the old Friday night fights on the
Gillette Cavalcade of Sports
. Now he would watch
Mod Squad,
but without bothering to arrange to meet Peggy Lipton. He didn’t even want to dial up Jimmy Van Heusen’s endless parade of call girls. I knew the man was depressed, and I was worried about him.

I had to stay in L.A., though, because Mr. S wanted me to look after Ava Gardner, who was coming into town from London, her new home after living in Spain for over a decade. In addition to this major relocation from the land of sun to the land of rain (“What does it matter?” Ava said. “I sleep all day anyway.” Like Frank.), Ava was coming off of a disastrous romance with George C. Scott, whom Frank hated, and an end of starring roles in her film career. She had just played second fiddle to Catherine Deneuve and Omar Sharif in the flop
Mayerling.
Getting older was a nightmare for a movie star, bad for Frank and far, far worse for someone like Ava who lived—and died—by her looks. Frank was worried about her and had always been protective. But he was in such a deep funk himself, he sent me in to sub for him.

Ava was staying in a bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Some friends were taking her to a Count Basie concert that night. I was going to meet her after the show at the hotel and hang out. Ava and I had developed a real bond, which was easy to do considering she was the earthiest, and most down-to-earth, movie star you could ever imagine. She always told me she was part black, that “poor white trash,” the stock she came from in North Carolina, always had black blood in them. (Maybe that was why so many of them joined the Klan, going overboard to conceal their true roots.) Ava totally identi
fied with her role as the mulatto in
Show Boat,
though she never forgave MGM for dubbing her songs. Like me, Ava was a frustrated singer. I knew that tonight I would go over to her bungalow, get plastered, and we would sing to each other until daylight.

But first I had an evening to kill. It was a pretty dead weekday in Beverly Hills, which was never what anyone would call a party town. The stars had to get up too early to be on the sets to support a real nightlife. It was usually dinner, at Romanoff’s, Chasen’s, the Bistro, then home to bed. Still, there were a few hangouts, which is a few more than there are now, which is nothing but fancy designer chain stores catering to rich Asian tourists. First I stopped in at the Luau, which was a Trader Vic’s-style Polynesian fantasy right on Rodeo Drive, big banana trees and koi ponds and hurricane lamps and giant clam shell urinals that were the restaurant’s chief conversation piece. The Luau was owned by Steve Crane, the ex of Lana Turner, who had been an ex of Frank in his early Hollywood years (who wasn’t?). But it was dead, as was the Daisy, which was owned by Jack Hansen, whose across-Rodeo boutique JAX was where Marilyn Monroe, and every other star in town, outfitted herself in the California casual look. But the Daisy was dead, too, so I ended up at the Candy Store two blocks away from Rodeo, on Canon Drive.

The rise of Black Power notwithstanding, there weren’t many brothers who could get into the Candy Store. Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain, Sidney Poitier, the Candy Man himself, Sammy Davis Jr., and me. I may have been riding on Mr. S’s coattails, but who in this town wasn’t riding on someone else’s coattails? Everyone needed his or her Savior, his or her Messiah. Otherwise, they wouldn’t get into Hollywood Heaven. Mr. S played Messiah to a lot of people. At his prime, in the JFK years, he was the most powerful man in the entertainment business. Now it was starting to slip away, but no one, absolutely no one in this town, was about to show the slightest hint of disrespect
for Frank Sinatra. Hence I was one black man who would always get past the velvet rope, would always get a great table, would always get the run of the house. I also got a lot of beautiful girls in the process. Celebrity is a major aphrodisiac, but even celebrity adjacency can cast its own spell. It wasn’t as if they wanted to use me to meet Frank. Except for Mia, hip young chicks had no interest in meeting Frank Sinatra in those days. He was off the radar of coolness. But the idea of my working for him, of my being that close to him, that was what was cool. It was like working at the White House. It made folks want to meet you. It gave you a mystique.

The Candy Store was the disco of the moment in Beverly Hills. Because it was new, it was the place to be. The owner, Gene Shacove, who was partnered with Tony Curtis, George Hamilton, and other stars who could draw a scene, was one of the two hairdressers to the stars in Beverly Hills. Gene, the inspiration for Warren Beatty in
Shampoo,
slept with a lot of his clients and rode a motorcycle, just as in the movie. But his biggest kick was making over these women into something they never dreamed they could be. One of his greatest makeovers was Jill St. John, who had been a rich, overweight Beverly Hills High School princess. Gene convinced her to change her last name from Oppenheimer, lose weight, get her nose done, and let him give her what became her trademark red hair. It worked like a charm. Frank was crazy about her, as were Sid Korshak, the Teamster lawyer who everyone feared as the Mafia
consigliere
in show business, Henry Kissinger, and Robert Wagner, with whom Jill finally settled down. The other celebrity hairdresser was Jay Sebring, who would come to the house to do Frank’s hair, or what was left of it. Frank was super-sensitive about his baldness and his wigs. It was one of the few things he couldn’t control. He would never set foot in a barber shop, so Jay would do house calls, even driving down to Palm Springs when sum
moned. The next summer he would be a tragic victim of the Manson family.

There were a lot of pretty girls that night at the Candy Store. But because I was meeting Ava later, I wasn’t planning any pickup attempts. I was just hanging out at the bar, when who should come in but Mia, with her dear friend John Phillips. If the world thought Mia was in seclusion mourning her upcoming divorce from the Chairman, they would have been surprised by the gay party mood she was in that night. And if anyone symbolized the drug-rock culture, or lack thereof, that Frank Sinatra detested and feared, it was the long, greasy-haired, always stoned John Phillips, Mr. California Dreaming himself. Despite the drugs, Frank did covet Phillips’s gorgeous blond wife, Mama Michelle, which probably made him hate Phillips even more. “Georgie Porgie, pudding n’ pie, kiss this girl and make her sigh,” Mia greeted me in a playful singsong voice, as if she hadn’t seen me for years, though I had just been with her at the Bel Air house that afternoon. I thought she was high, high as a kite. “Dance with me, Georgie Porgie,” she insisted, dragging me out to the floor while John Phillips went into the men’s room to smoke a joint, or do something stronger. “John won’t dance,” she complained.

We danced for what seemed an eternity. I kept looking back to the men’s room to see when John was coming out, but he must have been having a wild time in there. Frank had never told me
not
to go out with Mia; on the contrary, he was grateful for what he called my “babysitting” her to keep her out of his orbit. And he never, ever spoke one bad word about her. But he never said anything good about her, either. At any rate, given the pending divorce, the scene at the Candy Store, innocent as it was, made me uncomfortable. Each dance felt as if it would never end. “Sunshine of Your Love.” “This Guy’s in Love with You.” “Love Child.” But when the DJ put on
“Somethin’ Stupid,” the previous year’s number one duet by Frank and daughter Nancy, it was time to give up the floor. Mia didn’t see the humor, or the horror, of the situation. I’m not sure she was even aware what the song was. Finally, John Phillips returned, stoned and smiling. I left Mia in his hands and went out into the night. The air of Beverly Hills never seemed more refreshing.

I went up to Sunset and the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ava had had a wonderful time at the Count Basie concert and was in great spirits, unusual given her loathing of Hollywood and its denizens. She was so up that she insisted we go for a nightcap in what was then Hollywood’s lion’s den, the Polo Lounge of the hotel. This was the place with the banana leaf wallpaper and the Philip Morris midget and the telephones at every banquette, where, if you were anybody in the business, you had to be paged. The polo players like Darryl Zanuck and Howard Hawks who inaugurated the place were gone, but everyone else would come there. I hadn’t been in the Polo Lounge for nearly two years, since the big fight there where Frank’s friend Jilly Rizzo broke a phone over the head of a powerful local businessman who had asked Frank, Dean, and a crew of their friends to hold down their noise. As Ava and I entered, the lounge was crawling with lizards like Paramount studio head Bob Evans, another guy Frank hated, not least because he was the executive in charge of
Rosemary’s Baby
.

Evans had even more women running through his house than Frank did. Because he and his brother were big Seventh Avenue garment tycoons, they had endless model connections on both coasts, and Bob was using them strategically to do sexual favors for everyone and rise to the top in showbiz. That night Evans was so surrounded with starlets that he didn’t even look up to notice Ava as we made our way to a back booth. He had been a bit player in Ava’s 1957 film
The Sun Also Rises
, and she had thought he was so miscast as a matador that she, Hemingway, and Tyrone Power all signed a telegram to Dar
ryl Zanuck demanding that Evans be fired. Zanuck refused, issuing his famous command, “the kid stays in the picture.” Evans could deliver pussy, and pussy always trumped talent in Hollywood. Ava figured Evans still resented her and was ignoring her, gloating that now he was on top, and she wasn’t. She couldn’t have cared less. At forty-five, she was, for a Hollywood goddess, way over the hill, yet she was somehow relieved to be there, to be earning her living doing character parts rather than star turns. To her, acting was a job, not a passion. Now the heat to be fabulous was off. The paparazzi cameras had stopped clicking. The Bob Evanses of the world had stopped looking up.

London was a fresh start. Ava liked the city as much as Mr. S hated it. She had a townhouse in Knightsbridge, she had her Corgi, she had culture everywhere, and she had rain. She said she had been in Spain for more than a decade, so long, she had forgotten what rain was. Her best friend at the time was the singer Bobby Short, who often flew over from New York to visit her, and she said she was hanging out with some other black jazzmen in England. She felt she was out of the fast lane forever.

We talked about Frank and Mia, which Ava knew was a ridiculous match from the outset. Everything she predicted had come true. However, she wasn’t the slightest bit pleased with the accuracy of her predictions. She felt as bad for Frank as I did. I urged her, as always, to try to get back together with him. It seemed to me that the entire fifteen years that I had been with Frank were a kind of crazy odyssey on his part to do everything in the world, and I mean the entire world, to get over losing her. I often wondered how much different my own life would have been if they had only stayed together. Ava laughed it off. She always laughed it off. She would always love Frank, but it was more as a friend, or actually a wayward son, than as the grand passion he once had been for her, and, alas, she remained for him.

One of Frank’s favorite songs was “I Can’t Get Started with You,” and he always had Ava in mind when he sang it. “I’ve been around the world in a plane, I’ve started revolutions in Spain, I’m down and brokenhearted, ’cause I can’t get started with you.” What he meant was that he couldn’t get started
again,
and that was the story of his life. Every love song he sang was for Ava, and every woman he had was an attempt to make him forget her. Nothing worked. Ava wasn’t at all melancholy about it. She was a no-bullshit woman, totally realistic. She called it the way it was, and the way it was with Frank was not meant to be. Poor Mr. S.

We gorged ourselves on margaritas and the Polo Lounge’s famous guacamole and Fritos. Ava said she didn’t care if she gained weight. Eating well was the best revenge. We went back to her bungalow and listened to her new jazz albums. We drank, sang, laughed, like old times. Then I went home at dawn to the haunted house in Bel Air. Mia never came back that night. The next day I took Ava to the airport, to see her off to San Francisco to visit some friends. Then I drove east to Palm Springs. The three-hour drive through the rapidly dwindling orange groves that were being replaced with a suburban wasteland of shopping malls, car lots, and junk food emporia was especially miserable in the blast-furnace heat of summer. It was a true descent into American Hell. And to think that all my friends around the country had this fantasy about how wonderful California was. California Dreamin’, all right. That John Phillips had the last laugh, he and the Beach Boys. They had sold a major load to the public. I wasn’t hearing any songs about West Covina, or Loma Linda, or Redlands. This was the real California, and it was nothing to write about.