Mr. S (24 page)

I never saw Sinatra get involved with a black girl, though he often requested black hookers. “Trade you two vanillas for one chocolate,” he’d say to Van Heusen. He talked about a brief fling with Billie Holiday in his crooner days in the forties and his desire to love and learn from the woman he considered the Queen of Song. Mr. S was attracted to Nancy Wilson, but she was taken and let him down without making him feel rejected. Not so with Lena Horne, for whom he did try to make a big play. It failed, and afterward he often dumped on her, which was strange for the normally gracious Mr. S. In a long interview in
Life,
he trashed her singing as “mechanical.” I never heard that before. But when a lady said “no,” hell had no fury like Sinatra scorned.

When all else had failed, Mr. S would go over to Big Nancy’s for a home-cooked meal, memories, and television, like a normal guy. Little Nancy was married, Frank Jr. was at a prep school in Idyllwild, in the mountains above Palm Springs, to keep him away from the “spoiled Jew brats” of Beverly Hills, whom Mr. S saw as a worse influence than drug pushers in Watts, and Tina was off being a teenager. So it was just him and Nancy, for old times’ sake, though I’m sure nothing sexual happened. He often said that was long over. Yet sometimes he’d seem so happy there that I’d ask him why he didn’t just pack it in and go home to the one who really loved him. “Cause I’m not a quitter, that’s why,” he’d say. It was a strange response, viewing that kind of a reconciliation as quitting. But what he meant, I guess,
was that as a true romantic, he wouldn’t give up until he found Miss Right, or Miss Right II, since Ava was always going to be Number One in the romance sweepstakes. As with his music and everything else, he was a ruthless perfectionist. It was the same with love, even if the dream girl turned out to be only a dream. The man would never compromise.

I asked Mr. S once if he had never met Ava, did he think he would still be with Big Nancy, and he said no. Maybe if he had never come to Hollywood…But he did admit that if he had never met Ava, he might have had a lower standard, and would not have been alone as he was. Whatever the reasons, he could never rekindle the fires with Nancy. He simply couldn’t get past the old Italian mother/whore split. And since he was adamant about no more kids, plus obsessed with class and status, finding a goddess/princess who didn’t want children was a tall order, even for Mr. S. On many nights, the playboy of the western world would fall asleep watching TV on Big Nancy’s couch. All by himself.

From the summer to the end of 1963, Sinatra had no time for anyone. He had some major fires to extinguish. His biggest problem was the Cal-Neva Lodge. Mr. Sam had done it again. Even though he was technically barred from the premises, Sam saw himself as above the law. Always the gentleman, he also wanted to be front and center for his girlfriend Phyllis McGuire’s shows, to cheer her on. However, one night after a show, when they were unwinding in Phyllis’s cabin on the lake, Phyllis’s manager made an insulting comment to her. The normally calm Sam leapt up and attacked the manager, who was bigger than he was. Sinatra had the cabin next door, just a few feet away, and we heard the awful ruckus. I ran over there immediately and found Sam and the manager wrestling on the floor. Phyllis was pounding on the manager’s head with her high heel. I tried to pull them apart, but before I knew it Mr. S had grabbed me from behind.
“Are you crazy? Are you fucking crazy?” he screamed at them, but they didn’t listen and kept slugging.

Sinatra yanked me away and out into the night. “Don’t touch them!’ he insisted. “We can’t have anything to do with this shit!” We called some guards from the lodge to break it up, and Mr. S had me drive Mr. Sam out of Tahoe and back to Palm Springs in one of our low-profile station wagons. On the ride, Giancana mostly slept, but when he was awake I found it unusual that he made no reference whatsoever to the brawl. He talked about getting some new golf clubs in Palm Springs. Mr. S hoped this mess would go away, but it didn’t. The manager, whose eye was nearly put out by a blow from Sam’s diamond ring, went to the authorities and claimed both Giancana and Sinatra had made Mafia death threats to him (I never heard them). True or false, his complaint opened up a massive can of worms. The Nevada Gaming Commission got into the act, and Mr. S, who believed he had
created
Nevada, told them to go fuck themselves. Alas, at the same time of the Sinatra-Nevada shouting match, another of the Hollywood moguls, who were the perpetual bane of Mr. S’s existence, began making his own Mafia-style threats to Sinatra. This was Jack Warner, an old-timey tough guy.

I had met Jack Warner in the early fifties with Lazar, and was flattered that this great mogul would remember my name whenever he saw me. “Hey, Jacobs, look sharp,” he’d always greet me, echoing the Gillette razor slogan of the times, “Look sharp. Feel sharp. Be sharp.” Warner, who prided himself on being sharp, was fascinated that a black guy would have a Jewish name, though he did everything he could to downplay his own Jewishness, from his English clothes, to his interest in polo, to his plantation-style estate on Angelo Drive in Benedict Canyon, to his wife Ann, who was from Louisiana, to his starlet mistresses, whom Warner liked to take to the dive Barney’s Beanery, where James Dean and other bohemian actors hung out. I
used to see Warner there and be surprised. The bartender told me he brought his own steaks for them to cook. He liked the atmosphere. In keeping with his flight from his Judaism, Jack Warner was fanatically pro-American and anti-Communist. He could be funny like Leo Durocher, though not as prolific with his one-liners. When he met Einstein, he told him, “I have my own theory of relativity. Never hire your relatives.” He was thuglike in his insistence on wielding his immense power, as Mr. S would find out.

Sinatra was now trying to merge Reprise Records into Warner Brothers, as part of an ambitious business move in which he might eventually take over the entire studio. The last thing law-and-order-loving Jack Warner wanted was
any
association with Sam Giancana, right or wrong. Just as Joe Kennedy made Sinatra back down on Albert Maltz, Jack Warner made him back down on Sam Giancana. It was a big pissing contest, and I guess Jack Warner had the bigger dick. He also gave Sinatra millions of dollars, a huge suite of offices on the Warner lot, and a rich movie production deal to make his point. All Sam Giancana had to offer was fear, but that wasn’t anything Mr. S could sneeze at. Smoking and drinking much more than usual to relieve his stress, Mr. S gave up his share of Cal-Neva as well as his big piece of the Sands. In doing so, Sinatra’s silent partnership with gangland came to an end, as did his relationship with Sam Giancana, who would never forgive Mr. S for choosing Jack Warner over him. A Hebe over a fellow Dago? What kind of heresy was that? The Hebe did give Mr. S a down-payment certified check of a million dollars which he didn’t cash for a week, flashing it to me and all his friends. This was true “fuck you” money. The only problem with it was that it said “fuck you” to Sam Giancana. Mr. S never met with or even called Mr. Sam to tell him he was going the Warner route. He just stopped talking to him. He was dumping Sam the same way he dumped his mistresses. Unlike with the girls, he
wanted
to talk, he
planned
to talk
to Sam, but it didn’t happen. I’m sure it was because Mr. S simply didn’t know what to say or how to say it to Giancana. It was a measure of the heat Bobby Kennedy was putting on Sam, the nonstop surveillance, that he didn’t do something unspeakable to this son who had spurned him.

The unspeakable happened anyway. First, there was the JFK assassination in November. Mr. S was at Warners in Burbank shooting
Robin and the Seven Hoods
, which was ironically conceived as an
homage
to Chicago (“My Kind of Town,” the song, came from here) and to Mr. Chicago, Mr. Sam. He was in such shock, he shut down the production for days. It was one time when he simply couldn’t work. We retreated to Palm Springs, where he holed up in his bedroom, watching the assassination circus, freaking out along with the rest of the world when Ruby shot Oswald, eating nothing but occasional fried-egg sandwiches, and drinking vast amounts of Jack Daniel’s. He called Pat Lawford in Washington to express his regrets, though he still refused to speak to Peter. Nor did he telephone Jackie or Bobby, who, he said “wouldn’t return my calls.” He sent an enormous floral display instead. For all his hatred of Bobby, for all the pain “TP” had inflicted upon him by cutting him dead, Mr. S would never say one unkind word about the man he once loved and continued to admire as a leader, if not as a man. “I really liked Jack,” I told Mr. S. I’d been crying. I couldn’t help it. “He liked you, too, George,” Sinatra answered sadly. “Probably more than me.”

Among Van Heusen and his closest friends, Sinatra wondered aloud (though not too loud) if Mr. Sam, who knew Jack Ruby from the strip-club circuit, in which he had a hand, could have had something to do with it. Mr. S thought Ruby was a nut, though maybe he was a
programmed
nut, as in Sinatra’s 1962 film
The Manchurian Candidate
, which he pulled from rerun distribution to avoid controversy and charges of bad taste. Sam Giancana certainly had a big
score to settle, and he was nothing if not bold and decisive. But Dallas was way beyond a mob rubout. Sam had never dreamed this big before. Mr. S would have loved to hear the inside of the greatest mystery of our time, but Sam Giancana had “Lawfordized” Sinatra. The man who owned his kind of town would never speak to Sinatra again.

Mr. S had still not recovered from the JFK tragedy when, two weeks later, he received an even more brutal body blow. His son Frank Jr., who had just kicked off his own singing career at a star-studded gala in New York, was kidnapped in a Lake Tahoe hotel, not far from Cal-Neva in the northern branch of Nevada mobland. Again, Mr. S suspected his new and deadly enemy Sam Giancana, so much so that he humbled himself by calling Bobby Kennedy and asking for his help. If possible, Mr. S was even more upset at the kidnapping than Big Nancy, who was remarkably composed and resolved. I’ve never seen anyone so positive. “He’ll be back. I know he will,” she declared time and again. Mr. S was not so sure. I was surprised that he didn’t sleep over with Big Nancy during the ordeal. He said he was “too nervous.” He needed to be in his own place to think straight. He felt terribly guilty about neglecting his son, and was terrified that he wouldn’t get the chance to make things right by “Junior,” as he called him.

I had never seen Mr. S go to church since he prayed for the Oscar at the Good Shepherd Church back in 1954. Now he was back at Good Shepherd, and, once again, his prayers were answered. As it turned out, the crime had been the work, not of Giancana at all, but of some rank amateurs, who did almost more harm than the abduction itself by asserting, after they were caught, that Frank Jr. had staged the whole crime himself to get publicity for his new singing career. It was devastating to the poor kid, who had enough problems trying to follow in his father’s footsteps, and it was completely untrue. Yet, because
father and son had a difficult relationship that was well-known, a lot of people believed it. That kind of Hollywood gossip was lethal. Moreover, the kidnapping ordeal, which lasted a week, the longest week in the Sinatras’ lives, did not in the long run bring the family any closer together. Frank Jr. remained estranged, and Mr. S remained aloof.

It should not be said, however, that Frank Sinatra did not support his son’s musical career. Mr. S knew that he was the toughest act in the world to follow, yet he did nothing to discourage Junior from trying to scale this Everest of sound. Mr. S, who was musically illiterate, had deep respect for Junior’s musicianship. “He’s first rate,” he’d say proudly. “Plays the piano as good as Nelson.” As for the charge that Mr. S had hurt Junior by missing the nineteen-year-old’s opening night at the Americana Hotel on Seventh Avenue in New York, Mr. S had purposely stayed away to avoid stealing the boy’s thunder. He was completely aware of it, beseeching all his friends in show business to go and cheer Junior. Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, Joe E. Lewis, all were there heeding the call of the father, who showed up a few days later, once the critics had declared the show a hit. Above all, Mr. S tried to treat Junior as a professional musician, as an equal, as a
guy,
and real guys weren’t all over each other. Mr. S could be cuddly and emotional with Little Nancy and Tina, do “girl stuff” with them, but he valued his son’s independence, and so did the son. Furthermore, the son lacked for
nothing.
Pete Epsteen in Chicago sent him a new Pontiac convertible the minute he could drive, his father gave him unlimited money, he had charge accounts so he could dress as well as dad, girls threw themselves at him, what
more,
Mr. S wondered, could the kid possibly need? Love? Love was for broads.

Not too long after Frank Jr.’s abduction, Tommy Sands walked out on Nancy Junior. Tommy didn’t have one, but
two
impossible standards to rise to. One was Elvis Presley, the other was Frank Sinatra. As a Southern rocker, Tommy was derided as the Poor Man’s Elvis. The
two had both been managed by Col. Tom Parker at one point, but the colonel had dropped Tommy. I used to joke with Tommy, who like me was born in Louisiana, that the reason he wasn’t as big as Elvis was that he didn’t have as much black blood in him as Elvis did. The bottom line was that, blood or not, Tommy was too clean, too white bread, too Pat Boone to become the heartthrob of teenage girls who were getting a lot funkier. On the other hand, if Tommy had been any funkier, Mr. S would have never let Little Nancy marry him.

Tommy and Nancy were really nice to me. I wasn’t exactly family to Little Nancy, because I was too busy with her busy dad to see her that much. We didn’t have heart-to-hearts, the way I did with Ava, for example, but she knew I was there if she needed me. Once Mr. S sent me to Nashville to look after the Sandses during one of Tommy’s recording sessions. The hotel in Nashville refused to give me a room, so Tommy and Nancy checked out and moved into a colored hotel so we could all stay together. When Nancy dropped her father’s name at the first hotel, the manager couldn’t have been less impressed or fearful that he might be the target of a mob rubout. Nancy never usually dropped her father’s name, nor did her father drop his own name or the muscle attendant to it. It wasn’t their style. People were supposed to
know
who they were. But not in Nashville, and Nancy was as frustrated as I was uncomfortable. “Do you know what he can do to you?” she threatened the white guy. He just shrugged and said, “He’s just another Communist like the Kennedys.” And that was that.