Mr. S (28 page)

One thing Frank Sinatra missed terribly was the excitement of being a political kingmaker that he had tasted in the JFK election, before being stabbed in the back by the kings and princes he had made. With Lyndon Johnson in office, Yankee Dagos couldn’t have
been less welcome in Washington, D.C. Mr. S was a fighter who had been barred from the ring. He knew he was the champ; all he wanted was the chance to prove it. He got that chance in 1966 in the California gubernatorial campaign. The Democratic candidate was incumbent Pat Brown, who asked for Sinatra’s help against his Hollywood challenger Ronald Reagan, in his first bid for public office. Mr. S was apoplectic that a bozo, or
Bonzo,
like Reagan would have the audacity to run for any office higher than dogcatcher. If anyone in Hollywood should be governor, it was Mr. S. Besides, at the time, Sinatra was still a liberal. He saw Reagan as a right-wing John Bircher, a Pacific Palisades Klansman. He also made fun of Nancy Reagan as both a failed actress and a failed Sinatra groupie (he claimed she had come on to him as a starlet in the forties, and he had said no), plus she had fire-hydrant legs. This election was a piece of cake. Just look at the entertainment lineup of Mr. S’s Democratic superstars versus the Republican lineup: Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Pat Boone. It didn’t seem close. It wasn’t. Reagan won handily. Once again, Mr. S ate humble pie.

The only place where Sinatra could get the respect he deserved was at his desert fiefdom, the Sands. But even in Vegas, the times were beginning to change. Sinatra’s first engagement as a new husband saw him sinking to a new low in tasteless humor. With Mia in the audience in front of the stage, Mr. S began a routine about his wife that was more appropriate for Henny Youngman (“Take my wife…”). He introduced Mia saying, “Finally I found a broad I can cheat on.” He didn’t stop at Mia. He joked that Sammy wasn’t there because he was at his own opening, of a gas station in Watts that sold three varieties of petrol: regular, ethyl, and burn, baby, burn. As noted before, comedy wasn’t Mr. S’s forte, though that didn’t stop him from trying. He came up with these routines himself. Because he was Frank Sinatra, the audiences would laugh, if only as a knee-jerk reaction, and often with their jaws dropping in bewilderment.

Mr. S could give, but he couldn’t take. When his onetime buddy Shecky Greene made his famous joke; “Frank Sinatra saved my life. His goons were beating me up and he said, ‘Enough,’” Mr. S did not laugh and excised Shecky from his buddy list. Jackie Mason might as well have been a dead man walking with his jokes about Sinatra’s toupees and dentures and Mia’s braces. Both Shecky and Jackie were badly beaten up by anonymous assailants. Although Mr. S had long broken with Sam Giancana and his genuine Mafia connections, he still knew a lot of tough guys who liked to
pretend
they were made men and did thuggish “favors” for Mr. S, favors he didn’t want done. The press had a field day playing Guess Who. Mr. S felt he was being crucified.

Nothing was safe for Mr. S, not even the Sands. The hotel, and much of Vegas, was about to be bought up by Sinatra’s old rival for the affections of Ava Gardner, Howard Hughes. The mob was having so much trouble of their own, they welcomed the opportunity to unload their casinos. Hughes was the sucker they had dreamed about. By now Sam Giancana was out of prison and had left the country, living in walled splendor in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and devoting his energies to criminal opportunities in Latin America, Colombian cocaine, Panamanian shipping, things of that sort. Mr. S sometimes reminisced about the old days in Chicago, Cal-Neva, early Vegas. He missed Mr. Sam like a lost uncle, or godfather, as it were. Johnny Rosselli was still around, actually helping broker the sting of Hughes. Now that Mr. S had gone the way of the Goetzes, he and Rosselli never crossed paths. Besides, after Cal-Neva and the split with Giancana, Rosselli was probably under mob pressure to give Sinatra the silent treatment.

An even worse treatment for Mr. S was the humiliation of having his credit cut off at the Sands, the House that Frank Built, but now it was Hughes’s house. The Apollo astronauts, heroes of Mr. S’s, had
come to see his show. It was a total mutual-admiration society. The astronauts were completely snowed, particularly when Mr. S sang “Fly Me to the Moon” for them. Sinatra wanted to further show off by staking the moonmen to bets at the tables. But all bets were off. Again I stood back as Mr. S went wild. He hijacked one of the golf carts that the bellhops used, put Mia in shotgun, and proceeded to play bumper cars with everything in the lobby before crashing the cart into the all-glass entrance. He didn’t intend to drive through the glass, for that would have put him and Mia at a risk even he, in his worst rage, wouldn’t have taken. But the cart, like Sinatra, went out of control and hit the window, shattering it but not going through it, as the press reported for more dramatic effect. Somehow, neither Frank nor Mia was hurt in the demolition derby. He then tried to do a burn, baby, burn number to some couches and drapes in the lobby, which, luckily, didn’t catch. When Mr. S failed to light his, or anyone else’s fire, he took Mia and left. During the tantrum, no one, no guard, no clerk, dared to interfere with him. They still treated him as if he owned the place and had the right to destroy it if he wanted to.

If Jack Entratter, who was still managing the Sands but was somehow away from the place that night, had been around, this scene would have never happened. Yet without Entratter there to bend them, the new Hughes rules were strictly enforced. Mr. S was no longer God. It’s hard not to be God anymore. The next day, Mr. S had a confrontation with Carl Cohen, Entratter’s Number Two, a why-hast-thou-forsaken-me kind of man to man. And instead of kissing Mr. S’s ring, as in the not-so-old days, Cohen, a mean Jewish brawler, knocked Mr. S’s two front teeth out, provoked by Sinatra’s having called him a “kike bastard motherfucker” (shades of Dolly’s diction). Mr. S got new caps and, suffice it to say, never played the Sands again nor spoke to his lifelong friend Entratter, whom he accused of having intentionally disappeared from the showdown out of fear of his new
boss Hughes. Sinatra signed with Caesar’s Palace the next year, but this man did expect to be a prophet in his own country. When he wasn’t, it was cruel and unusual punishment.

For Frank Sinatra 1967 was a very bad year. His biggest career accomplishment was the throwaway song “Somethin’ Stupid,” the only father-daughter love song ever to hit number one on the pop charts. It was a little incestuous, but, as Mr. S said, “Number one is number one. Take it any way you can get it.” His other big achievement was being named chairman of the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League, “The Dago NAACP,” as he termed it. Now that he was an elder statesman, he would have to can the racist humor. That was a major sacrifice. His being honored by the league made Mr. S feel old. The death of Spencer Tracy made him feel older. Being a pallbearer tagged all his Sicilian superstitious bases. He worried about being “in line.”

But nothing bothered him more than what was happening in San Francisco, and Mr. S wasn’t even there. In fact, he rarely went to the City by the Bay. It was cold and it was damp and it belonged to Tony Bennett anyway. At least it
used
to belong to Tony until it was taken over by Janis Joplin and Grace Slick and Jerry Garcia and the hippies in Haight Ashbury whose cancer of psychedelia, as Mr. S saw it, was spreading like a stoned contagion across America and the world. Everybody caught it, even the goddamned Beatles, on whom Mr. S would have taken long odds in Vegas that they would have been long gone by now. But here they were with even longer hair and this spaced out
Sergeant Pepper
album and this other freak from UCLA Jim Morrison and “Light My Fire,” and Mr. S knew exactly what they were all selling. Drugs, drugs, drugs, his most despised commodity. He could sell all the Jack Daniel’s in the world with
his
music, one more for the road, baby, but drugs, no way. He wished that Sgt. Barry Sadler (“Ballad of the Green Berets”) would come and blow Sergeant
Pepper into oblivion. These hippies were body-snatching America’s youth, brainwashing them, poisoning their minds. And worst of all, the most prized body these spaced invaders had snatched was that of his new wife.

Mia Farrow was a poster child for hippiedom. She loved going to San Francisco, she loved wearing flowers in her hair, she had every Beatle record, and would soon inspire some of them herself. There was no Eastern religion she wouldn’t embrace, no astrologer she wouldn’t consult, and no famous rock star, or cult figure, she wouldn’t want to get to know. I never knew her to have cheated, physically if not spiritually, with Mr. S, but the times were loose and anything was possible. She was young and experimental and open to everything, and my job was to babysit her through her coming of age, the Age of Aquarius.

I turned forty in 1967. I didn’t like turning forty any more than Mr. S liked turning fifty. We may not have been part of the “youth culture,” but we both believed we were forever young. Unlike Mr. S, I was excited by the changes in the world outside. I did my share of drugs as well in my off hours. I let my hair grow, bought some bell bottoms and big collars, a chain or two, even got a Harley-Davidson. Mr. S scrutinized every slight change the way a seismologist checks fault lines for the slippage that signals disaster. “What’s with the sideburns, George?” he’d ask. “What’s with the long collar?” “Are those
flowers
on your tie?” I rolled with the times, but held the line. I never “freaked out,” never went to a love-in, never joined a sit-in, or burned a bank.

Mr. S made a big point about the difference between
freedom
and
license
. “Don’t go thinking that by growing your hair or getting high that you’re gonna save the world, save your people, even save your ass,” he warned me. He didn’t go so far as to claim the whole hippie movement was a Communist plot, but he came close, blaming it on those insulated, permissive rich folks he called “Scarsdale liberals,” whose bleeding hearts were about to be broken when they saw the
country in bedlam. He suspected a radical, anarchistic element behind the big party America’s youth was having. Mr. S didn’t mind a welfare state, but he insisted on a state of
some
kind, and not the state of confusion where he thought we were heading.

Even though he had never served, he was a huge supporter of the military as a bulwark of our freedom. He was appalled at the way kids were attacking our soldiers over Vietnam when all the guys were doing was their duty. Once he saw I had an antiwar petition someone had given me to sign, and he gave me a long lecture on how, as a veteran, I would be committing a sacrilege by signing it. He warned that the JFK assassination could have been “just the beginning.” In the next year, 1968, when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were killed, I realized Mr. S may have been more than an aging reactionary. He
loved
America, and he would give his all to protect it. War or peace, Mr. S also really cared about me. He was worried I’d go wrong. If it weren’t for him, I might have indeed gone too far. He was a stabilizing influence. For Mia, however, he was the Bad Daddy.

The unwritten social contract between Frank and Mia had two key points, no career, and no kids. In 1967 Mia was already flagrantly violating one and, from my perspective, calculating how to violate the other. Just to humor her, Mr. S “allowed” Mia to make one film a year. He assumed she would get it out of her system. Was he wrong on that one! She spent months in London and Berlin making her own spy thriller,
A Dandy in Aspic,
about an assassin hired to kill himself. Mr. S was so down on Swinging London he never went over to visit Mia on the set. He wasn’t seeing anyone else in L.A., other than the occasional call girl, so I’d say he was being faithful. Mia was, too, but not according to the press, which Sinatra hated, and often with good reason for its sensation-seeking inaccuracy. The papers had a field day with
Dandy,
manufacturing big stories about Mia’s torrid affair with her costar Laurence Harvey. The paparazzi caught
them dancing together, in embraces that looked naughty and suspicious. That dancing. Mia should have been a go-go girl, she loved dancing so much. (I came to wish she hadn’t.) The world press’s blow-up of this “scandal” confirmed Mr. S’s dim view of celebrity journalism as just another branch of creative writing. We both knew that the only member of our family that Larry wanted to have an affair with was
me.
So we let that slide. To appease her husband and thank him for his “permission” to let her act, she brought him home a gift of a black London Austin cab. He hated it. He was a Dual-Ghia guy, a swinging convertible racer. Austin cabs were drab, slow clunkers, for old ladies and square bankers in bowlers. Is
that
how Mia saw him? A James Bond Aston-Martin maybe, the one with the ejector seat, but an
Austin
? All the gift did was create more tension.

A far bigger problem was Mia’s next project,
Rosemary’s Baby.
Mr. S got the heebie-jeebies over that one. He saw the plot line about a waif who gets impregnated with the child of the devil as way too close to his home, a reflection of Mia’s scarcely veiled wishful thinking. The girl envisioned herself, as she often told me, as a master-race breeding machine. How could a great man like Frank Sinatra
not
give her a child that would be more than a mere child. It would be a national treasure. It would be Rosemary’s Baby. She talked to me about it all the time, saying what a crazy, selfish attitude he had and how she was going to turn his mind inside out. She made me drive her to go browsing at all the maternity boutiques for baby clothes. We’d go to furniture stores where she would imagine how she would decorate the child’s room. If Mr. S ever heard some song on the radio like “Baby Love” he’d just cringe. Mia liked to sing the words to the hit song “If I Were a Carpenter,” “…and you were a lady, would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby?” I think Mr. S may have tried to avoid sleeping with her at times for fear that she would get pregnant. She loved the challenge, always thinking of original ways to
seduce him. Some “little boy,” as the press tried to make her out. She was a total femme fatale. The only one who knew how seductive she was was Mr. S, the ultimate connoisseur of women. Mia was the equal of the Chairman of the Board.