Mr. S (12 page)

It was deeply embarrassing. Mr. S didn’t even talk about it at first,
he was so humiliated. It seemed to me like a Keystone Kops comedy, but to Mr. S it was no laughing matter. The last thing he ever wanted was to be made a fool of like this. It was
his
detective, hence
his
fault, even if the detective was on the right track and had made an honest mistake. Mr. S would take a dishonest score over an honest mistake any day. He never used the detective again, and he blacklisted him with all his friends. It was tough for a Hollywood dick to survive under that cloud. The mistakenly raided woman got paid off, but Joe began to suspect Frank, like every other man, had his own designs on Marilyn and had set up the whole raid to destroy things with Joe, so Sinatra could have her himself. Mr. S thought Joe was preposterously paranoid, even more paranoid than he was about Ava. But as the years went by, and Mr. S got closer to Marilyn, and then introduced her to the Kennedys, treating her, in Joe’s eyes, as power catnip, no better than the whore Judy Campbell, Joe cut Frank completely. He later would blame him for the death of the woman he loved and would never forgive him. So much for Dago solidarity. Joe was replaced by famed player and coach Leo Durocher as Mr. S’s “baseball friend.”

Most of the time, however, as long as they weren’t competing over some girl, which could make enemies out of brothers, the Italians did stick together. One of Mr. S’s favorite “old neighborhood” guys was Skinny D’Amato, who was also a great friend of Joe DiMaggio. Skinny was the Toots Shor of New Jersey, the perfect host who never charged his famous guests. He was also a great impresario. Playing his 500 Club in Atlantic City was like playing the Colosseum in ancient Rome. It was the big ticket in the Garden State. It seemed like Valhalla to Mr. S when he was starting out, just as the Yankee Clipper seemed like Zeus. And now the boy could walk on Mount Olympus with his gods, and Skinny was the god of nightclubs. Normally among the Italian guys, Skinny would have been a fat slob. They liked
to give each other reverse names. But Skinny, whose real name was Paul, was really skinny. He looked more like a senator, very distinguished, fine clothes and bearing. I guess he had come a long way from the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where he had done time for white slavery. To Mr. S that sentence was hardly a blot on his record, but rather a red badge of courage. It proved why Skinny had a way with the ladies; he always treated Mr. S and his crew to amazing hookers. At Lewisburg Skinny had made great life contacts, especially with some Philadelphia crime lords who set him up after parole as their front man at the “Five.” It was also at Lewisburg where Skinny made the connections that led 500 Club patron and Prohibition bootleg supplier Joseph Kennedy to turn to him when he needed to find out whom to bribe to ensure that his son would win the 1960 West Virginia primary. Skinny was Kennedy’s “bag man” in the state, and, that, too, became a mark of honor.

In the same way that Skinny never charged Frank, Frank never charged Skinny. I’m sure Skinny paid Mr. S for his performances in the dark ages of the early fifties when few others would book him. But once the man was back on top, he would perform five shows a night for nothing but the honor of being there. On my first trip with Mr. S to Atlantic City, it was like a homecoming celebration. Here was Jersey’s favorite son, and they all came out to cheer him. We took a whole floor at the Claridge Hotel on the Boardwalk, which was wall-to-wall beauties courtesy of Skinny. I would have thought that after five shows, at five in the morning Mr. S would have liked to get back to the Claridge and the ladies or at least to sleep. No way. He was home, and he was wired. We went down to the black belt of clubs on Kentucky Avenue, places with names like Timbuktu and Club Harlem, to a place called Grace’s Little Belmont to visit Sammy Davis Jr.’s terrific mom, Baby Sanchez, who still ran the bar there. “Sammy’s Mammy,” Dean called her. Mr. S was passing out fresh hundred-
dollar bills, like Rockefeller with his dimes, to everyone, waiters, patrons, winos on the street, guys in the band. I’ve never seen anyone so happy to be in one place. And he always gave credit where credit was due. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Skinny.”

That same trip to Atlantic City, Mr. S took me to Hoboken to meet his mother and father, Dolly and Marty. The first thing she says, right in front of me, is “You never told me he was a nigger! Who do you think you are, Ashley Wilkes?” Mr. S was embarrassed, like any kid would be with his mom. I had no idea what to do, to run for cover or what. Then she gives me this big hug and kiss and welcomes me into her home. That was the way Dolly was. She was a chubby, bubbly dynamo with a big mouth and an even bigger heart. She said whatever came to her mind, no censorship. She may have been something of a local politician, yet she was anything but diplomatic. Hoboken, when Mr. S was growing up, was one big race riot. The Germans and Irish, who ran the place, hated the Jews, who were up and coming, who hated the Italians, who were down and out, who hated the blacks, who were nowhere at all, and so on.

Everybody hated everybody. It was nothing personal. Because once you were a friend, that’s what you were, not a black or a Jew or a Dago, but a friend. So if Frank liked me, Dolly liked me, and she quickly adopted me as her second son, her “Jigsilian,” which was Dolly-ese for black Sicilian. She took me into the kitchen with her, taught me how to cook Jersey-style
braciole, scarpariello, cannoli,
though she lamented, like any loving mother, how little her boy would eat. She’d lament a lot, despite his vast success, all the basic stuff, his family, his home life, or lack thereof. She adored Ava, I think, maybe more than Nancy. Dolly had stayed close to Nancy on account of the kids. But Dolly understood her son’s compulsive need for glamour and action. Because Dolly was, if anything, a realist, she knew Nancy wasn’t going to work but hoped that, if her son got his
act together and got over the Don Giovanni part, the Ava thing
could
work. She made me her emissary in trying to talk sense to him, not that that ever did any good.

I could see from meeting his mom exactly where Mr. S got his verve and his sass from. She should have been on stage. If she had, Marty, his father, would have been hiding in the wings, cringing. A boxer who became a fireman, Marty called his son “Mr. Big Shot,” as if he still thought Frank was crazy to try to get into show business. Marty was a tough, quiet, little guy, the kind you see playing cards all day in those Italian social clubs in Little Italy. He was Old World, a little bit of Palermo in Victorian, run-down Hoboken. Marty had seen how his boy had almost lost it all once, and you could see he was afraid he could lose it all again. Take nothing for granted that comes too easy, that was his philosophy. That was why he had gone to the firehouse every day, even when his son would have gladly bought him ten firehouses. Dolly (whose heritage was Genoese) gave her only child unconditional love, but Marty, superstitious Sicilian that he was, would never give up his doubts. I could see the pain in Mr. S’s face from his inability to get his father, of all people, to believe in him. In his own way, without meaning it, Marty Sinatra made him feel just as bad as Sam Spiegel had. As a result, Mr. S spent much more time talking to his mother, whom he’d call almost every day, like his kids, than his father.

Despite an awkwardness with Marty, Mr. S was great to his parents, whom he addressed as “Mom” and “Pop.” He paid for everything for them, though Marty was much prouder than Dolly about taking money. Mr. S would secretly slip three or four hundred-dollar bills in his father’s coat, so Marty could buy drinks for everyone down at the old bar he hung out in. He’d drag his parents to all his New York music openings and proudly show them off to his high and mighty friends. This was one man who wasn’t embarrassed by
where he came from, though Marty and Dolly may have been embarrassed by where he ended up. They
despised
everything about Hollywood and generally refused to let Frank fly them out to his gala film premieres or Vegas debuts. He begged his parents to let him set them up in high style in Beverly Hills, sort of an Italian Beverly Hillbillies, so they could be near their grandkids. But neither Dolly or Marty liked Los Angeles; they thought it was bogus and preferred New Jersey.

Marty especially hated the food in California. He thought Frank’s beloved Villa Capri was a bad joke. Marty was actually an even better cook than Dolly. He made the greatest “pastafazool” and taught me how to do a perfect calamari salad, though he told me the squid in California was all frozen. “Fake” was his favorite word for everything Pacific Coast. I think he liked me because I was from New Orleans, which wasn’t a fake place, because my dad had a bar, which to Marty was a noble calling, and because one of my dad’s partners had been a big boxer, Kid Coco, and Marty considered boxing the true sport of kings. As a result of his parents’ California antipathies, Mr. S would fly his three kids to his East River penthouse as often as their school schedules allowed, so they could keep in touch with their grandparents across the Hudson and with their bedrock immigrant values, which Mr. S deeply admired, even though he didn’t necessarily live by them.

The tricks Mama Dolly taught me about making authentically inauthentic Italian food would soon come in handy. Mr. S was putting on a huge spread in Palm Springs for a special guest. He even hired a mariachi band to entertain. I had never seen him try so hard to have everything perfect, not even for Ava. He was extremely nervous about each little thing being just so, the linens, the soap, the caviar, which had to be the finest Beluga, from Iran and not Russia. “The guy hates Communists,” Mr. S explained. Who was he, I asked,
Joe McCarthy? No, Mr. S laughed. He was as far from Senator Joe McCarthy as a guy could be. So who, I pressed my boss, was I going to all these pains for? “He owns Chicago,” Mr. S said. Sam Giancana was one Italian Mr. S did not call Dag.

The thing that made the first big impression of this Mr. Big of American Gangland were his hands. He had the most perfectly manicured hands and nails I had ever seen. Yet these were the same hands that, according to the man’s legend, in his youth had crushed tracheas and squeezed triggers. Mr. S never mentioned that side of Giancana. What impressed Sinatra about the capo was that he was a genius of a businessman. No matter that the legend labeled Giancana as a near idiot, with a double-digit IQ. To Frank Sinatra he was a genius when it came to money, and money was the only test that mattered in America, where anything was possible, even for an idiot to own Chicago. Where success was concerned, brawn could be better than brains, though “Mafia” was a word I never heard Mr. S use.

Sometimes they called Giancana Sam, sometimes Salvatore, sometimes Mooney, which was some kind of Italian usage for “crazy.” He didn’t seem crazy to me. He seemed very conservative. Sam Giancana, a small man, almost Sinatra’s and my size, but a little heavier, was around sixty, balding, mousey. He was the kind of man you might have seen in Marty Sinatra’s Italian social club, except his clothes were way too good. He had the fanciest clothes I ever saw, as fancy as his hands. He had silk suits, and silk shirts, and silk pocket squares, and alligator shoes even after alligator shoes became illegal. Everything was custom made. He wore a star sapphire ring that looked like the Hope Diamond, serious Breakfast at Tiffany’s stuff. And he smoked Havana cigars that would have made Harry Cohn jealous. Yet at the same time, he had a high, almost girlish voice that mispronounced half of the few things he would say. He got everybody’s name wrong, from President Eisenheimer to Clark Grable.

Sam Giancana looked dazed, lost, a scared rabbit. He carried huge rolls of dimes and quarters, to use in the pay phones he was constantly stopping at. He said all the regular phones he could use were being tapped. He seemed totally paranoid. Yet Mr. S insisted the man was a wizard, a business mastermind who understood big money better than anyone else in the world. Like Skinny D’Amato, Sam Giancana had kept Mr. S afloat when he was drowning, probably more so, because Skinny took orders from Sam. Sam had ordered Skinny and other gang-related club owners around the country to book Sinatra and to keep booking him, despite his voice problems, despite his dwindling allure. Sam Giancana’s confidence that Sinatra would come back became a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Talk about the heat being on in the kitchen. I must have cut myself five times and burned myself ten, but that was nothing compared to what this mob kingpin would do to me if I fucked the meal up. And it wasn’t just Sam Giancana. Throughout the day one mob boss after another showed up at the Alejo house. There was Johnny Rosselli, the original Dapper Don, with clothes and hands like Giancana but tall and handsome. Rosselli, who had done more time than a clock, was supposedly the Mafia’s man in Hollywood. I used to see him at the best tables at Romanoff’s and Perino’s, with the prettiest starlets as well as with Harry Cohn, who had a huge gambling problem that Rosselli enabled. They were also frequently at Santa Anita racetrack together, and they wore identical “blood brother” ruby rings that Rosselli had given the mogul. After seeing Rosselli at his house, I asked Mr. S if Giancana had leaned on Rosselli to lean on Cohn to give him the part in
From Here to Eternity,
and he gave me a Cheshire-cat grin. “Hey, I got that part through my own fucking
talent,
” he said. And then he gave me a wink.

And there were more. There was a guy named Joe F. and another called Johnny F., and some others with Italian names no one could
pronounce. Each guy came with at least one or two thick-necked bodyguards. Mr. S couldn’t have been more thrilled. He’d say, “George, feed ’em all.” Now I know how Wolfgang Puck must feel on a night at Spago when all the stars show up at once and want special dishes. One mobster wanted eggplant, another spinach, another wanted clams. There were no fresh clams in Palm Springs in those days, so I got canned ones and prayed to God the boys were drunk enough not to care about the difference. Luckily they were. I don’t know what was going on out there that attracted so many heavy hitters. It was like the famous Apalachin Conference they had the next year, I think, 1957, when the capos from all over the country met in a little town in upstate New York. But there were no closed-door meetings, at least at Sinatra’s house, and no whispers of dividing up Las Vegas, or Havana, or whacking some rival. No, the only talk I heard was about broads, boxing, and golf. Don’t forget, Palm Springs was a place to relax, even for criminals.