Mr. S (26 page)

While Mr. S was embracing seniority, Dean Martin was getting younger than ever. Drink in hand, he parodied himself on his hit TV series, backed by his famous chorus line of showgirls. He knocked the Beatles off the charts with “Everybody Loves Somebody,” which became the number one pop song in America. And he became an American James Bond in his Matt Helm series of spy spoof films. Dean, one hot Dago, chided Mr. S for hanging out with the “Hillcrest Set,” shorthand for the old rich Jews of
the
showbiz country club. Frank and Dean always had different temperaments. Now, with the Rat Pack gone with JFK, they remained in their different worlds. One Sunday in Palm Springs, Dean stopped by after a full morning of golf and found Mr. S, Jilly, and Jimmy Van Heusen still asleep with six hookers in various states of undress sprawled around the house. Dean shook his head with the dismay of a serious older brother of a juvenile delinquent. “You’d think they’d be sick of this same old shit by now, wouldn’t you, George? Hell,
you
must be sick of it.”

“You know I love this job,” I said, poured him a drink, and turned on the television so he could watch sports until the boys woke up.

Sammy was pretty much gone as well, doing the “family thing” with May Britt. While Mr. S was hanging out with the “theatah” crowd, Sammy was actually
in
the theatre. He had a huge Broadway smash
Golden Boy,
which ran from 1964 to 1966. And instead of hanging out with Bennett Cerf, as Sinatra did, Sammy actually wrote and published his autobiography,
Yes, I Can
, which was a top bestseller in 1965. Sinatra was pleased for the success of Dean and Sammy, though he seemed somewhat perplexed that they had not only thrived without him but also might be leaving him in the dust

One of the “Old Jews” Dean had teased Frank about who
wasn’t
a Jew was the very patrician, very rugged Princeton dropout and agent
turned theatrical producer Leland Hayward (
South Pacific, Gypsy
), who was the closest substitute Mr. S had found for Humphrey Bogart. Like Bogie, Hayward was heavy on the booze and loved by the ladies. He had been married to actress Margaret Sullavan (the first wife of his client Henry Fonda), then to Slim Hawks, whom he took from director Howard. Now he was with Pamela Churchill, who had been married to the son of Winston. Hayward was probably the best socially connected man in all show business, and Mr. S hung on his every glamorous success story.

Hayward had his big flops, too, and certainly he would not have won a Tony for child-rearing. One daughter committed suicide, and the son himself was committed by his father to a loony bin for running away from prep school. Mr. S was fond of the boy and even flew to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka to visit him. The boy eventually got out and produced
Easy Rider
(which in Mr. S’s current mind-set would have meant that the kid should have stayed in the clinic). Third wife Pamela, who was a famous British adventuress, with affairs with Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, and one of the Rothschilds under her belt, had big eyes for Frank Sinatra. Strangely, he had none for her. Finding her dumpy, he called her “the Jersey cow.” Pam was forever stroking Mr. S’s back, flattering him, flirting. It did her no good. He asked me to seat her away from him at Palm Springs dinner parties. If Pam had been skinny, her ploys might have worked, but her maternal routine didn’t play with Mr. S. “I’ve
got
a mother,” he said. I think the problem was one of keeping Mr. S down on the farm, after he’d seen mini-Mia. Once he’d been captivated by her “new look,” for Mr. S, Thin was In.

After her “unveiling” on the Fox lot, things between Mia and Frank moved quickly. She was down at Palm Springs and in his bed in short order. I had to stock up on more organic, vegetarian food for her than I did for Greta Garbo, though now it was easier to find. The odd
couple did have some history in common. Mr. S told me that Mia’s late father, John, an Australian boozer and womanizer, had directed Ava Gardner in
Ride Vaquero
in 1953, at the height of her turmoil with Mr. S, and had had an affair with her. Thus Sinatra had this score to settle, even if it had to be done over John Farrow’s dead body. Mr. S had even met Mia once before, when she was about twelve, at the time he was doing his cameo in
Around the World in 80 Days,
for which her father would share the Oscar for Best Screenplay. He claimed to think she was awfully cute back then, and claimed that John Farrow was deeply threatened by those thoughts, given his own transgressions with Frank’s wife. There was some chemistry there, but when Mia first showed up at the house with her pigtails and weighing about eighty pounds, what came to my mind were not wedding bells but the teens on
American Bandstand.

Then the coven of golden oldies got their marriage campaign into high gear. Most of them were friends with Mia’s mother, the beautiful Maureen O’Sullivan, who had played Jane in all the Johnny Weissmuller
Tarzan
movies. Ungawa! Mia, it turned out, was one of the most eligible society girls in L.A. She ran with a pack of beauties who had been her classmates at Marymount, the exclusive Catholic girls’ school where Nancy and Tina had gone. (That Tina was only two grades behind her dad’s new squeeze didn’t strike anyone in this crowd as weird. I guess Bogie and Bacall, pillars of this community, had the same spread.) Mia’s friends and romantic rivals included Candice Bergen; Tisha Sterling, who was the daughter of actress Ann Sothern; Kris Harmon, the daughter of football great and sportscaster Tom Harmon and sister of future star Mark Harmon; and Sheila Reeves, whose father owned the Los Angeles Rams. Mia was lowest on this list of teen goddesses; she had her own score to settle, to show these little bitches who was Number One. She may have seemed like a meek church mouse, but in fact she was every bit as driven as Sinatra.

At first Mr. S was embarrassed to be seeing this teenager. He wasn’t embarrassed by much, but this one was a little beyond the pale. Mia came down to Palm Springs, and they’d never go out. It was a total backstreet deal. The only people who knew about her were Jilly, Van Heusen, Jack Entratter, and Yul Brynner, who was hanging around a lot at the time, sponging off Frank for food, drink, and girls. As I said, Yul was as cheap as Peter Lawford. He may have been the King of Siam, but to us he was Uncle Scrooge, the king of tightwads. Mia seemed more impressed by Yul as a star than she was by Mr. S. Sinatra may have been Mia’s idol, but all she was idolizing was an image, a style, a legend. Mia knew zip about Sinatra’s songs, his movies, his struggles. I thought the coven’s idea that Frank should marry Mia was insane, though of course I held my counsel.

It wasn’t that Mia was a Beatles girl or a Stones girl, as opposed to a Frank girl. She was a
nothing
girl, a total space cadet. In a while, she would become a yoga freak, a Maharishi devotee, but in the first bloom of her romance with Sinatra, she was a clueless nineteen-year-old whose main passion was her deaf cat. She was like a kid in a contest with other kids to see who could be the first to get the autograph of a big star. As it was, the real autograph Mia Farrow was after was Frank Sinatra’s DNA.

Mr. S himself was like an insecure schoolboy, wanting to know what the guys thought of his girl “She’s fantastic, don’t you think?” he’d ask, and what could you say? That she was “modern?” “Different?” “Cute?” Yul was the most supportive. He was a closet AC-DC himself, having had a secret affair with Sal Mineo. He pushed the Mia thing, saying she was “divine.” Fascinated with colors and fabrics and styles, Yul sounded like a Seventh Avenue fashion designer. Mia was his own little model. As for the tougher critics in the group, Mr. S would have liked us to say what a sex kitten she was, but none of us had a frame of reference for anyone like her. Marilyn Monroe, even dead, was still everyone’s ideal.
Julie Christie was the new British look. But Mia was…Mia. Twiggy wouldn’t hit the scene for two more years. Kate Moss was decades away. Waif was the word, but it wasn’t a word Mr. S would have dug. I guess he was way ahead of the curve on Mia.

Eventually, Mr. S, urged on by the coven, particularly Edie Goetz and Roz Russell, went public with his new squeeze. He was most uptight about introducing her to his kids, who were basically her age, and to Big Nancy, who he knew would be appalled. Dean’s great joke was that the Scotch he drank was older than Mia, and Ava’s great joke about Mia being “a fag with a pussy” was that Frank was a latent homosexual who was finally coming out. She knew better, but she couldn’t resist the opportunity to tease Mr. S. No one, absolutely no one, took this romance seriously. Yes, Lauren Bacall was nineteen when Bogart found her, but she was throaty and sexy and seemed twenty-nine. Mia seemed twelve. I was there when he brought Mia to Big Nancy’s to meet the family. At first there was a lot of dead air, pregnant silences. It was so weird, seeing the past and future Mrs. Sinatras side by side. It was a true test of Big Nancy’s tolerance, and the fact that she didn’t try to strangle Mia—or Frank—got her a gold star from me. Big Nancy had basically no comment the whole time, but Little Nancy, who in December had her first huge success with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” was over the shock of Tommy Sands leaving her and was feeling secure enough to be gracious. And since Mia and Tina were pretty much contemporaries, they had much more in common than Mia had with Frank. Aside from Frank Jr., who had distanced himself from his father and didn’t bother to show, the Sinatra kids were incredibly nice to Mia, and didn’t give their dad any shit about her.

Mr. S pressed on, despite an awful beating from the press, with which he had had a dreadful relationship for decades. Reporters hounded him and Mia everywhere they went, including out to sea. In
August 1965, he chartered a big yacht, the
Southern Breeze,
to sail up the rocky coast of New England. Mia’s
Peyton Place
producers gave her a hiatus on the show by putting her character on the show in a coma. Soon Mia may have wished she were in one, or at least under the covers. On the yacht were Roz and her husband, Freddie Brisson, an Anglo-Danish Broadway and West End producer, Claudette and her husband, Joel Pressman, an ear, nose, and throat doctor at UCLA, the Armand Deutsches, and the Goetzes. Not exactly a swinging group, the yacht party would turn into
Voyage of the Damned
after a crewman drowned off Martha’s Vineyard.

Just before that, Sinatra had taken Mia ashore with the group at Hyannisport to visit old Joe Kennedy, who was still alive but still not talking. I think the Goetzes, who knew Rose, were the prime movers of the excursion, as Mr. S hadn’t really spoken to a Kennedy since he asked Bobby for help when Frank Jr. was kidnapped. For all the venom he felt toward Joe, the only reason Mr. S would have had to go see him would have been to pull the plug on Joe’s respirator. Maybe he was doing it to show off: “I’m fucking a teenager, and you’re a vegetable, Mr. A. Eat your heart out!” All through the cruise, there were daily headlines about the romance. Mother Dolly held forth from Hoboken that the whole affair was a publicity stunt that her magnanimous son was doing to help Mia’s career, a fresh air fund for struggling actresses. Mia’s mother pronounced that if Sinatra was to marry anyone, it should be
her
. The mama of Mia was only four years older than Mr. S. Although the cruise was supposed to last a month, Mr. S pulled the plug after a week of hell on the high seas.

Mr. S’s fiftieth celebration at the Beverly Wilshire in December, 1965, created a new set of diplomatic and logistical problems. This birthday party was being given by the Two Nancys, and at least one Nancy wanted No Mia. Mia threw a fit, Big Nancy threw a fit, Mr. S threw a fit. That the party ever came off at all is a miracle. It was like
the Israelis and the Arabs, there was so much fruitless shuttle diplomacy. Big Nancy basically said this was
her
party for
her
husband, and she sincerely would have taken long odds against Frank’s actually marrying Mia. She saw her as just another girlfriend, with a limited shelf life. This party was for eternity, for good memories forever. Why should it be spoiled by a passing fancy? At one point, however, Little Nancy prevailed on Big. Let’s make Dad happy, was her plea, and Big Nancy, ever the good sport and blessed peacemaker, relented. Little Nancy then invited Mia, but now Mr. S realized Big Nancy was right to begin with. He told Mia to skip this one.

So Mia ended up staying home, as did Frank Jr. The latter’s absence really hurt Mr. S. It looked as though Sammy Davis Jr. wasn’t going to show, either. Then he jumped out of the birthday cake. That was the only smile Mr. S had all evening. Adding to all the embarrassment, the next time Frank saw Mia, in protest against her exclusion, she had cut off all her hair. “Now I really will look like a fag,” Mr. S moaned. But he tried his best to put an Audrey Hepburn spin on the whole little boy look. For all his whining, something about Mia kept turning him on. And on and on. He wanted men, and not just gay men, to find her sexy, but when one did, he went insane with jealousy. When he found out Mia had been dancing, with wild brio, with British singer Anthony Newley (
The Roar of the Greasepaint
) at the Factory, a new disco on Santa Monica Boulevard in Boys Town, Sinatra and Jilly planned an elaborate “ambush” of Newley, who was soon due at the Sands. Newley, who was married to Joan Collins, knew that merely dancing with Sinatra’s girl was an act of treason and sedition. He knew that his impure thoughts would come back to haunt him. The guys were going to “lean on the Jew.”

Before the rendezvous at the Sands we ran into Newley at Matteo’s, the new red sauce, red tablecloth Hoboken-style restaurant in Westwood that was run by Matty Jordan, an ambitious waiter whom Dolly
Sinatra had delivered when she was a midwife. Matteo’s had become Mr. S’s new favorite hangout. It had toy trains, Mr. S’s new passion, running on a ledge around the entire dining room. There was nothing but Sinatra Muzak. It was his kind of place. I was at the bar drinking while Frank, Jilly and some others were having dinner. I was highly surprised to see Newley, who must have been tempting fate by going in there. When the Brit saw Sinatra, he turned a whiter shade of pale. I think he tried to bolt, but Sinatra and Jilly jumped up from their table and beat him to the door. I expected a bloodbath, as did Newley. Jilly grabbed him, and Sinatra put his arm around his shoulder, as a prelude to strangulation. But it was all prelude. Sinatra congratulated him on his newest song, they talked showbiz, and not a word about Mia. Because Sinatra was heading to London to make his next film, Newley offered him the keys to his city, and then some. His groveling was almost comical, were it not so real. The fear was as satisfying to Mr. S, if not to Jilly, as the blood, and the ambush at the Sands never happened.