Mr. S (8 page)

As a young guy, Van Heusen had spent some time in an upstate New York seminary before going on to Syracuse University, where he earned tuition by playing piano in a brothel. His whole life seemed to be a debauched backlash from that early religious schooling. Van Heusen had his own place in the hills above Palm Springs called the Rattlesnake Ranch, which was all sex, all the time. He would have entire plane crews of stewardesses, when stewardesses were the big sex symbols, crashing there at once.

He also loved hookers. His own “whore wrangler,” the guy who rounded up the ladies, was a fat song plugger named Murray Wolfe, who looked like hell but was a brilliant salesman, especially with the name Frank Sinatra to drop. Wolfe was a precursor of the payola people who would bribe disc jockeys to play songs on the radio. Wolfe would bribe anyone to do anything, and he got results. Wolfe worked closely with a madam in the Valley named Joyce, who was tight with all the casting people at the studios, keeping long lists of which starlets were new, which ones were hot, and which ones needed extra money—basically all of them. She also knew lots of non-Hollywood California beauties who wanted to earn extra pin money, girls like
Judy Campbell, who would later pull a sexual trifecta with Sinatra, Jack Kennedy, and Sam Giancana.

Some people would call Jimmy Van Heusen, who, bored with his original name, chose his new one from a shirt ad, a bad influence. His own songwriting partner, the nervous, milquetoasty, pun-spouting Sammy Cahn, was horrified by Van Heusen’s nonstop debauchery. But these excesses were just what Frank Sinatra needed, or thought he needed, to make it through the long Ava-less nights. Van Heusen, while not corrupting, had written “Nancy with the Laughing Face,” about Little Nancy, to show his respect for Frank’s family-man side. At his lowest depths, Sinatra was said to have slashed his wrists in Van Heusen’s New York apartment in 1953, before I started with him. It didn’t seem like his style, but the despair was there. If it was true, then Van Heusen’s mission was to never let his friend get so low again, and, to that end, he kept the booze and the broads flowing nonstop. Van Heusen, with his military training, had the stamina for this sexual boot camp. I was actually surprised that Mr. S, who was frail and fragile, could keep up with him, but he did. It was an occasion he spurred himself to rise to.

Because I had never met Ava Gardner, I found it hard to believe that any woman could have such a devastating effect on a guy like Mr. S, who was no stranger to beautiful ladies. Then I did, and I was blown away. If I were going to slit my wrists over a woman, this would be the one. As for the whores, the starlets, the stewardesses, Sinatra would have dumped them all in a split second if Ava would have come back to him. She wouldn’t, and she had made it quite clear to him time and again. But he still hung on to the hope and the dream. The winter I started with him, when Spiegel had knocked him low, he did a very masochistic thing and added insult to his own injury by flying to Spain to try to win her back one last time. He was up against some heavy competition. Ava’s man was Luis Dominguin,
the most famous, most fearless, most dashing matador in the bullring. Hemingway put the guy on a pedestal, and Dominguin put Ava on one. Even if Ava had been going with a bullshit sweeper, she wasn’t going back to Frank. He was too possessive of her, she was too jealous of him. Neither trusted the other. I guess it was a case of loving each other too much, so much that they would have killed themselves. Love and death. Sinatra came home empty-handed, yet he still wanted Ava in his life, whatever the circumstances. Thus when she came to L.A. to discuss her next movie projects, he insisted she relax for a weekend in Palm Springs. She accepted, but demanded that if she was going to relax, that Frank couldn’t be there. Fine, he said, and dispatched me to take care of her.

Ava Gardner was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, much less met. I picked her up at the airport, and she could stop planes, not just traffic. There was no movie star nonsense with her, no entourage, no fawning press agents in tow. She was pushing her own bags on a cart, trying to lie low in dark glasses and a tatty raincoat. But once I had her in the Cadillac and she took off the coat and the shades, I could barely steer straight. The first thing to hit me were those cats’ eyes of hers, green with flecks of gold and hypnotic as hell. She wasn’t wearing an ounce of makeup, and her skin was creamy and flawless. Her hair was thick and lustrous. Then there was her body. She was five seven, sleek, but with amazing curves. She wasn’t wearing a bra, which was totally risqué in those days. Defying gravity, she had no need of one. She had the ideal body, the kind that stars these days pay fortunes to plastic surgeons for. The best thing about her, though, was that she didn’t give a shit. She wasn’t trying to be hot, and she wasn’t trying to be grand. She was just trying to get away from it all. She made me stop for a Coke and some peanuts, which she pored into the bottle and ate and guzzled at the same time. It was a “Southern thing,” she said, apologizing that MGM had made her lose her
syrupy Southern drawl. When I told her I was Southern, too, that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

If you’re a Southerner, the distance between North Carolina and Louisiana isn’t all that far. Southerners somehow naturally relate to each other, even black and white, and especially black and poor white, which is where Ava was coming from. Her family were tobacco tenant farmers in a backwater called Boon Hill, outside the little town of Smithfield in eastern North Carolina. We were both Depression kids whose biggest treat was going to the “picture shows.” We both sang in Baptist church choirs, both loved fried chicken and collard greens, both hated the swamp humidity we had grown up with. However, the fact that my father was a nightclub owner in New Orleans made me seem like a super sophisticate compared to Ava. Compared to Boon Hill, New Orleans was Paris, and compared to the boys she knew, George Jacobs was Jean Gabin. At least that’s what she told me on the drive down to Palm Springs, and it made me feel pretty cool. She could have said anything, and I would have felt pretty cool hearing it from her.

Ava also told me that her dead father was such an awful racist that she was certain the gentleman did protest too much, that he had black blood in him, and hence in her, a touch of the tarbrush. Her idea of youthful rebellion was to sneak off with the kids of the black sharecroppers and go to church with them. She knew all the great spirituals, and got us singing along by the time we hit San Bernardino. “Rock of Ages.” “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” “It makes you almost believe in God,” she said. I told her what a good voice she had, and that was the biggest compliment I could have paid her. She despised movies, she said. She was only in it for the money. Singing was another matter. She’d do anything to sing, but the pigs who ran the studios wouldn’t let her. Even though she was a true superstar at this point and her film career was much, much bigger than Frank’s,
she was as insecure as he was about how long it might last. She had just taken Clark Gable away from Grace Kelly, on the screen anyway, in
Mogambo,
and she was about to light things up with Humphrey Bogart in
The Barefoot Contessa,
yet she didn’t act like the celluloid goddess that she was. She made me stop for cigarettes, for a bottle of cheap wine, and for Ritz crackers before we got to Sinatra’s house, by which time she was dead drunk. I had to carry her from the car and put her in Mr. S’s bed, where she slept until the next morning.

We were living in the original Sinatra house on Alejo at the time, which, like the Beverly Glen apartment, was filled with images of Ava. This was before the massive compound on Wonder Palms Drive where the Kennedys, and all the other celebrities on earth, were to stay. The Alejo house was pretty, in the postwar desert-deco style, but rather small. Then again, in 1954 Frank Sinatra was anything but rich. He was paying off a crushing six-figure debt to the Internal Revenue Service, which he owed for back taxes that his weak cash flow in the dark years of the early fifties had forced him to defer. In his divorce from Big Nancy, he had basically given everything he had to her, except this Palm Springs house, to buy his freedom to marry Ava. His bankability as a movie star based on
Eternity
was just kicking in, his records were just beginning to sell again, and he was negotiating for a piece of the rock or, as it were, the Sands in Las Vegas, which would prove to be a major cash cow. At that moment, he was a struggling thirty-nine-year-old entertainer with a famous soon-to-be ex-wife. Proof of this was that I was getting the same $150 a week that I had under Swifty Lazar. But I had faith things would be getting better. In the meanwhile I liked my boss and I liked his world.

Ava and I had a great weekend. We cooked Southern feasts—the glory that was grease, we called them—fried everything, vegetables obliterated in pork fat, rich cakes made in Crisco, pecan pie. She was one of those rare women who could gorge on everything she wanted
and never gain a pound, though somehow I sensed she wished she could get fat and bail from the business altogether. She was a terrible drunk, and would drink anything, cheap sangria, bad beer, expensive champagne, it didn’t matter. We played a lot of Mr. S’s record collection, mostly Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, but Sinatra’s albums as well. Ava loved his voice, but the songs didn’t make her sentimental over “them,” even at her booziest. The one she was a little misty about was her ex before Frank, bandleader Artie Shaw, on whom she had developed a teenage crush after seeing him and his big band in Raleigh. Music was only one of Shaw’s aphrodisiacs. A bigger one, she told me, was his brain. He was the first man to treat her as an intelligent person, rather than a sex symbol, which had so turned her off about Howard Hughes, who was still stalking her. Shaw taught her how to play chess and had sent her to UCLA to take classes, which, she sighed, was something Frank would have never done. She did the crossword puzzle every day, which she said annoyed Frank. Mr. S basically detested anyone who had had anything to do with Ava, Shaw, Hughes, or Peter Lawford, whom he excommunicated for five years for taking Ava to dinner during one of their estrangements. The only “Ava man” he tolerated was her first husband, Mickey Rooney, whom Ava wrote off as a studio-arranged marriage. She told me the PR man came along with them on their honeymoon. We’d swim in the pool in the desert night, and being alone with a tipsy, half-naked randy-talking Ava was a temptation that made me very uncomfortable. I didn’t feel like a valet, I felt like a friend, and I also felt awfully aroused, which was one Molotov cocktail of conflicting emotions.

I could now see exactly why Mr. S was so obsessed with her. Super-gorgeous women weren’t like this one. The other movie goddesses were narcissistic, neurotic, concerned about no one except themselves and their stardom. Ava was only concerned about others. Moreover, she had that magic that made those others feel that, with
her in their corner, anything on earth was possible. She was a cross between Miss Universe, a kick-ass girl-next-door, and a fairy godmother who could give you your dearest wish. The only problem was, once you met her, your dearest wish was
her.
“She’s a gas, ain’t she?” Mr. S asked me when I returned to L.A., wanting to know what we did every second of the stay. Thank God I didn’t have to lie to him.

I don’t want to give the impression that Mr. S was a Hollywood narcissist who only talked about himself, his career, his romances. As he got comfortable around me, he wanted to hear more about me than I did about him. Our card games would often go on until dawn, with his begging me to tell him stories of my Louisiana boyhood. To him my life in New Orleans was as exotic as life on Mars, and he was fascinated by it. So we would talk and talk about it all, things like my father growing up the one half-breed among eight white stepbrothers, about his nightclub partnership with the Cuban boxer Kid Coco, about my Creole grandmother with her 104 grandchildren, about my wife’s pimp father, with his diamond stickpins and his Cadillacs and his starry clientele that included Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Pegleg Bates.

He’d love my tales of how I would run away from home and show up on the doorsteps of the great moss-draped plantations of the River Road along the Mississippi. I was a cute curly-haired little boy, and I’d use that cuteness to get myself taken in by these white aristocrats. I’d tell them my parents had died, that I was all alone, so they’d feel sorry for me and ask me to live in their mansions and get waited on by their servants. I’d only stay one night, have one great dinner and live like a prince for a day, then vanish and go back home before my mother sent the law out to look for me. Every few weeks I’d do an Oliver Twist number like this. I had a huge fantasy life. I would read the
National Geographic
magazines at school and dream about the places I’d go. Now all those dreams were coming true, and Mr. S seemed very happy to be sharing his fantastic life with me. When I’d
tell him a story about how I’d chase after the Italian girls in Girt Town who looked down on me, he’d match me with one about how he’d chase after the Irish girls in Hoboken who looked down on him. It was nice being buddies with your boss, something that would have never happened with Swifty Lazar.

It’s amazing what winning an Oscar can do for you. I believe that if Frank Sinatra had been able to show the statuette on his mantel when they were trying to finance
Waterfront
, even Sam Spiegel would have been forced, by simple greed, to do the right thing and would have given him the Terry Malloy part. I say this because, after that March at the Pantages, no one, in Hollywood or anywhere else, dared say no, or even maybe, to Frank Sinatra. Even though at one low point Mr. S had declared “Fuck movies,” he would never repeat that pronouncement now that he was hot again. Although movies indeed were a crapshoot compared to music, where Mr. S was undisputedly Numero Uno, cinema was the Everest Frank Sinatra felt compelled to conquer. Yes, he liked being a shrewd businessman, but he liked being a dreamer and a conqueror too much to be
totally
practical. Some dreams, like movie stardom, were beyond the bottom line.