Sinatra Frank - Mr. S: my life with Frank Sinatra

Mr. S

My Life with Frank Sinatra

George Jacobs and William Stadiem

To my children who are still with me.

G.J.

Contents

Last Tango in Beverly Hills

Swifty

From Eternity to Here

Gangland

Camelot

Flirting with Disaster

Jet Set

Generation Gap

Aftermath

Last Tango in Beverly Hills

S UMMER 1968. The only man in America who was less interested than me in sleeping with Mia Farrow was her husband and my boss, Frank Sinatra. Theirs had to be one of the worst, most ill-conceived celebrity marriages of all time, and after two years of one disaster after another, it was all over except for the paperwork. Mr. Ss lawyer, Mickey Rudin, who was a combination bag man, hit man, and Hollywood hustler, was planning to take Mia down to Jurez for a Mexican divorce that would get her out of Mr. Ss life once and forever, which, for everyone who knew them as a noncouple, couldnt have been soon enough.

I may sound like Mr. Ss friend and idol Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca when I ask myself, of all the gin joints in the world, why did Mia have to walk into the Candy Store that hot night? But she did, and because I danced with her, and because the spying eyes of America, courtesy of an undercover scout for gossip queen Rona Barrett, were upon us, that frug, or watusi, or whatever it was, got blown up into a wild affair. And because I was Sinatras valet, and because I was black, and because Mia was Americas reigning Love Child, the rumors got particularly crazy, sort of Upstairs, Downstairs meets Shaft . Mr. S, who was the lowest hed ever been in the fifteen years wed been together, got even crazier. It cost me the job I loved, and it cost him a guy who loved him.

The summer of 1968 had been a particularly bad one for the generation gap. There had been the student seizure of Columbia University and the subsequent police riots and brutality. Then the same thing happened again in Paris. Soon there would be the Days of Rage at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and before too long Mr. S, who had been King of the Democrats, was supporting Richard Nixon. Because he thought that the permissive youth culture was a threat to the American Way, or at least His Way, Mr. S wanted all the police brutality he could get. On the other side of the fence, Mia was getting all moony about student radicals like Mark Rudd and hippie radicals like Abbie Hoffman, with the end result that Frank and Mia wouldnt even speak to each other.

At first they would argue politics over our Italian dinners that Mia would barely touch. Mr. S thought she wasnt eating as a kind of hunger strike against his capitalist pig, power elite, get a haircut attitudes, but it was more that Mia just wasnt much of an eater beyond yogurt and trail mix. Mia wasnt really a debater, either. She would just look at Mr. S with a betrayed look in those save-the-world big blue eyes of hers, as if to say How can you possibly think like that? How cruel, how insensitive, how unloving! And those big blue eyes that Old Blue Eyes himself had been such a goner for would just drive him up the wall, and certainly away from the table. Then shed turn those guilt eyes on me, as if I were the voice of the ghetto. But I wasnt about to get into that trap. I stayed as neutral as Switzerland. The only thing thatll save this world is my eggplant parmigiana, Id say, carefully avoiding the mention of any animal protein. Then shed give up and go read a script or call her agent. For an unmaterialistic hippie, Mia was wildly ambitious.

The Bel Air house we were renting, a big Wuthering Heights number just north of Sunset Boulevard, got to be like Berlin before they tore the Wall down. Separate rooms, separate meals, separate lives. The weirdest part about it was that there was no music. Mr. S didnt play his jazz, didnt play his Puccini, and Mia didnt play her Beatles or her Moody Blues. It was truly the sounds of silence, and it was loud as hell.

Its probably a good idea for me to point out that while I sometimes refer to the Chairman as Frank, or Sinatra, when we were together, I only addressed him as Mr. S. He generally called me George, but when he was being rambunctious, particularly with his so-called gangster friends, with whom he loved to act as bad as he could, hed call me Spook. I know these were the days of Black Power, but somehow it didnt bother me. After all, one of the few times I ever saw the guy cry was earlier that year when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. (He did not shed a tear for Bobby Kennedy, but thats another story.) He called his plane the El Dago. He called Dean Martin Wop, Gene Kelly Shanty, Cary Grant Sheenie, Jerry Lewis Jew, Laurence Harvey Ladyboy, Johnny Mathis the African Queen. Those were his terms of endearment. This was way before political correctness, and because he loved being the Bad Boy, he insisted on doing the opposite of whatever was political and whatever was correct, except around the kingpins of his youth like Sam Giancana with whom, ironically enough, he was always on perfect behavior, like a little altar boy.

But now Sam Giancana was long gone, in exile down in Mexico, in Cuernavaca. Johnny Rosselli would soon be going to prison. Because he grew up in a New Jersey subculture of godfathers, padrones, mob bosses, and such, Mr. S always seemed to need some power figures to look up to. His new kingpins became the Old Guard of Hollywood royalty, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, Leland Hayward, and, above all, Bill and Edie Goetz, he being the big-time producer of everything from Ma and Pa Kettle to Sayonara, she being the daughter of Louis B. Mayer and the Queen Bee of A-list Hollywood hostesses. I had gotten my start in showbiz nearly twenty years before as a liveried waiter, at their Holmby Hills estate, which was L.A.s answer to Versailles. The Goetzes were the ones who actually pushed Mr. S into marrying Mia, because the Goetzes had embraced her as one of them, so Frank thought he was marrying royalty himself. But he didnt account for the huge generation gap. Frank was then fifty-two, and Mia was twenty-three. Thirty years is a wide age gap at any time, but in 1968 it was as if they were a hundred years apart. What was worse, though, was that Mias star was starting to shine more than Franks.

Mias film career was taking off, and Franks was dying an ugly death. The fact that Rosemarys Baby had just come out and was the number one movie in America was killing Frank, especially since his new movie, The Detective, despite respectful reviews, lagged far behind it. But it was a lot more than box office. Rosemary was everything Mia embodied and embraced, occult, spiritual, freaky, out there. Detective was pure tough guy Frank. It was also, despite some attempts at kinky sex and gay murders and black cops, totally square and retro, as out of it as Frank had become. Moreover, Mia was supposed to be in it. The Chairman was going to make her career by creating what he considered a breakthrough part for her, but which was actually only the second romantic lead (romantic with Sinatras character, of course). Mia turned him down to stay on in the title role in Rosemary, which was running way over schedule, and ended up making her own career.

Frank may have thought he was punishing Mia by having an affair with his Detective costar Lee Remick and flirting with Jackie Bissett, whom Frank discovered in England and cut her beautiful long hair short to replace Mia in the movie. It didnt make Jackies career, though. It took the wet T-shirt in The Deep to do that. In addition to teaching Mia a lesson, these relationships were important for Frank to reassure him that he was still the Man. The problem was that Mia didnt seem to care. Without Mias remorse the machismo factor didnt kick in to make Frank feel better about himself. So they retreated to their separate rooms and their separate ways, Mia with her crunchy granola, Frank with his olive-oil-fried-egg sandwiches. Because of their different schedules (shed get up early to go to the set, hed sleep late) Mia and Frank each had his/her own bedroom suite, both on the second floor. In their lovebird days, theyd start the evening together, usually retiring to Mr. Ss chamber after dinner and rarely earlier than two A.M . After about an hour or so of whatever they were doing, Mr. S would doze off, and Mia would go into her room to sleep a few hours before going to the studio. Once the Rosemary conflict began, these slumber parties came to a crashing end.