Mr. S Read online

  Natalie was much more than a fling. Their secret affair went on for several years, off and on, until she reached the age of consent, and even beyond that until she took up with Robert Wagner. Mr. S truly cherished her, and whatever went on in private, he was also a father to her more than her own father, very protective, advising her about all the many men who would come after her. In Frank’s world casting was the sincerest form of flattery. He liked Natalie so much he put her, at age nineteen, in his 1957 movie about racism, Kings Go Forth, in which she plays a mulata living in WWII France in a love triangle with two GIs played by Sinatra and Tony Curtis, whom Frank always called by his real name “Bernie.” Because of my own background from New Orleans, where half the city was of mixed race, I was Mr. S’s informal technical advisor on that film. For all her many charms, I hate to say that Natalie was the least convincing black girl I ever met. We’d joke about it, calling her the “Black Russian.”

  Mr. S was also instrumental in encouraging Natalie’s marriage to Robert Wagner, one of the handsomest young actors in Hollywood. If anyone looked like the town’s dream couple, they were it. It was surprising that Mr. S liked Bob Wagner so much, he was such a pretty boy. I had met him as a young caddy at the Brentwood Country Club, carrying the clubs for Clifton Webb, the elegant British star of Laura, who was one of the reigning queens of Hollywood’s gay world. Webb got Bob the powerful gay agent Henry Willson, who had made stars out of Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, and Sal Mineo. Eventually, Willson also represented Natalie, who was one of his rare female clients.

  Mr. S would bait even his straightest friends for the slightest “fag” mannerism, like the way they’d hold a cigarette or use a French word, or affectation, like ordering wine instead of hard liquor with dinner, real-men-don’t-eat-quiche stuff. Anything that smacked of worldliness, culture, or sophistication was a “fag thing.” Despite Bob’s association with Webb and Willson, and despite his urbane manner, Mr. S gave him a pass on all that, and years later even gave him his blessing to get engaged to his daughter Tina, and when that didn’t work, he forgave him, and gave him another blessing to wed surrogate daughter Jill St. John.

  “What do you think of Bob, George?” Mr. S asked me one day.

  “He’s a nice guy,” I replied.

  Mr. S shook his head. “George,” he said. “‘He’s a nice guy’ is not a valid answer to my question.”

  I didn’t like being put on the spot like that. I didn’t want to insult anybody. Yet I knew Mr. S counted on me to be honest with him. Mr. S did most of his “serious” talking to his girlfriends. With the guys it mostly drunken insults and awful jokes and puns. Was he being serious with me? “Bob could be too pretty for his own good,” I blurted out. “What would people say if you looked like that?” I realized I had jammed my foot in my mouth.

  There was a long, scary silence. I thought this was the end of a short and wonderful career. Then Mr. S broke out laughing. “George, I do look like that. I think we have to get you glasses.” As time went by, the more I got to know him, the more candid I would be. But one rule was: never, ever, make a negative comment about his appearance. Some jokes just didn’t play in Sinatraland.

  Mr. S had a brief on-location flirtation with Sophia Loren on The Pride and the Passion in 1956. However, it went nowhere because his continuing passion for Ava Gardner was a fatal blow to Sophia’s pride. The main reason Sinatra took the part in the costume epic, aside from getting to work with another of his idols, Cary Grant, was that being in Spain gave him an extended opportunity to pursue Ava in Madrid. The pursuit didn’t work, nor did the film. He and the director Stanley Kramer went to war over Sinatra’s refusal to do more than one take of a scene, and Mr. S eventually stormed off the picture and out of the country.

  More revealing than the costars and starlets who shared Sinatra’s bed were the ones who got away. On Pal Joey Rita Hayworth ignored him completely. She was close to forty at the time and still a knockout. Mr. S never cared about age anyhow, old or young. Somehow he was terribly impressed with her because of her romantic pedigree with Aly Khan and Orson Welles. Because I used to know her in my law firm days, he tried to use me as an opening wedge to try and get something going. It didn’t work. She didn’t remember me, or even Mr. Tannenbaum, from whom she rented her house. She often forgot her lines, and her general blankness and disinterest even in Frank Sinatra at the top of his game, singing “The Lady Is a Tramp” to her, may have been due to early symptoms of the terrible Alzheimer’s disease that would destroy her.

  Another pedigree that got away, though not totally away, was Grace Kelly in High Society. Sinatra got a kick out of “Gracie,” as he called her, but he had felt humiliated pining around the set of Mogambo over Ava in front of Grace. He was certain she saw him as a major loser and he could not bring himself to make a play for her. But he had another problem on the set. He was deeply intimidated by his costar Bing Crosby, one of his childhood icons and one of the lords of the manor in Palm Springs. Crosby and Bob Hope were part of the Eisenhower elite, a WASPy Republican golfing aristocracy that would have nothing to do with Frank. I think this was why he worked so hard for John F. Kennedy, to gain acceptance and legitimacy. Crosby was particularly important to Mr. S because Crosby’s brilliant career was the precise blueprint for his own. Crosby had begun as a crooner, became a singing idol, then got into acting and won an Oscar for Going My Way, and then became a multimillionaire businessman to boot. Plus he was a wonderful sportsman. It was a scary act to follow, yet Mr. S desperately wanted to follow it, to a T. He would have also loved to be buddies with Bing, yet Bing, though invariably friendly, kept his cool distance. Their relationship remained strictly professional, and it killed Mr. S to think that Bing considered him neither in his class nor in his league.

  Everything about Mr. S had to do with paying debts and settling scores, all about the balance sheets of life. He would have treasured a Grace Kelly sexual credit, but he didn’t want to try and fail in front of the august Bing. There had been lots of rumors about Grace, for all her outward virginal blond purity being a real vixen, having affairs with all her leading men, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Ray Milland, and even Crosby himself on The Country Girl, for which Grace won her Oscar. So for all his fascination with Grace, Frank, as they would say today, didn’t want to go there.

  Debbie Reynolds in The Tender Trap was off-limits because of her marriage to Sinatra buddy Eddie Fisher, though even if she were unattached, Sinatra found her too impossibly perky to be sexy. He thought Olivia de Havilland in Not as a Stranger was sheer class, but she was involved with director John Huston, who was Bogart’s dear friend, which made Olivia untouchable. Nevertheless, Sinatra’s frustrated attraction to her led him to perform some adolescent pranks to attract her attention. Robert Mitchum, their costar, was legendary for his imperturbability. Every day at lunch, he would engross himself in the newspaper and not speak to anyone. One day, when I was with Mr. S at the studio, in front of Olivia, Sinatra sneaked up on Mitchum and set the paper he was reading on fire. Mitchum barely noticed until his fingers were singed. Then he jumped halfway across the table. Mr. S thought this stunt was much more impressive than his role, and bragged to everyone how he had “gotten” Mitchum. He never “got” Olivia, though, who was amazed at how childish Sinatra could be.

  Maybe for Mr. S, life did begin at forty, for this was about the time he started sending me down to Tijuana on cherry bomb runs. I would go south of the border and bring back entire trunkloads of explosives and fireworks, which he would set off in his friends’ shoes, in their toilets, under their beds, whenever and wherever they would least expect it. “The Hoboken Bomber strikes again!” he would exult with as much glee as if he had connected with one of the many girls of his fevered dreams.

  Mr. S’s problem, if you could call it a problem, was that he was like a hyperkinetic kid. Today they’d give him Ritalin. He couldn’t sit still, and he couldn’t be alone. Thus he always needed a girl, and she didn’t have to be famous. Fir
st he’d go for his leading lady. If she wasn’t free, he’d try some famous ex, like Lana Turner, whom he’d dated in the forties, for old times. Then he’d work his way down the food chain, starting with the starlets, then the hookers, and, if all else failed, he’d call Peggy Lee, who lived down the block. The name of the game was Dialing for Pussy, and Mr. S played it every night, except when he was “in training” for an album. Then he was a monk. Movies didn’t count. He’d astonish his costars by showing up on the set at seven A.M. straight from some all-nighter, dressed in his tux, his tie undone, and his whisker stubble starting to show, duck into makeup, and come out an hour later fresh as a daisy and in perfect control of his part. Just don’t ask him to do a second take.

  Mr. S got his one-take philosophy of acting from Boris Karloff. Boris Karloff? Frankenstein? Yes. Sinatra had been a huge Karloff fan as a kid in Hoboken and was deeply honored to have “the Mummy” as his friend. In the thespian department, Mr. S put Karloff up there with the Barrymores. The only stars in Hollywood he may have admired as much were Bogart and Fred Astaire. He had met the horror icon on a studio lot in the late forties and had been bowled over by what an English gentleman he was. Karloff’s real name was William Henry Pratt and his two great passions in life were cricket and gardening, not torture and murder. Whenever Karloff came over to visit Sinatra and to mentor him on roles he was considering by having Mr. S read lines for him to see how they sounded, he’d bring the most beautiful bouquets of freshly picked flowers. Mr. S never suggested this act of hospitality was a “fag thing,” as he would have if any other male had made the same gesture. Karloff’s acting philosophy, in a nutshell, was simple: “Say your lines. Hit your mark. Get out.” But Sinatra embraced this as the oracle of a legend and took it to heart. No multiple takes for him. In time, he became considered an efficient, naturalistic, often excellent actor. Whenever he was praised and asked how he learned to act, he didn’t say Lee Strasberg or Stella Adler or Stanislavsky, but gave all the credit to Old Frankenstein.

  I was never in the bedroom with Frank and his ladies, but I heard from a lot of them afterwards, though rarely from him. He was a true gent and didn’t kiss and tell, unless it was really bad—or really good. One actress, Jeannie Carmen, got so annoyed on a would-be romantic weekend in Palm Springs that she insisted that she go back to L.A. a day early. A disappointed Mr. S dispatched me to drive her, and, man, did I get an earful. Jeannie Carmen was a classic blond starlet and pinup girl with one of the most perfect figures in Hollywood. Ava Gardner once described her as “a pale [as in blond] imitation of myself,” which Jeannie took as an enormous compliment. She also had an unusual skill, as a trick-shot golfer. She would travel around the country and appear on television, this gorgeous girl doing these impossible shots. Hole-in-one-Jeannie, we’d call her. With a skill like hers, she was naturally in hot demand in golf-crazy Palm Springs. Sinatra only played at playing golf, but he really liked Jeannie, whom he dated both when he was down, and after he was up again. He appreciated her loyalty so much he bought her a Chrysler convertible, which wasn’t that unusual a gift for him to give once he was rich again. He was the master of the grand gesture.

  Jeannie both loved Frank and hated him. “All he does is whine about Ava,” she whined, echoing a complaint by many other lovers that, once the deed was done, the postcoital pillow talk was a never-ending obsession about the one who got away. Otherwise, she enjoyed going to bed with Mr. S, whom she rated as one of the lords of foreplay, a great kisser and an even better cuddler and hand-holder, sentiments that many other of Sinatra’s conquests repeated to me over the years. Jeannie Carmen worshipped Mr. S’s hands, which were always perfectly manicured and baby soft. He wasn’t exactly doing heavy lifting, other than skirts, with them. His “equipment” was, with her and others, a conversation piece. “I thought he was bending down to scratch his knee,” she marveled. He had no fetishes in particular. “The only place he liked lingerie was on the floor,” Jeannie told me. He did enjoy being woken up, at any hour, with a surprise blow job, but woe betide any woman who disturbed his precious sleep for any other reason. I can’t tell you how many calls I got from him in the middle of the night, screaming, “Come and get this bitch outta here.” Among his other cardinal sins were wearing too much perfume, of almost any brand. His own cologne, Coty’s “Jungle Gardenia,” he wore in the tiniest amounts. Jeannie and others would tell me how Mr. S liked to talk gangster slang in bed, “smack this one, smack that one,” “put the arm on,” “get it in the neck,” “ass is grass,” “cement shoes,” Godfather stuff, narrating the grisly tortures he had in mind for all his enemies. I would have liked to hear what he had dreamed up for Sam Spiegel.

  This particular weekend, Mr. S had gotten very drunk. When that happened, he could get both nasty and self-pitying, and Jeannie couldn’t take it. But she would come back, and he would take her back, and they stayed sexually friendly for many years. When he would train those hypnotic blue eyes on her, or anyone else, there was that magic moment when a woman was the woman, the only woman, and that was irresistible. In the early sixties, Jeannie, Marilyn Monroe, and I all ended up in the same apartment complex on Doheny Drive and had a different set of adventures.

  By far the most exciting thing that happened in the Alejo house during my early tenure, the thing that made me realize I truly was not in Kansas anymore, occurred when Mr. S wasn’t even there. As with Ava, my boss was ultragenerous with his possessions. He would readily lend his house to anyone, even if he barely knew the object of his largesse. The case in point here was Minna Wallis, the fiftyish homely sister of mega producer Hal Wallis, who as production chief at Warners had been responsible for such masterpieces as Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, and as an independent had produced the Martin and Lewis comedies and would produce all the Elvis Presley films. Because of her brother’s success, Minna Wallis was A-list, part of the Goetz charmed circle and someone Mr. S, who was admittedly a social climber, wanted to cultivate. Mi casa, su casa. And my valet, your valet. He sent me down to Palm Springs to prepare the house for her and whomever she happened to bring. Boy, was I unprepared when Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo showed up. Both women were in their fifties, and neither had made a film for years. As far as celebrity sightings could be rated, Garbo, who had “wanted to be alone” for over a decade, was by far number one, and Dietrich wasn’t far off.

  The two European superstars couldn’t have been more natural, no makeup, no airs, no frills. Garbo had some weird dietary requests, no dairy, no animal protein, just exotic organic grains and stuff (now the regimen is known as “vegan” and very popular among star and model types). These edibles she had learned about through her friend, Beverly Hills’s first celebrity nutritionist, Gaylord Hauser, but at that time no grocery store in Palm Springs had ever heard of them. I had to make a mad run back to L.A. and Jurgensen’s, which had everything, to keep the ladies happy. When I returned that evening, they couldn’t have been happier. Greta and Marlene were in the pool, completely naked, and Minna Wallis was lying on a chaise in a Moroccan caftan, drinking champagne and watching them like a hawk. They were oblivious to her, and to me. I slipped into the house and into my room so as not to spoil their party, though I couldn’t resist peeping through the blinds. What mortal could? I rarely heard Garbo talk, but I did hear Garbo laugh. She was having a wonderful time, giggling, splashing Minna, dunking Marlene under water. Then fun turned to heat. Marlene pulled Greta into what seemed like a playful embrace, which ended up in a kiss. They got out of the pool, but didn’t dress. They savored the privacy, the freedom, the nighttime desert warmth.

  Marlene lit up a cigarette, which she passed to Greta. They each took long drags, intercut with long, pregnant looks at each other. Then Greta sprawled out on a chaise, and Marlene lay down beside her, looking up at the constellations in the crystal-clear desert sky. Minna wouldn’t leave them alone, but they didn’t seem to care. If she liked to watch, let her watch. Marlene was the aggressor. She kissed Greta’
s lips, she stroked her, she began to slither down Greta’s long slender frame. And then a coyote began to howl. The ladies jumped in fright and retreated into the house, and the best I could do was to serve them yogurt, steel-cut oatmeal, and organic honey for breakfast the morning after. But at this point, even before Mr. S made the cover of Time a few months hence, I had no doubt that I had the coolest job in the world.

  4

  Gangland

  IF I thought that winning the Oscar was the ultimate for Mr. S, I was wrong. Getting on the cover of Time was an even higher pinnacle of accomplishment. That Time cover, combined with his being featured on the prestigious Edward R. Murrow television show Person to Person, was the Good Housekeeping seal of approval in American life in 1956. The Oscar, Time, and Murrow formed a magical anti-vampire crucifix that would do more than protect Mr. S from the bloodsuckers of Hollywood; this figurative talisman would also convert the naysayers into idolators. In the highest echelon of American life, Frank Sinatra was now a made man, in the best sense of the term. Yet, strangely enough, just when he had a free pass to the halls of power and prestige, he sought the company of a different sort of “made men,” the folk heroes of his youth and, to be fair, the only people who had not forsaken him when he was so recently down and nearly out. Now he was high and mighty. He could consort with anyone he wanted. Like any conquering hero whose most triumphant journey is back to his roots, to “show ’em” what he had accomplished against all odds, in the mid-1950s Frank Sinatra’s favorite journey was not around the world whose imagination he had captivated but back to Hoboken.

  To go with his new life, Mr. S had bought a new home up on Bowmont Drive, off Coldwater Canyon in Beverly Hills. The early 1956 Murrow interview was a sort of public housewarming at this sprawling Japanese-style estate, which Hollywood people called “the Teahouse,” after the hit Broadway play The Teahouse of the August Moon, and those who really knew what was going on called it the Whorehouse of the August Moon. But that wasn’t Ed Murrow stuff. And neither was I. I was all excited about getting my fifteen minutes, or more likely fifteen seconds, of fame as valet to the Biggest Star in the World. I got a special white jacket, got my hair cut, was looking quite sharp, if I might say so myself.