by Shawn Levy
Throughout 1965, in fact, that was the big theme: the View from the Top at Fifty. He cut a double album extolling himself—A Man and His Music—and starred in a hit TV special to promote it. Life and Billboard devoted special issues to him; CBS did a much-anticipated prime-time hour about him. His records didn’t have anything like the commercial impact that the Beatles were having, but he could still command all showbiz with a gesture.
And, weirdly, he had his eye on a new bride. He’d been with the little mammarella from the neighborhood, and he’d been with the Queen Bitch Sex Goddess. Now he was courting a nineteen-year-old flower child who starred in a soap opera and didn’t quite weigh one hundred pounds. Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow: The world stared in slack-jawed wonder.
They didn’t really know who Mia was—Maureen O’Sullivan’s kid, right?, and she had that part on Peyton Place. But look at her: no tits, no ass, no hair, for chrissakes. Frank had daughters older than this broad and better looking. What the hell was it all about?
From her point of view, it was uncomfortably clear. Her dad had been movie director John Farrow, a drinker and skirt-chaser much like Frank; the two men even wore the same cologne (“I can say it now,” she wrote, reflecting on Frank, “they had the same identical smell”). Frank was still Swinger Number One on Planet Earth, and he wooed her with a combination of extravagance and tenderness, letting her in on his childhood hurt.
What Frank got out of the relationship, who could say? Mia’s mom saw her daughter’s frailness as a cause: “Men had an instinctive desire to protect Mia. That’s the secret.” And Frank was certainly a great one for finding people to protect. But that didn’t mean he had to get serious.
Maybe it was simply that he was spending so much time with his own kids that he was beginning to appreciate the scene. Frankie—poor Frankie—was still playing lounges and everyone was still encouraging to him, but out of sight of him, they were a little sad, and he knew it—he had to know it. Yet he kept on at it, walking through his career like it was his doom.
Nancy had followed Dad, too, after divorcing her pop star husband, but Nancy was a kind of sensation. She sang these terrible songs and put on short shorts and vinyl boots and go-go-danced and was enthusiastic as hell—maybe too much. Whatever: She sold records and tickets—a good earner for Reprise. She and Frank cut a number together, and damned if he didn’t get his first-ever gold record with it—“Somethin’ Stupid,” a bossa nova pillow-talk thing that the wags around town called “The Incest Song.”
Frank showed up on TV with the kids, onstage with them, in movies (poor Frankie Jr. showed up and smiled, despite himself). Their friends, their scene: It was a gas, a big turn-on. Over in England, Sammy and Peter were swinging with wild young chicks. Frank did too.
But marriage? Was he honestly talking marriage?
Throughout 1965, gossip columns went nuts with this story, and the love birds did nothing to squelch it. Their romantic cruise through New England—chaperoned by Roz Russell and Claudette Colbert and their husbands—made headlines, especially after they dropped in on the addled Old Joe Kennedy and then lost a deckhand in a freak drowning. They returned home, away from the glare of reporters, playing house—doing crossword puzzles, playing with kittens and puppies, confounding the world with their closeness.
Then she started to drift from him, to spend time with someone closer to her own age. Frank was stunned by the idea that she might be leaving him; he got serious.
“What the hell?” he told Brad Dexter. “Let’s say I’ve got five good years left. Why don’t I enjoy them?”
Mia returned home and Frank proposed. Very quickly, with neither of their families represented, they married—and Mia was in for some very weird shit.
Proximity to Frank had made her famous, so she was able to jump from TV to movies. Maybe too fast: Frank hadn’t liked following Ava around the world when she had work and he didn’t, but he wanted the new Mrs. Sinatra to do that for him. She wanted to be in movies? She could be in his movies. They would fight over her projects for the whole of their time together.
Eventually, they divorced over her choice to make Rosemary’s Baby in California rather than act with him in The Detective in New York. Without any real warning, rather like the way in which they were married, Frank had his lawyer serve her with papers on her set. She sold off all the jewelry he’d ever given her and gave away the proceeds, then ran off to India to join the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram with her sister, Prudence, and, presently, the Beatles. She mourned her failed marriage for some time, but in ways that revealed what a strange union it had been from the start: “It was a little bit,” she said, “like an adoption that I had somehow messed up.”
And Frank?
Like it never happened …
One of the curious corollaries to the ten-year difference in age between Sammy and Frank was that Sammy was dragged through Frank’s middle-age angst when he himself was only in his thirties.
Frank had assembled the Rat Pack as a stay against his own mortality, as a reminder to himself and the world that no one was bigger, no one would ever be bigger, death and age be damned. Sammy was just—gratefully—along for the wild ride; it wasn’t until after the Rat Pack began to dissolve that he headed toward his own crises of aging—and by then he’d grown so jaded and fractured and dizzy from overexposure to Frank’s world that he nearly destroyed himself. Frank’s little party gave him a hangover from which he never recovered.
Take marriage: When Sammy married May Britt, he was the same age as Frank when he and Ava wed—that same ten-year gap, even though Frank’s ill-starred union seemed to have occurred ages, epochs earlier. Frank was alone in the world then, his talent tattered, his public image tarnished, his emotions unmoored, his mentors scattered and dead; he went through the trauma of Ava alone, with barely any chums to encourage him along as he stumbled.
But Sammy and May were at the center of things, even if, to accommodate the Kennedys and Frank’s political ambitions, they stepped quietly out of the spotlight. When Sammy got hitched (that first sham marriage of convenience can’t be counted), Frank orchestrated it as much as he did any event in his own life. It was Frank, recall, not May, to whom Sammy first announced that he was delaying the wedding to quell the Kennedys’ anxieties.
It was no wonder, then, May didn’t care too much for Frank and his hurtful brand of friendship. She was willing to give up everything she’d ever worked for for her husband, but when she looked for equity from him, she always found him constantly at the ready for Frank’s summons to party, to work, or simply to stay up till all hours engaged in pointless talk over whiskey bottles and ashtrays. She became openly surprised whenever Sammy was willing to turn in after only three or four hours of schmoozing with Frank. Once at the Fontainebleau, in the elevator coming back from one of Sinatra’s soirees, she turned warmly to Sammy and said, “I never thought you’d leave a party at Frank’s so soon”—it was 4:00 a.m.
That was the exception, though. More common were times like when she refused to visit the set of Robin and the Seven Hoods because she ws so tired of seeing her man belittled by Frank, even in jest. “The way he treats you,” she explained, “the jokes, the way you kowtow to him … I don’t mind him being ‘Sinatra.’ But I can’t take it when he treats you like ‘the kid.’ You’re a grown man.”
Sammy knew that she was right, but he also knew that he was complicit in Frank’s behavior. Later that day, when he arrived late at the set to a particularly pungent joke from Frank, he conceded to himself that he was glad she wasn’t there.
During some of these rueful periods, Sammy struggled to devote himself to May and their three children (a natural daughter and two adopted sons). But bachelor Uncle Frank was always dropping in, giving orders, making Sammy snap to, driving a wedge between the normal family life that, somewhere inside, Sammy wanted and the swinging Frankhood that signaled to him that he’d finally made it in the world.
When Sammy was starring in a revival of Golden Boy on
Broadway and trying desperately to keep his marriage and career afloat at once, Frank breezed into town and ordered him to Jilly’s for drinks, Chinese food, and schmoozing—on a night he’d set aside for an intimate dinner with May. He obeyed Frank, dragging May along.
A couple years later, after they’d separated, Sammy promised to take the kids to a game at Dodger Stadium. The inevitable call came from Frank and, poof: Sammy was in Palm Springs. Come Sunday, he woke up around two, bathed in his wonted brew of hot water and three different colognes (Lactopine, Hermes, and Au Savage), strolled into the living room, grabbed a drink, and sat down to watch TV. It was the ballgame. The camera panned over the crowd, and he saw his kids: “They were having a good time. And I was where I should be. But I wasn’t much of a father. No buts—fuck it.”
Sammy had wanted a houseful of babies—in the abstract, anyhow—but he didn’t, really, it seemed, want actual children. He couldn’t make time for them, couldn’t figure out what to do with them. He didn’t like the zoo, he put the kibosh on picnics and camping trips, he even skipped the shabbat dinners that May put on so as to raise the children in their father’s adopted religion. She finally confronted him with the most simple of requests: “Mark would love to have a catch with you right here in our backyard.” He balked: “Then somebody will have to teach me how to have a catch. I never played ball. When I was Mark’s age I was sitting around green rooms playing pinochle.”
He made a few stabs at domesticity. For a while, when Golden Boy was still playing, he turned down new job opportunities and requests to do benefits; he even tried to teach his preschool kids to play Monopoly. But he was afraid to desert the swinger image that had become so linked with his success and stardom.
May loved her family, but she couldn’t stand being made to feel a prop in Sammy’s whirlwind one-man-show of a life. She didn’t like the big Fifth Avenue town house he’d chosen for their New York home after she’d found a smaller, more family-friendly place; she didn’t like to put on the dog and then hang out in his dressing room schmoozing before and after the show; she didn’t like posing for magazine layouts touting Sammy’s happy homelife; she didn’t like Sammy’s gaudy spending habits (his personalized Abercrombie & Fitch bowling ball, for instance, did not go over with the missus).
One night the whole mismatched relationship fell into uncomfortable focus for both of them. He’d invited Judy Garland and little Liza by the house for dinner; Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolf Green, and Jule Styne were there: strictly A-list stuff. Laughs, drinks, food, and everybody singing and doing shtick around the piano. Sammy was lit up like a little Christmas tree.
“Y’know what I was thinking?” he asked May. “Why don’t we do a weekly ‘Sunday at Sammy’s’?”
“Why don’t we talk about that?” she shot back.
Later on she gave it to him straight: “Sammy, I love you but I hate our life.”
The feeling was, sickeningly, mutual. May didn’t want to share him with the world of glitter and glitz. Sammy grew anxious as he felt his image recede from Swinger Par Excellence to Homebody. They had misread one another, or simply been wrong in thinking that their love could fill the spaces described by their differences.
“Whatever happened to the Mary Movie Star that I married?” he asked sadly.
“I’d rather be plain Mrs. Sharlie Brown.”
Sammy knew that there was no resolving it. He could submit to his marriage and hate himself, or he could turn back to his career with characteristic vigor and fulfill, as he saw it, his destiny. It wasn’t really a choice; he set his agents and managers into motion, and within a few weeks, while still on Broadway, he was taping a TV series, filming a movie, and doing so many benefits that he lost count—all, virtually, at once.
And May took the kids to Los Angeles. The divorce became final in 1968.
He became a crazy man—working, partying, spending, moving, being like nobody ever had. Two years starring in a hit Broadway show, plus specials on ABC, plus an NBC series (for which he was so overextended that the first three of what turned out to be only fifteen or so episodes were hosted by Johnny Carson, Jerry Lewis, and that paragon of variety entertainment, Sean Connery), plus an original cast recording, plus LPs of his own on Reprise, plus a best-selling autobiography dictated to journalist pals Jane and Burt Boyar, plus an endless string of benefits (some truly exploitative of his good-heartedness). Exhausting: He suffered a nervous collapse in 1964 but treated it like a mere pit stop and cranked right back up soon again.
He knew, somewhere, how far gone he was: He produced and starred in a strangely autobiographical movie, A Man Called Adam, that was both lurid confessional and Rat Pack reunion. The costars included Peter, Cicely Tyson, Louis Armstrong, Mel Torme, Frank Sinatra Jr., and his own mom, Elvera. Sammy played a jazz trumpeter plagued with guilt after killing his wife and kids in a car wreck (!). After a botched romance with a civil rights activist (!), he joins in a wild jam session with Satchmo and dies right onstage (!): All That Jazz, of The Champion by Young Man with a Horn. (Frankie Jr., ever the masochist, reprised his dad’s most famous part. A member of Sammy’s band, he was beaten as a nigger-lover by racist whites, dying, a la Maggio, in their arms.)
Money was rolling in—$2 million in 1966 alone—but it was rolling out just as fast. Despite having worked as a single for nearly a decade, he still split his dough three ways with Old Sam and Will Mastin. And he was still spending like a kid in a candy store: the fifteen-room house in Hollywood that May hated but he just had to have; dozens of hand-tailored suits and pairs of shoes; a $25,000 customized navy-blue Cadillac limo; collections of canes, cameras and photographic equipment, tape recorders; huge cut-glass bowls filled daily with packs of cigarettes; a staff of thirty; a grand or two a week in gambling money. He reckoned he needed to make $17,000 a week just to break even, but he didn’t really know—and he didn’t care.
“I still live way beyond my means, I know that,” he told an interviewer, but that wasn’t going to stop him. “It’s my pleasure. I love it, and I earn it, and nobody gives it to me, and nobody works any harder for his than I work for mine. That goes for a riveter on a bridge, for a ditchdigger: don’t nobody work no harder than me, no matter what he works at. I’m out there sweating blood. So if I feel like having me a little Rolls Royce, I buy one.”
When he finally let Golden Boy die—“It became too hard to perform, and finally I got bored with it”—he couldn’t stand the quiet. He hit the Sands for the first time in two years and then went out on the road for a gargantuan solo tour—a big hit, sold out wherever it went.
And since he was traveling—what the hell—Europe and a whole wild new way to party. In Paris he had a passionate, drunken affair with actress Romy Schneider, a liaison promoted and mentored by Porfirio Rubirosa, Frank and Peter’s old pal from the Kennedy days. In London, he hung with the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cass Elliot; he smoked dope, dropped acid, snorted cocaine; he wore Nehru jackets, paisley shirts, beads; he covered numbers by Jimmy Webb and Blood, Sweat and Tears: a life out of Petronius with a score by Lennon and McCartney.
“Every day was like going into Tiffany’s or Cartier’s,” he remembered. “It was ‘What’s gonna happen today that’s new and glittery and shiny and bubbly?’”
In 1967, he and Peter made a Swinging London comedy together, Salt and Pepper. They played nightclub owners caught up in a James Bond-style goof, with murder and submarines and Nietzschean madmen and hot chicks. It made money for them both (they executive-produced), so they ordered up a sequel and asked Jerry Lewis, of all people, to direct it—to predictably awful results.
While working on these films, Sammy partied harder than anyone ever had during the making of Ocean’s Eleven: orgies with who knew who, a little dilettantish Satanism, drugs with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. “I was ready to accept the wildness, the rolling in the gutter, and having to get up the next morning and wash myself clean.”
It was all as much an escape from
the world as his titanic stage performances ever were, but it had a more insidious edge than before. It used to be that he would push himself to knock the racism and doubt out of the audience, to compel it to love him; now it was him running from himself, him dousing his mind, him “wanting to see how far the rubber band could stretch, how much I could tempt fate, how close to the edge I could go and still come back.”
One night he got ripped on pot brownies, walked onstage, did a single song, said “Thank you and good night,” and walked off. He thought he’d done a whole show: Dean’s old bit—“How did all these people get in my room?”—in reverse.
If his head hadn’t been attached to him, it would have spun off into space.
I don’t know what hit me
Joey may have gotten the boot from Robin and the Seven Hoods, but the Summit had launched him, it seemed, out of the clubs, and he was able to ride with that for a couple years.
So much as he wanted to, anyway.
It was that attitude thing again: He’d be granted some golden chance, and he’d seem reluctant to take it; he’d have fortune at his feet, and he’d be chary of bending over to pick it up.
NBC gave him a sitcom in 1961, but he approached it with that characteristic mixture of wariness, indifference, micro-management, even hostility.
“They think they bought a following,” he shrugged going into it. As far as pretensions to art, he sounded like his old man talking about the bike shop: “I figured over a period of time it would be good income for my family. I’m not trying to conquer worlds.”
He was cast as a P.R. agent—an effort to cash in on his renowned proximity to more famous fellows—and he had an officeful of fictional wiseacre colleagues and a make-believe family who were always looking for something from him. Danny Thomas was the producer; his daughter, Mario, played Joey’s kid sister.
Throughout the publicity drive leading up to the premiere, Joey seemed ginger, cautious. He was right: The show debuted to devastating reviews. He had always been a critics’ darling. Not anymore.
