Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  What she could have said—since quite a lot of this kind of thing had happened to Sinatra fifteen years earlier—was still that crazed for him.

  And no less remarkable was the fact that the crazed intruder had run right past the tall, strong, and preternaturally handsome Dean Martin to throw herself on this small, thin, balding man.

  MacLaine’s keen intelligence and mascot status made her a uniquely valuable observer of Frank and Dean at high tide. She recalled accompanying the two of them on a side trip to “some gambling joints near Cincinnati”:

  I’d sit in their hotel suite, fascinated at the spectacle of them primping for a night out. They didn’t mind my watching them. They thought of me as a loyal pet. They splashed on their cologne, each dousing himself with his own favorite brand…Their white shirts were crisp and new, the ties well chosen, the suits expensive and impeccably tailored. But what got me were their hats. They wore wide-brimmed hats right out of the racetrack number from Guys and Dolls…

  They took me with them everywhere, trailed by these friends who looked like gangsters. The “friends” adored basking in Frank and Dean’s fame, fame that was earned legitimately. Giancana was recognized in some places; in others he went unnoticed. But when he was recognized it was with fear.

  The young actress didn’t get it at first. Then it began to sink in. One day on location in Madison, she and Giancana were playing gin in the kitchen of the bungalow. Sitting by the window, “I wore sunglasses to cut down the sun’s glare and to disguise my reactions to my cards,” MacLaine writes.

  Unbeknownst to me, Sam was reading my cards from my sunglasses. I kept losing—I couldn’t understand why. Just then the doorbell rang. Since I was the official butleress, I went to answer it. It was a delivery of cannolis from Chicago. I brought them back to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, placed them inside, and noticed that one of the boys had put a toy water pistol on the first shelf. I pulled the pistol out and trained it on Sam.

  “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” I questioned, thinking of the wall of a post office.

  Sam leaped to his feet and pulled a .38 pistol, a real one, out of a holster inside his jacket. Just then, Frank and Dean walked in looking for something to eat. They saw Sam and me with guns trained on one another and fell down laughing.

  It seemed they could afford to laugh. On the other hand, as FBI files would later reveal, both Frank and Dean had already established their fealty to Giancana and his associates. An entry in Sinatra’s 1,275-page FBI dossier (released in December 1998, seven months after Frank’s death) states that on August 10, 1958, the day before Some Came Running began shooting in southern Indiana, “Frank Sinatra was met at Midway Airport, Chicago, by Joe Fischetti, a former Chicago hoodlum,* then residing in Miami, and taken to the Ambassador Hotel. After lunch, Sinatra, Fischetti and Dean Martin, a well-known entertainer who was also in Chicago, were taken by [name redacted] of the Chicago PD to the River Forest residence of Anthony Accardo where they gave a ‘command performance.’ ”

  In his past life, Dean, who preferred not to be bothered by gangsters or anybody else, had usually found a way to resist the Mob’s approaches. Now that he was spending more time around Frank, it was a little more difficult.

  At first glance, the goings-on in Madison, Indiana, in the late summer of 1958 were nothing but good copy: yet another chance to cluck over Frank’s misbehavior, not to mention a priceless opportunity to contrast Hollywood’s presumptions with the pieties and verities of rural America. Reporters swarmed the little town along with the gawkers and autograph seekers. Sinatra was still the show. But Martin, in his quiet way, was quickly gathering heat, and the combination of the two stars suddenly felt intriguing. No sooner had Time run its broadside than Life—the big-format picture weekly was very much a national institution—sent a reporter and a photographer to Madison to sniff around.

  The reporter’s name was Paul O’Neil, and Frank brushed him off. Dean and Shirley followed suit. “We wouldn’t talk to him,” MacLaine said years later. “And because we were never apart he dubbed us The Clan.”

  The pieces of a new myth were falling into place. Some of its gods—but not all—would soon come to believe in it themselves. “If people wanted to call him part of Sinatra’s Clan,” Nick Tosches wrote of Martin, “so be it, fuck it; it made no difference.”

  —

  At the end of August, Frank gratefully returned to Los Angeles, where the filming of Some Came Running continued on the soundstages of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The studio lot was familiar territory—he’d been a contract player there from 1944 to 1951—but MGM was a very different place. The Old Man, Louis B. Mayer—Sinatra’s champion and friend and then his nemesis—had died in late 1957. That year, for the first time, Metro ran in the red. As the television industry boomed, the studio system was fading away. Power in Hollywood had devolved from the studio chiefs and production heads to the independent producers and stars who headed their own production companies, of whom there was no greater power than Frank Sinatra. Accordingly, the new shooting schedule, by Frank’s fiat, would be from noon to 8:00 p.m., with a break at four for lunch.

  The shoot continued throughout September; early in the month, Sinatra went back into the recording studio. On the eleventh, he rejoined Nelson Riddle in the Capitol Records Tower and laid down three tracks: a lively but mediocre up-tempo number called “Mr. Success”; a tender and pretty ballad, “Sleep Warm” (the title was Frank’s TV sign-off catchphrase), by the up-and-coming songwriting team of Alan Bergman, Marilyn Keith, and Lew Spence; and a meltingly lovely update of Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When,” which Sinatra had last recorded in 1945.

  Mr. Success could have been his nickname in the fall of 1958. He was writing his own rules, and the world was buying what he was selling. Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely was released in mid-September; the album hit number 1 two weeks later and stayed on the Billboard chart for 120 weeks.

  In the meantime, Mr. Success pressed forward his alliance with Mr. Menefreghismo. Over three nights in mid-October, Frank conducted the orchestra for Dean’s new Capitol LP, Sleep Warm. (The composer Pete King did the arrangements.) The title and title number were a friendship gift from Sinatra to Martin—the equivalent of the star sapphire ring Frank had given Sam Giancana. The theme was bedtime. Besides the title song, the record’s tracks, described in the liner notes as “a beguiling set of lullabies for moderns,” included “Cuddle Up a Little Closer,” “Good Night Sweetheart,” and “Let’s Put Out the Lights (and Go to Sleep).” The album cover would show an appropriately sleepy-eyed Martin gazing out over the image of a bare-shouldered beauty smiling between the sheets.

  Dean had had a number of best-selling singles, but his albums, unlike Frank’s, had never done much commercially. (It grated on him endlessly that his former partner, never short on presumption, had scored a big hit in 1957 with his LP Jerry Lewis Just Sings.) As an attempt to redress that shortcoming, Sleep Warm (“Dean Martin with Orchestra Conducted by Frank Sinatra,” the cover copy read, the two names in type of equal size) fell short: it never charted. What was most remarkable about the LP was the size of Sinatra’s footprint; he was all over the project.

  It was typical Frank. Where friendship was concerned, he called the shots. “Of course, he’s prone to tell friends how he’ll help them rather than ask how he can help,” Vincente Minnelli would observe, sagely. “But I suppose that’s the prerogative of any leader of the clan.”

  The question is, did Dean accept friendship on Frank’s terms? To a certain extent: witness his presence at Sinatra’s Villa Capri birthday bash; his acceptance of the role in Some Came Running, and all that went with it, including the trip to Tony Accardo’s house. Witness Sleep Warm. But in general, Martin was such a closed book that friends, lovers, and wives felt they barely understood him. “He cannot communicate,” his wife Jeanne once said. “He’s one of the rare human beings who’s not comfortable with communicating. He’s just not interested
.” His nature was deeply passive and guarded: he would go along with anything if it served his self-interest, without ever fully committing emotionally.

  Martin seems to have been similarly distant with his wives. “Dean doesn’t have an overwhelming desire to be loved,” Jeanne said. “He doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t get involved with people because he really isn’t interested in them.”

  She was largely speaking for herself; she felt she bored Dean. Was he interested in Frank? “He never had a male friend,” Jeanne asserted flatly. Nick Tosches punts on the issue. “He was close to Mack Gray, to Sammy Cahn, to Sinatra, to others,” he writes. “But he did not need friendship. Men who did were probably looking to take it up the ass. ‘Yeah,’ he told a reporter who asked him about that other golden guinea. ‘Frank is my dearest, closest friend. In fact, we slept together last night.’ ”

  Jerry Lewis, like Frank an only child, once said that Dean was the big brother he never had. Sinatra looked up to Martin in similar ways—and looked to dominate him in similar ways. A song Cahn and Van Heusen would later write for Frank put it unapologetically: “I like to lead when I dance.” With Martin and Lewis, the dance had ended badly. With Dean and Frank, the dance—a strange, close waltz between two men who had no use for intimacy—went on and on.

  —

  In September, Frank had renewed and accelerated his acquaintance with Lady Adelle Beatty, the woman who almost certainly had not been the cause of the trouble between him and Ava in Rome in June. Frank and the former Oklahoma beauty queen seem to have first crossed paths some years before, when she was still on her first marriage, to William O’Connor, a deputy attorney general of California. She divorced O’Connor in 1949 and two years later became the third American wife of David Beatty, a dashing, witty, very rich—and titled—English war hero. She made the shift from Beverly Hills housewife to London peeress with ease; she also led her husband on a merry chase. In March 1958, Lord Beatty sued her for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The suit went undefended. She was left with her title and a pile of money.

  Adelle Dillingham O’Connor Beatty, of Ardmore, Oklahoma, was a type out of Edith Wharton or Henry James: not the heroine—who after all would have to possess some tragic dimension—but a figure in the middle foreground, one lacking depth and ever so slightly caricatured. Tall, cool, and elegant, she had a sharp eye for the main chance, excellent taste in clothes and furnishings, and, it seemed, not much of a sense of humor about herself or anything else. Frank would see her type again. Ava Gardner, whose dirt-road origins in Grabtown, North Carolina, trumped Ardmore, Oklahoma, any day but who had a temperament to match her beauty, dismissed Beatty as a mere social climber. Ava always did see things clearly.

  Yet Frank had a fatal weakness for class, and Beatty had worked hard to acquire it. When he reencountered her at a Hollywood party as production of Some Came Running came to a close, it seemed like kismet. She was forty now, but with her good jawline and high cheekbones and Mayfair bearing, her pearls and dark flashing eyes, she was more stunning than ever. He was smitten.

  On October 19, he flew to London, ostensibly to emcee a benefit premiere, for the British Empire Cancer Campaign, of Danny Kaye’s new comedy, Me and the Colonel. He arrived a week early for the event. When a pesky wire-service reporter asked what other business he might have in town, Frank referred him back to the benefit. “That’s the only reason for me being here,” he growled.

  “But within minutes of checking into the Dorchester Hotel Sinatra came bounding out again, jumped into a chauffeured limousine and called at Lady Beatty’s house in upper-class South Kensington,” the UPI reporter wrote. The pair had lunch there, then that night she took a taxi to his hotel, and “talked with him in his suite for 30 minutes,” the dispatch continued, omnisciently. They emerged amid a mob of autograph hunters and newsmen, got into Sinatra’s car, and drove a hundred yards down the street to a dinner party at a movie producer’s house.

  The circus continued for the next week, the London tabloids and public hungrily following the couple’s every move. The Daily Mail proclaimed the two would wed, quoting anonymous friends of Beatty’s as saying, “The only questions to be answered were when and where.” The Daily Express ran a picture of the couple every day. The pair were spotted at the Satire Club, where Frank wooed her with a chorus of “How About You?”—and then, when his mood turned, stung her with a rebuke. She fled to Zurich, where a psychotherapist diagnosed nervous exhaustion. Sinatra sent a friend to cajole her back to London. She returned; the press swarmed afresh. Things got so bad that when the premiere finally came, Frank took the stage and announced, even before presenting Danny Kaye and the film’s other stars, “I’m here in London solely for this film, the charity of tonight’s showing, and to introduce the cast. I did not come here to get married.”

  Lady Adelle Beatty, a former Oklahoma beauty queen, was tall, cool, and elegant, without much of a sense of humor but with a sharp eye for the main chance. Frank would see her type again. (Credit 10.1)

  What was there between them, besides sex and mutual titillation at the swath each cut through the world? They found out all too soon. Frank flew back to New York without Lady Beatty.

  But where the press was concerned, Sinatra was a movable feast. One night as he left the Harwyn Club, on East Fifty-second Street, in the company of Joe E. Lewis, David Niven, and Nan Whitney, a reporter made so bold as to call out, “Frank, what are your plans?”

  “When will you——stop calling me Frank?” he replied. (The newspaper account of the event omitted the offending word.) “I am Mr. Sinatra.” Then he added, “I just stopped off in New York for a hamburger. That’s all this town’s good for.”

  Seeing a Journal American photographer named Mel Finkelstein aiming his camera at him, Frank said, “You want to try it, buddy? No pictures.” As Lewis attempted to calm him down, Sinatra jumped into a waiting limousine shouting, “You newspapermen are all a bunch of——!” And then, as several photographers crowded in front of the car, he yelled to the chauffeur, “Run the——down! Step on the gas! Kill the no-good——!”

  The driver stepped on it, knocking Finkelstein down as the limo sped away with an illegal siren blaring. The photographer was taken to the hospital for X-rays. When Frank arrived in Miami a week later to begin shooting A Hole in the Head, one of the reporters who met him at the airport was wearing a catcher’s mask.

  —

  Rat Pack lore—we speak of the second, Sinatra-led incarnation of what was called at first the Clan—cites two possible origins for the group: the Frank-Dean-Shirley troika on the Indiana location of Some Came Running, and the night, in the fall of 1958, that Frank and Dean joined Judy Garland onstage during her act at the Sands.

  The time was early October, just before Frank’s trip to London; the stars were descending on Las Vegas to watch the greatest entertainer of the era fight for her professional life—and in many ways, for her life itself. At thirty-six, Judy Garland was grotesquely overweight, alcoholic, addicted to pills, and psychologically brittle. She had been struggling for the better part of a decade. In 1950, MGM, the studio she had virtually carried on her back since the late 1930s, had dropped her; in 1954, her comeback vehicle, the hugely expensive musical A Star Is Born, flopped at the box office. Garland and her husband, Sid Luft, who had produced the picture, lost a fortune, and the Best Actress Academy Award Garland seemed assured of went instead to the twenty-five-year-old Grace Kelly for The Country Girl. Over the next five years, Luft, who had extremely expensive tastes in clothing and racehorses but scant business sense, drove his wife on a relentless round of concertizing to try to recoup their losses. Las Vegas was a fabulous source of revenue—the New Frontier paid her $55,000 a week (over $470,000 in today’s dollars) when she opened there in 1956; subsequent gigs at other casinos would yield similar paychecks—but between Luft’s high living and the couple’s mountain of debt the money vanished as soon as it came in.

  Garland’s extreme vulnerab
ility had always been integral to her appeal as a performer, but more and more it was interfering with her act more than informing it. “It’s a disheartening, somewhat nerve wracking, experience to watch Judy Garland perform in her current stint,” a Billboard reviewer had written that March. In July, she clawed back her confidence and redeemed herself with a spectacular opening at Los Angeles’s Cocoanut Grove (Sid Luft had to take out a loan to get her costumes out of hock). Garland’s first engagement at the Sands was therefore especially important to her, a chance to solidify her gains: the Sands was the crème de la crème in Las Vegas, and it was Frank’s place. She arrived ten days prior to her opening, with her music and props, to begin rehearsing.

  Sinatra, her old lover, stayed away from her opening and the first few nights, perhaps to let her get her act on its feet. She pulled it off. Variety’s critic wrote, “Judy Garland has no dancing boys with her in the Copa Room; her act is pure Judy Garland, and on opening night it was Judy Garland at her best. Her voice was clear at all times, it was on pitch, she had perfect intonation, she showed confidence, and there was no wavering. If the quality of that first performance is repeated for the two-week run, then Jack Entratter has for himself a gem of a package.”

  Hollywood came to watch, and Frank followed. On October 10, he took some seventy of his friends—including the Dean Martins, the David Nivens, Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, Shirley MacLaine, the Sammy Cahns, and Jimmy Van Heusen—to Vegas in a private railroad car to, as Wagner recalled, “go up there and support Judy and help her get on her feet again. Everybody was very much for her to get going and get off the ground.”

  As Garland paused between numbers, Dean, in drunk persona, called a rude remark from his seat; the audience tittered. Frank chimed in. Finally, she summoned the two of them, like reprobate schoolboys, onto the stage. They bounded up, drinks in hand, and elbowed her out of the spotlight while she feigned outrage. She finally elbowed her way back in, and the three of them, as Louella Parsons wrote, “put on a comedy routine that was out of this world.”