by James Kaplan
It was a not-so-subtle shot across Farrow’s bow showing how Sinatra valued her work.
It was also a strange boatload. Apart from the crew, Mia was by decades the youngest person aboard, and even Frank was basically in a different generation from Claudette Colbert (born 1903), Rosalind Russell (born 1907), and Bill and Edie Goetz (born 1903 and 1905, respectively). There was something both respectable and slightly unseemly, a premonitory whiff of Rosemary’s Baby, about “the coven of golden oldies” hovering about the unregenerate middle-aged swinger and his apple-cheeked honey.
The press felt the same way.
As Farrow had noted, the world had been unable to get a handle on Frank-and-Mia from the beginning, and feeling puzzled, outraged, and titillated, the world had been unable to leave the couple alone. This cruise was far more than a photo op at a premiere or a nightclub: for the press it was four weeks of solid copy during the month that, in the palmy days before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, used to be known as the silly season. Here was America’s Fun Couple on a half shell, sitting ducks at sea.
Not even Frank, a battle-scarred veteran of the paparazzi wars, had anticipated the mania the cruise would set off, Farrow recalled. It was an act of imperious blindness on Sinatra’s part. Did he really expect that he could shield them?
Almost at once, Mia writes, boatloads of photographers were bobbing along beside them, helicopters were whirring deafeningly overhead, and it was impossible to turn on the television without seeing endless reports about how old Frank was, how young she was, how they soon would marry, how many beautiful women Sinatra had been with, how many fistfights he’d had, how many gangsters he’d befriended, how big the Southern Breeze was…
But the oddest thing, she remembered, was that she and Frank never spoke a word to each other about the press frenzy. She had no idea if he was angry or embarrassed; all she knew was that as a stubbornly good host, he was “absolutely determined” that everybody would have fun. He never thought for a moment about cutting the cruise short, and so they sailed on, and the press sailed with them.
Rather pathetically, the contingent paid a call on Rose and Joe Kennedy in Hyannis Port; the Goetzes, who knew Mrs. Kennedy, seem to have initiated the visit rather than Frank, who hadn’t been in touch with the family since Bobby had thrown his weight into the kidnapping investigation. The Ambassador was still in a wheelchair, unable to speak. A measure of relief was attained all around when the sisters Kennedy—Jean Smith, Eunice Shriver, and Pat Lawford—came aboard the Southern Breeze with their husbands for an evening. The curtains were drawn; charades was played and alcohol consumed copiously as Mia marveled at the youth and exuberance of the Kennedy crowd—especially in contrast to the elderly voyagers.
It is a mark of how deadly things had become that Frank temporarily relaxed his fatwa against Peter Lawford.
Mia Farrow saw deeply into Frank Sinatra. His image as a swinger and a brawler, she thought, was all wrong. He was filled, she knew, with a “wounding tenderness,” a vulnerability he couldn’t bear to admit to, except when he sang. Perhaps, she felt, if people looked at pictures of the young Frank, the skinny boy singer with the bow tie and the beautiful, angular face, they would see who he really was and what he was trying to shield with his tough exterior.
At the same time, this was the man she’d seen—often—polishing off a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in an evening. Liquor was an essential part of his armor, and on the Southern Breeze he girded and isolated himself. Amid the constant press barrage, Farrow recalled, the hardest thing for her, besides the hubbub and the confinement, was Frank’s emotional distance.
She also writes, tellingly, that the moment he entered a room, no matter who else was present, he became the center of attention. And that nobody was ever truly comfortable with him, even when he was at his most charming. She goes on to say—as if it were an explanation—that in a world of phonies, he utterly lacked artifice. That—as if they were virtues—he possessed “a child’s sense of outrage at any perceived unfairness and an inability to compromise.” That he was equally judgmental with others and himself.
The boat trip from hell, August 1965. What began as a pleasure cruise for the forty-nine-year-old Sinatra and his twenty-year-old sweetheart quickly turned into a media feeding frenzy, then a tragedy. (Credit 22.2)
And this too was true. Yet there is a disconnect in Farrow’s sensitive appraisal between the something about Frank that made people uncomfortable and what it was. He did lack artifice, and on a boatload of theatrical socialites playing charades and backgammon and kissing up to him and pretending everything was hunky-dory, he would have retreated ever further into himself. But he also possessed deep wells of self-dislike and anger and entitlement and grandiosity, he was irretrievably Frank Sinatra and no one else, and the gulf between himself and anyone, no matter how intimate, would always be as deep as the ocean.
—
The Southern Breeze docked at Martha’s Vineyard, where Claudette Colbert and Rosalind Russell met with reporters to try to defuse the media hysteria. They were friends of Mia’s mother and watchful chaperones, the two grandes dames insisted; no wedding was planned. The denial only fanned the flames: when the group visited James Cagney at his Chilmark house, fresh rumors leaped up that Frank and Mia were to be married there. A heavy fog rolled in. On August 10, a group of crew members on their night off went ashore for some fun; at the end of the evening, their launch returned to the yacht, minus the steward, James Grimes, and the third mate, Robert Goldfarb, who’d managed to miss the boat. Grimes and Goldfarb got two waitresses to row them back in a dinghy, but when they encountered heavy chop in the harbor, the craft was swamped and the twenty-three-year-old Goldfarb went missing. While the coast guard dragged the harbor (the young crewman’s body would wash ashore weeks later), Frank pulled the plug on the boat trip from hell. What Time had called “the most closely watched [voyage] since Cleopatra floated down the Nile to meet Mark Antony” had lasted all of one week.
—
He took her to Joey Bishop’s opening at the Sands; Vegas bewildered her. Sitting at a table in the Garden Room with Frank, Frank junior (who was appearing with the Dorsey orchestra at the Flamingo Lounge), Joey and his wife, Jack Entratter, and, as UPI reported, “10 other persons—including a 250-pound man who hovered over Sinatra and Miss Farrow protectively,” Mia got up to go to the bathroom, and Frank handed her a $5 bill. Did he want her to buy something? she asked. As the whole table laughed, he explained the money was for the attendant in the ladies’ room.
Typical nights in Vegas, she recalled, were full of booze and betting and “sitting around cocktail lounges telling stories until dawn.” The atmosphere was uproarious: Once Frank offered a waiter a hundred-dollar bill—surely as much as the poor man made in a week—if he would drop a tray filled with glasses. (The waiter declined; Sinatra gave him the C-note anyway.) The “broads” all sat up straight, their legs crossed demurely, sipping white wine, smoking cigarettes, and laughing at the men’s jokes. They made girl talk among themselves, carefully watching and listening to the men all the while. One by one they faded as the men partied on. Often, Farrow writes, she nodded off herself, her head drooping onto her folded arms.
At 3:00 a.m., after attending Bishop’s second show (Frank got onstage and clowned around with Joey—“Anybody want to buy a ship?” he ad-libbed), the two of them got on Frank’s little jet and flew back to California. It was time for Allison MacKenzie to come out of her coma and for Frank to go back to work.
—
In early September, Sinatra taped his guest appearance on the premiere episode of The Dean Martin Show. Like Frank, Dean hated rehearsing: the program took a lightning-like two hours to make, and the resulting broadcast looked it. The skits felt undercooked, the cameras occasionally seemed uncertain about just where to point, and Martin appeared to be fine with whatever happened. He was in high drunkie mode, tuxed and deeply tanned; his great rectangular head looked like a teak sculpture. Hi
s eyes gleamed naughtily at the whole silly shambles, which turned out to be nothing less than a formula for staying on the air forever.
Frank, his toupeed pate trimmed Caesar-close, was loose if not very funny and, as always, just a bit too hot-blooded for television. Dean addressed him as the Chairman of the Board; Frank liked that. A sketch where Sinatra brought six statuesque young women (“If you’ll pardon the expression, this is my sextet”) into Dean’s den started out lame and deteriorated as the parade of other guest stars—Danny Thomas, Bob Newhart, Jack Jones, Steve Allen, Eddie Fisher—entered the room one by one, each to obligatory applause. As the set filled, like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera, Sinatra, not knowing what to do with himself, kept sitting down and standing up and yelling out ad-libs, intent on remaining the center of attention. It was hard work on a crowded set. The best moment occurred when Fisher made a remark about his new album, and Frank shot him a hard stare of what looked like real dislike. “If it’s not Reprise, shut your big mouth!” he barked. Then he grinned, having made his point.
No record exists of whether he encountered two of Martin’s other musical guests, Jan and Dean, singing (something for the youngsters!) their hit “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena.” Dean Torrence having been, of course, indicted but never tried as a co-conspirator in the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr.
—
Warner Bros. essentially dumped Marriage on the Rocks, releasing it in the third week of September, well after the summer peak and well before the holiday rush. An added bonus for the studio was a newspaper strike in New York City, which meant that only two reviewers for unaffected papers covered the picture: the Post’s Archer Winsten (“well below the best Sinatra-Martin movie levels and almost out of sight of Deborah Kerr’s best”) and the Herald Tribune’s Judith Crist (“flat, insipid and watery”). Frank and Dean’s film partnership, which had begun so promisingly with Some Came Running, hereby ended with a thud—although they would briefly reunite, as old men who ought to have known better, in 1984’s Cannonball Run II.
They weren’t old in the fall of ’65, but both were well into middle age, and the movies had simply run out of ideas for the two of them. Drama was out as far as Dean was concerned. He had played his last straight role in 1963’s Toys in the Attic, had taken stock of the box office (the film lost $1.2 million), and had made a simple calculation: screw drama. But comedy wasn’t working for them either: Sergeants 3 and 4 for Texas had taken Sinatra and Martin farther and farther out onto that limb, and with Marriage on the Rocks the limb had snapped. Frank had gone it alone in the movies before, and now he would do it again.
In October, he would begin another picture, this one for Paramount: it was called Assault on a Queen.
—
It was a caper picture, “a lackluster nautical variation on Ocean’s 11,” in the words of Daniel O’Brien, a story about a crew of misfits who attempt to rob the passenger liner Queen Mary using a salvaged U-boat and a dummy torpedo. The Italian bombshell Virna Lisi co-starred with Frank, who played the head of the gang, a tough former submarine lieutenant named Mark Brittain. It was a role that fit him like a glove in a property that creaked like an old shoe. Tellingly, Sinatra’s pal the Hollywood grandee Bill Goetz produced the film. The barbarians might have been at the cultural gates in the mid-1960s, but in the movie industry the power structure was still firmly in place, and creative exhaustion prevailed. New voices were starting to be heard, however. In the words of the recently hired, eager-to-rock-the-boat Paramount executive Robert Evans, “Assault on a Queen was a B-picture inflated to A status only because it had Sinatra.” It was a “dinosaur,” he told his bosses. “If the product stinks, you can’t sell it.”
But Frank had to keep moving, so he made it.
—
Bob Thomas visited him on the set at Paramount and found him trying to get it all over with as quickly as possible. “It’s a good story and a forerunner in the field of far-out plots,” Sinatra told the columnist, sounding none too convinced himself.
“But listen, you can get away with these stories—if you hook the audience in the first eight to twelve minutes. And if you keep moving fast. And we move fast in this one, believe me.”
I believed him. You need only to watch Sinatra at work to understand the swiftness of his operation.
“What are we waiting for?” he asks when there is a lull in shooting. “Let’s get moving.”
A lull gave me a chance to inquire about current and future plans of the phenomenon known as Sinatra.
“On Thanksgiving Eve I’ll have a special on [NBC] television,” he reported. “A week before that, CBS is putting on The World of Frank Sinatra. [The title would be changed to Sinatra: An American Original.] They’ve been following me around for six months, shooting everything I do, almost.
“Then a couple of weeks ago Walter Cronkite came down to Palm Springs and taped a long interview. That guy is great, you know. I think he’s the best of the newscasters, a real reporter who can dig in an interview and come up with interesting questions. A real gentleman, too.”
A couple of weeks later, Frank had changed his tune about Walter Cronkite. A New York Times story of November 6 said that CBS had received a letter from Mickey Rudin expressing Sinatra’s grave reservations about the documentary and asking to preview the show. CBS declined. Rudin also charged the network with a “breach of understanding” and suggested that the Cronkite interview be re-filmed.
The crux of Frank’s objections was “CBS insisting on the right to cover matters in the program not related to his activities as an entertainer,” the Times’s Val Adams wrote.
He had consented originally to cooperate in filming the show, he added, because he was led to believe it would be a commentary on his professional career in the same manner CBS news had done shows on the careers of Pablo Casals, Isaac Stern and Marian Anderson.
The statement by the singer, issued through his press representative, Jim Mahoney, in Hollywood, did not define the matters outside his entertainment activities that CBS insisted on covering. However, the show contains an interview by Walter Cronkite in which the CBS correspondent poses questions about the singer’s private life…Authoritative sources have said Cronkite asked tough questions that irritated the entertainer.
Some questions were about Sinatra’s romances, his relations with the press and certain business activities. He declined to answer some questions. All this is in the show that CBS plans to televise.
The reality of the veteran newsman’s sit-down with Frank was a good deal juicier than the Times’s dry portrayal, especially when it came to those certain business activities. “We were getting along famously,” Cronkite remembered,
when Don [Hewitt] leaned over and whispered to me not to forget to ask him about the Mafia. My question was simply how he responded to charges that he had Mafia connections. Sinatra’s lips tightened to a tiny line. He gave me a piercing look through narrowing eyes.
“That’s it,” he said, practically leaping up from his chair and waving his sidekick, Jilly Rizzo, and Hewitt back to his bedroom. I wasn’t invited to the private conference, which featured the great voice raised to a level seldom used in the concert hall. The only coherent phrase I picked up was a charge that Hewitt had promised him that the Mafia question would not be raised.
They worked out a compromise that I never would have thought possible, and Sinatra came back to answer the question.
In his own memoir, Don Hewitt leaves Jilly out of the bedroom conference but makes the menace of the situation clear. According to the producer, Frank reproached him, alluding to Mickey Rudin’s advance visit to Hewitt to discuss the interview: “You broke all of Mickey’s rules.”
“No, Frank,” the producer told him. “We never agreed to those rules.”
“I ought to kill you,” Sinatra said.
“With anyone else, that’s a figure of speech,” Hewitt claims he said. “But you probably mean it.”
“I mean it,
” Frank said.
Hewitt writes that he then “scurried out of [Sinatra’s] house and back to my hotel.” But in truth, something was worked out, for Cronkite got to ask the question—albeit off camera—and Frank answered it, after his fashion.
—
An unwitting victim of Hewitt and Cronkite’s indelicacy was the journalist Gay Talese, who had recently left the New York Times and signed a contract with Esquire, where his new editor, Harold Hayes, assigned him in the fall of 1965 to go to Los Angeles and write a profile of Frank Sinatra.
Talese had accepted the assignment somewhat reluctantly. A writer of style and dignity, he didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a celebrity journalist, and then of course Sinatra was known to eat journalists for breakfast. But it was the big year, the year of the great chronicles (Billboard would also publish an eighty-nine-page piece on Frank in late November; Look would run a cover story a couple of weeks later), and Jim Mahoney assured Harold Hayes that Sinatra would be agreeable to an interview, and so Talese swallowed his misgivings and flew to the Coast.
He arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday, October 31, rented a car from Avis, and checked into the Beverly Wilshire (Esquire, large in format in those days and flush with success, did things in style), where he ogled the pretty chambermaids, had a room-service feast and a bottle of wine, and prepared, not without pleasurable anticipation, to meet with Sinatra, perhaps the next day.
On Monday morning, Mahoney told Talese that Frank Sinatra had a cold and would not be meeting with him soon, or perhaps at all.
It was more than just the cold, the publicist explained. “Cronkite’s doing this thing—this fucking Don Hewitt,” Mahoney sputtered. “This exposé that CBS is doing has got Sinatra very upset.”
