by James Kaplan
Rehearsals for Johnny Belinda began in the first week of June. On the fifteenth, Reuters reported that Mia Farrow was under observation at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “She is just run down,” Jim Mahoney, now also working as Farrow’s press agent, told reporters. “She is in the hospital for an examination and a rest,” Mahoney said, adding, “She has just completed a strenuous film role in England.”
Worried that he might have to replace his star, David Susskind flew to the Coast. What he said he saw when he met with Farrow upset him deeply. “She was bruised from head to foot, with mean red gashes and marks all over her arms and shoulders and throat as if she’d been badly beaten,” he told Kitty Kelley. “I sat down with her and said, ‘Mia dear, I don’t think someone wants you to do this role.’ She lowered her eyes and said that she still wanted to do it. She begged and pleaded with me and said she would be fine. She pointed out that most of the damage was done below her face, so we could cover her up with makeup, which we did, but in certain lights you could still see those awful welts. I felt so sorry for that poor kid.”
Though rumors of Sinatra’s physically abusing women have long circulated, Susskind’s is the only implication that Frank ever struck Mia Farrow, and both the source—Susskind harbored no affection for Frank Sinatra—and its uniqueness should be taken into consideration before judgment is passed. In 1986, Farrow herself said that “the references [in Kelley’s His Way] as to how Frank Sinatra treated me…are absolutely untrue.”
Yet Frank could be a mean drunk at the best of times, and the spring and summer of 1967 were not the best of times. His wife was frequently absent and, when present, was both passively and—sometimes—actively defiant. Not only was she constantly seeking the work he didn’t want her to take; she was also, George Jacobs wrote, “a creative genius at starting fights that got Mr. S crazy. She’d push all his hot buttons, long hair, drugs, mysticism, rock, Vietnam, making him feel like the Ancient Mariner for being so out of it to disagree with her. ‘How can you say that?’ was her favorite expression, delivered in a tone of insulting intolerance.”
Her usual modus operandi, the valet said, was to then redirect the heat of their arguments to the bedroom. Physical passion had been the keystone of their relationship, but they were now nearing the three-year mark, and an inevitable cooling had begun. Other aspects of the relationship needed to take on more importance if it were to continue. She passionately wanted to have a baby with him; he passionately wanted no such thing.
More and more, it seemed as though their differences overshadowed their similarities. “Maybe it bothered him not being young,” she said years later. “He felt things getting away from him. My friends from India would come into the house barefoot and hand him a flower. That made him feel square for the first time in his life.”
He tried. Tina remembered joining Frank and Mia at the Daisy, “Dad wearing a Nehru jacket and love beads, or silver-studded denim—he got downright funky, as cute as he could be. He’d sit and smoke and drink with us, and he loved to get up and dance to the latest tune from Motown.” But his former girlfriend Sandra Giles, who also saw the pair at the Daisy, took a different view. “Mia Farrow was dancing with all the men,” she recalled. Frank “looked very lonely. And he came up to my table and said, ‘Sandra, would you mind if I sit with you guys?’ ”
He was growing old in a time that worshipped youth; for all his money and power, the world seemed to be getting away from him. He had just helped carry Spencer Tracy’s coffin, and the young were celebrating their immortality. And the music, always the new music, coming out of radios everywhere, incessantly. That was the summer the Doors’ “Light My Fire” seemed to be on a tape loop; according to Jacobs, Frank kicked a car radio in with his heel when the song turned up on three stations in a row.
A television; a radio. If he was unleashing his fury on things, could people be far behind?
—
Work, as always, was the balm. He began making a new album: the first recording session was in New York at the end of June, Frank’s first date in the Big Apple in almost fifteen years. The LP, The World We Knew (alternately, Frank Sinatra), was a hodgepodge, more a singles collection than a unified concept: no fewer than five arrangers were involved, including Gordon Jenkins, Claus Ogerman, and the now inevitable Ernie Freeman. Nelson Riddle was nowhere in sight.
The album was another chapter in Jimmy Bowen’s continuing quest to keep Sinatra relevant; as always, Frank went along with reservations. He had—so recently—been the times; why should he now have to keep up with them? The tone of the LP was set by the Freeman-arranged, Bowen-produced title track, a poundingly catchy weeper from the pen of “Strangers in the Night” composer Bert Kaempfert, who knew how to write a hook that really got its hooks into you. Backed by a portentous fuzz-bass figure, a chink-a-chink rhythm section, and a soaring choir, a heavily echoed Frank goes into the grabby, empty lyric:
Over and over, I keep going over the wor-lld we knew,
Once when you-u walked beside me.
It’s like the theme to an imaginary mid-1960s movie, some unholy mélange of spaghetti Western and achingly triste Continental romance—a short way from “Strangers” and a long way from great Sinatra. (And consciously or unconsciously, the song’s message harked back to a time that had been kinder to him.) But Kaempfert, Bowen, and Freeman knew what they were doing, as far as it went: when the song was released as a single later that year, it would spend five weeks atop Billboard’s easy-listening chart.
Virtually the entire album had an easy-listening quality: highly produced, determinedly contemporary, edging on (and into) vacuity. Besides the unavoidable “Somethin’ Stupid,” there were two actual movie themes, “Born Free” and “This Is My Song” (written by Charlie Chaplin for A Countess from Hong Kong); the lesser Petula Clark hit “Don’t Sleep in the Subway”; and, for whatever reason—some say Frank’s pique at Richard Rodgers for a scolding reminder to sing his songs “as written”—a screechily swingin’ update of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening.”
But the enterprise was somewhat redeemed by the weirdly wonderful “This Town”—the closest thing to a straight-up blues Sinatra ever recorded, complete with wailing harmonica—and the LP’s one truly fine track, Claus Ogerman’s gently lovely arrangement of the Johnny Mercer and Doris Tauber lament “Drinking Again.”
Significantly, Frank performed none of this material when he toured in July, hitting the heartland—Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Madison, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—to meet his true audience. They came out in droves—the tour would be an unprecedented success—to see Sinatra and his opening act, the Buddy Rich Orchestra; also on the bill were comedian Pat Henry (filling the Shecky Greene slot) and Jobim’s protégé Sergio Mendes. Knowing where his bread was buttered, Frank mostly stuck to the classics—songs like “Day In, Day Out,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” the inevitable showpiece “Ol’ Man River”—and mixed in some of the best new material, like “Summer Wind” and “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.” Naturally, he had to acknowledge the big new hits, “Strangers” and “That’s Life.”
He sang the latter twice in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall on July 13, reprising his defiant new anthem at concert’s end, to the delight of an audience that included Mia Farrow. “I remember how he played to her throughout the show, blowing her an occasional kiss, playfully sticking his tongue out and making faces at her,” recalled the Sinatra archivist Richard Apt, who was also present. “I also recall Ed McMahon sitting with her in a special section set up against stage left. After every song Mia stood up and cheered. She was really quite cute.”
The two of them were working hard to put the best possible face on the marriage. What went on behind closed doors was another matter. When Paramount officially offered her the role in Rosemary’s Baby at the beginning of July, “the timing…was terrible, and I was in a quandary,” she recalled. She was in the midst of rehearsing for Johnny
Belinda; she had recently been hospitalized for exhaustion, or worse.
She and Frank discussed the pros and cons, she writes, perhaps euphemistically. The shoot for Rosemary was scheduled to last twelve weeks; Farrow asked Sinatra if he could deal with her working for a few more months. And it wasn’t just work, she maintained: it was her big chance at last. Furthermore, she reminded him, she’d be on set at Paramount for almost the whole three months; she could come home every night. There’d be only ten days of location work in New York, a week at the beginning of the shoot and three days at the end.
Frank tried hard to see it her way, she writes, but still had doubts about the project. In bed one night in Palm Springs, he finally read the script. His verdict: he couldn’t see Mia in the role. So strong was his influence on her, she recalled, that all at once she couldn’t imagine herself in the role, either. Part of her hoped he would simply forbid her to do it. He didn’t.
Filled with misgivings, she accepted the part.
What rings truest in the account is his coolly trying to deceive her out of taking the role of a lifetime.
—
Throughout July, Howard Hughes negotiated with the eighteen official owners of the Sands—including Jack Entratter, Carl Cohen, and Dean Martin, but not, any longer, Frank Sinatra—to purchase the hotel-casino that had been Sinatra’s Vegas headquarters for fifteen years. As the talks proceeded, Frank got an idea: Since Hughes seemed bent on buying up the state, perhaps he would like to pick up Cal-Neva, too?
In the wake of the Giancana imbroglio, Sinatra had been forbidden to operate the Tahoe hotel-casino but had maintained his majority stake, leasing the place to a pair of gamblers from San Francisco. An outright sale would take the white elephant off his hands and put a lot of money in the bank.
But the billionaire refused to bite. He wouldn’t even take Frank’s calls. Then, on July 22, it was announced that Howard Hughes had purchased the Sands—property and operations—for an estimated $15 million (the figure was later revealed to be $23 million). A spokesman for Hughes issued a statement: “We are buying a very successful operation which has been built by a successful management, executive and employee team which we welcome into the Hughes family. We plan no changes in operation of the Sands.”
Nobody had ever talked this way about a casino before: it wasn’t the way the men who had built Las Vegas talked. But it was exactly the way corporate spokesmen talked.
—
Despite Frank and Mia’s longtime contention that they wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t work together, it appeared, at the end of July, that that was exactly what they were about to do—and not once but twice. “We were half-kidding a few months ago,” Earl Wilson wrote on the thirty-first, “when we suggested that Frank Sinatra & Mia Farrow should make movies together and become another Richard Burton–Liz Taylor item—but it looks like that’s precisely the plan 20th Century–Fox has for them in ‘The Detective’ and ‘The Chairman’ (a spy story about Red China). And if 20th doesn’t manage to get them in a love scene, the whole world will be disappointed.”
Talk of The Chairman, which would wind up as a lesser Gregory Peck vehicle, was just that: movie talk. But The Detective had been in the works since the previous fall—just not with Mia in it—and was now set to start shooting in mid-October in New York City. Because she was to play a pivotal yet supporting role, her work was set to begin on November 17. The timetable dovetailed tightly with the shooting schedule of Rosemary’s Baby, which was due to have wrapped by November 14.
—
For all her ambivalence, self-doubt, and anxiety, Mia was the eager focus of a Paramount publicity stunt on August 16, smiling and making faces in front of dozens of reporters and photographers gathered on a cavernous soundstage as Vidal Sassoon trimmed her already short hair by exactly one inch, ceremonially kicking off the production of Rosemary’s Baby.
After two weeks of rehearsal, she went to New York to shoot exteriors, and as the Labor Day weekend began, Frank opened at the Sands for the twenty-ninth time.
He was socko, as always. “Frank Sinatra, still the strongest attraction on the Strip, is back,” Variety wrote. “At one point he kids Howard Hughes’ Sands takeover by singing ‘Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you—if you’re Howard Hughes.’ As usual, Bill Miller at the 88 conducts the festivities.”
The festivities quickly grew testy. “You’re wondering why I don’t have a drink in my hand,” Frank told the Copa Room audience one night. “Howard Hughes bought it.” He would repeat the joke at several subsequent shows.
The Sands had changed, abruptly and dramatically. “The Sands’ owners got their money and Hughes brought in his own people,” Ed Walters recalled. “It was done at midnight to start a new day. The Hughes people, a combination of accountants and lawyers, came in heavy and strong. Stopped all casino transactions and did accounting on everything. These guys had never been in the casino business before and looked on us as mobsters and gamblers. They immediately put in a long list of new casino rules, especially concerning the taking in and giving out of casino credit.”
The Hughes foot soldiers were also, to a man, Mormons: teetotalers and non-gamblers, humorless bean counters taking over a world that only yesterday had been full of freewheeling, naughty fun. Overseeing the operation was the casino’s new manager, a retired air force general named Edward Nigro.
And Sinatra was pissed off, in plain English: at Hughes, for neutering the Sands, for not taking his phone calls, for challenging his supremacy in Las Vegas—and everywhere else. Who was the most powerful man in the world? A billion dollars went a long way toward settling the question. (“I’m here to buy Howard Hughes out,” Frank joked at another show. “Who else would be able to do it? I got it on me!”) And he was furious at Jack Entratter, secure in his new five-year contract as the Sands’ president—and rolling in the nearly $3 million he’d pocketed in the sale—for not persuading Hughes to buy Sinatra’s share in Cal-Neva.
And, of course, at Mia, for being in New York. And for advertising his inability to rein her in.
How could he be so big and feel so small?
On Labor Day, the biggest night of the year at the casino, he abruptly canceled both shows, claiming he had strep throat. He flew back to Palm Springs. Over the next three days, while Sammy filled in for him, Frank met secretly with the owners of Caesars Palace, the brand-new (and still Mob-run*3) hotel-casino across the Strip from the Sands, about jumping ship. One of his conditions was that Caesars buy out his stake in Cal-Neva. It looked as though he was going to be able to get everything he wanted.
Yet he was still in a rage. Eventually—Thursday—he had to go back to work, and working for Howard Hughes was innately demeaning. He stomped around the casino in an especially ugly mood, announcing to all within earshot that there was no reason that Hughes, with all his money, shouldn’t share it with him, because he had made the Sands what it was. And he gambled as if there were no tomorrow.
“Like somebody deranged, he was flinging away his chips, losing thousands,” recalled Earl Wilson, who was there that week. “He was soon into the Sands for $200,000 in markers.”
In the pre-Hughes Sands, Frank Sinatra had operated under a unique set of rules: he never paid off his markers when he lost; when he won, he kept his winnings. Nobody else did this, but nobody else was Sinatra.
But this wasn’t the old Sands. On Thursday, September 7, casino manager Carl Cohen went into Jack Entratter’s office and told him that General Nigro (though he had retired, the honorific stayed with him) had decided to cut off Frank’s credit in the casino because he hadn’t settled his debt. Entratter’s assistant, Eleanor Roth, later wondered why the Sands would cut off Sinatra’s credit when he hadn’t yet been paid for the engagement: the markers could have been deducted from his salary without embarrassing him, she felt. In any case, Roth asserted, “Jack Entratter didn’t have the balls to tell Frank about the situation.”
For the second time.
Early the next morning—Friday, September 8—Frank went to a blackjack table in the casino and asked for $200 in chips. Walters, the pit boss on duty, regretfully told him the new rules. “He just shook his head and walked away,” Walters recalled. “He seemed annoyed, but not that mad.”
He was keeping it in for the time being. But Mia had returned from New York to find him deeply roiled. As was his custom, he went to sleep at an hour when most Americans would eat breakfast and didn’t awaken until late afternoon.
On Friday night, six of the Apollo astronauts—Jack Swigert, Gene Cernan, Tom Stafford, Walt Cunningham, Wally Schirra, and Ron Evans—came to see Sinatra’s midnight show in the Copa Room. When the show was over, Eleanor Roth recalled, Frank took the astronauts to the baccarat table and asked for credit. He no longer had credit at the Sands casino, he was told—not just a humiliation, but a humiliation in front of American heroes. Sinatra was predictably enraged.
Mia Farrow’s account of the first scene in this memorably mad weekend—the time is sometime after dawn on Saturday—begins placidly, if bizarrely. After yet another endless Vegas night, she writes, she and Frank were in a golf cart, headed back to their suite and bed at last: “He was wearing a shoe box on his head to keep the sunlight out of his eyes.”
A memorable image, and not a good sign. Sinatra had been upset in the casino, she writes, but everything had been ironed out. Now, all at once, he jerked the golf cart into a U-turn and floored it, heading straight for the lobby’s plate-glass window. Farrow knew her husband too well to try to protest. Her life flashed before her eyes: How, she wondered, had she wound up in a Vegas casino, riding in a golf cart driven by a man wearing a shoe box on his head, heading toward what appeared to be certain disaster?
At the last second, Frank jerked the steering wheel: Instead of hitting the window head-on, the cart sideswiped it. Miraculously, the two of them were uninjured. Filled with a demonic energy, Sinatra jumped out of the golf cart and strode purposefully into the casino, as Farrow “trotted after him, clutching my little beaded evening purse.” He picked up some chairs and threw them into a pile; he tried to set them ablaze with his gold cigarette lighter. Casino guards were hurrying over. But, Mia writes, when the chairs refused to ignite, Frank grabbed her hand and led her out of the building.
