Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Yet oddly, Farrow’s memoir has once again juggled events, situating the episode not in September 1967 but before their marriage, over a year earlier than it actually happened, thus pulling it out of context and rendering it both stranger and less significant than it really was.

  Why would she have done this?

  Memory is the flukiest of faculties, yet the golf cart incident was extensively documented in the press soon after it happened; there can be no mistaking it for any other Sinatra escapade. But by decontextualizing it, Farrow has removed its meaning, presumably because the meaning is too painful to bear: Frank was in a fury, not just at Hughes and the Sands, but at her. The gambling humiliation was only part of it. She had humiliated him again and again.

  Ed Walters, who was on the casino floor that night, found her revisionism entirely understandable. “The cocktail waitresses at the Sands knew Frank well and wouldn’t put up with any of his bullshit,” Walters said. “If Mia hadn’t been there, they would’ve told him, in no uncertain terms, to go back to his room. And he would have listened. But when Mia was with Frank, nobody went near him.”

  Far simpler, in retrospect, not to have been there at all.

  There are large holes in all accounts of Frank Sinatra’s memorable last weekend at the Sands: though the crazy events have been written about many times, a precise sequence has never been fixed—first, well, because things were just too crazy; second, because the highlights (or lowlights) seem sufficient to satisfy morbid curiosity.

  But a timeline might lend some clarity to the chaos.

  In a memo to Hughes later that day—Saturday, September 9—Robert Maheu broad-brushed the drama. “For two successive nights into the wee hours of the morning Sinatra has made a damn fool of himself in the casino at the Sands,” he wrote. “He moved around insulting people with vile language. Last night he drove a golf cart through a plate glass window and was disgustingly drunk. In an effort to protect him from himself Carl Cohen stopped his credit after he had obtained $30,000 plus in cash and had lost approximately $50,000.*4 Sinatra blew his top and late this afternoon called me to tell me that he was walking away from the Sands and would not finish his engagement.”

  News accounts corroborate this. “A spokesman for the Sands Hotel Sunday said he had no idea why Frank Sinatra broke off his engagement there ‘without explanation,’ ” UPI reported on Monday the eleventh.

  “I don’t think Sinatra knows why either. He just left,” the spokesman said.

  The singer opened a three-week run on Aug. 30. He was to have appeared in the strip hotel’s Copa Room through Sept. 20. Singer Frankie Avalon was booked to complete the engagement.

  “This is the first time anything like this has happened,” the Sands representative said.

  Sinatra, who was making his 29th appearance in the hotel since 1952, left for his Hollywood home Saturday night before the first show.

  Mia Farrow writes that that night—there is no fudging the timeline here, because of the events that followed—she and Frank went out to dinner with Nancy junior and her new beau, Jimmy Bowen, at Trader Vic’s in Beverly Hills.

  They all chatted agreeably and everything was fine, she writes, until the evening took a turn. Well lubricated, Frank suddenly decided he was going to Vegas, that instant, and Mia was going with him.

  She was all too used to his quick mood swings, his abrupt need to go somewhere else—wherever the action was. And once there, she knew, he would be caught up in the spirit of the nighttime world, a place where her existence barely registered.

  But that night Mia had an excuse: She had an early call at the studio. And so, she writes, Frank drove her home, gave her a sweet goodnight kiss, and headed to the airport. He phoned later to tell her he’d arrived safely.

  The next morning, she recalled, he phoned her on the set at Paramount, his speech indistinct, to tell her there’d been a fight, and the caps had been knocked off his front teeth: It would soon be all over the papers, and his dentist was bringing new teeth.

  All of the latter was true, except that the fight, such as it was, had been very brief.

  Sometime before sunrise on Sunday the tenth, Frank had returned to the Sands, smashed his hand onto the desk of a startled bell captain, and demanded to see Carl Cohen. “He threatened to kill anyone who got in his way, used vile language, and said he would beat up the telephone operators if they did not connect him with Cohen,” Maheu reported to Hughes later that day. “In an effort to calm the situation, Carl agreed to meet him.”

  “I built this hotel from a sand pile and I can tear the fucking place down, and before I’m through that is what it will be again!” Sinatra announced, in that big voice, to one and all.

  It was 5:45 on a Sunday morning, the casino otherwise relatively quiet, and Sands employees were shaken. Cohen got dressed, came downstairs, and went to the Garden Room to get something to eat before dealing with Sinatra. “When Carl is mad,” his brother once said, “he eats with both hands and he don’t give a shit about nothing.”

  Cohen wasn’t mad now, merely annoyed. He was a tough Jew, a Cleveland protégé of Moe Dalitz’s who had risen to the top of the gambling business through a combination of cunning and implied physical menace. The implication was strong. Cohen stood six-three and weighed 250 pounds; his smile—when he smiled—was somehow warm and chilling at the same time. Very few men had ever been foolish enough to cross him. “You didn’t fight Carl Cohen,” Ed Walters said. “There were a couple guys that got on the wrong side of him who were never seen again.” He had absolutely no fear of Frank Sinatra, whom he knew to be a hothead and nothing like a fighter.

  Cohen was sitting at his table in the Garden Room when Frank stalked in, accompanied by Jilly Rizzo and a wealthy Miami friend named Stanley Parker. Sinatra demanded to know why his credit had been curtailed, and Cohen, who didn’t know Parker, asked him to leave. The conversation was private, he said.

  “You son of a bitch, he can hear anything I have to say to you,” Frank told Cohen.

  “What did you call me?” Cohen asked.

  “You heard me, you son of a bitch,” Sinatra said. “What are you so nervous about?”

  “You just got me out of bed,” Cohen said.

  Frank stared at him. The Jack Daniel’s talking, he repeated himself. “What are you so nervous about?” he said.

  That did it for Carl Cohen. He stood up, said he was tired of the one-sided conversation, and began to leave.

  From this moment, things got very crazy very fast. Accounts accordingly vary. “Sinatra called Cohen every dirty name in the book,” Maheu reported to Hughes. Among the names, according to law-enforcement officials, were “motherfucker,” “rat fink,” and “cocksucker.” (Dolly herself could have done no better.) One source says that Sinatra overturned Cohen’s breakfast table, spilling a pot of hot coffee in Cohen’s lap and scalding his abdomen and groin. Another says that Cohen himself knocked over the coffeepot when his substantial belly caught the table’s edge as he rose to leave. Some sources say that Frank flung a handful of casino chips into Cohen’s face; others disagree. But most concur that after Sinatra threatened to have Cohen killed (“I’ll get a guy to bury you, motherfucker”), Frank pulled the one weapon from his verbal arsenal that finally drove the big man over the edge.

  “You kike!” he screamed.

  A dirty secret about Frank Sinatra, the FDR Democrat and champion of tolerance, a man who had himself often been the victim of ethnic prejudice, was that if he was drunk enough and in the wrong kind of mood, he was apt to revert to the language of the Hoboken streets—to “get racial,” as a longtime employee of the Sands recalled. As a rule, the victims of his demeaning epithets tended to be bewildered menials, waiters and busboys and parking attendants, who had somehow gotten on his bad side—perhaps brought him a hamburger done the wrong way—or merely walked into his peripheral vision at the wrong moment. They were the easiest to pick on; their very existence also tapped that part of Frank that felt weak
and contemptible.

  But now he had picked on the wrong guy. Carl Cohen, slow to anger, instantly drove his big fist into Sinatra’s mouth, smashing the caps off his two front teeth and knocking him straight to the floor.

  Bleeding and furious (“You broke my teeth! I’ll kill you, you motherfucker son of a bitch!”), Frank got up, threw a chair at Cohen (it missed and hit a security guard in the head), then barked a command to Rizzo: “Get him, Jilly! Get him!”

  Jilly Rizzo might not have been a rocket scientist, but he had an advanced degree in the mathematics of the streets, and an instant calculation told him to stand quietly with his hands visible at his sides. “Jilly ain’t going to go up against Carl,” Ed Walters noted. “In this town, there were some people no entertainer better fuck with. There’s no entertainer bigger than the whole town. Entertainers have bosses. They work for us. And we have bosses.”

  But as of this moment, Frank Sinatra no longer worked for the Sands.

  —

  Frank’s people tried to soft-pedal the incident for a couple of days, but it finally blared onto the world’s front pages on Wednesday the thirteenth, along with the news of his defection to Caesars—and Caesars’ purchase of Cal-Neva for $2.5 million. UPI’s story quoted a Sinatra spokesman as admitting, “We can’t deny any of what happened in Las Vegas. There were too many witnesses. I have to assume it is all true. We can’t even deny his teeth were knocked out.”

  The story also noted that “Dr. Abe B. Weinstein, who has been the singer’s dentist since 1943, flew Monday [from Connecticut] to Sinatra’s home in Beverly Hills, Calif., to repair the damage…The dentist said on his arrival back in New York Tuesday that the incident had been ‘quite a shock’ for Sinatra. He said after the dental operation, ‘he put his arms around me and was very emotional.’ ”

  The news cycle moved on, and, as Frank’s friend Kirk Douglas remembered, most people around Sinatra studiously avoided referring to the humiliating episode. Douglas couldn’t resist. When he asked if the one-punch fight had really occurred, Frank admitted it had. Then he looked at his old friend with a twinkle in his eyes and added, “Kirk, I learned one thing. Never fight a Jew in the desert.”

  At the Sands in the aftermath of the episode, Kitty Kelley writes, “Cohen was…treated like a conquering hero, especially by employees who had suffered Frank’s wrath over the years. Some even considered giving him a testimonial dinner.”

  Ed Walters disagreed vehemently. “Carl was not a hero and we weren’t glad Frank got hit,” the former pit boss recalled. “Hell, we had just witnessed a fight between two of the most talented and loved people in the town. I personally looked up to and respected them both. They were the best at what they did. Together with Jack [Entratter], they made the Sands into what it had become. And we all knew from that day forward, we would never be the same.”

  “Sinatra’s fight at the Sands destroyed Jilly’s reputation as a tough guy,” Leonard Lyons noted in an early-October column. “Jilly stood by and watched his idol flattened without raising a finger.”

  —

  Variety’s long page-one account of the Vegas fracas ended with Frank’s carefully yet oddly worded official statement: “I regret the termination of my long association with the Sands hotel. I have admired and respected Howard Hughes for many years and regret that my decision to accept the Caesars Palace offer comes so soon after his acquisition of the Sands. In addition to performing, I have agreed to assist management in getting talent, both for Caesars Palace and the Cal-Neva.”

  As to the last, the entertainment weekly wondered whether “Sinatra will influence Dean Martin, [Sammy] Davis, possibly Joey Bishop and other intimates to shift bookings to Caesars Palace.”

  It didn’t happen. Sammy would remain at the Sands; Dean would play out the last year of his contract there, then move to the Riviera; Joey would stay on TV until his show tanked, then, in 1970, return to the Sands.

  At the end of the Variety piece, another Sinatra item was tagged on, on a very different subject. “Out of friendship for Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, a Minnesotan,” it read, “Frank Sinatra is donating his services Oct. 8 for a one performance Sunday night ‘Evening of Stars’ benefit show in St. Paul Auditorium to raise campaign funds for Citizens for Johnson-Humphrey Committee of the Minnesota Farmer Labor Party.” Frank, the story continued, had lined up his daughter Nancy, Dean Martin, Milton Berle, Pat Henry, the Step Brothers, the Fifth Dimension, “and possibly Buddy Rich and Trini Lopez” for the show.

  Frank had first met Humphrey in New York in November 1966: not long after Pat Brown lost the California governorship to Ronald Reagan, Sinatra and his young wife paid a courtesy call on the vice president and his wife, Muriel, who were staying at the Waldorf Towers. “Frank stopped by on a Sunday afternoon with Mia, who was quite kittenish and curled up on the couch beside him, but didn’t say a word,” Norman Sherman, Humphrey’s press secretary, recalled.

  She just listened as Sinatra and Humphrey reminisced about the big bands in the 1930s in South Dakota. Hubert was a nut on boxing and knew all sorts of trivia about who weighed what and which contender won what crown, so they shared that as well. There was an instantaneous bonding between them, an immediate good feeling that led to a nice friendship. Humphrey thought highly of Frank, but then he thought highly of everyone. And let’s face it, friends were not that easy to come by then, especially in the entertainment industry, which was so violently opposed to President Johnson’s Vietnam policies.

  A strange scene: the two public figures in intimate yet utterly impersonal converse; Mia, who had already begun differing vehemently with Frank about the war, biting her tongue and being subjected to yet another geriatric chat.

  Sinatra had no love for Lyndon Johnson (the feeling was mutual: Frank not only was rumored to have disrespected LBJ’s revered mentor Sam Rayburn at the 1956 convention, but had thrown in his lot with the Kennedys in 1960, when Johnson hated them). But he badly missed the grand game of political kingmaking, and now, in the run-up to the 1968 presidential election, Humphrey was as close as Frank could get. So, with his new front teeth in place, he would once again lend his time and his voice to the Democrats: life went on, showbiz and politics went on, despite disasters elsewhere.

  —

  Now and then showbiz went on sublimely. At the beginning of October, Frank taped the third Man and His Music special, with guest stars Ella Fitzgerald and Antonio Carlos Jobim and with Nelson Riddle conducting the orchestra. Televised popular music simply didn’t get any better. A kind of magic happened when Sinatra and Fitzgerald sang together: they duetted on “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing”; then they did a “Lady Is a Tramp,” with special lyrics, that was such a barn burner that when they were done, Frank said, “I think I hurt myself.”

  The feeling was naturally very different on his four-song medley with Jobim. The two tuxedoed men sat side by side against a dark background, Sinatra with a cigarette and the Brazilian with his guitar, and segued from “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars” to “Change Partners” to “I Concentrate on You” to “The Girl from Ipanema,” without a wrong note or a false step. Frank’s singing was so quietly gorgeous (Jobim now and then vocalized soft harmonies in the background, with the effect of cello notes) that it called to mind what Ava had once said about his voice: that it had “a quality that makes me want to cry for happiness, like a beautiful sunset or a boys’ choir singing Christmas carols.”

  A quality that only made the madness at the Sands seem that much more surreal.

  —

  Mia Farrow recalled that Roman Polanski preferred to film long scenes in one extended take, which called for great precision in the moving of actors and the camera. For this reason, and because of the Polish director’s perfectionism, he often shot up to forty takes of a scene—a method, she writes, that drove the hot-tempered John Cassavetes to distraction.

  Cassavetes, Farrow’s co-star in Ro
semary’s Baby, was himself a writer and director who made personal, highly improvisatory films that had a raw, almost documentary quality; his artistic vision was diametrically opposed to Roman Polanski’s, and the two men quickly came to loggerheads. The conflict, combined with Polanski’s painstaking methods, put Rosemary seriously behind schedule almost at once, and Mia, who was in almost every scene, would not be able to get away before the shooting of the picture was completely finished.

  —

  The Detective was in every way a more substantial picture than Tony Rome, a complex crime drama with a gritty New York City setting, dark themes (police corruption, homosexuality, social hypocrisy), and a no-nonsense main character in Sinatra’s Sergeant Joe Leland, an NYPD detective forced to grapple with a very nasty crime and the failure of his own marriage. Even the supporting cast made Frank’s previous film look lightweight by comparison: Lee Remick, Ralph Meeker, Jack Klugman, Al Freeman Jr., Robert Duvall, Horace McMahon. The thirty-one-year-old Remick, who played Leland’s estranged, promiscuous wife, Karen, was an accomplished actress who’d starred in distinguished movies such as The Long, Hot Summer, Anatomy of a Murder, and Days of Wine and Roses. She was a striking screen presence, with extraordinarily wide and haunted-looking china-blue eyes. Mia Farrow was to play Norma MacIver, the widow of a closeted gay man who, in a key plot point, commits suicide. The role was small but important, yet Farrow’s nervousness at having to pit her still-minor luminosity against the star power of the woman playing Joe Leland’s wife was not entirely misplaced.