by James Kaplan
The Detective brought together virtually the same production team as Tony Rome’s—producer Aaron Rosenberg, director Gordon Douglas, director of photography Joseph Biroc—and the new movie’s shoot proceeded no less smoothly, on location in Manhattan and then back on the studio lot at 20th Century Fox. But while Frank’s movie clicked along under the direction of Douglas, a capable craftsman working at the height of his powers, Mia’s picture fell ever further behind schedule as the meticulous artist in charge battled his male lead and shot take after take.
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A curious item appeared in Earl Wilson’s column on October 11, under the headline SINATRA APPROVES MIA TRIP TO INDIA:
Maureen O’Sullivan tells me she and her son-in-law Frank Sinatra both approve Mia and Prudence Farrow going to India to study and meditate with a famous mystic.
“I’d like to go myself. We’re all interested in religion and philosophy,” Maureen says. “Whether I’d go would depend on whether I get a show to do. And I’m sure Mia wouldn’t go without Frank’s approval.”
Maureen adds cheerfully: “Oh, everything’s just fine in that department.” Meaning marital relations.
The famous mystic was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, India and the Beatles are in the wings, and a riddle hereby arises, involving—once again—the timeline of Mia Farrow’s relationship with Frank Sinatra, as related in her memoir.
In the book, she speaks in agonized detail of the collapse, at the beginning of 1968, of her strangely filial marriage, comparing it to an adoption that she had managed to spoil. She felt as if she’d been “returned to the void,” she writes. Her life had fallen away; she could no longer imagine a satisfying future. Her work, she feared, had by its very nature doomed her to triviality: Acting in general and movie stardom in particular fostered her natural selfishness and arrogance. Once she had cherished idealistic dreams of becoming a nun or a pediatrician ministering to impoverished children overseas; now she was just “a lightweight,” just another Hollywood starlet about to divorce.
In her recollection, she desperately pondered how she might transform her life: change her name; dye her hair brown; get fat; move to Peru. In the midst of her psychic disarray, she writes, a phone call came in the night from her sister Prudence, in Boston, “unmoored in some nightmare of her own…talking about transcendental meditation.”
In Farrow’s book, all this happens after the turn of the year, when any hope for a reconciliation between her and Frank has withered. But in real life, here are Mia and Prudence planning their getaway in the early fall of 1967, and Frank (between whom and Mia, we have it on Maureen O’Sullivan’s breezy authority, everything’s just fine) surely approves.
Frank was puzzled and infuriated by the slowness of the Rosemary’s Baby shoot, Farrow recalled. He went to New York to do a few weeks of location work for The Detective; she flew out to see him on weekends, hoping to keep their relationship intact. The date for her joining Sinatra’s film was looming; Frank made it clear that he expected her to satisfy her commitment, even if she had to quit Rosemary’s Baby before it was finished. Mia saw that her marriage itself was at stake. But so, she felt, was her honor: If she abandoned Rosemary, she thought, eventually even Frank would come to respect her less.
She imagined herself back in Vegas again, desperately bored and sleepy at 4:00 a.m. while the men yelled their jokes and the women, in their best dresses, chatted about cats.
He gave her his ultimatum, and she explained how impossible it was. He called Robert Evans at Paramount and demanded Mia be released from Rosemary; Evans said that Polanski needed her for another month. “While she’s working for us, she’s Mia Farrow, not Mrs. Sinatra,” he told Frank.
In her absence, he began a halfhearted affair with Lee Remick: just another on-set romance, compounded of loneliness and boredom. Word got back to Mia. She gritted her teeth and went on working.
The picture was grueling: sometimes in the evenings she went dancing, to let off steam—at the Whisky, at the Daisy, at the Factory. With unimpeachable escorts, Lenny Gershe or Larry Harvey or Roddy McDowall.
Then came the night of November 13.
The occasion was a benefit at the Factory for a project to bring theater to inner-city schools. The entertainment was a fashion show by the wildly popular French fashion designer André Courrèges, “a gay, fast-paced romp of models dancing to African jazz music,” according to the Associated Press. Much of Hollywood was there: the Gregory Pecks and the Kirk Douglases; Barbra Streisand and Omar Sharif and Lucille Ball and Shirley MacLaine and newlyweds Jack Jones and Jill St. John. Even Ava, in town to begin work on the historical drama Mayerling, was there, looking radiant in white organdy and green satin. And Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, who were visiting the Douglases in Palm Springs, were also present. As was Mia.
And sometime during the evening, Mia, who loved to dance, danced with Bobby Kennedy in front of hundreds of people, including many of Frank’s Hollywood friends. They danced again and again.
Word got back. Fast.
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All this time, she had tried to tell him how important her work was to her; she had believed that their special bond, the thing they shared on the rare, quiet occasions they were alone together, would make him understand. And he did love her in his way (though the rare, quiet occasions also made him uncomfortable), as she loved him in hers, but she didn’t understand: she had humiliated him again and again. Intentionally, unintentionally—it didn’t matter.
November 17 came and went. The world knew she hadn’t shown up for The Detective—then production shut down on the movie, its star too upset to work. On the twenty-second, the day before Thanksgiving, Mickey Rudin appeared on the Rosemary’s Baby set at Paramount, went to Farrow’s dressing room, and, with all the charm of the pawnbroker he’d played in Tony Rome, handed her a sheaf of papers.
Made out in her name, it was an application for a divorce from Frank Sinatra. She saw an “unprofessional look of surprise” pass over Rudin’s face as he realized how blindsided she was by this. Holding herself together as best she could, she quickly signed the papers, reading nothing. She told Rudin she would do whatever he and Frank wished; she would not hire a lawyer herself.
When it was time to resume shooting, Roman Polanski found Farrow in her dressing room, “sobbing her heart out,” he recalled. “What hurt her most was that Sinatra hadn’t deigned to tell her himself, simply sending one of his flunkies. Sending Rudin was like firing a servant. She simply couldn’t understand her husband’s contemptuous, calculated act of cruelty, and it shattered her.”
“I had nothing I wanted to live for,” she said many years later. “Nothing. My life was over.”
“Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow spent Thanksgiving day apart by mutual agreement, the first day of a trial separation that ended 16 months of marriage,” UPI reported on November 24.
The singer and his willowy young wife were in seclusion, Sinatra at his swank desert retreat in Palm Springs and Miss Farrow at her fashionable Bel Air mansion where an armed guard patrolled the entrance gate.
Sinatra, 52 [sic], made the announcement of the trial separation through his public relations representative, who said after reading the statement that there would “be no further comment from either party.”
The actress refused to accept telephone calls but a maid gave an indication of her emotional state by saying she was eating very little and keeping to herself.
On the twenty-ninth, 20th Century Fox’s production chief Richard Zanuck announced that the twenty-three-year-old British newcomer Jacqueline Bisset would replace Mia Farrow in The Detective. (The role of Norma MacIver would be cut down considerably.) Meanwhile, the movie was still shut down. “Zanuck said he hoped production on ‘The Detective’ would resume next week when Sinatra returns from his home in Palm Springs,” UPI noted.
In the desert, Frank too was desolate, feeling, as his valet vividly remembered, that he had “no one, nothing.” Now and then he consoled him
self by playing with his vast set of electric trains, housed in its own cottage on the Wonder Palms compound: a boyhood dream fulfilled. Electric trains had also been a passion of Sinatra’s great and severe mentor, Tommy Dorsey—another man who had often found human relations an insuperable challenge.
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Sinatra had signed Duke Ellington to Reprise in the first flush of excitement with his new record label, at a time when he still believed that his passion for jazz would be shared by the record-buying public. It hadn’t happened. Soon after the Warner-Reprise merger, Ellington, along with a number of other jazz artists, including Count Basie, was cut from the roster.
Though Frank had lost interest in being a record executive, he still loved jazz and had long harbored a desire to make an album with Duke; he’d first considered the idea in 1947, back in the Columbia days. Twenty years later, the album finally happened, though just barely.
Duke Ellington was a great artist in decline at the end of 1967. His longtime collaborator, arranger, and muse, Billy Strayhorn, had died in May; the sixty-eight-year-old Ellington, who as a bandleader had always depended on Strayhorn and the musicians to inspire and piece out his great compositions, was now finding, as his biographer Terry Teachout writes, “that his music was no longer in vogue.” (Much to Duke’s annoyance, Sinatra had tried hard to steal Strayhorn away from him in Reprise’s early days.) After leaving the label, Ellington had to stoop to recording albums of contemporary pop tunes, including Beatles music; he also continued to tour with his band, which included many of the musicians he’d worked with for years—legendary players such as Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, and Cootie Williams. But it was ever harder to find an audience, and though the players were still great, they were no longer as great, or as committed, as they had once been.
Sinatra had tapped Billy May to write the arrangements, and the two of them came up with the song selections, a slightly melancholic mixture of unexpected jazz numbers (including only one Ellington original, “I Like the Sunrise”), Broadway tunes, and one contemporary hit (Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny”). The album would have just eight tracks in all, in order to give the great soloists time to show what they could do. Yet when May and Bill Miller flew to Seattle, where Duke and the band were playing an extended stand, and rehearsed the charts, May’s heart sank. “Jesus, the rehearsal was terrible,” he recalled. “That band, you know…they’re terrible sight-readers. So we got it to where they ran them down, and they sounded okay.” With two weeks to go to the session, Ellington promised May that the band would continue to rehearse the charts in concert, with Duke playing Frank’s vocal parts on piano.
But the moment Ellington and his men straggled into Western Recorders (forty-five minutes late for the session), Billy May realized “they [had] never touched the charts again; they never even looked at ’em after that day.” As Will Friedwald writes, “The Ellington organization was not only the greatest amalgamation of soloing and composing talent the jazz world has known, it was also a band of prima donnas who could only be held together by the biggest ego of them all…The band just didn’t care to put any effort into the work of outside arrangers.
“May’s solution,” Friedwald continues, “was to add a couple of ‘ringers’ to the band, [music-]reading studio men who could follow the charts and play in the Ellington style.” These included the trumpeter Al Porcino, a veteran of many Sinatra dates, and the keyboardists Jimmy Jones and Milt Raskin, to reinforce the aged maestro’s fading pianistic skills.
It was a strange meeting that took place on the night of December 11: Ellington the old genius, a regal, feline, elusive presence (“He was very quiet,” engineer Lee Herschberg remembered; “he didn’t have much to say at all”), had an ego every bit as grand as Frank’s and might still have held a grudge against him over Strayhorn. And understandably, Sinatra, the grieving soon-to-be ex-husband, was not in good voice that week; between his own condition and the band’s poor preparedness, he’d briefly considered scuttling the project. But the chance to record with Ellington, he realized, might not come again.
And somehow, between Sinatra’s determination, May’s brilliance, the skill of the ringers, and the residual greatness (and sheer pride) of Duke and his men, it all came together. The great alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges played gorgeous solos on “Yellow Days” and the exquisite “Indian Summer”—a track Nelson Riddle later described as his favorite Sinatra chart and the only arrangement he wished he’d written. And tenor-sax legend Paul Gonsalves blew beautifully on the last song of the evening, the album’s one up-tempo number: the blistering, brassy, bravura “Come Back to Me.”
That song (by Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane, from the Broadway musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), with its plangent lyric—
Have you gone to the moon,
or the corner saloon and to rack and to ruin—
—was all too appropriate that week (as was the session’s first number, Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne’s “All I Need Is the Girl,” from Gypsy). And all too appropriately, Frank’s long final note, the me of “come back to me,” was one of the flattest he had ever hit.
The next night was his fifty-second birthday, and he couldn’t have felt less festive. He wasn’t in the mood for a party, he had told friends. “He wasn’t really thrilled,” recalled Milt Bernhart, who was visiting from the next studio. “At that point somebody wheeled in his birthday cake.”
But, Lee Herschberg remembered, Frank’s mood soon picked up: “Somebody, Jilly or one of his guys, came in with two really nice-looking ladies on his arm, and said, ‘Frank, here’s your birthday present.’ We were out of there in an hour and a half that night!”
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“Mia Farrow Sinatra slipped quietly into town to finish filming ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ” Earl Wilson noted on December 12.
In her memoir, Farrow recalled filming her last scene, in front of Tiffany on Fifth Avenue. In a perfectly poignant moment, she stands on the sidewalk as the crew members, her family for the last three months, stow away the gear and head home to their lives. It’s Christmastime; she’s alone. She goes back to Frank’s penthouse and packs her things; all at once she sits down next to her bags, uncertain where to go next. Just then, Pamela Hayward—the wife of Leland Hayward and part of Sinatra’s A-list set—breezes in. She tells Mia she’s been worrying about her. She’s headed to Palm Springs, right away, to stay at Frank’s for Christmas. She phones Frank and chides him good-naturedly: This girl needs some sunshine and a good meal. The next thing she knows, Farrow writes, they’re landing in the desert.
That’s the written version. Back in 1968, she’d told Photoplay, “I begged him to take me back, at least for the holidays. For just another try. He told me that he had invited a lot of people to spend the holidays with him and that if I didn’t mind a crowd, he would be happy to have me there.”
It was always safer in a crowd.
It wasn’t much of an invitation, but then she was desperate. “I would have taken him up on the offer if the crowd had been big enough to fill the Colosseum,” she said.
It almost was. Frank had invited no fewer than twenty-seven people to Palm Springs to salve his birthday/holiday/marital blues: the Deutsches, the Goetzes, the Brissons, the Cerfs, the Hornblows, Harry Kurnitz, the Haywards, the Brynners, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon; a dozen more. All of them old and staid and rich, except Mia. “It was a fun crowd; two weeks of fun and games,” she insisted to Photoplay just after the holiday, her desperate smile readable between the lines. “I never had such a marvelous time. Frank was surrounded by the people he likes best, me included. And he was so relaxed and happy. I have never seen him so happy. Maybe the happiness of those two weeks had a good effect on our marriage. I hope so.”
It’s eerily like the brittle Daisy Buchanan—a character Farrow would play six years hence—sobbing about how beautiful Jay Gatsby’s shirts are.
In fact, Mia found Frank “withdrawn and stern” when she arrived in Palm Springs. At th
e same time, she writes, she felt thankful to be there and anxious not to make any mistakes. They discussed nothing of substance—not Rosemary’s Baby, or The Detective, or Lee Remick, or the papers she had signed. Most of all, she recalled, they avoided discussing the future.
As in the past, Sinatra asked her to arrange the seating for each night’s dinner, specifically instructing her never to seat him next to a certain woman, because she was so boring. He tolerated the couple, established A-listers in Frank’s life, because the husband was so amusing.
And so every night Farrow dutifully shuffled the two dozen guests around the three dinner tables, taking care never to place the offending woman next to her host—until, one night, the woman’s husband caught Mia alone in the living room. She smiled, but he was screaming at her, she remembered. They had been there for four days, the man yelled, and Farrow hadn’t seated his wife next to Frank once. The woman was unhappy and humiliated, he told her. “ ‘You are a stupid, rude little girl—you will never be a hostess!’ ”
Farrow was so unnerved by the assault, she writes, that she said nothing, to the man or to Sinatra. She was convinced that the man would never have lit into her this way if he hadn’t felt certain she would soon be out of Frank’s life. As a final slap she adds that the couple were friends of Ronald Reagan and would eventually play a key role in winning Sinatra’s support for Reagan and the Republican Party.
Her Christmas present to him was a genuine London taxi, bought while she was filming A Dandy in Aspic. She had gone to considerable trouble to have the vehicle converted to U.S. specifications, and Yul Brynner, she recalled, had planned an elaborate ceremony, complete with rented livery uniforms for himself and George Jacobs. That afternoon, as cocktail hour began, Brynner would honk the horn and Farrow would roust Frank and the rest of the company outdoors, where Brynner and Jacobs, with much ado, would present the taxi.
