by James Kaplan
Mia Farrow was transformed by their presence. They sat by the river, playing their guitars and singing; as she talked with them, she recalled, the heaviness that had descended on her lifted. “They seemed beautiful and fearless,” she writes. And young. Amazingly, she hadn’t spent time with people her own age since high school.
All at once, Farrow recalled, the ashram changed from a gray place into a colorful one. The Beatles and their music seemed omnipresent—even at meals, to which they brought their guitars, improvising ditties for the amusement of the other pilgrims, Farrow recalled. Many of these tunes—including “Dear Prudence,” imploring Mia’s sister to leave her cloistered meditating and come out to play—would wind up on The White Album.
Then, one day, the maharishi invited Mia to a personal meditation session in his cave. After twenty minutes, as they rose to their feet, he was suddenly embracing her with surprisingly hairy arms.
She fled—the cave, the ashram, the country. A movie, Secret Ceremony, was waiting for her in London if she wanted it. Joseph Losey directing, Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum co-starring. She decided to take it.
Mia Farrow with three Beatles, Donovan, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Rishikesh, India, March 1968. On the run from her disintegrating marriage, Farrow found momentary peace at the ashram; soon she would be running again. (Credit 25.1)
And Frank had finally decided to take her calls. From Miami, he invited her to stay in the vacant flat in Grosvenor Square, an idea that appealed to her, Farrow recalled, because she imagined it would make her feel somehow close to him. Instead, though, staying in the place where they’d lived as newlyweds only made her miss him more sharply.
The previous months’ events, in her case with the chaotic overlay of the ashram and India, had undone her no less than they had him. With two weeks to kill before filming began, she slowly unraveled. Unable to sleep at night, she spent her days in bed, afraid to go outside. Then, one day, her doctor found her incoherent and checked her into a clinic. After spending three days there, heavily medicated, she enlisted her secretary’s help to escape, climbing out a window and down a fire escape. “If you kill yourself,” the secretary told her, “I’ll never forgive you.”
She flew to Miami.
Her taxi pulled up to the Fontainebleau on a hot, humid night; the big marquee read FRANK SINATRA. From the driveway she could hear the band playing “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is).” Walking into the showroom, she saw Sinatra as she had seen him so often before: standing in the smoky spotlight in his tuxedo, microphone in hand.
“Near the end, when the lights went up, the audience suddenly turned,” Hollywood reporter Hal Bates wrote. “There was a low murmur. Someone spotted Mia Farrow standing in the La Ronde Room, near the entrance. Frank hadn’t seen her.”
According to the Associated Press, Farrow had slipped into the Fontainebleau at 1:30 on the morning of Saturday, March 9, sneaking in by way of the hotel tennis courts and basement, much as she had sneaked out of the London clinic. She watched the rest of his show, then went up to the penthouse with him.
A couple of days later, she returned to London. They’d agreed they would finish their respective movies. Then they would see.
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His energy was back, but not his equilibrium. “He was sad. He was hurting,” said Nancy junior, who’d traveled to Miami to comfort her father. He was determined to wrap up the silly movie—in three weeks, he said.
His haste showed: the good feelings of the Tony Rome shoot faded into memory as the irritable star intimidated much of Lady in Cement’s cast and crew. “He was real upset,” an extra named Al Algiro recalled. “I remember Pat Henry messed up his lines real bad, and after three takes Frank got so mad he went over and slapped Pat in the face a few times and told him to shape up.”
Kitty Kelley charged the star with “refusing to do more than one take and ripping out handfuls of the script to save time” and treating Gordon Douglas “like a lackey who was on the film simply to accommodate him. At Frank’s insistence, Douglas scheduled his scenes so that he never had to come to work before noon; the sets were pre-lit, and his double plotted every move so that by the time Frank arrived, he could complete action on one set and proceed to the next without delay.”
But Sinatra had been One-Take Charlie since the start of his film career; ripping out script pages and starting work at noon were nothing new, either. Frank well knew the difference between an entertainment and a work of cinema, and he was no longer in the cinema business: Zinnemann and Preminger and Frankenheimer were figures of his past. He had hired Gordon Douglas—and had kept on hiring him—not because he was a lackey, but because he was a skillful journeyman who could be depended on to get the best possible work out of Sinatra in the shortest possible time.
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Screw the movies; singing was the only thing that really mattered. Raquel Welch remembered attending one of Sinatra’s shows that March, accompanied by a reluctant Elia Kazan, who wanted to talk to her about a possible movie role. “Gadge said, ‘Where can we meet?’ ” Welch recalled. “I said, ‘Every night, I go to see Frank at the Fontainebleau. Would you like to have dinner with me there?’ He said, ‘Oh, I hate that son of a bitch.’ ” She persuaded Kazan to go anyway.
“So we’re sitting there,” the actress said, “and Gadge is saying, ‘This son of a bitch, he only does one take—who the fuck does he think he is, telling some director that that’s it, he’s done?’ I said, ‘Okay. But I’ve been with him on the set, and actually Frank’s first take is a pretty remarkable first take; he actually does seem to get it. It’s kind of annoying if you have to wait for everybody else to catch up with you.’ ”
She kept trying to soften Kazan’s stance, but the director “kept going on and on about what a son of a bitch Sinatra was, how he thought he was such a big shot and a tough guy and all the rest. Finally, the overture starts and they’re playing all these amazing arrangements, and Frank comes out from the wings, grabs hold of the microphone, hits center stage with the spotlight, and just starts singing. He gets halfway through the first song, and Gadge turns to me and says, ‘My God! This fuckin’ guy is the best actor I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s completely naked up there; I take back everything I said. He’s a genius.’ ”
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Early in that presidential election year, Communist forces in Vietnam launched the surprise Tet Offensive, killing thousands of American and South Vietnamese soldiers and significantly eroding U.S. confidence that the war could be won. In early March, as domestic resistance to the conflict intensified, the antiwar Democratic candidate Eugene McCarthy made a surprisingly strong showing against President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary; four days later, Robert F. Kennedy, also an opponent of the war, declared his candidacy. On the Republican side, Richard Nixon held a strong lead in the polls against Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller.
On the night of March 31, as Frank Sinatra and his older daughter watched the television in Frank’s penthouse suite at the Fontainebleau, the president—who privately worried about his health and felt he had lost control of the Democratic Party over Vietnam—stunned the nation by announcing he would not seek reelection.
After the broadcast, Nancy Sinatra remembered, she and her father talked about the war and the upcoming presidential election. Frank told Nancy he felt strongly that Hubert Humphrey should run. Nancy, a Bobby Kennedy supporter, said she believed Humphrey would have to weigh in on Vietnam. Her father agreed, but said that as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Humphrey couldn’t embarrass LBJ by denouncing the war. Nancy, who had seen the hostilities at close range, bridled at this: the war had to stop, she believed passionately. Frank told her he felt the same way, and knew Humphrey did too.
This was the sober and contemplative Frank. The less sober, vindictive Frank immediately began salting his onstage patter with nasty cracks about Bobby Kennedy. And soon, he had something more immediate to be irked about: the Miami Herald, the very paper that ha
d just given him such a glowing review, was threatening to subpoena him in the Fontainebleau’s $10 million libel suit against the newspaper, which had run a story two years earlier charging the hotel with being run by the Mob.
Sinatra had briefly testified in the suit while he was in Miami the previous spring. But the Herald’s attorney, William Steel, now said, “Sinatra played fast and loose with us on his deposition. There were misleading answers. We want to explore the curious relationship of Sinatra to the Fontainebleau and whether he is an owner or not.”
Frank’s curious relationship to the great and tawdry Miami hotel went back a decade and was tightly entwined with his longtime friendship with Joe Fischetti. And as the libel trial now proceeded, an odd piece of information emerged: “Hotel executive v.p. Frank Margulies testified that Sinatra has not been paid anything by the Fontainebleau for his six-week engagement this year, nor for a double date in La Ronde Room a year ago,” Variety reported on April 10.
Margulies said Fontainebleau prexy Ben Novack handled Sinatra arrangements and that Joe Fischetti was instrumental in them.
Hotel records show that Fischetti, a cousin of the late Al Capone, was paid $1,080 a month by the hotel on and off between 1959 and 1962. Fischetti’s two dead brothers, Rocco and Charles, were leaders in the Chicago Mafia organization before their deaths.
When Joe Fischetti was called for pre-trial deposition, he took the Fifth Amendment to all Herald questions. Several Fontainebleau employees have testified that Fischetti is Sinatra’s constant companion when at the Fontainebleau.
In a fury about the Herald’s subpoena, Frank almost canceled his last four nights at the Fontainebleau, but then, having suddenly and strangely calmed down, he decided to take the summons and finish his engagement. “We’re having a wonderful time in Miami Beach,” he told his audience on the night of April 3. “Get a subpoena every day.” He was served the next day and ordered by a circuit-court judge to show up or risk going to jail.
On April 4, while Sinatra contemplated his legal woes, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Rioting broke out in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Kansas City, and Chicago.
But not in Miami, where Frank wrapped Lady in Cement on the fifth, having completed the picture as speedily as he’d wished. He finished his Fontainebleau engagement the next night.
Then he skipped town.
“The Miami Herald reported today that Frank Sinatra abruptly left Florida Tuesday to avoid testifying under oath about his relationship with the owners and operators of the Fontainebleau Hotel here,” the Associated Press reported on April 10.
But the Miami–Dade County circuit court was saved the trouble of trying to extradite Frank: on the twenty-first, the Herald suddenly retracted its accusations, and Ben Novack just as suddenly dropped his lawsuit against the paper. If it all smelled slightly fishy—had the Herald buckled to financial pressure? Had Joe Fischetti simply covered his tracks too well?—Novack got exactly what he wanted: a front-page statement in the Miami Herald saying, “We are of the opinion that the Fontainebleau is not owned or controlled by any gangsters or any underworld characters.”
A curiously backhanded retraction.
Mickey Rudin wasn’t so easily placated. The Herald’s subpoena of Frank Sinatra, he sniffed, had been “simply an attempt to harass and an unsuccessful effort to embarrass” his client about his relationship with the Fontainebleau and Ben Novack.
Once again, the newspapers had impeached Sinatra’s reputation; once again, he had emerged tarnished but unindicted. But the papers weren’t done with him yet.
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Hubert Humphrey announced his candidacy in Washington, D.C., on April 27. Three days later, Frank Sinatra returned to the nation’s capital for the first time since the Kennedy inaugural gala, ostensibly to give a benefit concert for the Big Brothers of America at the Shoreham Hotel on May 3, but actually to get back into the kingmaking business.
The syndicated political columnist Drew Pearson, who was president of the Big Brothers, had invited Frank to do the show; the payback was good publicity. At seventy, the distinguished-looking, white-mustached Pearson was the best-known columnist in America, famous for his liberal stances and muckraking investigative pieces. He’d battled Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and more recently had gone after Governor Ronald Reagan. But in the May 1 column, he welcomed Sinatra to town, giving a glowing nod to the singer’s participation in the benefit and adding as a lagniappe a refutation of the old rumor that Frank had dodged the draft in World War II. Pearson failed to mention his own connection to the Big Brothers, plus the fact that the vice president would be speaking at the event.
President Johnson, hearing that Sinatra would be starring at the Shoreham affair, had declined to attend.
Both Frank and Hubert Humphrey were guests at a cocktail party at the columnist’s Georgetown house on the night of May 1. Tantalizingly, the invitations read “To meet Frank Sinatra and his candidate,” but Sinatra’s choice of candidate surprised nobody in Washington: he struck no one as a Eugene McCarthy man and had already said, for the record, “I don’t think Bobby Kennedy is qualified to be president of the United States.”
In a town of massive egos, Frank could more than hold his own. “I’m really going to make this town jump for the next two days,” he told Mayor Walter Washington, as the cocktail music tinkled in Drew Pearson’s colonial garden. Among the other guests that evening were two friends of Sinatra’s, Teamsters vice president Harold Gibbons and a gray-haired, rugged-looking Chicago businessman named Allen Dorfman. Gibbons, the head of St. Louis Local 688, had organized the 1965 benefit for Dismas House at which Frank had entertained; he was also the heir apparent to the Teamsters’ president, Jimmy Hoffa, then residing in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
Allen Dorfman, officially in the insurance business but in reality a close associate of Hoffa’s, had been acquitted of the same charges on which Hoffa had been convicted: bribing a juror and defrauding the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund by making large loans to organized-crime figures. Hoffa was in prison largely due to the efforts of Bobby Kennedy, who before resigning as attorney general to run for a U.S. Senate seat in New York had made convicting the Teamsters leader a personal crusade.
Frank had flown into Washington with Allen Dorfman.
Maxine Cheshire, the Washington Post’s gossip columnist, was also at Pearson’s party. She found herself intrigued by the sight of a man widely reputed to be mobbed up socializing with not only Frank Sinatra but also the vice president of the United States. “While Sinatra and several Teamsters had Humphrey back against a brick wall at one end of the terrace, I cornered Dorfman,” Cheshire recalled. “I put my question bluntly: ‘I understand you’re here to make a deal with Humphrey; he’ll pardon Hoffa in exchange for your help in getting him elected.’ ”
“Yeah, honey, we’re here to buy everybody in town who’s for sale,” Dorfman said, adding charmingly, “What’s your price?”
When Sinatra left, Cheshire followed him to one of Georgetown’s most expensive restaurants, the Rive Gauche. Frank’s dinner companions were Harold Gibbons, Allen Dorfman, and Mrs. Jimmy Hoffa. The columnist approached their table and asked, quietly but firmly, whether Humphrey had promised to pardon Hoffa. No one answered.
Mrs. Hoffa “was tight-lipped and non-committal when asked if she had come to talk politics with a group that obviously was going to have unkind things to say about the man who put her husband in the penitentiary,” Cheshire wrote in the Post.
She stared grimly at her plate and the only time she opened her mouth was to nibble the minced clams in front of her.
Sinatra disappointed other diners at the posh Georgetown restaurant. Many who have read of his public displays of pugilistic prowess expected him at least to take a swing at the Washington Post photographer.
But Sinatra controlled his temper, despite the fact that he had asked the management to protect his party from publicity…
It was not the kind of publicity Frank had been looking to get in Washington.
He did better with the Star’s society columnist Betty Beale, who went gaga for his concert. “Sinatra, wearing the gold Russian cross of St. Anne on a chain with his white Cossack-type shirt and tuxedo, wowed the 1,600 people who subscribed to the Big Brothers benefit dinner honoring its president, Drew Pearson,” Beale wrote.
All 1,600 listened spellbound to the performance that helped raise the dinner’s profits of $50,000.
“He’s the king, isn’t he?” exclaimed Vice-president Humphrey.
Washington also saw a different Sinatra than the one generally portrayed in print…At the dinner here, Frank told Mayor Walter Washington that during the poor people’s march in the Capital he will need to keep people occupied to keep the situation under control.
“At any time if you need me to come back and help,” he said, “just give me a few days’ notice and I will do it.”
Sinatra told Beale that he planned to do fund-raising shows for Humphrey in six to ten cities starting at the end of May; he said he also intended to organize a committee of a hundred entertainers for the candidate, including his daughter Nancy. (He had pulled this number out of the air; because of Humphrey’s continued support for the war in Vietnam, Hollywood Democrats, including Nancy junior, were staying away from the candidate in droves.) When the matronly columnist asked him about the diamond-studded cross he was wearing, Frank, turning on the charm, told her it had been a gift from Mrs. Leland Hayward. “It was the first really valuable one your correspondent has seen on a man, though pendants are the new rage, and I must say it was very handsome,” Betty Beale fluttered.
