by James Kaplan
At the same dinner, Maxine Cheshire saw Frank come through the receiving line, again with Mrs. Hoffa, and heard Drew Pearson apologize to them both for Cheshire’s unfortunate story in the Washington Post—which, he’d said on his radio show earlier in the day, had been completely fabricated.
Though President Johnson had skipped the concert, he’d suggested to Hubert Humphrey that he “bring Drew around to the White House after the party.” Little did Johnson suspect that Pearson would himself bring a guest: the man the president had been trying to avoid in the first place.
The vice president, the columnist, and Frank Sinatra arrived in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House after midnight to find a mildly surreal scene. “Lady Bird Johnson was already under the covers in the big four-poster Lincoln bed with its overhanging canopy,” writes Pearson’s biographer Oliver Pilat.
The President, bare above pajama bottoms, was lying on a table being pounded by a masseur.
After a quick glance, Johnson turned his head away from his visitors without saying anything. Humphrey’s light conversation with Lady Bird gradually evaporated. The President finally threw a few words of greeting at Humphrey and Pearson, ignoring Sinatra, who had gone over to the famous mantelpiece, on which, Pearson had reported in the column, Jacqueline Kennedy had carved a strange record of her husband’s tenancy.*1
The president hopped off the massage table, picked up a souvenir booklet about the White House, and thrust it at Frank. “I don’t suppose you read,” Johnson said, “but this has lots of pictures.”
Frank and Hubert Humphrey, August 1968: a very temporary friendship. Sinatra’s lifelong identification as an FDR Democrat would come to an end in this annus horribilis of assassinations, riots, and an escalating conflict in Vietnam. (Credit 25.2)
Towering over his uninvited guest, the six-foot-four-inch president also handed Sinatra something else: a presidential trinket for women visitors, a lipstick with the White House seal on it. “It’s a conversation piece,” Johnson said. “It’ll make a big man of you with your women.”
Frank turned and left the room without saying a word.
—
He hit the campaign trail hard, and alone. The Democrats were deeply divided that spring, and Sinatra’s celebrity friends were either Republicans or—like Shirley MacLaine, Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Gregory Peck, and Sammy Cahn—Kennedy supporters. A splinter group of stars (among them Paul Newman, Robert Vaughn, Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner) supported Eugene McCarthy. The California primary was set for June 4, and the state leaned heavily toward RFK.
But politics was almost beside the point when Frank gave a concert for Humphrey in Oakland on May 22. “The King of the World—that would be Frank Sinatra, not Charles de Gaulle—came to Oakland the other night,” wrote local columnist Al Martinez, “to give a benefit performance in behalf of the presidential candidacy of…of…oh yes, Hubert Humphrey, and it was a highly successful event. Sinatra ought to take the nomination on the first ballot easily.”
It was funny, but it was pointed: Hubert Humphrey had energy and convictions—he’d been an outspoken liberal on civil rights since the late 1940s—yet unlike Frank’s hero Jack Kennedy he barely moved the charisma meter. He wanted (a little too much) to be liked, and he was likable: certainly more likable than Dick Nixon. But Nixon had announced a “secret plan” to end the war, the country was sick of seeing the bodies come home week after week, and Humphrey kept waffling about the issue.
Bobby Kennedy, on the other hand, was an inspirational candidate, lacking his late brother’s lustrous charm and dangerous sexuality but exuding an idealistic intensity which many found stirring in that tumultuous year. He wasn’t just against the war; he spoke passionately for racial and economic justice; he visited and wooed the inner cities; he challenged America’s young people to create a better future. Kennedy burned bright and pure, as though exorcising his Joe McCarthy past.
His backers felt that if Kennedy won the California primary, he could knock Eugene McCarthy out of the race and set up a face-off against Humphrey at the Democratic convention in August. This was the way it was heading. Kennedy won the June 4 primary (and on the same day beat Humphrey in Humphrey’s birth state, South Dakota), but then shortly after midnight, after he addressed his supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the all-too-thinkable happened as he left the ballroom and walked through the hotel kitchen.
That night Sinatra was in Manhattan, drinking at Jilly’s with a few friends, including the concert promoter Ken Roberts. “We were in the back, in Frank’s booth,” Roberts recalled.
The hat-check girl, Fran, came in, and said, “Someone just shot Bobby Kennedy,” and Sinatra made the comment, “I hope they shot him in the fuckin’ head.” That’s exactly what he said, because we all thought she was kidding.
A couple minutes later, she came back and said, “Yes, he was shot in the head.” Sinatra turned white and became so frightened and panicked…He was panicked because he thought that, while he was singing, someone might shoot him.
According to George Jacobs, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan brought Frank “no sense of satisfaction or retribution.” This is hard to believe. Though Kennedy had come to Sinatra’s aid during the kidnapping of Frank junior, deploying massive Justice Department muscle, it only underlined for Frank what he really was: a cop. And it never absolved him in Sinatra’s mind of the primal sin of cleaving him from his friend Jack and bringing him massive public shame in the bargain.
More likely was that Frank felt a keen sense of retribution, mingled with guilt, horror, and, in this year of fire and upheaval, new vulnerability.
Her father was quiet for a while after the assassination, remembered Nancy Sinatra, who now, sadly, joined Frank in supporting Hubert Humphrey. Frank told his daughter he thought Humphrey was a decent man who seemed to care about people that others didn’t care about. Frank believed him and believed in him, he said.
It was all very reasonable; all it lacked was passion. But then maybe passion was a thing of the past.
—
At the beginning of August, a strange item appeared at the top of Walter Winchell’s column:
Ava Gardner, who is mending rapidly from major surgery in St. Joseph’s Hosp. where she was jetted in ex-husband F. Sinatra’s private plane. It also flew her to his Palm Springs home to convalesce. The buzz adds that he also paid her hosp. bill ($8,000) etc.
In fact, Winchell’s intelligence was almost two months out of date: Ava’s surgery had taken place at the beginning of June. “An examination at the Chelsea Hospital for Women in London had detected the likely presence of a fibroid tumor in her uterus,” her biographer writes. “Her mother’s early death from uterine cancer had haunted Ava for more than twenty years. Any gynecological problem she ever experienced had provoked anxiety, and she would imagine a harbinger of that killing disease. Now, with little consideration, she elected to undergo a hysterectomy.”
She had the operation at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, and at first she recuperated at her sister Bappie’s house nearby. The early-June date can be fixed through Ava’s vivid memory of the surgery’s aftermath. “I was lying in bed at my sister’s house in California, recovering from my hysterectomy, which does jumble up a woman’s mind, and I saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy on television,” she recalled. “That night I had a terrible sort of vertigo, and by morning I was in a black depression. The deepest, blackest cloud descended on me; it completely engulfed me.”
She was forty-five. The operation had definitively changed her as a woman; her career, too—such as it was—showed her age. In Mayerling, Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve had played the leads, the tragic lovers Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Vetsera; Gardner, though just ten years older than Sharif, had portrayed his mother, the empress Elisabeth, opposite James Mason’s emperor Franz Josef. To crown the indignity, the dashing, certifiably heterosexual Sharif had insisted that their close friendship during the three-m
onth shoot remain platonic.
On the other hand, some part of her was grateful not to be a star anymore, to no longer have to be the most beautiful woman in the world. She had stepped off that treadmill forever.
Still, she was adrift again, feeling low; she would eventually be put on the mood-altering medication Elavil. She convalesced from the operation at Frank’s place in the desert, the tables turned oddly: just three months earlier, she had treated his illness with scorn; now he met her distress with a kindness as intense as the Palm Springs sun.
But then, he was the one who kept the torch glowing, even when all hope for rekindling it was gone.
—
The Detective opened nationwide on June 3 to mixed notices. “Critics praised the movie for its pungent, realistic dialogue,” Nancy Sinatra said, which wasn’t saying much. In fact, reviewers found much to fault about the picture: Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “a film that haphazardly, even arrogantly, mixes the real and the fake,” flaying Gordon Douglas’s direction as “weak [and] unimaginative” and saying of Frank’s performance, “Mr. Sinatra, whose toupee must be the best money can buy, has the waxy, blank look of a movie star as he moves through grimly authentic big city settings.”
This was about right. In a time when the movies were going through big changes—Canby was writing in the stead of Frank’s old nemesis Bosley Crowther, who’d been drummed out of the Times for his insistent and scathing attacks on Arthur Penn’s groundbreaking, bloody 1967 feature, Bonnie and Clyde—The Detective had a dated look about it. As did its star. In Tony Rome, you thought less about Sinatra’s age because he was having fun with the role; the movie never took itself seriously, nor did its star. The Detective was Serious. And Frank, forced to be tough and grim, looked mostly old and puffy, as though the troubles with Mia were visibly weighing on him. His attempts to leaven the performance with humor didn’t quite come off. (And the wig—though doubtless very expensive—wasn’t that good.) Movie audiences were no longer sure why they wanted to see him. The Detective did so-so business.
On the other hand, Rosemary’s Baby, which opened ten days later, quickly became the number one picture in the country, making an instant star of Mia Farrow in her own right and no longer as Frank’s child bride. And that was the last straw for the marriage. The two of them had been talking on the phone, even writing to each other, but Mia’s definitive box-office victory over him was the final humiliation.
She took no pleasure in the win. The movie’s success, and her own, felt like abstractions to her, she recalled. She finished Secret Ceremony, reconnected with old friends, and prepared to move on. After a few months, she writes, though she still loved Frank, she stopped dreaming of a future with him. She had a summer fling with Peter Sellers; it made the gossip columns. Frank read the gossip columns.
—
He took Bill Miller and an orchestra back out on the road, singing for Humphrey in Cleveland, Minneapolis, Detroit. Then, on July 24 in New York City, he stepped into a recording studio for the first time in seven months to record a single that would take him in a new direction.
The A-side, arranged by Don Costa, was business as usual: another Bert Kaempfert song, with the strangely Germanic title “My Way of Life.” The tune, complete with soaring chorus and rat-a-tatting drums, was imbued with the same kind of swelling Euro-drama as “The World We Knew” and was every bit as florid and vapid:
You are my way of life,
I’ll never let you go.
It sounded as much like a threat as a promise.
But the B-side was a different matter altogether: a determined effort by Sinatra to come to terms with the musical times, his first foray into the new genre awkwardly known as folk rock. The number was titled, with breathy, earthy, late-’60s import, “Cycles.”
Written by Gayle Caldwell, a former singer for the clean-cut ersatz-folk group the New Christy Minstrels, it was a lilting, bittersweet ode to the circularity of life: the being up and the being down, the passage of the seasons, that kind of thing. The songwriter Teddy Randazzo (“Goin’ Out of My Head”) had done a spare and gentle arrangement—a strumming guitar, a country-and-western-flavored piano, a small choir, some strings—and the song was, in its own pretty way, as vapid as the Kaempfert:
I’ve been told, and I believe,
that life is meant for livin’
It was thematic territory that Frank had covered before, far more powerfully, in “A Very Good Year” and “That’s Life.” But “Cycles” was here, and it was now; it matched the tenor of the times—or one kind of tenor, at any rate: a reaction against the harshness of the exploding world and corporatization; a retreat to natural things and youthful idealism.
It was just kind of ironic that Frank Sinatra was singing it.
In a certain way, he was bowing to the inevitable: youth was taking over the world, and youth had to be served. But he had had his fling with youth, and he’d been hurt: Was this pseudo-folk number his attempt at recovery or merely an attempt to sell records?
A song’s meaning, residing in the words and music alike, meant almost everything to Sinatra. Among popular singers, he possessed a unique ability to penetrate to the core of a song’s sense and convey it to a listener in ways that went beyond words. But selling records had always been equally important to him, even in the bad old Mitch Miller days. The sweet spot was when he could make great records that sold, and that had stopped happening. Now one out of two would have to do.
—
Mia, back in California, was living alone in the Bel Air house, waiting for the legal end of her marriage but managing to console herself in spite of it all. “Peter Sellers is in town seeing Mia Farrow,” Dorothy Manners wrote from Hollywood on July 27.
Mia’s also seeing Sammy Hess, young realtor. Sometimes the dates overlap, and the three “losers” are spotted, a jolly threesome, at the fun-and-games spots.
Losers? Well, Mia has lost Frank Sinatra; Peter has lost teeny-bopper wife Britt Ekland; and Sammy lost fiancée Tina Sinatra, the about-to-be ex-stepdaughter of Mia.
The other night the trio went to Warner Bros.–7 Arts studio to see a special showing of “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas,” Peter’s starring picture. They thought it was pretty hilarious. And I hear it really is.
According to his valet, Frank was holed up in Palm Springs, too depressed about the divorce to do much besides watch The Mod Squad on TV—too down to “even want to dial up Jimmy Van Heusen’s endless parade of call girls.” Even so, he managed to make it to Los Angeles on Monday, August 12, to join his two daughters in recording a Sinatra-family Christmas album (Frank junior, touring county fairs in the Midwest, would dub in his vocals later). Though Nelson Riddle had done nice enough arrangements (Don Costa also contributed) and obligingly stood at the podium, The Sinatra Family Wish You a Merry Christmas was a rather insipid affair. Still, the album has curiosity value, marking Frank’s third recording of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne’s wonderful “The Christmas Waltz,” and Tina Sinatra’s only recorded vocals (she was “in a coma” with fear, she recalled). On a Cahn-reworded update of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” the youngest Sinatra even has a brief solo, pealing out,
On the third day of Christmas I gave my loving dad
Three golf clubs,
surprisingly on key and with girlish charm.
—
The divorce was planned for Friday, August 16. Mia was going to fly to El Paso with Mickey Rudin, who would bring the papers; they would drive across the bridge to Juárez and meet with a Mexican judge. It could all be done in an hour.
The night before, she badly needed to forget her troubles. Frank had Jack Daniel’s and television; she had her own remedies. She would dance and dance, dance until her mind was empty.
That night, Thursday, August 15, George Jacobs had an evening to kill, a dead summer night in Beverly Hills. Not many nightspots were open: first he hit the Luau, a Trader Vic’s–style restaurant on Rodeo Drive, with big banana tree
s and koi ponds and hurricane lamps and giant clamshell urinals in the men’s room. But the Luau was dead, and so he ended up at the Daisy.*2 “I was just hanging out at the bar, when who should come in but Mia, with her dear friend John Phillips,” Jacobs recalled.
If the world thought Mia was in seclusion mourning her upcoming divorce from the Chairman, they would have been surprised by the gay party mood she was in that night. And if anyone symbolized the drug-rock culture, or lack thereof, that Frank Sinatra detested and feared, it was the long, greasy-haired, always stoned John Phillips, Mr. California Dreaming himself. Despite the drugs, Frank did covet Phillips’s gorgeous blond wife, Mama Michelle, which probably made him hate Phillips even more. “Georgie Porgie, pudding ’n’ pie, kiss this girl and make her sigh,” Mia greeted me in a playful singsong voice, as if she hadn’t seen me for years, though I had just been with her at the Bel Air house that afternoon. I thought she was high, high as a kite. “Dance with me, Georgie Porgie,” she insisted, dragging me out to the floor while John Phillips went into the men’s room to smoke a joint, or do something stronger.
They danced for what seemed to Jacobs like an eternity. He kept looking in vain for Phillips to emerge from the men’s room while the music played: “Sunshine of Your Love”; “This Guy’s in Love with You”; “Love Child.” Jacobs felt uncomfortable, especially when the music was slow and he held his boss’s soon-to-be ex, stoned and a little too affectionate, in his arms. When the DJ put on “Somethin’ Stupid” and the voices of Frank and Nancy junior filled the club, the valet had had all he could take. Finally, he handed Mia back to Phillips and left.
