by James Kaplan
Amid much fanfare, the book was published on March 10. It went straight to number 1 on the best-seller lists and stayed there a long time, jousting with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint for the top spot. From the beginning, despite the colorful inventiveness of Puzo’s novel, few people had any doubt that he had based the character of Fontane on Sinatra. “The Godfather is a work of fiction, though there is one character so accurately modeled on the life and times of Frank Sinatra that he, Frank, is bound to do some exceedingly vocal Italian-American roaring about it,” wrote the Winona, Minnesota, Daily News’s book columnist, Jean Hurd, in a typical evaluation.
For the time being, Frank could do little but build up a head of steam.
—
Rod McKuen was an outsize western character—a big, rawboned guy, rugged but sensitive, who’d run away from home at eleven and worked as a ranch hand, lumberjack, and rodeo cowboy before he started writing poetry and songs. He found his way to the San Francisco Beat scene; he drifted over to Paris, where he met his mentor, the Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel, and began translating Brel’s songs into English. McKuen’s early poetry, published by small presses, caught on by word of mouth; by 1968, Random House was his publisher and his three books of poems had sold a million copies. The public had also bought two million LPs of his spoken verse and songs.
Bennett Cerf, Random’s co-founder and editor in chief, loved McKuen, not so much for the quality of his poems, which were shamelessly lowbrow, literal, and romantic—greeting-card sentiments for a hippy-dippy age—as for the quantity of his sales. When Time ran a piece calling the poet “Edgar Guest with lemon juice,” Cerf retorted, “Nevertheless, he sells five or six thousand copies a week. This is poetry, mind you! If you sell two thousand copies of the average book of poetry in all sometimes, you’re quite satisfied. I’d like to find a few more Rod McKuens!”
Early in 1968, Cerf gave a dinner for McKuen at “21”: the guest list included Ed Sullivan, Walter Cronkite, Gloria Vanderbilt, Richard Rodgers, Arlene Francis, Mr. and Mrs. John Steinbeck, Mr. and Mrs. George Plimpton, and Osborn Elliott, the editor of Newsweek, and his wife. But “the most important guest, as far as Rod McKuen was concerned,” Cerf recalled, “was Frank Sinatra. And before the evening was over, Sinatra had agreed to listen to some of Rod’s music.”
The venue and the company and the fact that Bennett Cerf published McKuen automatically conferred class on the poet-songwriter in Frank’s eyes. For his part, McKuen was pre-impressed with Sinatra. “I had tried for years to reach Frank; wrote songs with him in mind, but could never get to him,” he recalled. “When we finally met, instead of just offering to do just one or two [of my songs], he promised me an entire album, which he’d never done before for any other composer. It was incredible.”
Or all too understandable. Rod McKuen sold like crazy; Frank Sinatra’s sales were flagging.
Frank had recorded a McKuen-translated Jacques Brel song, “If You Go Away” (Ne me quitte pas), for My Way; the slow, brokenhearted, Frenchy melody and the poet’s tear-soaked lyric were a queasy fit for Sinatra: it was as though he’d plopped a beret on his head. Nevertheless, three weeks after that LP was complete, he returned to the studio to make good on his promise to McKuen. The resulting album, based on a familiar theme and once more orchestrated by Don Costa, was called A Man Alone. But as starkly distinguished from 1962’s All Alone, which in title and content was heavily influenced by Irving Berlin, A Man Alone was thoroughly saturated with Rod McKuen, about whom the most that could be said was that he sold a lot of books and records.
The record contained six songs, all with words and music by McKuen, and five spoken pieces. The title number set the tone:
In me you see a man alone…
A man who listens to the trembling of the trees.
The music was pretty and simple and heavy on the strings; the lyrics were—well, Johnny Mercer they weren’t. As for the spoken pieces, “Empty Is” was typical:
Empty—the faces of women mourning, when everything has been taken from them.
Sinatra recited the thing in hushed, reverent tones and in full Hoboken accent. The effect was vaguely menacing, as if he were murmuring threats late at night on the telephone: surely not what anyone had had in mind. Maybe Frank’s one previous adventure in spoken-word recording should have alerted everyone to the dangers.
In June 1966, three days after the horrific Polo Lounge beating of Frederick Weisman, Sinatra, though technically in hiding from the law in Palm Springs, had, quite astonishingly, made a comedy record based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din.” (One source says the recording was done at Frank’s home in the desert.) The result was the most surrealistic product of his recording career. It began with a spoken preamble: “Let us re-create that moment. With the enemy waiting in ambush, the humble water boy sees his beloved comrades rapidly approaching the deadly trap. He realizes fully well that sounding the bugle to warn them might mean certain death.”
Two solid minutes of sound effects follow: the warning bugle call, a gunshot, a distressed-sounding bugle call; hoofbeats, more shots, a more distressed bugle call; a lot more shots and a barely functioning bugle. It all goes on for what feels like forever, until the final shots silence the bugle for good, and Frank returns, intoning Kipling’s words:
Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,
By the living Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
It must be heard to be believed.
Mo Ostin recalled the story behind the record: “Sinatra had watched this comic, Jimmy Komack, on television, doing a reading of Kipling’s ‘Gunga Din.’ It was a joke; there was a trumpet blowing at the end and all that kind of stuff. Frank thought it was really funny. He said to me, ‘Let’s make that as our next record!’ I said, ‘What? You’re going to follow up “Strangers in the Night” with that? We can’t do that.’ He said, ‘I want to make that record, and I want it to go out.’
“So he recorded it, and then we went ahead and pressed up the record and [prepared to send] it out for distribution. Before we sent it out, I said to the head of production at that time, a guy by the name of Matt King, ‘Matt, sit on this; don’t put it out. Maybe he’ll rethink this and recognize that he shouldn’t be doing this.’ But Frank didn’t change his mind.
“One day, I was out playing golf with a guy by the name of Bob Cavallo, a very important manager, and a couple of other guys. We’re on the eighth hole, and some caddie runs out, saying, ‘Mr. Ostin, Mr. Ostin, there’s an urgent phone call from Frank Sinatra!’ The guy was so excited that Frank Sinatra was calling.
“I go over, pick up the phone. Frank says, ‘I heard you held up the release of “Gunga Din.” ’ He says, ‘How dare you do that? You countermanded my instructions. I own this fucking company!’ He went nuts on me. Shook me up. I said, ‘You know what, Frank? I’ll deal with it. I’ll make sure it gets out.’ That was that. Then I went back to the course. I didn’t want those guys to know how shook up I was by the phone call! I took a nine on a par three.”
In the end, Frank came to his senses. The 45 rpm single, with “Gunga Din” on both sides—what, after all, could one back it with?—was distributed only privately, to friends.
By 1969, Ostin, soon to become president of Warner/Reprise, wasn’t quite as subservient to Sinatra as he’d once been. Having discovered rock and the softer quantity known as folk rock, he’d been instrumental in signing artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, and the Grateful Dead; he was in the process of acquiring the likes of Jethro Tull, Van Morrison, James Taylor, and Fleetwood Mac. The man who had once been a meek accountant, Mickey Rudin’s whipping boy, was well on the way to becoming one of the most powerful men in the record business. And his company was raking in money by the bushel basket—but mostly not from Frank Sinatra. “When he started chasing pop records, he was not making great records, and a lot of them were not successful,” Ostin recalled. “That Rod McKuen r
ecord was not good.”
My Way, the album, wasn’t especially good either, but it had “My Way,” the song, which hit the Billboard charts at the end of March and would eventually rise to number 27. The LP, released around the same time, would hit number 11. Both the single and the album did far better in England, where the thrumming anthem whose message Frank found so distasteful somehow struck a popular chord.
—
By 1969, there was another regular visitor to the compound on Wonder Palms Road, one who was more dazzled by the place and its owner than she might have been willing to let on. Barbara Marx was a beautiful blonde at a dangerous age, just north of forty, and in a dangerous frame of mind: ready to dump an elderly husband—Zeppo Marx, the youngest and, once, the best looking of the Marx Brothers—and trade up.
Barbara Blakeley, the daughter of a Bosworth, Missouri, butcher, was never brilliant, but she was beautiful and tough and reasonably clever about capitalizing on her dazzling good looks. In 1948, after her family moved to Long Beach, California, she entered her first beauty contest and won it. She was twenty. “I met Barbara when I was fourteen years old, in Long Beach, and she was Miss Fiesta of Belmont Shore,” Betsy Duncan Hammes—runner-up in the pageant—recalled. “She was really tall and absolutely gorgeous. But you know what? I’ve always said Barbara could have had a great career, but she always married the wrong men. They took advantage of her.”
On the other hand, maybe she was just a late bloomer. Blakeley married her first husband, an aspiring band singer named Bob Oliver, when they were both twenty; two years later, they had a son, Bobby. Capitalizing on Barbara’s looks, the couple started a modeling school—she did the actual work—and got in on the ground floor of a new beauty pageant called Miss Universe. But the marriage broke up after Oliver began fooling around with contestants, and Barbara bounced into the arms of another singer named Joe Graydon. The two, along with little Bobby, moved to Las Vegas (accounts differ on whether they ever married), where Graydon worked as a DJ and Barbara got a job at the Riviera as “a $150-a-week showgirl, gliding across a stage in towering headdresses that featured anything from the Statue of Liberty to the Eiffel Tower,” she remembered.
The pit boss Ed Walters remembered seeing Barbara in the Sands often around this time—“she was stunningly beautiful,” he recalled—walking through the casino with a friend, another statuesque blonde, the actress Dani Crayne, who later married the actor David Janssen. “They cruised the Sands like barracudas, looking for wealthy older men who wanted to remember what it was like to be young,” he said. “It wasn’t about money, and it wasn’t about sex; it was about improving their place in the world.”
Some time after Graydon lost his job and money troubles began, Barbara recalled, “a well-tailored, middle-aged man started appearing every night to watch me rehearse. At 56, Zeppo Marx had taken early retirement from show business to do the things he enjoyed—gambling, women and golf.”
Zeppo—Herbert on his birth certificate—had appeared in the first five Marx Brothers movies, then bowed out after 1933’s Duck Soup to join the Hollywood talent-management agency founded by the other retired Marx, Gummo, a.k.a. Milton. Zeppo was also a gifted mechanic: during World War II, he founded a company that developed the clamps that held the Fat Man atomic bomb in the B-29 that dropped the device onto Nagasaki; he also invented a wristwatch that sounded an alarm when the wearer’s heartbeat became irregular.
Despite Zeppo’s ingenuity, his engineering work failed to make him a wealthy man; according to one source, he lived off a family trust fund and eventually had to be supported in his old age by his brother Groucho. Whatever the case, he was a significant improvement over Joe Graydon, and when Barbara Blakeley wanted a thing, she went after it. “She was like a racehorse, you know, with blinkers on,” Betsy Hammes said.
Zeppo “was an inveterate card player, but he was the most famous and important man she had met up to that point and so she set her sights for him,” said the fashion designer and critic Richard Blackwell, for whom Blakeley modeled in the mid-1950s.
I helped by borrowing jewels and mink coats for her to wear when she went out with him so that she would look good—like she didn’t have to marry for money…She desperately wanted to marry Zeppo because of the good life he could give her and her young son.
After three years Zeppo finally proposed and they were married in 1959. That got her into the Palm Springs Racquet Club and the Tamarisk Country Club, which was very important to her. She became good friends with Dinah Shore. Zeppo brought her into a new world of money and social prominence that she had never known before. He wasn’t the classiest man in the world, I’ll grant you that, but he was the best that Barbara could do for herself at the time.
After a decade, though, she had had it. She’d never loved him in the first place, he wasn’t as rich as she’d thought, and all he ever wanted to do was play cards. Not only that, but he had had the nerve to be unfaithful to her. She returned the favor. She and a friend “were always sharing some guy,” Hammes recalled. “She always had guys around. Zeppo—that didn’t stop her.”
What’s more, he was an old man, closing in on seventy, and she was in the prime of life. She loved to dance; she was a good athlete, an avid golfer and tennis player. The Racquet Club and Tamarisk were her second homes; her house with Zeppo was next to the seventeenth fairway, right across from Sinatra’s compound. At first, she and Frank would “nod a hello each time our carts passed on the golf course, but I don’t think he registered who I was unless he saw me with Zeppo,” she remembered.
Then, one day, he called me out of the blue. His ex-wife Ava Gardner was due in town, and he’d had a tennis court built specially for her—even though she was only staying a few days. Could I organize a doubles match for her?
When I arrived at his court with two friends, I found Ava’s maid mixing Moscow Mules at the side of the court. I think Ava was half-looped before we even started. Frank tried to make her jealous by flirting with me—even cornering me up against the chain-link fence—but I’d figured out his game.
By the late Sixties, Zeppo and I were going out twice a week with Frank and his friends, or having dinner at The Compound.
This is verifiable. “On Saturday evening, saw Frank Sinatra at the Beachcomber with a party that included Barbara and Zeppo Marx (of the famous Marx brothers) and Jilly, who has Palm Springs’ newest and foremost night spot,” reads a December 1968 social-column item. At the compound, “those who drank and stayed up till the early hours—Bill Holden, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Glenn Ford and Orson Welles—were part of his in-crowd,” Barbara recalled, still starry-eyed decades later. Her old man, who liked to turn in early, would have paled by contrast.
Then, one late night, there was a memorable game of charades. “I was on the opposing team to his, which included his drinking buddies the comedian Pat Henry, the golf pro Kenny Venturi, the songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen, and Leo Durocher, the baseball manager,” she wrote in her memoir.
Having placed a large brass clock on my lap, I called time before Frank’s team guessed his charade—the government health warning on a pack of cigarettes.
“Three minutes are up,” I cried gleefully. “You didn’t get it!”
They began to howl their protests, but the look on Frank’s face as he rose to his feet silenced them all. “Who made you timekeeper anyway?” he barked, his eyes like blue laser beams.
“Why, you did!” I replied.
Frank snatched the clock from my lap and gripped it tightly in his hands. For a moment I thought he might hit me with it. Refusing to be intimidated, I stared him out until he turned and hurled the clock against the door, shattering it into a hundred pieces. Springs, coils, and shards of glass flew across the room. The clock face lay upturned on the floor, its hands forever fixed at a few minutes after 4:00 a.m.…
I’ll never forget the fire in Frank’s eyes and the way he looked at me. His expression was full of anger and frustration, but there was
something else—desire. I think I knew then that something would happen between us someday. I just didn’t know when.
Maybe that fire in his eyes was just irritation. “He hated her at first,” George Jacobs recalled. “Wouldn’t date her, and everywhere we’d go she’d show up. He said, ‘Who keeps inviting her around?’ ”
Soon enough, though, the valet remembered, she was inviting herself. “Zeppo was in his sixties and sick all the time, and often at night when he had gone to sleep, Barbara would sneak out and visit Mr. S. I asked him what he saw in her. ‘Grace Kelly with my eyes closed,’ he answered.”
Then Jacobs was gone, but Barbara kept coming around.
In May, Frank returned to Caesars, once more at a Circus Maximus–size salary of $100,000 a week, wearing a thin Mephistophelian beard to accent his turtleneck and medallion. He seemed mellower, according to Variety: “no longer lean or rapacious with a desire to swing every second. By his own admission, he speculates about this nitery aspect of his multifaceted career, saying at one intermission point of his songathon, ‘It’s for the kids.’ ”
Was he really growing weary or just trying on weariness? (He had lost his father: How could he explain to anyone?) But after singing “My Way” and “Cycles” for introspective effect, he revved up the beat on “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and was as socko as he’d ever been.
“Epitome of his generation’s affluential attainment via showbiz,” Variety’s scribe wrote, “Sinatra cannot be compared to anyone else on today’s polyglot scene. In every move and gesture, Sinatra reveals he’s rather in a class by himself.”
He knew it; he had always known it. Sad and tired as he might have felt sometimes, he was certain in his heart of hearts that he was indispensable.
