Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  I think often of that day in June 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival—the pulsating excitement of Janis Joplin’s performance, the sense of possibility in the air, the exhilaration of realizing what a life pursuing your biggest dreams might be like—when a door opened to what the rest of my life would be. That so much came from the events of that one day has been an incredible gift, and the passion I felt then is with me still.

  Another man might have found it painful to harbor these apparently contradictory influences, but Davis doesn’t register them as contradictory—because for him they haven’t been. He had to be Goddard in order to be able to hatch Janis; he had to have Janis to spark his life into meaning. Given his irrepressible vigor and adaptability, his relentlessly positive response to necessity and possibility, can we fault him for his almost touching complacency and self-congratulation?

  * * *

  BUT THERE ARE MYSTERIES, the most perplexing of which is his relationship to music itself. As we have seen, it didn’t mean much to him as he was growing up. There seems to have been no classical music in his background, and although he took so much from Goddard Lieberson, he didn’t absorb his passion for it—no Stravinsky connection, for instance, although he did once take the Vladimir Horowitzes to a disco blasting Motown all night. (“They loved it.”) In Clive, he speaks at length about his relationship with Columbia’s major symphony orchestras—that is, about their contract negotiations, never the music. Jazz doesn’t really have a grip on him, although he seems to have enjoyed his ruffled relationship with Miles Davis. (All relationships with Miles Davis were ruffled.) He hardly ever refers to the wonderful pop of his time that wasn’t in his immediate line of sight: Elvis, the Beatles, Motown. What does grip him is performance—far more than what is being performed. And most of all the industry itself: “My love of the business dominates all my memories.”

  This frame of mind stands out even more clearly when seen in contrast to the impassioned response to music of Davis’s younger rival Tommy Mottola, whose autobiography, Hitmaker, was published only weeks before The Soundtrack of My Life. Tommy came from the Bronx, not Brooklyn; was Italian, not Jewish (although he converted to Judaism to marry his first wife). His book is personal in the best way—it winningly conveys Mottola’s exuberant, generous, impetuous personality, his directness and sometimes unnerving honesty. But the chief difference between the two moguls is that for Mottola, everything started with the music. His family made music, the streets he grew up in were filled with music.

  Music was around me from morning till night. From the time I was two years old I would climb on the stool and bang on the keys of our family piano. But there was one single defining moment that ran through me like a bolt of electricity when I was eight years old: that was the first time I heard “Don’t Be Cruel” blasting through my sisters’ AM radio. The beat and the rhythm of that song branded me forever and was everything that motivated and inspired me to become what I became.

  He became a (failed) musician himself. He then started in the trenches at the very bottom of the industry, and went on to the very top. His artists are a roll call of fame—Hall and Oates, John Mellencamp (not Mister Nice Guy), Gloria Estefan, Celine Dion (it was he who masterminded her singing “My Heart Will Go On” on the Titanic soundtrack). His account of dealing with Michael Jackson’s dementia and megalomania is chilling and pitiful. And central to his story is his professional and personal relationship with Mariah Carey—his Whitney Houston—whom he helped propel into superstardom and, famously, married. It was a mistake, which he manfully acknowledges: He was twenty years older and should have known better; and he did know better when he entered into a third, and happy, marriage. His book, then, is a chronicle of professional and personal success, yet it never seems ego-driven. Because it’s music-driven.

  But even if Tommy Mottola is a very different kind of mogul from Clive Davis, he recognizes and salutes Davis’s accomplishments. “When I first started out,” he says, “I could only hope to come close to achieving some of Clive’s success. His work in this industry is unrivaled. Everybody in this business looks up to him.” This tribute, as it happens, appears not in Hitmaker but is quoted by Davis himself in The Soundtrack of My Life.

  The New York Review of Books

  JUNE 20, 2013

  Sizing Up Sinatra

  ONE OF THE ODDER BYWAYS OF NONFICTION are the dishy memoirs by those who have served the great or the near-great. Think of all those books by former White House staff members: seamstress Lillian Rogers Parks’s My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House, chief usher J. B. West’s Upstairs at the White House, kennel keeper Traphes Bryant’s Dog Days at the White House. England has a long tradition of royalty rip-offs, most famously The Little Princesses (1953), the royal nanny’s best-selling tell-all. The Queen was not amused.

  We, of course, don’t have royalty—even presidents don’t qualify—but we do have Hollywood. And now we have Frank Sinatra’s onetime valet, George Jacobs. With the help of William Stadiem, Jacobs has given us a vivid account of his many years serving The Voice, and of the tragic (to him) denouement of their relationship. Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra is a curious and convincing portrait not only of Sinatra but of Jacobs himself, and of the kind of mentality that breeds such passionate attachment to a man so spectacularly unworthy of it.

  George Jacobs, now seventy-six, was born in New Orleans. Although black, he had Jewish blood on both sides—hence his last name. After a stretch in the Navy, during which he became aide to an admiral and learned to cook Mediterranean style, he married, moved to Los Angeles, and, through a series of maneuvers and accidents, found himself Man Friday to agent Swifty Lazar’s Robinson Crusoe. Which in turn led to Sinatra snatching him from Swifty—needling Lazar was one of Sinatra’s favorite pastimes.

  It was love at first sight: “I loved the guy, and I assumed he loved me, too.” From 1953 to 1968, George was Frank’s shadow. He cooked for him—the Italo-American food Frank craved; he dressed him (orange was Sinatra’s favorite color); he ferried Frank’s lady friends and call girls to and from the Residence; he palled around with the Rat Pack; he watched over Ava (long after she had bounced Frank) when she needed looking after; he became a link to Sinatra’s family—big Nancy and the three kids—and stayed on close terms with Dolly, Sinatra’s bar-owning, ward-heeling, midwife/abortionist mother, even after Sinatra booted him; he knew Marilyn (“the girl Dolly wanted her son to marry”) and the Kennedys, the notorious Judith Campbell and the dangerous Sam Giancana. And he dealt as best he could with Mia Farrow (when she was Mia Sinatra), whom he clearly despised, even before she became the engine of his fall from grace.

  A summer night in L.A. George has the evening to kill before going over to Ava’s bungalow, where they would “get plastered, and … sing to each other until daylight.” Looking for action, he stops off at a place called the Candy Store for a few drinks, and along comes Mia. “I thought she was high, high as a kite. ‘Dance with me, Georgie Porgie,’ she insisted, dragging me out to the floor.…” After they dance “for what seemed an eternity,” George slips away to meet Ava. When Frank reads about their dancecapade in Rona Barrett’s gossip column, it’s over in a flash: George’s key suddenly doesn’t fit the compound door, and a letter from Frank’s lawyer tells George that he’s been fired. “I was not to re-enter the premises, nor telephone, nor in any way approach or try to contact Mr. Sinatra.… There was no explanation, no apology, no severance pay.” And indeed, the two men run into each other only one more time, in 1978, at Don the Beachcomber. “I took one look at him and broke down into tears. I couldn’t stop crying. Mr. S put his arm around me. ‘Forget about it, kid,’ he said. ‘It isn’t so bad.’ I guess I couldn’t forget about it, because the tears didn’t stop. Mr. S gave me one last squeeze and was gone.… I was sad he wasn’t as sentimental about us as I was.”

  There are telling discrepancies between what George Jacobs says here and what, in the early 1980s, he told Kitty Kelley when sh
e interviewed him for her no-holds-barred Sinatra bio, His Way: “After fourteen years together, he dropped the net on me just like that, and he couldn’t even look me in the face to do it. He couldn’t fire me in person. He had to have his prick lawyer do it for him. I was so mad afterwards that I threw away everything he’d ever given me—two-thousand-dollar watches, suits, sweaters, shirts, shoes, coats, cameras, radios—everything. I didn’t want anything from the bastard around. I got twelve thousand dollars in severance pay and blew it, and then I sold all my shares in Reprise Records.” It’s not only the wasted severance pay that stands out here, but the anger that’s generally absent or veiled in the new book. Time does heal all wounds.

  There was clearly a blurring of lines in the relationship between the two men, as there often is between master and servant. George was definitely more to Frank than a valet, unless your definition of valeting includes procuring, getting chummy with gangsters and presidents, and babysitting Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe. We’re not talking Jeeves here. To George, Frank was a hero—not only “the most powerful man in the entertainment business” (“the folks in show business feared Sinatra the same way the folks in Communist Russia had feared Stalin”), but also “my best friend, my idol, my boss.” What George was—actually—was an adoring courtier to a member of Hollywood’s royalty. “It feels great,” he tells us, “to be the right hand of a king.”

  It doesn’t feel great, though, to be expelled from paradise. What George Jacobs suffered at Sinatra’s hands is the old story of Prince Hal and Falstaff, and of a million less famous examples of favorites being abruptly shed: You think you’re a “we” and discover you no longer even exist; the king doesn’t need you anymore, and wants you out of his sight and off his conscience. Some cast-offs fade gracefully into oblivion; some shriek with rage (The Devil Wears Prada); and some put a good face on it, which is what George Jacobs has done in Mr. S. It helps that he has humor and a certain wit, and it’s a relief to the reader, who comes to like him, that he managed to make a life for himself after Sinatra, despite the dismal fate of several of his children and an appearance on The Gong Show.

  What we discern about Sinatra—and it jibes with other accounts—is that he was a man with profound feelings of inferiority about everything but his music. He was a shrimp; he had scars and a damaged ear from a difficult birth; and he never got over his unlovely background. Hoboken was hardly “class,” and no concept was more important to this man who aspired so desperately to be accepted by what he saw as the elite: Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Bing Crosby, Edie Goetz (Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, and supposed doyenne of social Hollywood), the Kennedys. “Mr. S craved class like a junkie craves a needle.” But his social aspirations were undercut by his blatant weaknesses—an almost pathological anger and blasts of unforgiving coldness: Tommy Dorsey, Lauren Bacall, his godfather, and many others who had been faithful and loyal were brutally banished. He was a serial hater. “Everything about Mr. S had to do with paying debts and settling scores”—the Sinatra family needn’t have left Sicily.

  Sinatra pursued women voraciously, but did he ever really love anyone except Ava and Dolly? Certainly he cared as a friend for some of his occasional conquests—Marilyn, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, Natalie Wood, Dinah Shore, and a hundred more—and he was generous and gallant to his bought women. After all, they gave him what he most wanted: control. He was fun, yet abusive; free from prejudice, yet consorting with and admiring some of the most repellent criminals of his day. And, of course, he was a very great singer.

  It’s hard to feel sorry for Frank Sinatra, and yet he was crushed by two traumatic defeats. One was the loss of Ava. The other was being dropped by the Kennedys after Jack made it to the White House (with Sinatra’s crucial help). By then, Frank’s criminal connections were too rank for Bobby and for Ambassador Joe, and Frank in turn became the Falstaff figure, banished by the prince. It was a public humiliation. Indeed, the severest portraits in Jacobs’s book are of Bobby (Sinatra called him “the weasel”) and of Dad—Joe Kennedy is probably the one man in the world George Jacobs could be said to have hated. Vile about blacks, Joe was even nastier about Jews. “The Jewish jokes didn’t stop. The worst one I can recall: ‘What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza doesn’t cry on its way to the oven.’” “Mr. Ambassador,” Jacobs sums up, “if anyone had the guts to spit in his face, a bravery that my boss sadly lacked, should have been called Mr. Asshole.” As for Bobby’s assassination at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan, the unforgiving Sinatra could only mumble, “It wasn’t even one of us.” Peter Lawford? “Cheap, weak, sneak, and freak.”

  Jack was a different matter. “As much as I disliked his father, that’s how much I was crazy about John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” Jack was “handsome and funny and naughty and irreverent as Dean Martin,” insisting that George call him by his first name and obsessed with Hollywood gossip and Mr. S’s love life. According to George, the senator “was far more in awe of Mr. S than Mr. S was of him.” Why? “Because Frank Sinatra controlled the one thing JFK wanted more than anything else: Pussy! Mr. S was the Pope of Pussy, and JFK was honored to kiss his ring.” After all, Mr. S could “bestow” not only a Judy Campbell but a Marilyn Monroe. There’s a hilarious scene in which Kennedy is being massaged by George while they “talk pussy.” The talk has its effect, leading to the punch line: “We better get you laid, Jack.”

  About Frank himself close up, George is specific and admiring. Ava, weighing up her “one-hundred-twenty-pound runt,” put it most succinctly: “There’s only ten pounds of Frank but there’s one hundred and ten pounds of cock!” On the other hand, Jacobs may be the only witness to how Sinatra dealt with the problem of size. For Oscar night—the night he won Best Supporting Actor for From Here to Eternity, the night that revived his career—he “had special underpants made, a cross between a panty girdle and a jock strap. The idea was to hold down that big thing of his, so it wouldn’t show through his tuxedo pants.” Everybody’s got problems!

  I only wish I’d known about this cunning device the one time I met Sinatra. Among his closest friends were Bill Green (chairman of the Clevepak Corporation) and his wife, Judy, an old school pal of mine. Judy was determined that Frank and I should meet, God knows why, and she set up a formal dinner party. One night during the 1970s, my wife and I drove up to the Greens’ house in Mt. Kisco with Swifty Lazar—Sinatra, by the way, was still on Swifty’s case—and I found myself at the end of a long dinner table on one side of Judy, with Sinatra on the other. If I’d known about the dick-suppresser, it might have gotten the conversational ball rolling, but as it was, I was as much at sea as Sinatra about what to say. Finally I blurted out some bland question about Hollywood, and Frank lit up: Here was a subject he could safely address. Leaning over Judy, he looked at me directly for the first time. “You know, Bob,” he said, “sometimes Hollywood can be the loneliest town in the world.”

  The New York Observer

  JUNE 30, 2003

  American Ballerina

  MARIA TALLCHIEF

  THERE ARE CERTAIN PUBLIC FIGURES so important to us that we welcome everything that those who knew them can tell us, no matter how marginal or anecdotal. Ballet lovers like me, for whom George Balanchine has been the central artistic figure of our time, have reason to be especially grateful in this regard: During his lifetime and especially since his death, in 1983, an entire literature has grown up around him. His first and third wives, Tamara Geva and Vera Zorina, and his second, “unofficial” wife, Alexandra Danilova, have published autobiographies, as have a number of his leading dancers, including Suzanne Farrell, Edward Villella, Peter Martins, Merrill Ashley, the apostate Gelsey Kirkland, and, most recently, Allegra Kent. There have been many substantial interviews, including those in Francis Mason’s essential assemblage of reminiscences, I Remember Balanchine. There is the profound commentary on his work—another kind of biography—by our finest dance critics, Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce. And, of course, there is the br
illiant testimony, over a period of fifty years, of Balanchine’s partner at New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein. What we have not had until now is an extended account of one of the great turning points in Balanchine’s life—the middle 1940s to the late 1950s—by his fourth wife, Maria Tallchief, who not only witnessed the beginnings of City Ballet but was instrumental to them. In the face of resistance to Balanchine by large sections of the ballet public, to say nothing of the dance critic of The New York Times, John Martin, Tallchief’s personal success was a crucial element in the company’s survival and eventual triumph.

  Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, in 1925, to an Osage father, whose family was financially comfortable through oil rights, and a mother of Irish-Scottish extraction, who was both beautiful and “determined”—a quality her older daughter was to inherit. (The younger daughter, Marjorie, also grew up to be a dancer of distinction.) Betty Tall Chief, who had perfect pitch, was trained as both a concert pianist and a dancer—she began lessons at three and soon was performing at community events, country fairs, even rodeos. But this was not the career their mother envisioned for her children, and when Betty was eight, Mrs. Tall Chief moved the family to Los Angeles and proper teaching—eventually from the demanding Bronislava Nijinska, choreographer of Les Noces and Les Biches and sister of Vaslav Nijinsky. In Nijinska’s studio Betty “became committed to becoming a ballerina, and Madame understood I was serious,” and by the time she was seventeen she was in the corps of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. It was then that Agnes de Mille suggested that “Maria” might be a more appropriate name for a dancer than “Betty Marie,” and, “Tall Chief” having become “Tallchief” in high school, Maria Tallchief was born.