Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  As part of his act, Dean would often take a long drag from his ever-present cigarette, flick it onto the stage floor, and then plug his ears with his index fingers as if in anticipation of an explosion. The gag usually got laughs. During his performance in Oakland, however, he inexplicably flicked the cigarette into the audience. When he put his index fingers into his ears, the audience members laughed, as they always did, though many observers wondered if anyone had been burned. Still, the three finished the show to a standing ovation.

  Backstage afterward, Frank was extremely angry at Dean. Recalled a member of the tour’s road crew, “They had just gotten offstage, and Frank grabbed Dean by the arm and tugged him into the dressing room, saying, ‘Come with me.’ Sam followed.”

  “What the hell was that about?” Frank demanded to know.

  “Huh?” Dean asked, out of breath. He seemed not to know what Frank was talking about.

  “That thing with the cigarette butt into the audience?” Frank said angrily. “What, are you crazy? You don’t ever do that to an audience. You don’t insult an audience like that. What is wrong with you?”

  “Oh, screw you, Frank,” Dean said, exasperated. “Who cares? I’m tired. Gimme a break.”

  “Now c’mon, guys,” Sammy jumped in, trying to stave off an argument. “Let’s the three of us—”

  “Let’s nothin’, Charlie,” Frank said, cutting him off. “Let’s just nothin’.”

  Years later, Dean would remember the confrontation. “I was an asshole, yeah. You don’t do that. Someone coulda got burned or something and they would have sued us for everything we made. Frank was right. But I was scared. I almost had to change my shorts, I was so scared that night.”

  After the show in Oakland, Frank wanted to go out drinking and maybe find some “broads,” just like in the old days. Dean was tired, however. He wanted to stay in the hotel room and watch TV. “When’d you get so damn old?” Frank wanted to know. “C’mon, pallie. You’re making me feel old.”

  “You are old,” Dean said.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Frank finally exploded. “Get outta here before you see my bad side,” he warned Dean.

  Dean bolted from the room.

  There was another engagement at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver and then one at the Seattle Center Coliseum in Seattle. Of Dean’s performance, Seattle Times critic Patrick MacDonald wrote, “If his drunk act is an act, it’s mighty believable. He was teetering through the show. He was an embarrassment.”

  The fellows were then scheduled to perform at the Chicago Theatre from March 18 to 20. Despite any hard feelings between the performers, the concert was a great success. Rick Kogan of the Chicago Tribune called it “one of the most amazing evenings of entertainment that has ever taken place.” Of Martin, Kogan noted, “He looks too fit to be the boozer of legend, still handsome around the edges, but determined to play the hooch habit to the hilt. . . . One wished for more singing and less boozy burlesque.”

  After the performance, Frank complained to Mort Viner that Dean wasn’t performing up to par. Viner told Dean what Frank had said, and Dean announced, “That’s it. I’m quitting.” Viner chartered a plane and arranged for him and Martin to fly back to Los Angeles, leaving Frank and Sammy to perform as a duet. Before they left, Dean said goodbye to Frank at the hotel.

  “Frank, I gotta go,” Dean said, according to his memory of the conversation.

  Frank regarded him with an annoyed expression. “You son of a bitch, you,” he said. “If you didn’t want to do this damn thing, why didn’t you just say so? Now what are we supposed to do?”

  Dean didn’t have an answer to the question. He just stood in place, staring at Frank.

  Frank would later tell a reporter he was “disgusted.” Maybe in that moment he was, but these guys went back so far, it’s difficult to believe the feeling lasted very long. “Disappointed” would have been more like it. In his eyes, Dean served a sad reminder to Frank that the best was not yet to come, that the glory days were over . . . and that “you gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.”

  “Frank hugged me,” Dean recalled. “He kissed me on the cheek. Then he said, ‘Get the hell outta here, you bum. Go home.’ And I left. It was as simple as that. No big deal.”

  After Dean left Chicago, Frank, Sammy, and Eliot Weisman, executive producer of the tour, had a meeting to determine how they would continue. Dean would have to be replaced. They thought of Shirley MacLaine or Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, but ultimately settled on Liza Minnelli, if she was available. Still, Sammy hoped that Dean would return. Frank didn’t. He told Sammy, “That S.O.B. better check into some hospital somewhere, because if he ruins this tour for all of us by giving us the bad rap that we couldn’t get along, I’ll strangle him with my own hands.”

  A look of astonishment crossed Sammy’s face; he couldn’t fathom his friend’s lack of sensitivity. Noticing Sammy’s reaction, Frank stopped his tirade.

  “You’re right, Charlie,” he said, seeming to read his mind. “It was too soon after Dean Paul. I shoulda known. I get it. A man loses his son, he’s never the same. We can’t blame Dean.”

  At that, Sammy remembered, he couldn’t help himself. He just burst into tears. “The stress of it, man—it was killing us all,” Sammy said later. “I can’t tell you how anguished I was about it, to see Dean like that. Part of me died on that tour.”

  When Dean returned to Los Angeles, he actually did check into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. His publicist said he was sick with a kidney ailment. Later, his son Ricci admitted that “he . . . went into the hospital for the full effect.”

  On March 22, 1988, Frank and Sammy went onstage for the first time during the tour without Dean at the Metro Center Arena in Bloomington, Minnesota.

  “We just got through talking to Cedars-Cyanide in Beverly Hills,” Sammy said to the packed house before he sang his first song, “Here I’ll Stay.” (He had unintentionally mangled the hospital’s name.) He continued, “Mr. Martin is improving. They haven’t got any final word, and he’s got to go through some more tests. But Frank and I wanted to come here to do this show because that’s first of all the tradition of what show business is all about, the family continues. And that’s what Dean would have wanted us to do in any event. This one we’re dedicating to our man.”

  Without Dean, the whole original point of the tour was lost. Still, the show had to go on. So when Liza Minnelli joined the act, replacing Dean in April 1988, the tour was renamed “The Ultimate Event” and went on to rave reviews for the rest of the year.

  On April 28, just a little more than a month after leaving Frank and Sammy, Dean Martin opened his solo act at Bally’s Grand in Las Vegas. “Frank sent me a kidney,” he joked, referring to the ailment that supposedly ended the Together Again Tour, “but I don’t know whose it was.”

  The Sinatra Daughters’ Revolt

  Around the time of the so-called Rat Pack reunion, Nancy and Tina Sinatra drew a line in the sand where their stepmother, Barbara Sinatra, was concerned.

  By this time—the summer of 1988—Nancy was forty-eight and Tina forty. Anytime they sat down with Barbara to work things out, the results were less than satisfying. Then their subterranean feelings about her would rise to the surface whenever they would come in contact with her, and the climate would turn cold. Moreover, they didn’t feel welcome in her home. When she acted as if she was making a genuine effort to be open, they couldn’t help but believe she was faking it, which frustrated them even more. Therefore, they decided the only course of action was to stay in communication with their father by telephone but no longer go to the house, even for holidays. They would have no communication with Barbara whatsoever, even though this meant their access to Frank would be severely limited. Frank Jr. was very surprised by his sisters’ decision. However, he didn’t try to talk them out of it. “They’re old enough to make their own decisions,” he said at the time. “But this one is a doozy, isn’t
it? Obviously, they are wanting to make a big statement.”

  Nancy Sr. would still be in telephone communication with Frank, but would most certainly not be visiting him as long as her daughters had taken such a position. She was heartsick about it, though, and encouraged them to reconsider, but these were Sinatra women and once they dug in their heels there was no changing their minds.

  Barbara thought the Sinatra siblings were just being dramatic as usual. She knew it was very Sinatra-like to make a huge, shocking gesture and then sit back and watch as others reacted to it. But nothing really seemed to rattle Barbara. She was also aware that whenever she and Frank had any sort of problem, his daughters were hoping for a breakup. If they didn’t want her in the family, that was fine with her. As Frank’s wife, she knew they would lose any campaign they might wage against her. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite sad,” she told one close friend, “but I have no more influence over those two girls than I have over their father. This is between them and Frank. I’m staying out of it.”

  At first, Frank didn’t take it seriously. “Looks like da shit really hit da fan,” he exclaimed when he heard that Nancy and Tina were now boycotting the household. However, when he realized they were serious, he was hurt, but felt he had to side with his wife. Perhaps ten years earlier, he might have found a way to include his daughters in his life with marriage. But now his whole world was shrinking anyway. Nothing was as it once had been. The way his daughters had abandoned his household seemed like just another consequence of his ever-dwindling life. In a way, their decision felt like a testament to the way he’d raised them. Nancy and Tina were tough and independent, like their pop. “I guess I’d do the same thing in their shoes,” he told Tony Oppedisano. “I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it. They should stand up for themselves.”

  One of the most disconcerting aspects of this period, which would actually last a few years, was that the Sinatra daughters would no longer be able to fully monitor their aging father’s medications. He was taking a number of antidepressants and sedatives that seemed to be making him groggy and listless. He was falling into an ever-deepening emotional abyss.

  Though the daughters would not go to the house, they would visit Frank on the road when Barbara wasn’t around. What they found out there was upsetting. It seemed to them that he was unfocused, physically imbalanced, and suffering from memory loss. He couldn’t even remember the lyrics to his songs. He had fallen deep into an apathetic state of mind, and he didn’t seem to care about anything. By this time he was seventy-three. Was it his age that was causing him to fail? Or was it the medication he was on? Since they weren’t around to see for themselves what was happening, Nancy and Tina began to wonder about Barbara’s caregiving skills.

  Meanwhile, Barbara began to assert herself more than ever. Now she wanted to take another look at the prenuptial agreement she said she was forced to sign on the morning of her wedding. She and her attorney decided to have the prenup rescinded. She had kept her divorce lawyer, Arthur Crowley, on retainer after her separation from Frank ended. It was he who drew up the new document, which was called “An Agreement to Rescind Pre-Marital Agreement.”

  Arthur Crowley had argued that the previous agreement, constructed by Mickey Rudin, had been unfair to Barbara because she was forced to sign under duress and hadn’t had the opportunity to have an attorney review it. That prenup—the one Sidney Korshak had told Tina Sinatra saved the family “a shitload of money”—stipulated that Frank’s earnings were his own and his assets prior to the marriage were separate property; Barbara was entitled to a six-figure yearly allowance. Under the modified agreement, however, all of the money Frank had earned during his marriage to Barbara—along with any future income—would be considered community property, with half belonging to Frank and half to her.

  When they found out about this modification, the Sinatra family felt certain that Frank had not been represented by counsel when he signed the agreement. However, according to paragraph F of the contract, “Husband and wife acknowledge that each of them has been represented by independent counsel and that they fully understand and agree with the terms and conditions of this agreement.”

  In truth, Frank wasn’t at all opposed to modifying the prenuptial agreement with Barbara. His daughters’ partial exile from his life had marked a seismic shift in his psyche. As early as the Ava years, he had wondered what would happen if Nancy and Tina ever completely revolted against him and his way of life, and he always feared the possibility. Now they had actually done it, and yet he had survived. In some strange way, it was a relief.

  Much the way he had done with Ava, Frank now began to feel that Barbara was the only woman—indeed, the only person—upon whom he could truly count. In his mind she was there for him when he felt abandoned by his family. His daughters’ decision to absent themselves from his household had therefore only served to make him more emotionally dependent on the one woman in his life he knew was going nowhere. If she wanted to modify the prenuptial agreement, that was fine with him.

  Ava: “I Always Thought We Would Have More Time”

  On January 25, 1990, Frank received devastating news: Ava was gone. She had died a day earlier in London, at sixty-seven, of pneumonia.

  Ava Gardner had not aged well. For a woman who so valued her appearance, it must have been difficult for her to deal with the loss of her beauty, but too much liquor had ravaged her face and body. Her troubled life was reflected on her face, which was now lined and puffy. By the time she was sixty, she was but a dim reflection of her former self. She claimed she didn’t care, either. She felt she had been beautiful long enough.

  A popular misconception about Ava in her last years is that she had fallen on financial hard times and that Frank was supporting her. Her business manager, Jess Morgan, clarified: “Frank was supportive of Ava, but he was not supporting her. She had plenty of capital, was in sound financial condition, and lived on her assets. She wasn’t super-rich. However, she didn’t need any money from anybody.”

  Morgan recalled, “Ava came down with pneumonia in January 1988. She had a doctor here [in Los Angeles] that she liked, Dr. William Smith, who was also my doctor. I arranged to get her here to see him. We had to charter a private plane because she was too ill to fly commercial. I got a telephone call from Mickey Rudin telling me that Frank wanted to help. The Italian in him, the gentleman in him, always wanted to feel that he was taking care of her. I said, ‘Terrific.’ I called Ava and told her he was giving her some money to use for medical expenses, and the chartering of the plane.”

  Jess Morgan wouldn’t say how much money Frank offered (others have said it was $50,000), and his face reddened when asked Ava’s reaction to this demonstration of generosity. “Let’s just say that she appreciated it,” he said, “but she thought it could have been a bigger gesture. She didn’t think it was enough. She had given him the best years of her life, after all,” Morgan said, smiling. “So, yes, she had a caustic comeback which I did not convey to Mickey. But that was just Ava.”

  “Ava woke up one morning, and there he was, standing at the foot of her bed, smiling,” recalled Lucy Wellman. “She said they had a nice talk. He told her that the end of their marriage had actually caused him to take a good long look at himself and that it had made him a better person. She said, ‘Oh, Francis, you are so full of shit.’ They had a good laugh.”

  It was while she was at St. John’s Hospital that Ava suffered a stroke.

  “After the stroke, I had a difficult time staying in touch with Ava on the phone,” said Wellman. “I went to visit her maybe six months before she died. I noticed she kept a framed photo of herself and Frank kissing, on a table next to her bed. There were no other reminders of her former life in Hollywood, not a single memento, except for that picture. She was lonely; she longed for the past.”

  Mickey Rudin telephoned Frank, who was in New York at the time, to give him the bad news about Ava’s death. The two weren’t even speaking at this time
, so for Mickey to make this gesture meant a lot to Frank. A member of his staff recalled, “The tears just kept coming. He just kept saying over and over, to no one in particular, ‘I should have gone to see her. I should have been there for her.’ ”

  “When I visited her before her death,” recalled Lucy Wellman, “Ava said to me, ‘I feel like it was just yesterday when I was giving Francis hell. Goddamn it, I really loved him, didn’t I? Where did the time go?’ she asked me. Then her eyes misted over and she said, ‘I don’t know why, but I just always thought we would have more . . . time.’ ”

  Sammy—Rest in Peace

  Frank Sinatra faced many challenges in the last decade of his life. He still had the ambition and drive of a younger man, but the reality was that by January 1990 he was seventy-four. Still, he refused to slow down. He was able to work; in fact, his touring schedule between 1991 and the end of 1994 was astonishing. He entertained practically every week, traveling, performing, singing for enthusiastic audiences around the world—and certainly not because he needed the money. (In 1991, Forbes listed his worth at $26 million, although that seems low.) The schedule couldn’t have been easy for a man his age. However, for Frank it was easier than dying. It was as if he were running from death, city to city, country to country. “If I stop working,” he told associates, “I know I’ll be next.”

  The adulation and appreciation demonstrated by his audiences was like a tonic to Frank. The need for love, or perhaps vindication, now seemed to be Sinatra’s guiding force. He knew he was one of the lucky ones. Dean was not well. Ava was gone. And the simple luck of the draw would make it Sammy’s turn to next cash in his chips.