Part 4

The night before he left to rejoin his wife in Paris, I received a tip that he could be found in a certain bungalow in the grounds of Beverly Hills Hotel. “Just knock on the door; he’ll let you in.”

I did precisely that. He was astonished to see who had rapped on his door, but I was invited in. The telephone started to ring almost immediately. He wouldn’t accept the call. “I won’t talk to her,” he told the switchboard operator.

“Why not?” said I. “You’ll probably never see her again. Go on. Speak to her.” But he couldn’t be persuaded. He suggested a drink, and I offered to mix them. I stirred up one hell of a martini to get him talking.

“You deliberately made love to this girl. You knew she wasn’t sophisticated. Was that right?”

“Had Marilyn been sophisticated, none of this ever would have happened. I did everything I could for her when I realized that mine was a very small part. The only thing that could stand out in my performance were my love scenes. So, naturally, I did everything I could to make them good.”

I’m sure that he knew what he was saying no more than half the time. She was “an enchanting child” and “a simple girl without any guile.” He said: “Perhaps she had a schoolgirl crush. If she did, I’m sorry. But nothing will break up my marriage.”

The last time I talked with Marilyn, there was no new man in sight. She owed Twentieth Century-Fox another picture, _Something’s Got to Give_, under her old contract, but even if she’d finished it it would have paid her only $100,000, where she could have made at least $500,000 elsewhere. Her courtiers made her feel sore over that, though the only thing on her mind should have been the need to make a movie that was good for her after _Let’s Make Love_ and _The Misfits_. Three flops in a row, and anybody’s out. Marie Dressler said it best years ago: “You’re only as good as your last picture.”

I believe Marilyn realized that the end of her acting career was waiting for her just around the corner. The last scenes she did in _Something’s Got to Give_ looked as though she was acting under water. She was sweet as ever, but vague, as if she were slightly off center. She did little more than the near-nude bathing shots, and she gave a still photographer who was on the set exclusive rights to pictures of the scene because “I want the world to see my body.” Newspaper and magazine readers around the world were promptly granted that opportunity, needless to say.

Arthur Miller once called her “the greatest actress in the world.” She was far from that, in my book. In spite of all her talk about playing Dostoevski heroines or some of Duse’s roles, the sex-appealing blonde remained her stock in trade. And there was something else missing among her ambitions. She ached to have children, though she was physically incapable of it. Twice she lost babies through miscarriages when she was Mrs. Miller. She told friends that she longed for a baby on whom she could shower the attention she never had.

On June 1, 1962, she reached her thirty-sixth birthday, married three times, with still no baby and no husband. Two months later the end came, and all the sob sisters of the world fell to work explaining why. Of course, we shall never know. She took that secret with her. When you’re alone and unhappy, the past, present, and future get mixed up in your brain. You say to yourself: “What’s the use of it all? Nobody loves me. Perhaps I shall never find happiness again.”

She seemed to be touched by forces that few human beings can bear, and her life turned into a nightmare of broken dreams, broken promises, and pain. In a way, we were all guilty. We loved her, yet left her lonely and afraid when she needed us most. Now she is gone forever, leaving us with bitter memories of what might have been. Dear Marilyn, may she rest in peace!

* * * * *

One of the men I loved most above all others was Gene Fowler. He once wrote me a letter from London. “What is success?” he asked. “I shall tell you out of the wisdom of my years. It is a toy balloon among children armed with sharp pins.”

How can anyone say it better than that?

_Three_

Much as I regret it afterward, I all too often speak before I think. And too many years have gone by for much to be done about it now. For better or worse, I’m doomed to shoot from the hip, to be a chatterbox who’ll fire off a quip if one comes to mind, without much thought about the consequences.

I love to laugh and to make other people laugh. That’s what we’re put in the world for. But I sometimes don’t realize how thin some skins can be. I talked my merry way out of a tête-à-tête with Frank Sinatra, whom I’ve always liked, and I’ll be sorry to my dying day for what was said on the spur of that moment.

The place was Romanoff’s penthouse; the occasion, the crushingly dull farewell party that Sol Siegel, then head of MGM, and his wife gave Grace Kelly before she sailed off to be a princess.

To start with, the arrangement for welcoming guests was peculiar, to say the least. Instead of standing beside Mr. and Mrs. Siegel to say hello, Grace stood in solitary state in the middle of the floor. She was dressed up, rightly, for the fray--white gloves, a beautiful coat and dress. But she stood with her handbag hanging over her arm as though poised for take-off at the flash of a tiara.

Like all the rest of us, I went up alone to wish her well for her future in Monaco. She was regal already, smiling as benignly as Queen Mother Elizabeth opening a charity bazaar.

“If you’ll excuse me,” said I, after three minutes of nothing much, “I think I’ll go and have a glass of champagne.”

That party never did pick up. As the hours dragged by, it grew stiffer and duller and colder, though the champagne flowed and the orchestra played its head off.

Come eleven o’clock I was dancing with Frank. _Confidential_, the scandal sheet which was the scourge of Hollywood in those days, had very recently printed the doleful reminiscences of one young woman whose expectations, she confided, had been aroused when Frank whisked her off to his Palm Springs hideaway. But hope had crumbled when he spent the night constantly getting up to eat Wheaties.

As the Siegels’ guest, he was as bored as I was. “Let’s blow this creepy party,” he said, “and go down to my Palm Springs place.”

“Why, Frank, I couldn’t do that; I didn’t bring my Wheaties.” The wisecrack popped out without a second’s consideration, and he nearly fell down on the floor. So ended the chances of getting the name of Hopper on the roll call of Sinatra dates, which has included Marilyn Maxwell, Anita Ekberg, Gloria Vanderbilt, Kim Novak, Lady Beatty (who became Mrs. Stanley Donen), and, according to witnesses, a master list of conquests among the female stars at MGM that he used to keep behind his dressing-room door.

He continues to send me gorgeous flowers for Christmas and Mother’s Day, so I guess I’ll be content with that. I got asked up to his handsome new house on top of a Beverly Hills mountain, equipped with lights that fade at the touch of a switch and a telescope through which he studies the stars (celestial variety) in their courses. But I haven’t been invited to Palm Springs again.

Maybe it’s for the best. I consider Frank the most superb entertainer of this age. When he’s in good voice and a good mood, he’s ahead of the field, and nobody can equal his charm. Like almost everybody, his nature has many sides to it--more than most people, because he has more talent than most. But on a host of subjects, we’re far apart, not omitting politics. If I’d gone to his desert house and written about it, we might have seen a beautiful friendship dented.

When Charles Morrison, owner of our best night club, the Mocambo, died, he left a mourning wife, Mary, with a mountain of debt. Like Sinatra, he’d spent it when he had it and also when he hadn’t. Frank telephoned Mary and said he’d like to bring in an orchestra and sing for her, free for a couple of weeks. On opening night he caught fire, and his quips were as good as his singing.

He never worked harder than he did for two months arranging President Kennedy’s inaugural ball. He wanted Ethel Merman and Sir Laurence Olivier for the show, but they were playing on Broadway in _Gypsy_ and _Becket_, respectively. So Frank closed the two theaters for a night and refunded the price of the tickets to every disappointed theater-goer. After the inauguration Frank and most of his co-workers--including Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, Roger Edens, and Jimmy Van Heusen--went to Joe Kennedy’s Palm Beach home for a weekend’s rest. I don’t think the President has fully repaid Frank for that memorable evening.

Sinatra swears his private life is his own. Until the recent era of peace with the press dawned, he’d let fly with his fists to prove his point with some reporters. He once told me: “If a movie-goer spends $2.00 to see me in a motion picture, or $10 to watch me perform in a night club, then he has the right to see me at my best. I do not feel, however, that I have any responsibility to that movie-goer or that night-club-goer to tell him anything about my private life.”

He likes to quote something said by Humphrey Bogart, one of his good friends: “The only thing you owe the public is a good performance.” He must have remembered that when Bogey’s widow, Betty Bacall, announced that she was going to marry Frank. A pal with him at the time--he was staying in Miami Beach--told me: “He was so angry he blew the roof off the hotel.” That marked the end of that romance.

Frank has let his temper and temperament explode too often for his relations with many newspapermen and women to be anything but spotty. Believe it or not, that has him chewing his fingernails sometimes. “There are a handful of people who won’t let go of me and won’t try to be fair,” he said, defending himself one day. “And after a thing is over and I fly off the handle, I feel twice as bad as when I was angry. You get to think, ‘Jeez, I’m sorry that had to happen!’”

He isn’t the man he’s usually painted to be. The brandy drinker who shrugs off advice? He was a guest of mine at a small dinner party for Noël Coward, along with the Bill Holdens, Clifton Webb, and one or two others. Over the liqueurs Noël, who’d spent the previous weekend with Sinatra at Palm Springs, said: “I’m very worried about you, Frank. You’re the finest singer since Al Jolson. But unless you cut down on drinking, your career won’t keep going up--it’s going to start running downhill.”

Frank listened as attentively as a new boy getting the business from his headmaster. “I think you’re right, Noël,” he said quietly. And for a long time his drinking tapered off.

Is he the headstrong egomaniac who thinks he owes nothing to anybody? “You know, there’s one thing I wanted to say when I accepted the Oscar for _From Here to Eternity_,” he said on another day. “I wanted to thank Monty Clift personally. I learned more about acting from Clift--well, it was equal to what I learned about musicals from Gene Kelly.”

He sits up to take notice of his children, too, if they criticize him. There are three of them, Nancy, Jr., Frankie, Jr., and Tina. He drove up to see me once in a new fish-tail Cadillac that, he said, his son despised. “Frankie wondered what I wanted with all that tin on the back.” Father Frank dragged me out to take a look. I knew he couldn’t live with the car after his boy’s jeers. He sold it one month later.

Can he be at heart the willful, adult version of Peck’s Bad Boy that millions of women have adored since those days when he had them swooning by their radios? Bet your boots he can. As for example ...

Earl Warren was still governor of California when Frank was working at Metro on _Take Me Out to the Ball Game_. The studio boss was Louis B. Mayer, a big Republican with ambitions to be bigger. Louis was thrilled to bits when a spokesman for Warren asked if Frank could go to Sacramento to attend a convention of governors of all the states which was meeting there. They were eager to have him sing for them as the sole representative of the motion-picture industry. Warren would have his own private plane fly Frank there and back if he’d agree to the trip.

Louis went to work on everybody who was close to Frank, pressuring them to persuade him that the honor of Metro--and the ambitions of Louis--demanded his presence at Sacramento. Frank, for once, seemed reasonable about it. Be glad to go, he said.

Louis was delighted. He gave orders that the picture was to be closed down at two o’clock on the auspicious afternoon. That would give Frank plenty of time to clean up and change out of his baseball suit to catch the governor’s plane, which would be waiting for a three o’clock take-off. “Get a picnic basket made up,” Frank told Jack Keller, his press agent, “with cold chicken and wine, silver and napkins and everything, so we can eat on the plane.”

Keller and Dick Jones, Frank’s accompanist, were ready early, waiting with the basket in his dressing room. Two-thirty came, but no Frank. Three o’clock; not a sign of him. A worried call to Dick Hanley, Mayer’s secretary, established that work on the picture had stopped punctually at 2 P.M. A check of all the gates showed that Frank hadn’t left; his car was parked outside the dressing room.

“He’s probably up in some dame’s dressing room having a little party,” somebody suggested. So a squad of security guards, standing on no ceremony, went bursting in on the stars and starlets, searching for him. Not a trace. By four-thirty Louis was having apoplexy. By five o’clock all hope of delivering Frank to Sacramento had vanished. An hour later Louis was swallowing his rage and his pride, to call Governor Warren and explain that Frank had suddenly and inexplicably taken sick.

The following morning the mystery was solved. Sinatra, in make-up and uniform, had decided at two o’clock that Sacramento wasn’t for him. So he hid in the back of a workman’s truck and rode unseen through the studio gates, hopped off at a stop light, and flagged down a cab to take him home.

After _The Miracle of the Bells_, which he made for RKO on loan from Metro, he was ordered to San Francisco for a charity opening of that hunk of religious baloney. Frank, who harbors an almost fanatical resentment against being told what to do, went to Jesse Lasky, the producer, whom he admired, and asked: “You won’t be paying the bills?”

“Not I. RKO.”

“That’s all I want to know. I’ll go for you.”

Frank hadn’t taken off his hat and coat after checking into his four-bedroom suite at the Fairmont Hotel before he called room service. “Bring up eighty-eight manhattans right away.” Jack Keller, manager George Evans, and composer Jimmy Van Heusen, who’d all gone along on the trip, were determined not to ask Frank why he’d ordered the cocktails, and he never explained. Four days later, when they checked out, the eighty-eight manhattans stood untouched on the waiter’s wagon.

Meantime, he’d taken the three of them on a shopping spree in the most expensive men’s shop in San Francisco, to buy them alpaca sweaters, $15 neckties, and socks by the box, while the cash register clicked up a score of $2800 for one member of the party alone within forty-five minutes. “Send the lot up to the Fairmont and have ’em put it on my bill,” Frank said.

Fog covered the city the morning they were due to leave, and every air liner was grounded. Mad as a caged bear, Frank tried to argue Jimmy, who is a trained pilot, into chartering a private plane. “You think I’m nuts? Take a look outside,” Jimmy said.

“Forget it then,” Frank snarled. “I know what to do.”

He had one of his favorite picnic baskets assembled by the Blue Fox restaurant, then hired a car and chauffeur to drive Jimmy and himself to Palm Springs, five hundred miles away. But the limousine got stuck in the mountain snows and Frank and party were marooned in a farmhouse for three days. Jack Keller and George Evans caught a noontime plane when the fog lifted and were home in Los Angeles by mid-afternoon.

The car-hire bill by itself ran to $795. Like everything else in the trip, it was charged to RKO.

* * * * *

When Frank originally moved out to California, he picked up his own bills. They ran high. He had a weakness for showering his friends and hangers-on with such trinkets as gold cigarette lighters lovingly inscribed. He imagined that every thousand dollars of salary was worth that much money in the bank, never realizing that in his tax bracket, and with his agents’ cuts, a thousand dollars probably gave him no more than ninety to spend. The more he made, the more he owed the government, until the total tab ran to nearly $110,000. It took his switch from Columbia to Capitol Records to settle the tax score. That was part of the price Capitol paid out for him.

His first full-length picture, _Higher and Higher_ for RKO, brought him out to live in the Sunset Towers apartments as a grass widower, leading a life as respectable as a church warden’s. No girls, no drinking except an occasional beer. When his wife, Nancy, arrived and they bought the house at Toluca Lake that Mary Astor once owned, they kept up the same, small-town ways. Their wildest parties were devoted to gin rummy at half a cent a point. Frank was as happy with Nancy as he could be with anybody for long.

Fireworks usually start to sizzle in a marriage when the husband pulls himself ahead and the wife lags behind. But Nancy, the plasterer’s daughter from Jersey City, kept pace with Frank’s growth as an entertainer. She’s maintained her patience and her dignity over the years, saying not a malicious word about any of the women who’ve cluttered up Frank’s life.

The first feet of film in which he appeared were actually shot for Columbia Pictures in a little low-budget item entitled _Reveille for Beverly_. Harry Cohn, boss of Columbia, thought so poorly of him that he let him escape without optioning him. Frank couldn’t let him forget that.

At the Toluca Lake house, Frank, Nancy, and their friends used to stage little Christmas Eve revues, running for an hour and more, complete with scenery, costumes, props, original score by Sammy Cahn and Julie Stein, sketches and performances by anybody with a mind to pitch in and work. The jokes were all “inside” humor, drawing a bead on the members of the group.

One sketch set its sights on Peter Lawford, a celebrated party-goer from the day he arrived in Hollywood and an actor whose performances in some pictures would scarcely show up under a microscope. On the stage built in the Sinatra living room, he sat at a table entertaining a girl while Frank, dressed as a waiter, served drinks to the pair. “Give me the check,” said Peter as the skit ended. “I’ll take care of it.”

Frank’s eyeballs revolved. “You mean you’ll _pay_?” he gasped as he dropped his tray on Peter’s head and staggered offstage.

When the bigwigs at Columbia heard about the shows, they asked Frank to put on a similar affair at Harry Cohn’s house to celebrate his birthday. It turned out to be quite a party. The guest list included Rita Hayworth, José Iturbi, Al Jolson, and the Sinatra regulars. On the temporary stage, Phil Silvers acted the part of Cohn. Al Levy, Frank’s manager who went on to found Talent Associates, took the role of agent and Frank played himself. “Mr. Cohn,” said Al, introducing Frank, “I have a boy here I think has great talent.”

“Can’t use him,” growled Phil Silvers.

“But at least listen to him. Give him a chance.”

“No. Too Jewish.”

Al (bewildered): “He’s too _Jewish_?”

“No, you are. Get out of here.” Everybody had a wonderful time ... except Harry Cohn, who didn’t crack a smile.

* * * * *

The woman who came within an ace of wrecking Frank Sinatra sat on my patio fresh from Smithfield, North Carolina. “What do you do down there?” I asked Ava Gardner, as beautiful then as she was frank about how dirt-poor she’d been until Hollywood whistled at her.

“Oh, I just went around picking bugs off tobacco plants,” she said.

The earliest matrimonial picking she made was Mickey Rooney. She was twenty and he was a year older when they married. He had what she wanted, which included his limousine, the first she ever rode in. Though they were separated some frantic years later, they remained friends and he couldn’t break old habits. They were sitting side by side and directly behind me at a premiere after their divorce. I heard her whispering: “Don’t do that. Stop it. People will see.”

Turning around, I spotted that he had his hand down the low-cut neck of her dress. “Aw, let him play,” I said. “It’ll keep him quiet.” He gave a grin as broad as a barn door and left his hand where it was.

Frank’s passion for Ava dragged him halfway around the world: to Mexico, Spain, Africa, England, France. It broke up his marriage to Nancy in 1951; it plunged his spirits and his bank balance so low that in December 1953 he had to borrow money to buy Ava a Christmas present.

Their jealousy of each other passed the raw edge of violence. At one point in their teeth-and-claw romance Frank was hired to sing at the Copacabana in New York, while the two of them stayed in Hampshire House. While he worked nights, Ava got bored and started running around town with her friends. She strayed one evening into Bop City, where Artie Shaw, ex-husband number two, was starred with a jazz band.

The following afternoon, when Frank discovered where she’d been, the fur began to fly in his hotel bedroom. When she screamed that she was sick of his jealousy and was going to leave him, he pulled out the .38 he carried and threatened to blow his brains out. She stalked toward the door. He fired twice--into the mattress of the bed. Ava didn’t turn her head; she kept right on walking.