Chapter II: Part 2

Even Garbo had some odd quirks when the cameras stopped rolling. She used to go regularly to the house of some friends who had a big, secluded pool. Before she arrived, all the servants would be dismissed, and her host and hostess would take themselves off for an hour or so, too. Then Garbo undressed and, naked as a jay bird except for a floppy hat, swam gravely round and round in the water. Katharine Hepburn is another home nudist, presumably finding it better than air conditioning for keeping cool in summer. After all, it’s nature’s way. Didn’t we all come into the world stripped to the pelt?

Under stress, the deep-down desire to show themselves to an audience can take strange turns. Once in front of the crowded long bar of the Knickerbocker Hotel, an actress whose career had run into trouble--she was happily remarried in 1958--began to strip. This was Hollywood, remember, so hot-eyed stares were the only help she got from anybody in the room. When she was down to her shoes and stockings, and the rest of her clothes lay discarded on the barroom floor, she gave a shriek and ran down the front steps out onto Ivar Avenue. Then at last somebody remembered to telephone the police.

More recently an agent from one of the big television studios called at the hotel apartment of a much-married woman whose name still spells glamour to any serviceman of World War II. His mission was to sound her out about doing a TV show. She greeted him in a bathrobe and asked him to run the hot water for her before they talked business. She locked the outside door behind him. The following morning his conscience began to stir. “I’d better leave now,” he said. “The office will think I died.”

“You can’t go,” she cried. “I’m so lonely.” She kept him there three days.

The town has always been full of lonely, frustrated women who have let their few years of basking in the sun as movie queens blind them to reality forever. You can start with Mary Pickford, who used to talk a blue streak about a wonderful girl protégé whom she said she was going to make over into a movie sensation. I had to try to disillusion her. “You’re fooling yourself, Mary. What you should do is hire a press agent. All you really want is to keep your name alive.”

Gloria Swanson is another who can’t see straight today where her career as an actress is concerned. As a businesswoman in the dress industry she’s not nearly as sharp as Joseph P. Kennedy was when he was a movie tycoon and she was his reigning queen. She’d made a hit in _Sunset Boulevard_ and her reputation was on the rise again when I suggested she might do a movie version, written by Frances Marion, of Francis Parkinson Keyes’ _Dinner at Antoine’s_. Not a chance. “I couldn’t possibly play the mother of an eighteen-year-old daughter,” she snapped. “The part’s too old for me.” At the time, she was the mother of two daughters and a son, and she had two grandchildren.

Most of the unhappy ones have no husbands. One unfailing cause of that brand of misery is lack of female charity. They turn their backs on the facts of life and refuse to forgive their husbands a single act of infidelity--I believe every man married to a movie queen deserves one break in that department.

Barbara Stanwyck lives in a two-story mansion with her only company an elderly maid, the books she reads by the score, and the television set which hypnotizes her into watching old movies into all hours of the night. You don’t see her around town much any more because people forget to ask her down from the ivory tower in which she’s locked herself. When you do invite her out, there are roses from her the next day and thank-you notes so pathetically grateful they’d melt a stone.

Up to the day in 1951 that she divorced Robert Taylor, she was one of the happiest women alive. He was such a handsome slice of man, highly desirable, a full-size star. When he went to Rome for eleven months to make _Quo Vadis_ with Deborah Kerr, women everywhere mobbed him. But Barbara loved to act. The Taylors didn’t need the money, but she worked all the time, going straight from one picture into another, instead of taking time out to join her husband in Italy.

When he arrived home after nearly a year, Barbara disposed of him, while he found a much younger bride, Ursula Thiess. She has now had two children by him, although now they’re having difficulty with an older child by a former husband.

At fifty-five, Barbara remains a talented actress and a mighty attractive woman, though she gets thinner all the time. She’s kept her appetite for work, but suitable parts aren’t easy to find--I don’t rate her last role as a Lesbian madam of a New Orleans brothel in _A Walk on the Wild Side_ as worthy of her. I have begged her to kiss Hollywood good-by and go to Europe. “There’s nothing for you here. I guarantee you wouldn’t be over there twenty-four hours without having at least two offers for pictures.”

But Barbara stays on; with her maid, her books, and Helen Ferguson, her press agent and one of her closest friends.

* * * * *

Dinah Shore used to say, in one of those standard quotes that queens come up with when life is sunny, “My family means more to me than anything in the world--nothing will ever interfere with that.” Then George Montgomery, her husband went off to work on his own, and seventeen years and 362 days of a good marriage went out the window.

Her place of purgatory now is an oversized mansion, built on a $75,000 lot, near that of Richard Nixon. There she sits in melancholy, alone much of the time, by the pool, which is equipped with a waterfall; or perhaps in the living room, which is proportioned somewhat like Grand Central Station. It’s a great spot for brooding, but nevertheless she kept on singing on her shows “It’s Great to Have a Man Around the House.”

On the face of it, this used to be a couple that could never be divided. Certainly her reputation overshadowed George’s, a situation which usually creates continual problems. It’s hard on a husband when his house is invaded most nights by writers and directors who’ve come to discuss the new picture or new TV show with his wife. He has to sit and listen to them fuss over her with: “Now, darling, you’re looking a little tired and you have to work tomorrow, so you’d better take a pill and go to bed early to catch up on your beauty sleep.”

George, however, didn’t resent Dinah’s success. Though he never quite made film stardom and his own Western series died young on TV, he had his furniture factory, where he worked alongside his employees, and he went on making low-budget pictures. He steered clear of the parasitic life so many husbands enjoy when the woman is combination breadwinner, wife, mother, and working head of the family.

When the husband carries the title of “agent” in Hollywood, it’s a safe bet that he knows next to nothing about the business and is living off his wife. It’s also odds that he has a mistress to while away those long afternoons when he isn’t at the race track or propping up a bar. What can the wife do about it? If she wants to keep her home and family together in some semblance of order, she’s powerless. Daddy must be allowed to continue as “agent,” even if it ruins her.

When you’re a wife as well as an actress, you have to think of your husband, too, not only about your career. Maybe Dinah didn’t think hard enough. George, who in the past had given up several jobs to travel with her, went to the Philippines alone to make a picture and was gone three months. While he was away, she heard rumors that he was seeing a great deal of his leading woman. He hadn’t been back in Hollywood long before she released the announcement that she was filing for divorce.

Only minutes after she’d finally decided on that step, she went on the air with no detectable strain showing as she sang and clowned in her TV show.

She is a forty-five-year-old woman with two children still in school. She is up to her ears in work most of the time. The fact that good men don’t grow on trees is something most women don’t realize until it’s too late. Chances are that a new husband would be second-rate by comparison with George. Could be that thought has struck home with Dinah, too.

* * * * *

Inside the blonde head of tragedy’s child, Marilyn Monroe, fame and misery were mixed up like tangled skeins of knitting wool. She was an unsophisticated, overly trusting creature whose career was always professionally and emotionally complicated beyond her power to control it. She was used by so many people.

She let herself be surrounded by such a clutch of nudgers, prodders, counselors, and advisers that the poor child developed an inferiority complex so ruinous that she was terrified to walk onto any movie set for stark fear she’d fluff a line or miss a cue. She never did have confidence in herself. Toward the end of her life, she couldn’t sit and talk to you without her fingers twisting together like live bait in a jar.

That wasn’t surprising in light of the words of wisdom her confidantes poured into her ears: “You cannot worry about unhappiness. There is no such thing as a happy artist. They develop understanding of things that other people don’t understand.”

Marilyn wasn’t visibly suffering from anything the night she stopped off at my house for a last-minute talk on her way to Los Angeles Airport and New York for _The Seven Year Itch_. Her husband of that era, and one of the real men in her life, Joe DiMaggio, drove her over, but he wouldn’t come in. “I’ll knock on the door when it’s time to go,” said Joe, whom I’d known long before Marilyn.

She was wearing beige--beige fur collar on her beige coat, beige dress, beige hair. “You look absolutely divine,” said I. “Are you beige all over?”

She had started to lift her dress before she murmured: “Oh, Hedda, that’s _vulgar_.”

“Just thought I’d ask.”

I was a booster of Marilyn’s as far back as _All About Eve_, when she came on for a few minutes with George Sanders and glowed like the harvest moon. She had an extraordinary power of lighting up the whole screen. No one in my memory hypnotized the camera as she did. In her brain and body, the distinctions between woman and actress had edges sharp as razor blades. Off camera, she was a nervous, amazingly fair-skinned creature almost beside herself with concern about her roles, driven to seek relief in vodka, champagne, sleeping pills--anything to blunt the pain of her existence. When the camera rolled, everything was as different as night from day. Then she became an actress using her eyes, her hands, every muscle in her body to court and conquer the camera as though it were her lover, whom she simultaneously dominated and was dominated by, adored and feared.

She was the original Cinderella of our times, the slavey who’d washed dishes, swept floors, minded babies, been pushed around from one foster home to another without anybody caring for or loving her. But she was always as honest about her whole ugly past as an ambitious actress can be who smells good copy in her reminiscences. She was simultaneously lovely and pathetic most of the time, but she kept a sense of humor. I asked her once about a man alleged to be looming large in her life. “Is this a serious romance?” was the question.

“Say we’re friendly,” she said, “and put that ‘friendly’ in quotes.”

The girl who was rated as the sex goddess supreme used to fight tooth and nail to hang onto the career which she was afraid might slip away from her at any moment. But there was an air of impregnable innocence about her in those calendar pictures. The innocence showed, too, in shots very much like them that her first husband used to carry around when he worked in an aircraft plant in World War II, to flash them in front of his workmates. One of the workmates was Robert Mitchum.

In the first great picture she made, _The Seven Year Itch_, the same charm of ignorance let her spout double-meaning lines as though she didn’t know what they implied. She had that superb director Billy Wilder telling her what to do. “You had the innocence of a baby,” I told her. “We knew the words were naughty, but we didn’t think you did.”

“I didn’t know?” she said, bewildered. “But I have always known.”

Soon after that picture, she lost the little-girl quality. She was surrounded by people all telling her how to act. They worked up her dissatisfaction with her studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. It’s an old pitch that sycophants make to a star: “You don’t need your studio. You’re bigger than they are. You can have your own production company.” She believed it. Basically simple women like Marilyn, who rise as fast as she did, are pushovers for this kind of mad propaganda.

A leading figure in her new circle was Milton Greene, the New York photographer who set up Marilyn as a one-woman corporation to do battle with her studio, meantime driving himself close to bankruptcy. Milton could take credit for getting her on Ed Murrow’s “Person To Person” television program. After that painful evening I asked her: “How could you possibly go on TV looking like that?”

“Everybody said I looked good.”

“Everybody lied then. You were a mess. You don’t look well in skirts and heavy sweaters because you’re too big in the bust. On that show you should have been the glamour girl you always are. But the glamorous one was Mrs. Milton Greene. This kind of thing will destroy you.”

She spent part of the time during those rebellious days living in Connecticut with the Greenes, the rest in a three-room suite at the Waldorf Towers. She told me about the joys of adventuring around New York in dark glasses and turban with built-in black curls, going off on a cops-and-robbers round of cafes, theaters, the Metropolitan Museum. Meantime stupid rumors circulated that she was being kept in fantastic luxury by one millionaire or another, but nobody bothered to deny them.

“Didn’t it occur to you,” I wrote, “that great stars pursue their careers in conventional fashion, accepting the experienced judgment of good producers?... How did you rationalize the idea that a photographer who’d had no experience in making theatrical pictures could do better by you than the men who had made you famous?”

Then along came Arthur Miller, a writer held in awe by most of Hollywood, who ended a fifteen-year-old marriage to marry her. They were deeply in love and happy at first. When that ended, she came and sipped a martini in my home. He was, she said, “a charming and wonderful man--a great writer.” And Joe DiMaggio? “A good friend.” I believe Miller loved her, though it was Joe who turned up trumps in the end when she lay dead and deserted in Westwood Village Mortuary. One other man loved her, too--Miller’s father, Isadore.

She said: “I have only married for love and happiness. Except perhaps my first one, but let’s don’t discuss that ever.... I still love everybody a little that I ever loved.” And about being the ex-Mrs. Miller? “When you put so much into a marriage and have it end, you feel something has died--and it has. But it didn’t die abruptly. ‘Died’ isn’t the right word for me,” she said when we talked. But I think she was already dying inside her heart.

She went into _Let’s Make Love_,--it was a terrible script, in her opinion--out of shape physically and mentally. As her leading man, she had Yves Montand, who was Lucky Pierre himself in getting the role, being choice number seven after Yul Brynner, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, and Jimmy Stewart had all turned down the part. Montand had performed beautifully in his own one-man theater show, though three quarters of his American audiences obviously hadn’t the least idea what he was talking about, since it was all in French. Opposite Marilyn, he thought he had only a small part after Arthur Miller had been asked to write additional dialogue for the heroine.

During shooting I detected that something strange was happening to Mrs. Arthur Miller, who hadn’t announced yet that she was going to get a divorce. She was falling hard for this Frenchman with the carefully polished charm. Between the end of that picture and the start of her next, _The Misfits_, the stories spread that he would divorce his wife, Simone Signoret. M. Montand scored high in the publicity sweepstakes. The gossip spread all over town, with some help from the Twentieth Century-Fox promotion department and no hindrance from himself.

Before the prophetically titled _Misfits_ was finished, she became so ill she was flown in from Reno and put into the Good Samaritan Hospital for a week’s rest. She couldn’t even reach Montand on the telephone, and she called him repeatedly, day after day.

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.

David Selznick, in the suite next door, heard the shots and called the front desk. The clerk there telephoned the police. Mannie Sachs, the king of talent scouts for RCA, who had a permanent suite down the hall, had also been startled by the explosions, and came running. He and Selznick hurried into Frank’s room, listened to what had happened. Then they grabbed the mattress with the two holes in it and toted it down the hall, to exchange it for one on Mannie’s bed. When the police arrived to search Frank’s suite without finding a trace of bullets, Frank was as cool as a cat. “You’re dreaming,” he told them. “You’re crazy.”

He had already applied to Harry Cohn for the featured role of Maggio in _From Here to Eternity_ when he flew to Africa in 1952 to be with Ava while she made _Mogambo_ with Clark Gable and Grace Kelly. Cohn had originally doused cold water on his ambition. “You’re nuts. You’re a song-and-dance man. Maggio’s stage-actor kind of stuff.”

Frank had been in Africa five days--days of sitting around with nothing to do but watch his wife work. He killed time by building an outside shower in the woods for her. He rounded up fifty native singers and dancers for a party for cast and crew. He worked harder than on any sound stage to keep from going crazy. Then his agent, Bert Allenberg of MCA, called him back to test for _Eternity_. Frank told me the whole story later:

“I left Africa one Friday night. I had a copy of the scene and I sat up all night on the plane. Didn’t sleep the whole trip. Monday morning I made the test. I finished at 3 P.M. and that night flew back to Africa. My adrenalin was bubbling. I waited five days, ten, then got a letter they were testing five or six other guys, among them Eli Wallach.

“I’d seen him in _Rose Tattoo_ on Broadway, and I know he’s a fine actor. So I thought: ‘I’m dead.’ Then I got a wire from Allenberg: ‘Looks bad.’ My chin was kicking my knees. But Ava was wonderful. She said: ‘They haven’t cast the picture yet. All you get is a stinking telegram, and you let it get you down.’

“Clark would say: ‘Skipper, relax. Drink a little booze. Everything will be all right.’ I left Africa and went to Boston for a night-club date. I got a call another Monday morning that they’d made the deal. I told Allenberg: ‘If you have to pay Harry Cohn, sign the contract; I’ll pay _him_.’”

For Maggio, Frank’s fee was $8000 instead of the usual $150,000. He flew off to join Ava for a few days of fun and fury in Paris. “Then I got a cable from Harry Cohn: ‘Clift already proficient in army drill. Seeing as how you have same routine, suggest you get back a few days early.’ I wired back: ‘Dear Harry--will comply with request. Drilling with French Army over weekend. Everything all right. Maggio.’ I talked to his secretary later, and she said when she opened the wire she screamed. But Cohn didn’t crack a smile. He had a sense of humor like an open grave.”

Unpredictable as always, Frank went with his family to the Academy Awards show when he collected an Oscar for Maggio. “The minute my name was read, I turned around and looked at the kids. Little Nancy had tears in her eyes. For a second I didn’t know whether to go up on stage and get it or stay there and comfort her. But I gave her a peck on the cheek and reached for young Frankie’s hand.

“When I came back, it was late, so I got them home and sat with them for a while. Then I took the Oscar back to my place, where a few people dropped in. I got Nancy a little miniature thing for her charm bracelet, a small Oscar medallion. The kids gave me a St. Genesius medal before the Awards, engraved with, ‘Dad, we will love you from here to eternity.’ Little Nancy gave me a medal and said, ‘This is from me and St. Anthony.’ That’s her dear friend. She seems to get a lot done with St. Anthony. I guess she has a direct wire to him.”

There’s a show-business legend that, abracadabra, Frank’s career started going up like a skyrocket from that moment on. It’s a legend, nothing more. Turning the corner was slow going for him. He still had to play in such flops as _Suddenly_ and find he was turned down for _Mr. Roberts_ because Leland Hayward thought he was too old. He still had night-club tours to make under old agreements. And he still had to work out the switch to Capitol which eventually made him a best seller on records.

It took him a long time, too, to recover from Ava. She hasn’t yet recovered from him. Holed up in Spain, she has been outcast to most Spaniards, who don’t tolerate her flouting of their social rules. Recently she went back to work again, talking a comeback, as so many like her do. The proof, as always, lies in the performance they can deliver before the cameras.

Frank came near the end of the road he’d traveled with her when he returned unexpectedly early one day to his Palm Springs house and overheard her talking with another woman star whom she’d invited down there while he was away. The subject they were discussing, I understand, was Frank’s love-making, which they were downgrading. Those two would do just that. “Pack up your clothes and get out,” Frank yelled. “I don’t want to see either of you again.”

I sat in his dressing room at Paramount in December 1956 when the Ava era finally ended for him. A Hollywood reporter had taken her out driving one night in the desert around Palm Springs, gotten her drunk, and recorded what she told him over a microphone hidden in his car. The magazine story that resulted had appeared that day. Frank sat with a copy of it in his hand, cringing silently in his chair. Ava was quoted as complaining: “Frank double-crossed me ... made me the heavy ... I paid many of the bills.” Even the ashes were cold after that.

That was the year he waged a busy-beaver campaign for Adlai Stevenson, just as he had worked for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and, four years later, would slave for John F. Kennedy. He was in Spain, filming _The Pride and the Passion_, when he was asked to assist the Democratic convention in Chicago by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on opening night. Eager to oblige, he flew for thirty-three hours through appalling transatlantic weather and reached the convention platform at 8 P.M., a bare thirty minutes before Sam Rayburn, late Speaker of the House of Representatives, was scheduled to gavel the session to order.

No more than four hundred people had filtered into their places in the 25,000-seat auditorium when Mr. Rayburn, fortified by bourbon, started banging away with his gavel. Frank had no choice but sing to a virtually empty hall, while his fine old Sicilian temper flamed.

During the anthem somebody alerted Sam Rayburn to his error. He went over to Frank as soon as he’d finished singing and put his hand on Sinatra’s sleeve to apologize. Frank brushed him aside. “Keep your arm off my suit,” he snapped, and stormed away.

When Bill Davidson wrote the story, Frank had his attorney, Martin Gang, file suit for $2,300,000. He was armed with a telegram from Rayburn asserting that the incident was undiluted imagination. All Davidson had was the word of Mitch Miller, who’d been close enough on the platform to overhear what had gone on there. There didn’t seem to be any other witnesses.

But on a visit to New York soon after, a Hollywood press agent who was close to Davidson bumped into a Madison Avenue advertising man whom he hadn’t seen for years. The old friend happened to tell the press agent about a funny thing he’d seen on the platform at the Democratic convention, which he’d attended on agency business: He’d watched Sinatra giving Rayburn the brush-off. Needless to say, the suit was dropped.

Politics are serious business to Frank--they used to be to me until I got tired of the game and decided to give the young ones a chance. I was doing a bit in a picture at Las Vegas while he was there making _Oceans 11_, and I wanted to talk to him. But he was always too busy. After the 1960 conventions came and went, he was off on the island of Maui doing _Devil at 4 O’Clock_ before he could keep a promise to come over to my house.

From Maui he sent me a letter “giving you all the answers to the questions you would have asked me if we actually did an interview.” He’s a John F. Kennedy man and I was a Robert Taft woman; what better subject for a letter than politics, Sinatra version?

“Every four years,” he wrote, “the same question arises: Should show-business personalities become involved in politics? Should they use their popularity with the public to try to influence votes?

“My answer has always been ‘yes.’ If the head of a big corporation can try to use his influence with his employees, if a union head can try to use his influence with his members, if a newspaper editor can try to use his influence with his readers, if a columnist can try to use his influence, then an actor has a perfect right to try to use his influence.

“My own feeling is that those actors who do not agree with my point of view are those who are afraid to stand up and be counted. They want everybody to love them and want everybody to agree with them on everything.

“I am not sure whether they are right or whether I am right. I only know what is right for me....”

I almost tore up the letter as soon as I’d read it because of its last paragraph: “Maybe it will make a good Sunday piece for you. If you think so, then please don’t start to edit it. These are my thoughts, and if you want to pass them on to your readers, let them stand as is.” I haven’t edited; I’ve quoted, but not all five pages. Life’s too short for that, and you probably wouldn’t read them, anyway.

Though he’s proud to be a Democrat, he’s uneasy about being called a “Clansman.” The Clan consists of the men with which this mixed-up, lonely talent has surrounded himself--Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Pentagon Lawford.

“I hate the name of Clan,” Frank once said.

“Did you ever look the word up in a dictionary?” I said. “It means a family group that sticks together, like the Kennedys you’re so fond of. They’re the most clannish family in America. I don’t like Rat Pack, but there’s nothing wrong with the name of Clan.”

What is wrong with the Clan and the Leader, as his gang have christened Frank, is the pull they both have over young actors who would give their back teeth to be IN. Membership dues include generally behaving like Mongols from the court of Genghis Khan.

The Clan was riding high the night Eddie Fisher opened his night-club act at the Ambassador Hotel here, before the _Cleopatra_ debacle got under way. I was in New York at the time. Frank and his henchmen took over and mashed Eddie’s performance. “This was a disgusting display of ego,” snorted Milton Berle, sitting in an audience that included comedians like Jerry Lewis, Danny Thomas, and Red Buttons, any one of whom, if he’d tried, could have joined in and made the Clan look silly. Elizabeth Taylor, on Eddie’s side that night, raged: “He may have to take it from them, but I don’t. One day they’ll have to answer to me for this.”