B009HOTHPE EBOK (31 page)

Frank was upset about the Kitty Kelley book but tried to make light of it and encouraged the rest of us to mock it. So Sammy and I would think up jokes about it. I’d get up and say, “President Reagan’s got a little suspicious of Frank and Nancy in the White House when he was passing the door and heard Nancy singing, ‘All the Way’ while Frank was singing, ‘I Can’t Get Started.’” Or Sammy would claim, “The book comes out in three editions: hardcover, softcover, and under the covers.”

After “My Way,” Frank and I became closer. We would hang a lot more and with the booze he would open up. If getting old is not for sissies, it was especially hard on the Rat Packers. He did not like the fact that he was aging—things were changing in his life. He used to joke about how his pencil wasn’t working quite the way it did anymore. The hooker action became much more prevalent. It was a rough period for Frank. He went through moods of extreme depression. He complained he was falling apart. He talked to me about Dr. Ayres, who gave him a hair transplant—an application that hadn’t exactly worked out as well as he thought. The all-night booze sessions were starting to take their toll. You could hear it in his voice, which got wrecked by all those unfiltered Camel cigarettes he smoked. He had muscle problems with his right hand for which he had to have surgery in the 1970s.

He was very moved by his father’s death, as he was about the death of Fred Astaire—he was very superstitious and found that an omen. One of the biggest blows for Frank and for me was the death of Don Costa. Don had recently recuperated from open heart surgery but unfortunately was a cocaine user, heavy smoker, and drinker—as well as being one of the sweetest guys on earth and a genius musician. Shortly before his death, he’d come to my home in Carmel. While working with him I saw he was not well and needed rest. I tried to convince him to stay with me at my guesthouse and take it easy, but he insisted he had to get to New York to finish an arrangement with “the Old Man” as he called Sinatra. He left me in Carmel and proceeded on to New York. The next afternoon he called me from the Warwick Hotel in Manhattan and informed me he had chest pains. I called Ben Dreyfus, my friend for many years, godfather to one of my children, and an incredibly stylish sophisticated and warm human being. I informed him of the situation and told him to get to Warwick with the ambulance immediately. He called me after they had put Don on a gurney. He told me that Costa wouldn’t leave until they handed him the musical scores for the arrangement he was writing for Sinatra. They were in his arms in the gurney … while getting into the ambulance. I called Steve Ross, then the CEO of Time Warner, who had a similar heart condition and he did what he could for Don, but, by then it was all too late. Costa arrived at the hospital, they operated, but he did not make it. Later in the year I was in Vegas with Frank and we, along with Jilly and others, toasted him with tears—our friend Don Costa. I always think of him and miss him so much to this day.

The murders of Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli naturally upset him. At our bar dinner meetings Frank would get bitter about the public’s perception of him and the mob. He was not happy with those innuendoes and blamed the press although it didn’t stop him from associating with the boys. I know that Barbara tried to take Jilly, with his obvious mob associations, out of the mix and not have him seen so much around Frank. By the summer of 1978, his mob affiliation was at its most evident. For example, we were all hired to work the Westchester Premier Theater in Tarrytown, New York. Word had it that the Mafia had financed the theater and that the Gambinos, the powerful crime family in New York, was involved. I was booked there along with Frank, Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gormé, and Diana Ross as well as many other performers. The trouble started when Frank took pictures with a host of these Outfit guys: Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, and Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno. Group shots backstage are something we all do every night after a show—but not usually with high-ranking mobsters. Unfortunately the Sinatra pictures got out and things only got worse for his reputation as a mobbed-up guy.

When you hang around with connected guys there’s always the possibility of violence in the air. One summer Jilly Rizzo and Frank were at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a birthday party for Dean Martin. As usual Frank and the guys were true to their rowdy code, having a great time and laughing and swearing like troopers, when some big-wig from Hunt Foods came over to the table and started reprimanding them for their behavior and foul language. It got very heated, culminating, from what Jilly told me, with this guy being knocked unconscious and taken away by ambulance in critical condition with a fractured skull. For a while it did not look like he was going to make it. Jilly, never one to rat on any situation, told me just so much. He said Frank was very upset about it, very concerned that the guy was going to die, but not concerned enough that he tried to stop the beating up of the guy by his goons. Thankfully the guy recovered … and chose not to press criminal charges, and that was the end of that.

Frank had a terrible temper, especially when he was drinking, but he suffered great remorse for his actions. Long after the event he told me how badly he felt about the incident with Carl Cohen—despite at the time trying to have him whacked. Sometimes he’d joke about it, using the line made famous by comedians: “Never fight a Jew in the desert.”

He got very verbal about how fed up he was with being on the road. He announced he was retiring in April 1971.

Because of their age and all that booze there would be a lot of joking in the steam room that they could sometimes no longer get it up sexually. At that time it was not uncommon to see a lot of prostitutes coming and going—with a hooker, not getting it up isn’t going to be a big problem.

As he approached 60 the age factor became the predominant topic of his conversations. He obsessed about his age and his appearance. We all realized he’d had some plastic surgery done, and he hated wearing the toupee.

While we were both working the Golden Nugget in Vegas in 1986 I became aware that Frank had had some intestinal surgery and that parts had been removed. Frank was destabilized by that operation and old age was ever looming. When I saw him backstage after a performance, he showed me the colostomy bags that he had to wear for a couple of months until his insides healed. He was utterly humiliated by this and was not happy about going in again for his third operation.

I would see him from time to time in the ’80s at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City. Time was marching on, and I could see that these three heroes of mine—Sammy, Dean, and Frank—were in the September of their years; they were physically and emotionally beat up. I would see Dean Martin at a restaurant in Beverly Hills after the death of his son in a jet crash. Dean was half alive after that. Whenever I would run into him at a little Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills called La Famiglia on Canon Drive, I would ask him, “How are you doing, Dino?” He would be sitting there with his false teeth in a glass of water, look up at me and say, “Just waiting to die, pally, just waiting to die.”

Eliot Weisman from the Westchester Premier Theater became a friend and a great manager, booking Sinatra, Sammy, Liza Minnelli, Don Rickles, and others. We became pals and on occasion business partners. At dinner one night with Eliot, he informed me that Frank, Dean, and Sammy were reuniting—the optimistically named Together Again Tour. They indeed went out—these elder statesmen were forecasted to make a lot of money. Bottom line is, Dean never finished the tour. His manager and my agent, Mort Viner, were in Chicago when Dean just quit and went home. He didn’t want to do the Rat Pack two-step anymore. He was old, he was tired, and he felt
finita la commedia!

Toward the end of his life I stopped going to the shows, because it was so depressing to see Frank with the teleprompters, dropping lyrics. Every once in a while, he’d lose the teleprompter and start looking for the words. It was very disturbing. One night he forgot to put on his toupee and went out onstage like that. He was forgetting the words he’d sung a million times and that anyone in the audience could have recited by heart. It was a tragic end to a brilliant career.

Frank had started losing his mental faculties. He would get confused as to where he was. You’d be with him in Vegas, and he’d think he was in New York. He’d say, “I got to call Barbara; she’s out in L.A. and I’m not going to be seeing her for a while.” We were in Nevada, only a couple of hours away from Los Angeles, and she was arriving the following day, but you couldn’t tell him. It was very upsetting. It really broke my heart to be around him like that because I’d known him in his prime. Near the end you’d look in his eyes and he was a different guy, more vulnerable than I’d ever seen him, someone who had lost his bearings as to where he was, what he was doing—even
who
he was. It was scary to watch.

One of the last times I saw Frank was near the end, actually. I was having dinner with him. He became poignant and sensitive, going over and over old regrets in his mind. He suddenly became sad and said, “Paul, you know one of my big regrets was I wanted to play the Marlon Brando part in
The Godfather
. I don’t know why they wouldn’t give that to me. I called everybody, I mean
I’m him,
that part was me, I wanted to play that so badly.” He became very emotional about it. Barbara would go, “Yeah, I know Frank, you’re right, it should have gone to you, baby.” She’d heard his lament a thousand times. Toward the end it became a litany, he repeated it over and over: “I should’ve been the one to play that, not Marlon Brando.” It was because he was so fragile at that point in his life. It was unsettling to see him like that.

The last time I did see him was down at his house in Palm Springs. I was writing songs for him; he wanted to go back into the studio and sing again. I had one song called “Leave It All to Me.” I think we were all set to go—Torrie Zito had done the arrangement and the band was booked and in the studio. We were all waiting for him to appear and he called and cancelled. It all just started to unwind for him, and he became a lost soul.

I knew all his sides—the macho side, the vulnerable side—and I think it all came out in his music. You will hear people say,
What a shame what happened to him at the end,
but I look at it differently. God bless him, he lived the life of three men. He lived life more fully than anyone I ever met. He was here, he was there, lighting up everywhere he appeared with that Sinatra magic whenever he walked in the room. He lived the equivalent life of a man who lived 150 years. It was the end of an era—you can close the book now. There was no one like him, nor will there ever be.

Seven

MICHAEL JACKSON, LIZ TAYLOR, A JEWEL HEIST, KINKY BRITS, TENNIS AT MIDNIGHT … AND THEN I GET PREGNANT

Things began to pick up for me recordwise when in 1971 I wrote “She’s a Lady” for Tom Jones. The first meeting I had with Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Gordon Mills, their manager, they came to my home in New York and we tried to make a deal for my publishing company. It’s late at night, and we were watching a movie at my house and they are all drinking champagne. The next day I woke up, looked in the living room, and my wife, being a significant decorator, and I were shocked to find all our bowls of potpourri empty. They had eaten all of it thinking it was potato chips.

I wrote “She’s a Lady” on the back of a TWA menu, flying back from London after doing Tom Jones’s TV show. Jones’s manager wanted me to write him a song. If I have an idea and I don’t have a pad of paper, I’ll write on whatever is available. What’s the difference? Paper is paper. And those blank pages on the back covers of menus are nice and hard. I like the look of them, and I can print on them without needing anything for support. When I’m writing, I generally toy with an idea until it manifests itself—meaning a phrase or a tune comes into my head and eventually begins to jell. When something hits me, I write it down immediately. I don’t wait or it’s gone. You just cherish those moments and write on anything—the stewardess’s leg if need be.

My main problem in writing for Tom Jones was finding the right vibe for him. He’s got a great voice, and he’s a good friend. “She’s a Lady” is not a song I would ever sing myself, but thinking of Tom it just came to me. It started with a verse.

Well she’s all you’d ever want

She’s the kind they’d like to flaunt and take to dinner

Well she always knows her place

She’s got style, she’s got grace, she’s a winner.

Ouch! You get that first verse, and if you’re lucky you’ve found your groove and the rest writes itself—theoretically anyway. I don’t know where that stuff comes from, but believe me I’ll take it. A germ of an idea in your head is all you need, but it does help to have an artist in mind. When I think about Tom Jones, I get a cocky, macho image—writing for other people is like playing a character and I thought, “What would this character say?”

What came out was pretty brash and arrogant, and sure, it was politically incorrect, but what the hell. I write like a Method actor, putting myself in his place. It’s the shortest time it ever took me to write a song. I knocked off the lyric on that TWA flight from London back to New York. Later I went to my den and pulled the melody out in about an hour and a half. But I can tell you this, I dislike “She’s a Lady” more than anything I’ve written. I’m not saying I don’t have a chauvinistic side, but not like that. Still, I wanted to make it as realistic as possible, and Tom Jones is as swaggering and brash as a Welsh coal miner in a pub on a Saturday night.

Jones was all the rage at the time, he and a guy with the outrageous name of Engelbert Humperdinck. Well, when your real name is Arnold George Dorsey, you’ve got to think of something that’ll make you stick in people’s minds. He took the goofy-sounding name of a German composer (who probably would have preferred to have been called Arnold George Dorsey)—and it made people pay attention.