Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown (23 page)

With two founder members of the
original
Rat Pack, talent agent Swifty Lazar and David Niven.

The night Frank and I met, we only really exchanged pleasantries. Frank greeted me warmly and said, ‘Hi, I’m
Frank Sinatra,’ as if I – or anyone else in that room come to that – didn’t know who he was. His humility was another of his qualities that so impressed me. I thought this was a man I would like to meet again.

Francis Albert ‘Frank’ Sinatra’s entry into this world had not been an easy one. For as long as I knew him, Frank continually said that he would like to meet and kill the doctor who delivered him. He had used forceps, which had badly damaged Frank’s ear and scarred his face. Alarmed that the just-born infant was not breathing, and with the
doctor seemingly not knowing what to do, his grandmother hurriedly grabbed Frank and placed his head under a cold water tap, startling the baby into taking his first gasps of New York air.

With dear Frank Sinatra and yet another princess, this time Princess Margaret at a swanky function in London.

In later life, Frank suffered from terrible hearing and ear problems. He maintained it was due to that doctor’s negligence, which only fuelled his desire to ‘bump into him’ even more. As well as being loyal to friends, another of Frank’s qualities was that he always bore a deserved grudge.

I didn’t meet him again until a decade later, in the mid-60s, at a London restaurant with his then wife Mia Farrow, who was in town making a film called
Guns at Batasi
(in which she replaced Britt Ekland whose new husband Peter Sellers had whisked her to LA for the weekend and refused to allow her back to Pinewood to continue filming) and Frank accompanied her.

‘We just love watching
The Saint
,’ said Mia, taking me totally unawares.

‘We watch it in bed, in our hotel room. It’s the best thing on TV,’ Frank added.

We had dinner and chatted until the very late hours about movies, TV, London, family and just about everything else. Frank was very grounded and it was clear his success hadn’t spoilt him. He also made time to smile and say hello to our fellow diners as they passed our table, which undoubtedly made their night – being in his company certainly made mine.

I can’t help think about an old story here – probably apocryphal – of a young man who approached Frank in a restaurant, and said, ‘Mr Sinatra, I’m so sorry to bother you, but I have my new girlfriend joining me on a dinner-date here this evening, and I wondered if you’d mind saying,
“Hi, Al! How you doing?” when she gets here? It’ll really impress her.’

Not wanting to deny the young chap a chance of getting his leg over, Frank said sure, no problem. A couple of minutes later the young lady duly arrived, Al leapt up to greet her and, in walking her to the table, they passed Frank.

‘Hey, Al! How you doing, my old friend?’ said Frank.

The young man turned around and snapped, ‘Oh, fuck off, Frank! Can’t you see I’m with my girlfriend?’

I was a huge fan of Frank’s, both his music and films, and revelled in his stories over the dinner table. He told me of the making of his movies and the people he’d worked with and hoped to work with in the future. Frank began his musical career in the swing era, with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey – Dorsey in fact called
him
‘kid’ as a term of endearment. Frank told me that he realized a large part of their performing success was down to their ability to ‘phrase’, that is, to ‘say play’ their instruments and play without appearing to breathe and interrupting the rhythm. Frank took up underwater swimming to help increase his lung capacity and develop his breathing technique. From there, he practised his phrasing method, which you’ll see in evidence on screen whenever he sings: he developed a slight twitch in the corner of his mouth through which he breathed in, while expelling air through the rest of his mouth in song.

As well as captivating all audiences with his singing, Frank also had a great screen presence. His ability to glide across it with seeming ease was one I envied greatly. Frank’s acting came naturally to him. He was an all-round natural performer, but he only ever did one good take.

George Schlatter, who directed him in several advertisements and TV shows, told me that Frank psyched himself up so much for take one that if you didn’t get it on that first shot, then you never would. While he rehearsed dance routines for the big musical numbers, Frank literally walked on to the set word-perfect and ready to go. He never rehearsed dialogue scenes and loathed re-takes.

‘Bang-bang-bang, went the scene,’ said George. ‘And Frank would leave to await the next set-up.’ He didn’t suffer fools and expected everyone else to be as fully prepared as he was.

I often read about Frank’s alleged personal and professional links with Mafia figures such as Sam Giancana, Lucky Luciano and Rocco Fischetti, so I asked him about it.

‘Kid, most of the venues I play are, in one way or another, controlled by the Mob – they run Vegas for a start,’ he said. ‘I turn up at the places and am greeted by all these suited guys who want me to pose for a photo with them. I’ve no idea who they are, yet in the photos they’re standing with their arm around me and appear to be long-lost friends. How many photos have you posed for with people you don’t know?’

Mind you, I don’t think Frank ever did anything to publicly dispel the rumours of his underworld connections. He rather liked it!

Frank had three children: Nancy Jr, Frank Jr and Tina by his first wife, Nancy Barbato. He was married three more times, to the actresses Ava Gardner, then Mia Farrow and finally to Barbara Marx, to whom he was married at the time of his death. He, like any loving father, supported his children in every way he could. I remember on Nancy Jr’s thirtieth birthday, she opened her present from her father
to discover it was a clear $1million wrapped up. Frank was very generous like that.

When his daughter Tina made the dramatized biography of Frank for TV, apart from mis-casting a rather – dare I say – plain-looking actress to play Ava Gardner, she showed her father having a string of affairs – and usually interrupted his bedroom scenes with a phone call to say his wife was in labour! It was a very unflattering biopic to say the least. I broached the subject with his wife, Barbara, and asked what Frank thought of it. She said that she had sat Frank down in the TV room with a large drink and ran the tape for him to watch, alone. When he emerged from the room he said, ‘I don’t think they quite got me, did they?’

My former wife and I socialized a lot with Frank and Barbara, and spent virtually every Thanksgiving and Easter at their lovely home in Palm Springs, along with Gregory and Veronique Peck, Don Rickles, George and Jolene Schlatter, Cary and Barbara Grant and sometimes the legendary agent Swifty Lazar. They were great days. We would chat, run movies, eat, drink and go swimming in the pool. It was a rare recipe for total relaxation – which Frank relished.

On Easter Sunday Frank would clear us out of the kitchen, and cook his favourite dish of spicy meatballs and pasta. It was the one day on which no one else was allowed to cook. Our only involvement was to help select the accompanying wine.

‘Come on down the wine room,’ he’d say, ‘and choose a bottle.’ Frank had one of the best-stocked (and biggest) wine coolers in the world, and was an expert sommelier. After an hour or so of exploring we chose many more than one bottle! Alas, I’m not a great authority on wine, but I can assure you that we drank some pretty good vintages,
not to mention expensive ones. But that was Frank – a very generous and attentive host.

One of our other favourite pastimes, aside from drinking copious amounts of Jack Daniels into the night, was gambling. We played the tables in Vegas on many occasions – rarely ever winning much, I might add – and as Frank was very much a night person, he loved it when people stayed up into the early hours with him. It wasn’t so much the gambling as the company he loved. He was a very social person and came to life in the late evenings. I couldn’t always keep up with him, especially if I needed a clear head the next morning for work.

Frank had a view on hangovers, as he did most things, ‘I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.’

Despite increasing success, in 1971, at a concert in Hollywood to raise money for the Motion Picture and TV Relief Fund, and at the age of fifty-five, Frank announced that he was retiring. Perhaps he thought he was at the pinnacle of his career, and this was the time to bow out? His self-enforced retirement didn’t last long, though – his public wouldn’t allow it. Two years later, Frank returned with a television special and an album, both entitled
Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back
. He certainly was.

As far as I was concerned, Frank had never changed from the first day I met him. He remained humble, kind, generous and warm. He only ever had praise for me when he saw one of my movies, and when I was cast as James Bond he called to say how delighted he was for me. He never once criticized or offered advice on any of my performances, such as they were, he merely expressed his satisfaction.

Despite various health problems, Frank toured extensively and remained the highest attraction on the worldwide concert circuit during the first half of the 1990s. Alas, at times his memory failed him as did his hearing. I asked how he could still pick up his musical cues. He said he ‘felt’ it through his feet, via the reverberations on stage. Nothing was going to get in the way of Frank performing.

Having fought bravely against cancer, Frank sadly suffered a heart attack and died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at 10.50 p.m. on 14 May 1998, with wife Barbara and daughter Nancy by his side. His final words were ‘I’m losing’.

The following night the lights on the Las Vegas Strip were dimmed. A light had gone out in all our lives. The tributes were manyfold and came from far and wide: Presidents, Prime Ministers, Royalty and, of course, his many friends and fans.

Frank’s legacy to the world is a vast one: his many films and TV performances, his many concerts and his many recordings will live on forever, as will my memories of this amazing man who I was so fortunate to be able to call a friend.

Dean Martin was a former boxer turned comedian, actor, singer and hugely charismatic man. I first encountered him way back in 1952 when, with my then wife, Dorothy Squires, I was in New York and we trotted to Times Square to see ‘Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ at the Paramount Theatre. I’d heard a lot about Dino and Jerry from the cast of the play
Mr Roberts
with whom I’d worked in London – and I was not disappointed. It struck me that,
like Morecambe and Wise in the UK, Dino and Jerry were both very talented individuals in their own right, but together they were dynamite.

The Cannonball Run
, in which I played someone who thought he was Roger Moore.

A few years later, when I was a contract artist at Warner Bros., I bumped into Dean on the studio lot – where he and Jerry Lewis were making their caper films – several times and exchanged pleasantries.

Later in the decade, of course, he became a founding member of the Rat Pack with Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr and Peter Lawford, and went on to even greater movie success with them in
Ocean’s 11.