Sinatra

  A year after the birth she saw Frank when both appeared at a London charity benefit. “He embraced me,” she recalled, “and said, ‘How are you, angel?’ I remember looking at him and seeing those eyes looking back at me, the same eyes I had just left back home in the cot. A woman walked up and asked if I had a picture of the baby. Of course I had. This was the moment. But as I looked down to find the picture in my handbag somebody took Frank away to introduce him to someone else. He would never see his daughter.”

  In 1973, long after she had told her daughter who her father was, Bartok managed to reach Frank on the phone. Deana, listening in on another extension, remembered him saying, “ ‘Hi, Eva! How are you?,’ casual and friendly. Mother said, ‘I need to talk to you about something.’ She didn’t want to discuss anything so intimate over the phone. Frank promised, ‘I’ll call and we’ll meet and talk.’ ”

  He did not call. Four years later, when her daughter was almost nineteen, Bartok sent him a letter:

  Dear Frank,

  This is a difficult letter to write, so please bear with me. . . . This is about my daughter Deana. I have sometimes wondered during the past eighteen years whether you ever suspected that she is also your daughter. . . . Deana has known this truth since she was three years old. Rightly or wrongly, I have always dissuaded her from contacting you. But now she is virtually a woman, with a mind of her own, and her emotional needs are too strong to be denied any longer. Very simply, she needs that you should know and understand. . . . After all this time, Frank, I don’t have to tell you that we have no material needs from you whatsoever. I can only tell you that it is an emotional crisis in her life and quite honestly I can no longer deny her. . . . I cannot let her continue to be hurt in this way. . . . It would have been so much better to have been able to discuss it with you in person, but you are not the easiest man to meet up with.

  Love,

  Eva

  P.S.: I’m enclosing a recent picture of Deana. She really is very beautiful.

  Frank responded through his attorney, but only to say he was “too busy with other family problems” either to acknowledge Bartok’s daughter or meet with her. In the early 1990s, at age thirty-six and with children of her own, Deana sent Frank a letter. “My sense of loss at not ever having known you, except at a distance,” she wrote, “is breaking my heart. Please respond.” He did not.

  “NOBODY LOVED FRANK better than Frank,” said Jeanne Carmen, who went with him intermittently over a lengthy period starting in the mid-1950s. George Jacobs has described Carmen as an “on-off bed-mate” and, less politely, as “a stand-by girl.” When she met Frank, she was in her early twenties, a Southern girl with Comanche Indian blood who had already worked as a model, a burlesque artist, a bit-part actress, and a trick-shot golfer. Her stunning looks—she had been Esquire’s Calendar Girl in 1952—were to keep her in the girlie magazines throughout the decade.

  Carmen took the initiative with Frank by sending him a photograph of herself. The Hollywood furrier Abe Lipsey, whom she knew, then put them together at a Palm Springs dinner party. “We saw each other from then on,” she said, “for about seven years.” The early phase of the relationship was very soon after Frank’s separation from Ava and, Carmen said, he became “Sad Frank” as soon as he was away from company. He would “walk around the house depressed. Sometimes, when he’d let guests out, he’d fall against the door and start crying. He really cried a lot back then. He’d be shaking, and telling me to hold him. He was like a little boy.”

  For all the excitement of being around Frank, of mixing with his celebrity friends and receiving expensive gifts, Carmen never became deeply involved. In the bedroom, she said, he was no great shakes. “He had the equipment but he didn’t know what to do with it. We’d go to bed and he’d say ‘Hold me, hold me. . . .’ Today he has this reputation of having been a tough guy, but actually I had to mother him—he needed a mother figure. I was just a kid and he was about twenty years older, and I didn’t want all that whining, didn’t want to be mothering him.”

  One day, seemingly on sudden impulse, Frank asked whether Carmen thought they should get married. As swiftly, he turned it into a joke, saying he hoped he could sleep with her friends once they were married. She was not amused, and he dropped the subject. He proposed several times again.

  “Frank wanted to get married. That was his bag. He had to be married. I didn’t want that. If I was away I kind of missed him. But I just couldn’t spend a lot of time with Frank. I would make all kinds of excuses to get out of there before the weekend was up. He was romantic, but in a needy way. He was so needy.”

  Once Carmen answered the telephone and found herself talking with Ava Gardner. “She knew about me,” Carmen recalled. “She said, ‘Hi, Jeanne, are you taking care of my Frankie?’ I said, ‘Apparently not as well as you did, Ava, because he’s whining and crying all the time.’ She let out such a laugh. . . . She said I was a sort of pale imitation of her.”

  “There was a ‘Frank woman,’ ” Brad Dexter said. “ The ‘Frank woman’ was Ava, who personified to him the perfect woman—figure, face, everything. It was the image he sought all the time in women. He kept looking for her all the time.”

  He may have thought, for a while, that he had found her.

  20

  Peggy

  PEGGY CONNELLY was a dark-haired Southern beauty in her early twenties, a band singer starting to break into the business, when she met Frank in early 1955. He was thirty-nine. Her mother, like Ava’s, had allowed her to head west only on condition that an older sister watch over her. She was living at the Hollywood Studio Club for Girls, which had rules designed to protect young ladies from predators.

  Peggy had no special interest in Frank Sinatra until a close girlfriend who did came up with a madcap scheme. Her idol was in town, she said, and spending a lot of time at one of the in places, the Villa Capri. She wanted to go there in case Frank might show up and notice her, and asked Peggy to tag along. The restaurant was almost empty when they got there, and Peggy was embarrassed.

  “I didn’t want to be there,” she recalled. “I was naive, from the South, had freckles. She was from California, a stunning girl. But Frank was there as she had hoped! We had hardly sat down when suddenly his friend Jimmy Van Heusen came leering over to our booth and said, ‘Look, could Mr. Sinatra and I come over for coffee when you’ve finished your dinner?’

  “They came over. I just smiled a lot, but my friend came on too strong. It drove Frank mad. And after ten minutes he stood up and he said to me—not to my friend—‘Miss Connelly, would you like to have dinner with me next Thursday?’ He liked to be formal. And I said yes, and Jimmy took my phone number. And so it began.”

  Peggy was entering a strange and exotic world and beginning a testing emotional experience, a three-year affair that would bring two Sinatra marriage proposals and a confrontation with Ava Gardner. She would see him singing in his prime, making his mark as an actor once and for all, and—now that he was on top again—exercising Sinatran power.

  Between early 1955 and the fall of 1957 Peggy would go with Frank to the studio and hear him record in the period that made him a legend, the years of “You Make Me Feel So Young,” “Mind If I Make Love to You?,” “It Happened in Monterey,” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” “I can still hear him biting off the words,” she said in 2003, “his perfect diction and rhythm. I wasn’t a connoisseur then. I was too young, and I didn’t have the experience. But his technique and timbre, his sense of swing, plus the taste and the intelligence to put it all together—that rates legendary.”

  Peggy was there when Frank, convinced that Capitol executives were not really listening to his work, decided to prove his point by playing a trick on them. “He had Nelson Riddle write a romantic arrangement for a Jimmy Van Heusen song—‘There’s a Flaw in My Flue’—that was intended as comedy, pure spoof, with lines like ‘Smoke gets in my nose.’ Then he recorded it straight, in an absolutely serious way.??
? Capitol approved the album containing the song without demur. Had Frank not then brought the ludicrous song to the attention of the studio, it would have reached the stores as a track on the album Close to You.

  Frank was in demand again as an actor after his success in From Here To Eternity. He took Peggy along for the filming of Guys and Dolls, the poor imitation of the hit musical in which he co-starred with Marlon Brando. A year or so earlier, according to his valet, he had “half destroyed” his own living room because Brando had been preferred over him to play the lead in On the Waterfront. That the movie was filmed in Hoboken had been salt in the wound.

  During the filming of Guys and Dolls, the two men carried on a childish war. They refused to say “Good morning” to each other, and Frank deprecated Brando as “the most overrated actor in the world,” called him “Mumbles,” and disparaged his Method Acting techniques. He would come out of his dressing room, he told director Joseph Mankiewicz, only “when Mumbles is through rehearsing.” He once walked off the set in a rage.

  A couple of months later, again with Peggy close by, Frank behaved better and performed better as the smooth-talking bachelor in The TenderTrap. His recording of the title song made the charts. Peggy was around, too, when, cast as the sort of gossip column journalist he so abhorred, he made High Society with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. In contrast to the super-relaxed Crosby, known on the set as “Nembutal” after the much used sleeping pill of the day, the restless Frank was dubbed “Dexedrine.”

  “I have to go,” Frank once complained to the movie director Vincente Minnelli. “No one seems to be able to help with it—doctors, no one. I have to move.” Frank “was always on his way somewhere else in his mind,” Peggy thought, “even while he was looking you in the eye. Someone once said he had no ‘now.’ He was never satisfied to be where he was. That’s why I used to love it when we would go down to Palm Springs alone, when there were no others around.”

  It had been a while before Peggy would agree to go away with Frank. “I had had one boyfriend back home,” she said, “and that was the extent of my carnal knowledge. He knew that. He had the Italian Madonna/whore complex, so I was the Madonna. I remember the first time he made a real attempt to carry me upstairs at his apartment. I fought my way out and said, ‘Take me home,’ and he said glumly, ‘Get your coat.’

  “He had a Cadillac convertible, and it started raining, and he pushed the button for the roof to go up and it wouldn’t. I told my girlfriend that it had rained on the famous Frank Sinatra hat! All because I wouldn’t stay with him. . . . But we went out now and then after that, and in the end I thought I had said no long enough. I went to bed with him only when everything was clear in advance. He was really delicate about it, and he took me to Palm Springs and we were totally alone.”

  In bed, Peggy said, Frank was “energetic and interested, but it was more about himself. Being that way doesn’t make a man the perfect lover.” They had become a couple however, so far as she was concerned, and she remained faithful as long as the affair lasted. She chose not to ask if Frank was too.

  “When we’d be apart for two or three weeks at a time,” Peggy said, “I figured I didn’t want to know. I thought he needed freedom. I’ve wondered, though, if he found a way to keep an eye on me. When I went off singing somewhere, the phone would mysteriously ring—always at sort of three in the morning. He’d found out where I was, and I’d hear this deep voice on the phone, ‘Baby, how’re you doing?’ . . .

  “An older woman friend of mine had told me right away, when I first met him: ‘He’s played games with the best. Don’t ever try to play games with him, because you don’t know how. If it doesn’t work by you being yourself, it wouldn’t have worked anyway.’ And that’s the way I played it. . . . I did my very best, and always looked for the best in him.”

  Peggy was rubbing shoulders with Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Cole Porter, Edward G. Robinson, Joe DiMaggio. “Being with him was like being with a fairy godfather, like having Daddy Warbucks on your side. He gave me a mink stole when we’d hardly known each other a couple of months. He had asked me to say whether I wanted a mink or a car, and I said, ‘Neither, you don’t have to buy me anything.’

  “But he came to pick me up one evening, and got in the front seat of his car and he put his hand over the back and opened a box and put a mink stole over my shoulders. I remember putting it on and saying, ‘No, no, no!’ But it was the most delicious thing I’d ever touched. . . .

  “Life went along like a dream. Wherever I went when he wasn’t with me, he smoothed my way. Things appeared as if by magic. People took care of me. I never handled money, never signed hotel registers. I didn’t stop at the concierge’s desk, even in places like the Waldorf Towers. No bills were ever presented—to me. I ate in his friends’ restaurants in New York as their honored guest, and I brought as many friends with me as I chose. When I told him Edith Piaf was in town and I wouldn’t be able to see her, he got me smuggled in to see her rehearse.”

  Early on, Frank asked Peggy to live with him. She had her own apartment by then, and was not prepared to give it up. The many days and nights she did spend with her lover, though, left her with unique, intimate memories.

  Frank was “lucky with his skin. He had that kind of skin that only needed a little while in the sun to turn a lovely golden tan. But not your hirsute Italian—I don’t recall any chest hair, perhaps almost none. He was lean of course, then, and he had unusual hands, rounded and padded, strong-looking, not like the rest of him.” Peggy, unlike others, never saw Frank use makeup to hide the scars he had been left with after his difficult birth. He had back pain, and rarely exercised. When he did it was to swim lengths in his pool, “to help his lung capacity, although he was smoking—a lot.”

  She had noticed, that first weekend at Palm Springs—at the new home he had built outside the city—that everything Frank possessed was “the cleanest, the best, fresh-smelling. The sheets, the towels, the whole house, smelled good. Everything around him was immaculate, in perfect order, his home, his dressing room and his bedroom, his closets, his drawers.

  “There were two perfumes he used. Yardley’s English Lavender for his drawers, shirts, and things. And Jungle Gardenia, which had been Ava Gardner’s fragrance. He kept her perfume in his bathroom, and you could smell it on his things.”

  Out of the public eye, Peggy noted, Frank wore “beautiful cashmere sweaters in orange and olive gradations. He favored peach, and he had beautiful gold sweaters and cotton shirts. I remember the accent on the color orange in the house and in the furnishings.”

  As early as 1945 a reporter had noticed that Frank had orange lawn furniture. By the 1950s he favored orange shirts, sweaters, blazers, and handkerchiefs, though not orange ties. He would eventually have an apartment at the Waldorf with orange decor, an airplane that sported orange inside and out, and an orange phone. “He hated orange on women,” though, said George Jacobs. “Orange was for him and him alone.”

  Frank never talked about his music or sang at home, in Peggy’s experience. When guests came he mostly played classical music. During Peggy’s time with him he was enthusing especially about the Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, who had recently made her American debut in Aida.

  Peggy said Frank seemed “embarrassed about his lack of formal education. He wasn’t a fool. He was very intelligent, intuitive. But when he wrote on a typewriter he used no punctuation and no capitals. Rather than make mistakes, I think, he just wouldn’t punctuate at all.

  “He read. He always had these big books, whatever was out at the time. Even when we hadn’t been together that long, we’d sit in bed with pillows behind us. He would read one of his books, or his script for the next day’s shooting. I remember reading Zen in the Art of Archery. Sinatra the great lover lying in bed with his studious girlfriend reading Zen books. Even then it struck me as amusing.”

  In their private moments, Frank was a man of few words. “He wasn’t a gabber. He wasn’t cold, but re
served, self-contained. He stored things up. He wasn’t shy, but he was extremely inhibited. I could never get him to dance with me—except once, when we were alone at a club and I got him to dance half a song. I remember, too, a time on a plane going down to Palm Springs when the plane lurched and he spilled coffee all over himself. He said, ‘I’ll just clean this off,’ and got up and went to the bathroom. And didn’t come out again until the plane landed.

  “I never saw him careless or vague, dreamy. And he never exposed his feelings, not ever. He wasn’t an openly emotive person. It was important to him to be in command of himself. . . .

  “I discovered what you can do if you have enough money and power. Once, when he was smoking and drinking too much, and he had a recording session the next day, I kept saying, ‘Don’t have that cigarette, don’t take that drink,’ but of course he did. Then, when we got to Hollywood, he couldn’t sing. He tried a couple of songs, and couldn’t make it. You know what those sessions involve, and the cost of it all, when musicians and studios are booked. But he just rescheduled it, and did it later when he felt like it.”

  Frank talked with Peggy about heavy drinking he had done years earlier. He told her that “when he was younger, but already a star, he and a bunch of his friends, the guys around New York and New Jersey, used to take a hotel room for a weekend and just drink and drink and drink. He said, ‘I woke up one morning and found myself wrapped around a mailbox in the street. My doctor told me it was time I straightened up and took care of myself, or I wouldn’t make it. I wouldn’t last.’ ”

  In the mid-1950s, Frank’s alcohol use worried his girlfriend. “He amazed me early on, in Palm Springs. The times that he drank it would be late and in private, alone or with close friends. He’d have only Jimmy Van Heusen or one or two of his intimate Italian friends there. They knew how to handle him. I used to look at the bottles in the kitchen in the morning. It never was the stumbling around sort of thing—he just got quieter and quieter. I saw a willful man who wanted instant gratification, and when he didn’t have it he got bored. I’d just keep out of the way.”