CHAPTER 4
I did not rush to send a telegram to Sammy Davis, Jr. I wanted to mull it over. Watermelon and chicken wings? Was Sinatra serious? I wondered if I was being set up. Was it going to be a joke on me or on Sammy? It didn’t seem plausible that Frank would take advantage of a brother Rat Packer because of the color of his skin. Besides, I had my own baggage concerning racism and prejudice.
When I was growing up, Oklahoma City was segregated—it was two cities in one. The only blacks I saw were the servants in our home and those in the rear of the bus when I stole away to watch movies after school. I never thought much about it; it was the norm. I didn’t shed tears over the plight of black Americans any more than I cried over the demise of American Indians. I did, however, have a sensitivity born of my own experience.
Between my junior and senior years at Casady Prep School, I accepted a summer scholarship to Presbyterian Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey. My sponsor was Professor Bayard Auchincloss, of the famous New England Auchincloss family, and my choirmaster was the first cousin of Ernest Hemingway.
Another student was Barbara Smith, who by coincidence was from Oklahoma City, where her father was the minister at the First Presbyterian Church. Barbara and I happily entered into a puppy-love relationship. When we returned to Oklahoma at summer’s end, her father wanted to meet me.
“Hey, that’s neat!” I thought. It was an indication of the seriousness of the relationship Barbara and I had. Her old man wanted to check me out, see if I was of the same stock as my father, Jerry, the proprietor of Jerome’s, Oklahoma City’s finest women’s clothing store.
I put my act together and duly went to see Barbara’s father, chock-full of charm and good manners. But our meeting was not what I expected. The Reverend Smith first told me how he had grown up in Philadelphia, where “Jews weren’t allowed to build.”
I stood listening to him, thinking, “Build what?” I had not the foggiest idea that he was talking about ethnic restrictions in white Anglo-Saxon Protestant neighborhoods.
“Bernstein,” he continued, “is a Jewish name.”
It was the first time I’d heard that revelation with a negative connotation. All I knew was that my family’s name was the only Bernstein in the phonebook. Reverend Smith wrapped up the conversation by inviting me to hear his sermon the following Sunday at his church.
I went. Barbara was up in the choir. She sang, her eyes pinned to me sitting alone in my pew. Then Reverend Smith began preaching: “Jews are a community within a community, and we as a Christian congregation should be nice to them.” As he continued, I began to feel more like a caged animal in a zoo than like a Jew in a Christian congregation. Before the sermon was finished, Barbara began to cry, until at last she escaped in tears from the choir gallery.
The Reverend Smith’s point was well taken by me. After the sermon he forbade Barbara and me from seeing each other. At sixteen, it was my first experience of prejudice, against me in particular because my name was Bernstein, and against Jews in general for no reason I could honestly discern.
Like Romeo and Juliet, Barbara and I didn’t follow her father’s injunction. We continued to see each other on the sly, but it was hard on Barbara; finally she succumbed to the stress and we broke up.
A few years later, when I was in college, my mother sent me a clipping about Reverend Smith’s appointment as chairman of a Christian-Jewish conference in Oklahoma City. The purpose of the conference was to foster Christian-Judaic unity and eliminate prejudice. To me, appointing the Reverend Smith to head up the conference was like making Adolph Hitler a rabbi. It was ludicrous, and I vowed to exorcize hypocrisy from my being.
I wrestled with the telegram chore Sinatra had given me. Then Peter called. “Jay, can you get me an extra key to my room?”
“I’m sure I can,” I told him.
“Did you send the telegram to Sammy?”
“Not yet.”
“Better send it before you see Frank again.”
Frank won out. I sent the telegram. My desire to ingratiate myself with the Chairman of the Board was too strong. Besides, I could call him Frank now. He had said so himself. I was making headway.
The next morning Sinatra cornered me in the lobby before he went to the set. “Did you get the melon and the chicken?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me know if he breaks the rules.” He was dead serious.
At two o’clock I was waiting on the tarmac at “Kanab International,” the name Dean had given to the two intersecting strips of hardtop. Sammy’s puddle jumper taxied to a stop.
It was no secret that Sammy was a little guy physically. What surprised me was that he was tiny. He was like a shrew darting about, radiating energy. He could hardly keep still, even as I approached and stuck out my hand. “I’m Jay Bernstein with Rogers & Cowan. Frank asked me to meet you.”
Sammy cocked his head, raised his sunglasses and looked at me with his one good eye. Then he lifted a finger in the air as if to give the moment pause, pulled a little notebook from his breast pocket and quickly scribbled a note. He handed it to me. It read: “Nice to meet you, Jay. I can’t speak for 24 hours.”
Obviously he had received the telegram. He grinned. I didn’t; I was too flabbergasted. Here were grown men, some of the most important figures in show business, playing children’s games in earnest. Finally I laughed. If Sammy was partaking, then I would, too.
We rode in silence to the Parry Lodge, Sammy’s bodyguard in the front seat, the rest of his entourage following in a second car. Sammy squiggled in his seat, occasionally dashing off a note and handing it to me. One read: “I can outdraw Frank, Dean and Peter combined.”
I didn’t understand. Sammy wrote another note: “Like in High Noon.”
“When I was a kid,” I told him, “I used to go home after the movies and act out the gunfights. I did the good guys and the bad guys!”
Sammy stabbed his chest and mouthed the words “Me, too! Me, too!”
He was a fast-draw artist, and he was looking forward to using his talent in Sergeants 3. The script didn’t have a fast-draw scene for his character, but Sinatra and Co. weren’t following the script anyway, a predisposition to innovation Sammy was aware of. Sammy’s character was a runaway slave with a bugle; unfortunately, it remained a runaway slave with a bugle.
Sammy followed Frank’s order, never once uttering a word. When he was momentarily still, he was like a stick of dynamite ready to explode. The wagon pulled up to the motel. He hopped out before it had come to a complete stop, heading for the lobby. I caught up with him and tugged his arm. Sammy stopped and looked at me quizzically.
I mimed Frank’s instructions as if we were two deaf mutes, shaking my head and pointing to the rear of the motel. Finally I got my senses back and said aloud, “Frank said you can’t go through the lobby. You have to go around to the back, where your room is.”
This was 1961; the civil-rights movement was incipient, not full-blown, and “coloreds,” whether they were stars are not, were usually not welcome in so-called “white hotels.” In fact, it was because of Sinatra that this time-honored segregation had been broken in Las Vegas, where Sammy and other black entertainers could now stay in the same hotels where they performed. Sammy looked at me and grinned. Then he jotted a note: “Do you have the room key?”
I nodded vigorously and mouthed the word “yes.” We took off, walking around the motel to the rear entrance. It was nuts; we were playing charades. Yet Sammy was all but dancing with excitement.
When we found his room I thought it was time to excuse myself. I knew what hors d’oeuvres were waiting inside, since I had choreographed their delivery. I gave Sammy his key and said, “I’ll see you later.”
Sammy wouldn’t have it. He mouthed, “No, no. Come in, come in.”
We entered. An odor of grease struck our nostrils. The place smelled like a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop. The watermelon, chicken wings and gizzards were on plates on the dresser. Sammy stared, and then tugged my arm for attention. He mouthed the words “That . . . son . . . of . . . a . . . bitch! Si-nah-tra!”
I got along with Sammy better than I did with the others, although we seldom communicated directly. It was more of a mutual commiseration. We shared the role of Frank’s whipping boys.
When we went to the set the next day, Sammy’s first, Frank told him, “You’re riding in the back with Bernstein, Charlie. It’s punishment for being two days late.”
Joey Bishop was not an outdoor person, and he complained constantly. He was a stand-up comic whose humor was sarcastic. Once, when a conversation drifted to Frank’s amorous achievements—the press had recently made hay out of his affair with long-legged dancer Juliet Prowse—Joey said, “When Frank dies, they should retire his zipper to the Smithsonian.”
Dean remained aloof, only appearing to be a consummate yes-man to Sinatra. Sergeants 3 was a continual news story because it was the second Rat Pack movie with all five members in the cast. The press came to Kanab in droves, and it was my responsibility to set up interviews. Every time I asked Dean if he could be on hand, he answered, “When and where, pally?”
“Ten o’clock tomorrow morning in the lobby.”
“I’ll be there, pally.”
Not once did he show up. After a while, I stopped asking him.
From a distance, however, I admired Dean. He wasn’t communicative, but his taciturnity seemed derived from a sense of independence. I thought most of Frank’s pranks were foolish; Dean did also. He didn’t kiss ass with anyone; as a consequence nobody ribbed him.
Frank and Peter had the strongest bond, probably because of Peter’s relationship with President Kennedy, whom Frank idolized. Sergeants 3 was filmed a few months before Kennedy snubbed Frank by staying at Republican Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs, instead of at Frank’s place, a breach that ended the Sinatra-Lawford friendship. I got on with Peter, but I never felt close to him. In Frank’s absence, he was in his own world.
Every chance I got, I called Diane, my girlfriend back home. During the day I got her service; at night she did not answer. I was more than suspicious; I was angry, antsy and horny. The Rat Pack apparently shared my mood because Frank decided to fly them to Vegas the second weekend. I was hoping they would ask me to go with them; when they didn’t, I rented a car and drove all night to Los Angeles, smack through Las Vegas, five hundred grueling miles. It was stupid, but nature was calling.
It was evening when I arrived at Diane’s apartment. I was so eager to get there that I didn’t stop to buy cigarettes. I knocked; she didn’t answer. I had a key, so I went in. She was in the shower. I didn’t say anything. I took off my clothes and got in the shower. She was startled. “My God, Jay! What are you doing here? You scared me to death!”
I didn’t answer; I just did my thing. By the time we were finished, the hot water was cold. We got out of the shower, and I put my clothes back on while she was toweling off. I said, “I’m out of here. I’ve got to get back to Kanab. They don’t know I’m gone.”
“Are you crazy? You came all that way just for—”
I kissed her again. When I finished, she began combing out her hair. “I’ve been calling every day,” I said. “Why haven’t you answered or returned my messages?”
“I’ve been soooo busy, Jay,” she said. “When I come home from the set, I’m just beat. I’ve been turning the ringer off.”
“Would you turn it back on for me?”
“I promise.”
I kissed her again. She picked up a hairdryer and switched it on. I left, but as I was walking down the corridor I remembered the carton of cigarettes on top of her refrigerator. I went back, unlocked the door and went to the kitchen.
I hurriedly opened a pack and lighted a cigarette on the gas range. The front door opened. I froze. A handsome actor, whom I recognized from a television series, entered and walked by the kitchen door on his way to the bathroom. He did not see me. His mind was focused on something else. After a moment the hairdryer stopped.
“Darling!” I heard Diane say coolly. “You’re early!”
I sneaked out the front door. I never called Diane McBain again.
Back in Kanab I went to the set every day. I was learning, listening and watching. I did gofer work for Frank. The other members of the Pack never asked me to do anything. The only one I really talked to was Sammy. He used me as a valve to release his energy.
The action at the motel was in Frank’s suite. I wasn’t there much, but when I was invited I tried to act as cool as the others. Frank was never alone. Fame doesn’t eliminate insecurity, and Frank, like the others, had his entourage of backslappers, a coterie that constantly told him how great he was.
One night he was planning another weekender to Vegas, ordering Peter to call this person, Sammy that one. Dean sat drinking a cocktail, paying little attention. Factotums were hopping about trying to act important. I don’t remember Joey Bishop being there; I hardly remember Joey Bishop being anywhere, except during the rides to the set.
Someone called Frank’s pilot and told him to rev up the engines. I kept waiting to be invited; when I wasn’t, I went to my room disappointed. I had done my best to ingratiate myself with Sinatra, and failed. He was hot and cold, kind and thoughtful one moment, frigidly inconsiderate the next. Stardom had given him the rare and royal authority to answer to no one.
Half an hour later my telephone rang. It was Peter. “If you’re going to Vegas with us, you better get with it. Frank’s not holding the plane much longer.”
I got with it. For the next thirty-six hours, I was going to play follow-the-leader. So was everybody else.
First stop in Vegas was the Sands Hotel, Jack Entratter’s gambling emporium, where the Rat Pack had been born and where Frank owned 6 percent of the action. He was king there; indeed, he was king everywhere. In those days Sinatra was the personification of Vegas. Wherever he went, the high rollers followed; so too did Dean, Sammy, Peter and, of course, Jay Bernstein, the mascot kid. When Frank snapped his fingers, everybody followed his lead like puppies after their mother. I felt privileged to be part of his court.
After twelve hours of nonstop partying, I began to think I was hallucinating. The drug was Jack Daniels. We had another twenty-four hours to go. Nobody slept, at least in the conventional sense. Dean or Peter might take off to his room with a showgirl, but he would be back in the fold in an hour. Sammy, still in the throes of love for Mai Britt, whom he had married three months earlier, was the only one who stayed aloof. Not that he didn’t flirt. He had great lines for the girls. We were at a craps table when a petite young beauty edged between us. Sammy took one look at her smiling face and said, “Hon, I’ve got cuff links bigger than you!”
It was an existential weekend, a sort of do what Frank wants to do . . . or die! Keeping up with him was debilitating to body and soul. Frank was energized by Vegas, the casino sounds, the swirl of people, the gawkers and adulators, the music. Life in Kanab was snail-like by comparison, a vacation for superannuated geeks trying their best to suppress the inevitable wheeze of death rattles.
It was four in the morning and I was zombified. Why weren’t the others? They were not imbibing any less than I was. Then it came to me like a biblical revelation. Women were literally throwing themselves at them—at Frank first, of course, and then down the pecking order. It made no difference that I was at the bottom of the ladder; the ratio was fifty women to one, take your pick. Even Frank would sometimes be gone for an hour. Then I got it; it was a face-saving game. The bastards weren’t fucking; they were napping! And even if they were fucking, they were spending more time napping.
By dusk I was on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion, or maybe just exhaust, because my breath smelled like napalm smoke. I had to get out of there, to my room, bed. Frank hadn’t given me the time of day for hours anyway. I figured no one would miss me, and if anyone did, he wouldn’t remember it the next day, if the next day came. I slipped away, went upstairs in an elevator and bounced off the walls until I found my room. I flopped down on my bed, asleep in thirty seconds.
My telephone woke me. It was Peter. “Frank asked me where you were. He doesn’t like it when a guest skips his party, unless of course it’s to satisfy a certain need.”
“She just left,” I lied. “I’ll be downstairs in five.”
“Hurry, because we’re going up the road.”
I was raised from the dead, touched by the hand of Sinatra. “Frank asked where you were.” Wow! He had hardly acknowledged my presence, but that he had noticed my absence galvanized me. I was more than a peripheral figure now; I was part of the group, a member of the ensemble.
Mix booze and gambling and you get madness. Throw in some beautiful girls and you get macho madness, insanity at its worst. When the plane lifted off at McCarran Field in Vegas late Sunday afternoon, our passenger list had doubled. We had eight beautiful chorus girls for the return flight, “chorus” being a title that gave some of them undeserved status. The party atmosphere had not diminished a thermal unit; rather, it was reaching a fever pitch of lecherous molecular frenzy. Inhibitions were not at low ebb; they were gone. As the plane ascended into the clouds, the Pack descended into a hellish inferno of animal culture, no different from a bunch of rutting, ravenous wolves. Fornication was perversely public. Booze seemed not to have waylaid anyone’s prowess. For me it was glorious madness.
A naked showgirl was sitting on Frank’s lap, her legs parted over his thighs. He suddenly expended himself with a groan that woke the gods and made the sound of the engines a murmur. Everybody looked. He edged the disheveled girl into the aisle and with an imperial wave directed her to another seat. Holding her clothes against her naked body, she seemed as satisfied as he. Frank pulled up his trousers and settled in his seat. “George!” he called.
George Jacobs trotted forth. “Yes, boss?”
“Get me a couple of hardboiled eggs.”
“You bet,” answered George. He headed for the galley.
What possessed Frank to want two hardboiled eggs after a roll in the clouds, I never knew. But the yolk was about to hit the fans of both props at 12,000 feet. George brought the eggs. Frank cracked one hard on the top of his diamond ring. Slurp! White and yellow gook poured forth on his hand, down his shirt and on his lap. The egg was raw.
An infinitely fleeting moment of nothingness followed. Frank looked at the ooze of egg; George looked at the ooze of egg. Next Frank looked at George; George looked at Frank. Then Frank exploded with the lightning flash of an atom bomb in the desert. He wasn’t just angry—he was insane. Booze had taken over. He leaped out of his seat like a jack-in-the-box, spun George 180 degrees, wrapped his arms around the man’s shoulders and started shoving him down the aisle, screaming obscenities. “You sonuvabitch, you uncouth bastard! You’re out of here! Somebody open the fuckin’ door!”
Most of us sobered abruptly into glassy-eyed statues, but someone—I don’t remember who, but he was a sycophant beyond extreme—actually tried to unlock the door, such was Frank’s power of command. George was squirming like a trapped animal; Frank was pushing and shoving and screaming. “Open the fucking door! This stupid motherfucker’s outta here!”
Collectively we were so stunned at the unreality of what was happening, by the nightmarish nature of Frank’s insanity, that had the door actually opened we would have watched impassively as Frank shoved George to his death. We were frozen in place, like wax figures in a museum tableau—except for Dean.
Suddenly he was in the aisle blocking Frank’s path, blocking George’s. He was an all-American linebacker. The opposing team was on the goal line, inches from paydirt with time running out, but no one was going through the hole Dean was defending. No one.
“Outta my way, Dino!” screamed Frank. “I’m throwing this motherfucker outta here!”
Dean was calm but determined. “You’re not throwing anybody out, Frank.”
“Get outta my way! Somebody open the fuckin’ door!”
Dean planted his feet and with a powerful surge shoved Frank and George down the aisle. “Help me part them!” he cried.
We did, suddenly catapulted from the grip of our comas. The girls were screaming. Dean and Killer Gray wrestled George from Frank’s grasp, separated them, heaved Frank into a seat and held him down as someone fastened his seat belt. It was done then, finished. Frank melted into a blob, his hands trembling. For a few moments Dean and Killer hovered over him like hawks; then they retreated to their seats. The party was over. For the rest of the flight all we could hear was the roar of the engines.
No one said anything on the ride from the airport to the lodge. No one said anything in the lobby. Most of them just parted and went their separate ways. Sammy, seeing that I was still in a state of shock, gestured for me to follow him to his room. When we got there, he closed the door and said, “That’s just Frank’s way. Get used to it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Under all that bravado, he’s a good guy,” Sammy continued.
Suddenly I felt a bond with Sammy. He was trying to soothe my feelings. “You know, Sammy. We’re alike, sort of.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, the prejudice and all. You’re a Negro and I’m a Jew.”
He laughed under his breath. “Jay, the only time we’re alike is when we look in a mirror at midnight and the electricity is off.”
The dailies were shown nightly in the basement of Kanab High School. Few people went, except Koch, Sturges, his assistants and the camera crew. The only member of the Pack who had an interest in seeing what had been shot was Sammy. A couple of times he asked me to go with him. Later, as we walked back to the lodge, Sammy would critique his performance.
“I could have done better in that scene had Frank let Sturges do another take.”
I wanted to say, “Sammy, this isn’t Shakespeare. It’s a farce of the old West, a comedy.” But I didn’t.
As the production neared its end, Frank, in one of his generous public-relations gestures, ordered a rough cut of the movie. He then invited the citizens of Kanab to see the picture in the makeshift screening room at the school. Joining the Pack as they walked over from the motel, I caught up with Frank. “Is it okay if I see the rough cut?”
Frank stopped, looked at me and said, “I think . . . not yet.”
It was a low blow. My feelings were hurt, which was Frank’s intention. Had I kept my mouth shut, no one would have stopped me from going. As the picture’s assistant publicist, it was not only my right but also my duty to attend the screening. I was simply being courteous with my question, trying to make conversation. Now I felt insulted. I stopped dead in my tracks. I shrank from five-eleven to four-ten, from four-ten to three-three, and kept shrinking until I was a pool of jelly. Frank walked on. I stood there as the others passed, then went to my room to wallow in my misery.
The next morning Frank called me. “Meet me in front of the motel in five minutes.”
I went outside. Frank was waiting alone behind the wheel of one of the station wagons. “Get in,” he said.
We drove silently to the home of one of the Parry brothers, who owned the motel. It was a ranch-style house on the outskirts of Kanab. No one was home, but Frank entered anyway. I followed him. A baby-grand piano was in the living room with a big, framed photograph of Ava Gardner leaning on its music stand. Ava, as the world knew, had been the love of Frank’s life.
“Sit down,” said Frank.
I sat in an overstuffed chair. Frank sat down at the piano and began to play and sing, partly to Ava, partly to me. He sang for two hours. It was his way of apologizing for blackballing me from the rough-cut screening without having to say the words “I apologize.” Frank never apologized to anyone.
It was a moment to remember, those two hours. I felt privileged, but when we returned to the lodge I had not forgiven Frank for anything. I hated the bastard. If it took the rest of my life, I would get back at Frank Sinatra.
A few days later we wrapped location filming and moved back to Los Angeles.