“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they are going to feel all day.”
Frank Sinatra began as a singer, dubbed “the Voice” for his smooth inflections and distinctive phrasing. After fronting bands for Tommy Dorsey and Harry James, he embarked on a solo career in the early 1940s, quickly acquiring the sort of rabid teenage fan base that later coalesced around Elvis Presley and the Beatles. By the end of the decade, Sinatra had released a wildly successful solo record, The Voice of Frank Sinatra (1946), launched a weekly radio show, and teamed with Gene Kelly for three musicals: Anchors Aweigh (1945), Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), and On the Town (also 1949). Two years later, he struggled with hemorrhaging vocal chords and mentions in House Un-American Activities hearings. While attempting a singing comeback in Vegas, he accepted a paltry (by his standards) $8,000 fee to play Maggio in From Here to Eternity (1953), a part he desperately wanted. Eternity proved to be a major turning point, earning him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and laying the groundwork for such starring roles as The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Despite inspired collaborations with Count Basie and Antonio Carlos Jobim, his record sales flattened as rock ‘n’ roll became the dominant sound of the sixties. Still, Sinatra would spend the rest of his life as an American icon. Becoming part owner of the Sands hotel and casino in Las Vegas, he earned $100,000 each week he performed. Sinatra announced his retirement in 1971 but continued to make sporadic appearances all the way up to his eightieth birthday, when he performed for the last time at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
HOW DID SINATRA KNOW where to find her? No one bothered to ask. They were at the Villa Capri: Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Robert Mitchum, Lee Marvin, screenwriter Eddie Anhalt. Everyone but DiMaggio was out for yet another night of revelry during the production of the film Not as a Stranger. DiMaggio just had the misfortune of crossing their path—and he hadn’t been feeling that well to begin with.
DiMaggio’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe was basically over, everyone knew that. All he wanted to do was talk to her, he said. He’d spent days tracking her down, to no avail. It was tearing him apart. So Sinatra, DiMaggio’s loyal friend, suggested that he and the rest of the guys help him find her. In fact, Sinatra happened to know where Monroe was right at that moment.
But first let’s step back and acknowledge how astonishing it was that Stanley Kramer, director and producer of Not as a Stranger, had found it advisable to assemble this cast in the first place. In addition to Sinatra, Mitchum, and Marvin, he’d also hired character actors Broderick Crawford and Lon Chaney, Jr. It was the U.S. Olympic Dream Team of boozing—and much like their future basketball counterparts, they were unstoppable. The set was a free-for-all. Which is to say that a scheme like the one they were now hatching—the “Wrong Door Raid,” the press would later call it—was definitely in their wheelhouse.
It took place the evening of November 5, 1954. Two years later it was aired out in court. DiMaggio never testified. Sinatra—who some believe perjured himself on the stand—insisted he stayed in his car, and that DiMaggio and two private investigators were the only ones directly involved. He didn’t mention anyone else by name. Only Eddie Anhalt would speak publically about the incident, decades later, when all the other participants were dead. Anhalt said it went down like this:
After a few rounds at the Villa Capri, everyone present agreed to take DiMaggio to the apartment building where Sinatra said Monroe was hiding out. Apartment 3A. Sinatra said that’s where they’d find her. What if she refused to answer the door, DiMaggio asked? Then they’d knock it down, Marvin replied. The only question now, Whom could they get to knock it down?
Sinatra, for one, was not a big man, at least in the conventional sense. When his one-time wife Ava Gardner was asked why she was with a one-hundred-nineteen-pound weakling, she remarked that “nineteen pounds is cock.” However impressive that might be, it wasn’t going to knock down a door. Soon all eyes turned to Mitchum. Not a small man, Mitch. But Mitch suggested Broderick Crawford—that Old Brod was big enough to do it.
By now the gang was drunk enough that the plan seemed foolproof. So they got in their cars, picked up Crawford at the Formosa (his regular hangout), and drove off to find Monroe.
Everyone staggered out of the car and up to the door of Apartment 3A. Wham, wham—Crawford kicked the door down just as he’d been asked to. And everyone piled in. Only Monroe wasn’t there. In her place, they found a terrified fifty-year-old woman by the name of Florence Kotz—the apartment’s actual tenant. Something along the lines of “oh shit” was collectively uttered, as Kotz grabbed her phone and called the police. By the time the law arrived, everyone was long gone.
Sinatra said that’s where they’d find [Marilyn]. What if she refused to answer the door, DiMaggio asked? Then they’d knock it down, Marvin replied. The only question now, whom could they get to knock it down?
Monroe, it turned out, was staying at the apartment house just next door.
“It was funny how Sinatra knew all this,” Anhalt said. “Later I found out he was balling Marilyn himself, but we didn’t think of that at the time.”
In 1956, while living on a ranch outside Reno, Nevada (he was there establishing residency requirements to obtain a divorce), Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Arthur Miller made the acquaintance of some old cowboys so desperate for money that they’d been reduced to capturing wild mustangs to sell to dog-food companies. A year later, divorced and in the full bloom of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe, Miller wrote about the cowboys for a short story eventually published in Esquire. And so began one of the most infamous productions in the history of American cinema—a film followed by the death of the two Hollywood icons who starred in it.
The principal cast was small but sensational: Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter. The peerless John Huston would direct. Shooting on location in the Nevada desert was originally slated for March 3, 1960 (before the intense summer heat kicked in), but delays and prior commitments by Gable and Monroe pushed the start date to mid-July. By then, the desert was unbearable. Daytime temperatures could reach as high as 120° F. Dust was inescapable, requiring constant cleaning of camera lenses and generally making everyone uncomfortable. But that was nothing compared to the lack of comfort Monroe was creating.
Miller had written the script largely as a gift to Monroe, but by the time filming finally began, their marriage was in shambles. Monroe showed up having just completed Let’s Make Love, during which she’d done just that with her costar, Yves Montand, and was now demanding that Montand be given a part in The Misfits. (She was eventually convinced that, yes, the request was outrageous.) For his part, Miller would meet Austrian photographer Inge Morath on the set and begin a relationship that would last the next forty years. Added to this, the problems between Monroe and Miller were not so subtly working themselves into the story, which Miller was rewriting on the fly, incorporating their private conversations as dialogue, almost taunting his wife.
Monroe showed up in Nevada with an entourage of her own personal hairdresser, body cosmetician, secretary, masseur, makeup artists, and an acting coach (Paula Strasberg). Gable initially referred to her as a “self-indulgent twat.” Already heavily addicted to pills, she found a doctor willing to prescribe her three hundred milligrams of Nembutal—three times the maximum dosage. The night before her first scene with Gable, whom she’d idolized as a girl, she nervously popped the barbiturates like candy, nearly overdosing. She needed several hours to revive the next morning, and eventually her physical condition deteriorated to the point where she remained in her trailer for days at a time and finally had to be flown back to Los Angeles for a week to detox.
But Monroe wasn’t the only one in poor health. Clift was losing his sight to cataracts and had his own on-set vices, carrying around a hip flask with a powerful combination of orange juice, vodka, and downers. To hear Monroe say it, “He’s the only person I know who’s in worse shape than I am.” As for Gable—whose contract called for a salary of $750,000, ten percent of the gross, and weekly overtime payments of $48,000 if he was asked to work anything more than a nine-to-five day—he failed his preproduction physical and was told to give up smoking and drinking for good. (He followed this advice just long enough to pass a second exam.) Nearly sixty, Gable was also doing his own stunts; for one scene, he was dragged behind a truck traveling thirty-five miles an hour.
By the time production finally wrapped, The Misfits had gone forty days over schedule and a half-million dollars over budget. (There were rumors that the budget overrun was partly due to Huston’s incessant gambling.) Two days after the final scene was shot between Gable and Monroe, Gable suffered a heart attack. Ten days later, he died. The Misfits was released on what would have been his sixtieth birthday, February 1, 1961.
Monroe, whose chaotic behavior caused Gable so much stress that she was blamed in some circles for his passing, attended the premiere a week before checking into a psychiatric ward. A year and a half later, she, too, died. The Misfits was her final completed picture. And Clift died five years later, having made only three more films. The night of his death, his secretary had asked him if he wanted to watch The Misfits on television. His response stands as his final words: “Absolutely not.”
FOUNDED IN 1972 BY ROXY Theatre owners Lou Adler and Elmer Valentine (the latter of whom also owned the Whisky a Go Go), the Rainbow occupies a lot that once belonged to Villa Nova, an Italian restaurant famous as the site where Vincente Minnelli asked Judy Garland to marry him, and where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio had their first date. Its ties to the glamour of old Hollywood, however, end there.
The Strip had started to skew sleazy by the late 1960s, and while that didn’t suit the image of Villa Nova (which reopened in Newport Beach), it fit the Rainbow like a glove. A grand opening party in honor of Elton John established the grill as a primary haunt of just about every major rock star of the time, including John Lennon and Led Zeppelin. (The Rainbow, it should be noted, is also one of two places rumored to have served John Belushi his last meal—Dan Tana’s is the other.)
By the mid-eighties, the Strip had become ground zero for hair-metal: Members of Poison and Mötley Crüe were often seen at the bar; Guns N’ Roses featured it in three separate videos. (And although it’d be sacrilege to lump him in with the lipstick-and-spandex crowd, it should be noted that Motörhead’s lead singer and bassist, Lemmy Kilmister, was downing Jack and Coke there as long as any of them.)
Today, with hair-metal long dead, the Rainbow feels less like the hottest bar in town and more like a museum that serves steak.
