I glanced past him into the house. On the wall there were two pictures. One was of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The other was of Jack Kennedy. Yes, I said. Some water would be fine.
NEW YORK,
November 28, 1988
SINATRA
I.
One rainy evening in the winter of 1974, I was home alone when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, looking out at the wet street, and heard one of the most familiar voices of the century. It was Frank Sinatra.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading a book,” I said.
“Read it tomorrow. We’re at Jilly’s. Come on over.”
He hung up. I put the book down. I didn’t know Sinatra well, but despite all the rotten things I’d read about him, I liked him a lot and was sometimes touched by him. We’d met through Shirley MacLaine, who went back a long time with Sinatra. In 1958 Sinatra put her in Some Came Running, expanded her part to fit her talents, and made her a movie star. When they occasionally met, it was clear to me that Sinatra admired her relentless honesty, loved her in some complicated way, and was, like me, a little afraid of her.
I took a cab to Jilly’s, a seedy time warp of a saloon at the Eighth Avenue end of 52nd Street. The long, dark bar was packed with the junior varsity of the mob; of all the Sinatra groupies, they were the most laughable. They were planted at the bar like blue-haired statues, gulping Jack Daniel’s, occasionally glancing into the back room. A maitre d’ in a shiny tuxedo stood beside a red velvet rope that separated the back room from the Junior Apalachin conference at the bar.
“Yes, sir?” the maitre d’ said.
“Mr. Sinatra,” I said. “He’s expecting me.”
He turned nervously, his eyes moving past the empty tables at the booths in the left-hand corner against the wall. Jilly Rizzo looked up from a booth and nodded, and I was let through. “ ‘Ey, Petey babe,” Jilly said, coming around a table with his right hand out. Jilly has one glass eye, which gives him a perpetually blurry look. “Hey, Frank,” he said, “look who’s here.”
“Hey, Peter, grab a seat!” Sinatra said brightly, half rising from the booth and shaking hands. He moved clumsily, a newly heavy man who hadn’t learned yet to carry the extra weight with grace; he seemed swollen, rather than sleek. But the Sinatra face was — and is — an extraordinary assemblage. He has never been conventionally handsome: There are no clean planes, too many knobs of bone, scars from the forceps delivery he endured at birth. But the smile is open, easy, insouciant. And his blue eyes are the true focal point of the face. In the brief time I’d known him, I’d seen the eyes so disarmingly open that you felt you could peer all the way through them into every secret recess of the man; at other times they were cloudy with indifference, and when chilled by anger or resentment, they could become as opaque as cold-rolled steel.
“You eat yet?” he asked. “Well, then have a drink.”
As always, there was a group with him, squashed into the worn Leatherette booths or on chairs against tables. They had the back room to themselves and were eating chop suey and watching a Jets game on a TV set. Sinatra introduced Pat Henry, the comic who sometimes opens for him; Roone Arledge of ABC; Don Costa, one of Sinatra’s favorite arrangers; a few other men; and some young women. Sinatra was with a thin blond model in a black dress. He didn’t introduce her.
The conversation stopped for the introductions, then started again. Sinatra leaned over, his eyes shifting to the TV screen, where Joe Namath was being shoved around.
“I don’t get this team,” he said. “They got the best arm in football and they won’t give him any protection. Ah, shit!” Namath was on his back and getting up very slowly. “Oh, man. That ain’t right!”
They cut to a commercial, and Sinatra lit a Marlboro and sipped a vodka. His eyes drifted to the bar. “Jesus, there’s about 43 indictments right at the bar,” he said loudly.
“Present company excluded,” Pat Henry said, and everybody laughed.
“It better be,” Sinatra said, and they all laughed again. The blonde smiled in a chilly way. The game was back on again, and Sinatra stared at the TV set but wasn’t really watching the game. Then the game ended, and Jilly switched off the set. There was more talk and more drinking, and slowly the others began to leave.
“Hell, let’s go,” Sinatra said. He said something to Jilly, and then he and the blonde and I walked out. A photographer and a middle-aged autograph freak were waiting under the tattered awning.
“Do you mind, Mr. Sinatra?” the photographer asked.
“No, go ahead,” he said. The flashbulbs popped. The blonde smiled. So did Sinatra. “Thanks for asking.”
Then he signed the woman’s autograph book. She had skin like grimy ivory, and sad brown eyes. “Thanks, dear,” Sinatra said. We all got into the waiting limousine and drove down the rainy street, heading east.
“What do you think they do with those autographs?” he said. “Sell them? To who? Trade them? For what? How does it go? Two Elvis Presleys for one Frank Sinatra? Two Frank Sinatras for one Paul McCartney? I don’t get it. I never did.”
We drove awhile in silence. Then the chauffeur turned right on a street in the Sixties and pulled over to the curb. Sinatra and the blonde got out. He took her into the brightly lit vestibule. He waited for her to find a key, tapped her lightly on the elbow, and came back to the limo.
“You have to go home?”
“No.”
He leaned forward to the driver. “Just drive around awhile.”
“Yes sir.”
And so for more than an hour, on this rainy night in New York, we drove around the empty streets. Sinatra talked about Lennon and McCartney as songwriters (“That ‘Yesterday’ is the best song written in 30 years”) and George Harrison (“His ‘Something’ is a beauty”), prizefighters (“Sugar Ray was the best I ever saw”) and writers (“Murray Kempton is the best, isn’t he? And I always loved Jimmy Cannon”). It wasn’t an interview; Frank Sinatra just wanted to talk, in a city far from the bright scorched exile of Palm Springs.
“It’s sure changed, this town,” he said. “When I first came across that river, this was the greatest city in the whole goddamned world. It was like a big, beautiful lady. It’s like a busted-down hooker now.”
“Ah, well,” I said. “Babe Ruth doesn’t play for the Yankees anymore.”
“And the Paramount’s an office building,” he said. “Stop. I’m gonna cry.”
He laughed and settled back. We were crossing 86th Street now, heading for the park.
“You think some people are smart, and they turn out dumb,” Sinatra said. “You think they’re straight, they turn out crooked.” This was, of course, the Watergate winter; the year before, Sinatra sat in an honored place at the second inauguration of Richard Nixon. “You like people, and they die on you. I go to too many goddamned funerals these days. And women,” he said, exhaling, and chuckling again, “I don’t know what the hell to make of them. Do you?”
“Every day I know less,” I said.
“Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Maybe all that happens is you get older and you know less.”
After a while, the limousine pulled up in front of the Waldorf, where Sinatra has an apartment. He told the driver to take me home.
“Stay in touch,” he said, and got out, walking fast, his head down, his step jaunty, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. I remember thinking that it was a desperately lonely life for a man who was a legend.