"George, can't you see I'm in the middle of a game?"
"Yeah, sure, but it's a hell of a deal."
"You've seen this house?"
"Yeah, it's a beauty."
"Okay, if it's so great, buy it."
I write a check for thirty thousand, at least that's what they told me, because I forgot all about it a minute after it happened.
A few months later, Jane went to the desert to look at houses. We rented every winter. She found something she liked, then called our accountant to get money for the deposit.
"Why are you renting?" he asked her. "Jerry owns a house in Palm Springs."
She called me in a rage: "What the hell is going on? The accountant tells me you own a house in Palm Springs. How dare you! You have a girl set up down there? How dare you do this to me!"
I said, "What? No, no. That's crazy, absolute bullshit, not true. I own nothing in the desert."
I called the accountant. "What is this craziness?" I asked him. "You're telling Jane I own a house in Palm Springs? What's wrong with you?"
"But you do, Jerry."
"Do what?"
"You do own a house in Palm Springs."
"I do not. You're out of your mind."
"Jerry, you do. You bought it last season."
And when he said this, I had a fuzzy recollection of the card game, George Hamilton, and the rest. So we got the keys, went down, and checked it out. And you know what? George Hamilton was right. It was terrific, a sweet little house with a pool and a view of the hills. We stayed there for twenty years.
Wherever you went with Sinatra, you were surrounded-by fans, by politicians, by celebrities, and yes, by mobsters. A lot has been made of this, but there was nothing much to it. If you were in show business, there really was no avoiding the Mafia. They were in the music industry, operated the nightclubs. They loved Frank, but they had no real place in his life. They came around for the same reason everyone else came around: because it was fun to be around Sinatra. The fact is, as much as these guys loved Sinatra, they loved Dino more. He was their guy, big and handsome and charming as hell. When it came to Dean, women would lie down and open their legs. It wasn't even a question of, "Should I?" "Maybe it's wrong?" They just did it. It was his manner, his way. He was Peck's bad boy. The gangsters swarmed around him. He worked as a blackjack dealer in the Beverly Hills Club in Cincinnati. Dean's whole philosophy was that everybody on the other side of the table is a sucker. Whoever he was dealing to was by definition a sucker. And when he got on stage, everybody in the audience was a sucker, too. That's why he sang the way he did, cocky and nonchalant-because he was singing to the suckers. He couldn't believe people actually paid to hear him.
Most of that mob stuff was just rumor or misunderstandings. I will tell you a story:
In the late seventies, I had a great idea for a show. Sinatra performing with Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald. We would open on Broadway, then tour. We went through rehearsals, built sets, all the rest. Then, just before we were to open, word came down: The musicians are going to strike. The theater district will go dark. Did Sinatra care? Of course not. To him, it meant another night at 21. But for me, it was a disaster. I had a lot of my own money in the show. I would lose it all. I went around like a madman, meeting officials and union reps, trying to explain: Look, we're not a Broadway show. We're a concert that is opening in a theater on Broadway. There's a difference. We should get an exemption from the strike.
After twenty hours of this, I was sitting in a room outside the office of the union boss. I was spent, beat, wiped out, exhausted, undone, about to give it up. Just then, the door opens and out comes a woman, all done up, legs from here to here. She says, "Jerry? Jerry Weintraub?"
Uh-huh?
"Don't you recognize me, Jerry? I went to school with you. P.S. 70 in the Bronx."
"Oh, yeah," I say. "Of course, wow, you look fantastic!"
"I wish I could say the same about you. You're a mess. What's wrong?"
So I tell her the whole story-the show, the strike, how the show should not be part of the strike, and how a lot of the money in the show belongs to me, her friend from P.S. 70, Jerry Weintraub.
She takes me into the office of the union boss. He's not there. It's just me and her. She picks up the phone, makes a call. She gets the boss on the line. I can picture him, floating in his pool in Westchester or something, his wife and kids all around, his city-side honey suddenly ringing on the phone.
"I know you said don't call here, but I am sitting with an old friend from the Bronx, Jerry Weintraub, and what is happening to him and his show is just not fair… He needs an exemption… So I'm just gonna sign your name."
Which is how I walked out with that magic piece of paper. The next day, the story was all over the tabloids: Look what Frank Sinatra has pulled off with his mob connections.
Sinatra was not without flaws. He was a human being, after all. He had his problems and insecurities like the rest of us. You had to monitor his mood. He was usually happy Rat Pack Sinatra, but sometimes he fell into a funk. You never really knew what you were going to get. Now and then, he suffered bleak, dark, low-down moods-you had to throw him a rope and haul him back to the surface. If you really cared about him-and I loved the guy, it should be obvious-you had to be prepared, on occasion, to pull him out of the hole.
So here's a story:
One day, I was at home, early in the morning, reading the paper, when the phone rang. It was Frank. Francis. He sounded down. He was calling from Vegas. It was 9:00 A.M. there. He had a regular gig at Caesars and was staying in a suite on top of the hotel. He never went to sleep before 6:00 or 7:00 A.M., which meant he had been up all night, drinking and brooding on the roof of the hotel, where he had his own swimming pool. Could I hear all this in his voice over the phone? Yes. My job is reading people, keeping them level, and, when necessary, hip-checking them back onto the sunlit track.
"You sound terrible," I said. "What's wrong?"
"Depressed, Jerry," he said. "Depressed."
"Why? What's going on?"
"I can't do it anymore," he said. "The same thing, every day and night, going down to that same theater and singing the same songs to the same crowds, 'Fly Me to the Moon,' 'Chicago,' I just don't care."
What was Frank? Sixty? Sixty-five? No, younger. Late fifties, but he seemed old to me, a man with a lifetime behind him. It was 1974. I was a kid. It was just the beginning. I got on a plane for Vegas that afternoon, took a cab to Caesars, sat on the roof, staring at the heat shimmers dancing over the flats. Frank talked. He had a drink in one hand, a smoke in the other, double fisted, his voice full of fatigue, but his eyes sparkled. He told me how unhappy he was, bored of this whole business of night after night and song after song.
"Maybe I need a rest," he said.
"It's not a rest you need," I told him. "It's a new hill to climb."
This was Frank's nature. He was at his best when he was battling, fighting, struggling against all those fools who told him he had bitten off too much, gone too far. "You're bored," I explained. "You need a challenge."