BiographyGeorge Jacobs had been Frank Sinatra's valet and trusted friend for 15 years when Mia Farrow pulled him on to the dance-floor of a Beverly Hills disco. He went uneasily; even though she and "Mr S", as Jacobs called him, were by then divorcing. As they danced, a paparazzo was at the ready with his camera.
When he returned home to Sinatra's compound in Palm Springs, his key would not fit the gate. There was a letter from his employer's lawyer: he had been dismissed without notice or severance pay. Not only had the good times ceased to roll, Jacobs was suddenly a non-person. He became an outcast in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs. Even Mia Farrow, so he claims, crossed the street at his approach. This piece of snubbery, I take leave to doubt. To enter a personal note, I was and still am a friend of hers, and have never seen a vestige of her reputed flower-child flakiness.
Probably Sinatra thought what nobody else did; that Farrow was sending a public insult his way by cavorting publicly with the hired help. Abe Lincoln may have freed the slaves, but when the chips were down and the water-melon eaten they were still expected to say "Yassa, boss". He had partied, Jacobs says, with the kings and queens of the planet, movie stars, record stars, sports stars, princes, presidents, gangsters and goddesses. Without irony, one might say that he led a sheltered life.
Jacobs's mother was half-Creole, half-Jewish; the rest was black. He joined the navy, worked as a gardener and a waiter and was then hired as a dogsbody and gofer by a showbiz agent named Irving Lazar, known as "Swifty". Humphrey Bogart had given him the nickname because he hustled at the speed of light. Lazar was a mean one; he told Jacobs that blacks lacked an enzyme that made them able to digest sturgeon roe; it meant that he could safely send Jacobs to buy caviar.
Mr S stole Jacobs from Lazar. A Sinatra hatchet-woman simply gave him a set of keys and said: "You're working for us now." That was life: steal money, and you were dead; steal people, and it was no worse than taking a face-cloth from the Ritz-Carlton. Jacobs became a kind of black Jeeves, although Jeeves never drove Bertie Wooster's hookers home in the small hours and paid them off as if binning the empties. He fetched and carried and kept his mouth shut. Once, he even watched over Garbo and Dietrich while both of them, as naked as jay-birds, kissed and tongued each other in a swimming-pool. Well, as the saying goes, somebody had to do it.
When Jacobs went to work for Mr S, times were bad. The star's estranged second wife, Ava Gardner, had refused to return to him. He moped like a teenager, and it was an infatuation that never stopped. His career seemed to be on the skids. He wanted the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, but Eli Wallach was the front-runner; when he not only beat Wallach but won a best supporting actor Oscar, he set his heart on what became the Brando part in On the Waterfront.
When thwarted, his rages were terrible, as in the scene in Citizen Kane when the mogul, dumped by yet another wife, reduces her room to matchwood. Orson Welles could have taken lessons from Mr S. Afterwards, Jacobs did the cleaning up. One thinks of Byron's Beppo:
In short, he was a perfect cavaliero,
And to his very valet seemed a hero.
Sinatra, too, had his role models, and one of them was Humphrey Bogart. Mr S even aped his taste in clothes, and when his idol died he began an affair with Lauren Bacall. Unwisely, she told Louella Parsons that he had proposed marriage; it got into the gossip columns and Bacall was dumped, and from then on was referred to as the "Jew bitch".
Another conquest was Marilyn Monroe, but whereas Sinatra was fastidious, she was "a mess". She was "usually drunk . . . usually filthy and frequently too depressed to bathe or wash her hair, she ate in bed and slept among the crumbs and scrap, she would wear the same stained pants for days". Perhaps Mr S was privately not too upset when Jack and Bobby Kennedy took Monroe away from him.
What he wanted more than money, and even more than power, was "class" - but "class", when he found it, had other ideas. His relationship with the Kennedys would merit a book on its own. He despised Teddy Kennedy, went in fear of the monstrous Joe Kennedy, the villain of this book, who became virtually deranged at the suggestion that one of the performers at his son's inaugural should be Sammy Davis, who was black, Jewish and married to a blonde Aryan. Old Kennedy said "no" and prevailed.
JFK and Mr S were buddies; each fulfilled the other's needs, class and pimping, respectively. Then Kennedy became Mr President, and it could have been Sinatra's finest hour. There was to be a presidential visit to the West Coast and JFK was to be his house-guest; the mansion at Palm Springs was virtually pulled down and rebuilt; parties were planned. Robert Kennedy disliked Sinatra, and Jackie Bouvier Kennedy thought him trash; it mattered not at all, for at last the kid from Hoboken, NJ, had class. Then, to employ a euphemism, Peter Lawford hit the fan.
Lawford was a hanger-on. Mr S tolerated him because he had married into the Kennedys. Then it fell to him - a true instance of "kill the messenger" - to call and tell Sinatra that JFK had decided to stay, and the nails were dipped in vinegar, at the home of Bing Crosby. The given reason was that Mr S had been a consort of Mafia boss and Chicago godfather Sam Giancana, and other forms of low-life. Bobby Kennedy had sent word that, whereas Jack Kennedy, war hero and US senator, had slept - fitfully, perhaps - with hookers under the Sinatra roof, Mr President could not demean himself and his office by rumpling the same bedclothes as Sam Giancana. It was Mr S's cue for breaking up another houseful of furniture.
Anyone with a taste for gossip will enjoy this book, which, as ghost-writing goes, has the merit of racing along and garnishing most chapters with a coda of "volcanic-eruptions-lay-ahead" and "it-was-a-foretaste-of-worse,-or-worse-to-come". Read it, then, enjoy, deplore it and bin it.
Hugh Leonard is a playwright, novelist and columnist. His latest book, Fillums, will be published by Methuen later this year
Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra By George Jacobs and William Stadiem Sidgwick & Jackson, 260pp, £16. 99