• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1802 0

part—to embarrass Frank in front of the Big Boys,” said Lawford. “Those Mafia guys meant more to him than anything. So Sammy was quite lucky that Frank let him grovel for a while and then allowed him to apologize in public a couple of months later. It could have been a lot worse, given Frank’s temper. You have no idea of that temper. He can get so mad that he’s driven to real violence, especially if he’s been drinking, and I’m not kidding. I know. I’ve seen it. One time at a party in Palm Springs, he got so mad at some poor girl that he slammed her through a plate glass window. There was shattered glass and blood all over the place and the girl’s arm was nearly severed from her body. Jimmy Van Heusen rushed her to the hospital. Frank paid her off later and the whole thing was hushed up, of course, but I remember Judy Garland and I looking at each other and shivering with fright at the time. I did everything I could to avoid setting off that temper, but sometimes it was impossible. Look what happened when he heard I’d gone out with Ava. He threatened to kill me and then didn’t speak to me for five years. He got over it one night at Gary and Rocky Cooper’s dinner party. I had married Patricia [Kennedy] by then, and she was his dinner partner. I think we were very attractive to Frank because of Jack [Kennedy], who had been elected senator from Massachusetts and was getting ready to run for president. Anyway, that night at the Coopers got us back together again, and we started seeing Frank all the time. We went around the world together, we named our daughter after him [Victoria Frances], we set up corporations to produce each other’s movies, and we went into the restaurant business together, but even Pat, who adored Frank, was still scared of his temper.

“On New Year’s Eve in 1958, we met him for dinner at Romanoff’s with Natalie Wood and R. J. Wagner. He wanted us to go to Palm Springs afterwards, but when he went to the gent’s room, the girls said that it was too chilly to go that night. They preferred driving in the morning, but then we said, ‘Who’s going to tell him?’ Knowing his temper, Pat out and out refused to say anything, and Natalie didn’t even want to be in the same room when he was told. Finally, R. J. insisted that I be the one to do it, so when Frank got back to the table, I explained as gracefully as I could that we’d prefer joining him in the morning. Well, he went absolutely nuts. ‘If that’s the way you want it, fine,’ he said, slamming his drink on the floor and storming out of the restaurant. I rang him the next morning and his valet, George Jacobs, answered and whispered hello. He said that Frank was still asleep because he hadn’t gotten to bed until Five A.M. Then he said, ‘Oh, Mr. Lawford. What happened last night? I better tell you that he’s pissed. Really pissed off. He went to your closet and took out all the clothes that you and your wife keep here and ripped them into shreds and then threw them into the swimming pool.’ That gives you an idea of Frank’s temper and why I say that Sammy was very lucky to have gotten off so lightly.”

Dean Martin maintains that he holds his friendship with Frank because they always keep it light. “I don’t discuss his girl with Frank or who he’s going to marry. All I discuss are movies.”

Frank had first seen Dean Martin at the Copa back in 1948 when Martin was paired with Jerry Lewis, and Frank’s comment then had been, “The dago’s lousy, but the little Jew is great.” But after Martin and Lewis split, Frank gave Dean one of his first acting roles in Some Came Running in 1958, and the two men became fast friends. They had a lot in common: both were Italians from blue-collar towns, neither had a high school education, both were singers who couldn’t read a note of music, both enjoyed gangsters (federal wiretaps show that Dean was close to Sam Giancana and Paul “Skinny” D’Amato), both adored their mothers and took good care of their parents, both preferred spending nights drinking with the boys. They even shared similar phobias: Frank’s was a fear of heights and Dean’s a