His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [219]
The next day, the comedian said he received an anonymous call threatening his life if he continued making such jokes, but he did not alter his act or change his material. Six days later, an armed assailant climbed onto the patio of his hotel room in Las Vegas and fired three bullets, which shattered a glass door and lodged in the mattress of his bed.
“I told the police that Sinatra’s people had been calling me and telling me to lay off,” said Mason, who was convinced that someone was trying to kill him. “Maybe it was some kook who wanted to impress Frank.”
The Clark County sheriffs office in Las Vegas investigated, but closed the case two days later, saying that despite the evidence of the three pistol shots, there was no motivation for the shooting.
“I knew that Sinatra owned Las Vegas when the detectives there made me the prime suspect and asked that I take a lie detector test,” Mason said.
Three months later, Mason appeared in Miami at the Saxony at the same time Frank was appearing at the Fontainebleau. Mason continued telling his Sinatra jokes and related what had happened to him in Las Vegas. “I have no idea who it was who tried to shoot me.… After the shots were fired, all I heard was someone singing: ‘Doobie, doobie, doo.’
“I was threatened four times that week by friends of Sinatra who came to my dressing room and said I’d better stop talking about Frank and making cracks about him in my show, but I didn’t think much about it. Since Las Vegas, I was no longer mentioning Mia Farrow, and the jokes about Frank were harmless. Like I’d say: I see Sinatra has another girl. Boy, the way he goes from one girl to another … well, any psychiatrist will tell you that this denotes a basic insecurity—I should be so insecure!’”
At five A.M. on Monday, February 13, 1967, Jackie Mason was sitting in a car in front of his apartment in Miami with Myrna Falk, a receptionist, when an unidentified man yanked open the door on the driver’s side and with a fist wrapped in metal smashed into Mason’s face, breaking his nose and crushing his cheekbones.
“We warned you to stop using the Sinatra material in your act,” Falk heard the attacker tell Mason.
Although he could never prove any involvement and tried to make excuses for Frank at the time, Mason remains convinced that Frank was responsible.
“I know it was his doing,” he said many years later. “He’s a vicious bastard, and yet people act like fawning idiots around him. Look at Alan King. Frank pushes him around and Alan takes it. He never made it big, so he wants to be with the biggest and will do anything to be in Frank’s company. Ordinarily, he struts around like a putz, but then Sinatra walks in, and Alan goes duh, duh, duh. Cowering to Sinatra makes him feel important, I guess. It just makes me sick.”
Everywhere Frank went during his faltering marriage to Mia Farrow, especially when he was in Miami and Las Vegas, violence seemed to erupt. Shortly after they were married he had agreed to let her pursue a movie career, saying, “I love her and I must be fair. She has talent.” Later he resented her being away from him, and the longer she was gone, the more violent he became, throwing furniture out of his penthouse window or lobbing cherry bombs.
Compounding his marital problems was a subpoena from the federal grand jury in Las Vegas seeking evidence that casino owners had skimmed profits from their receipts before taxes and then diverted those funds to underworld figures with hidden interests in the casinos. The grand jury wanted to question Frank about his relationship with Sam Giancana and his ownership interest in the Sands and Gal-Neva. Sinatra fought the subpoena and tried to get out of testifying, but was finally forced to appear on January 26, 1967. “We wouldn’t let him out of it,” said William G. Hundley, former chief of the Justice