His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [229]
Agreeing to a quick divorce in Juarez, Mexico, Mia refused to charge Frank with mental cruelty, saying the only acceptable ground would be incompatibility. “I didn’t seem to be able to please him anymore,” she said. She asked the court to restore her maiden name.
The night before the decree was granted, Mia was in Hollywood at the Daisy when George Jacobs walked in with his date, and Mia grabbed him for a dance. Since it was the eve of her divorce, that dance with her husband’s handsome black valet became a gossip item on Rona Barrett’s television show. When George returned to Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, where he was living, Frank refused to speak to him.
“The maid came to me and said, ‘Mr. Sinatra wants you to get out of the house,’ ” said Jacobs. “This was the day of the Mia divorce. Frank had locked himself in his room and wouldn’t come out. I banged on the door and said, ‘What’s wrong? What’s going on?’ He wouldn’t open the door. ‘Mickey will tell you. Mickey will tell you,’ he said. ‘Call Mickey.’ So I called Rudin and waited an hour for him to get back to me.
“He told me that the stuff Rona Barrett reported really stirred Frank up, that I’d better take a few days off and, in the meantime, move all my belongings out of the house. I tried to explain that I didn’t do anything. All I did was walk into the Daisy with my date and see Mia, who was sitting there getting stoned. She wanted to dance, so we danced a couple of times. That was it, but everyone around the old man—Jilly and all of them—poisoned his mind until he actually believed that his valet was sleeping with his wife. I couldn’t believe that he’d ever think I’d do something like that to him. After fourteen years together, he dropped the net on me just like that, and he couldn’t even look me in the face to do it. He couldn’t fire me in person. He had to have his prick lawyer do it for him.
“I was so mad afterwards that I threw away everything he’d ever given me—two-thousand-dollar watches, suits, sweaters, shirts, shoes, coats, cameras, radios—everything. I didn’t want anything from the bastard around. I got twelve thousand dollars in severance pay and blew it, and then I sold all my shares in Reprise Records.
“I had been so close to that man. I even signed his name better than he did. In fact, I did all the autographs. ‘Just give it to George,’ Frank would say whenever someone wanted a signed Sinatra picture. I went everywhere with him. I nursed him through his suicide attempt in Lake Tahoe. I helped him get through Ava, who was the only woman he ever loved. I was even the nurse after his hair transplants from Dr. Sammy Ayres, who had done Joey Bishop first and then Frank. I drove all the girls to Red Krohn [Dr. Leon Krohn] for their abortions, and I treated each one of those dames like a queen because that’s what he wanted me to do. The women that man had over the years! I still remember Lee Radziwill sneaking into his bedroom. How do I know? I heard her. I always had a room next to Frank so he could slap the wall for me if he needed anything.
“Yeah, I was at Cal-Neva with Giancana, and I was with him a lot when he visited Frank in Palm Springs. The guy was great with tips. I knew them all—Sam and Joe Fischetti. I even knew Moe Dalitz when he was calling himself the entertainment director of the Desert Inn. Don’t that beat everything? The entertainment director!”
Devastated by the firing, Jacobs reminisced about the years he worked for Sinatra, saying that what he missed most was the riotous merriment.
“We had some funny, funny times together because Frank was always doing numbers on people. He loved practical jokes. Like the time he walked in when Milt Ebbins [Peter Lawford’s personal manager] was shaving and said, ‘Let me see that, Milt.’ Wham! He threw the razor out of the window. ‘What time is it, Milt?’ He’d take Ebbins’s watch off his wrist and throw that out the window, too. He was always doing crazy stuff like that. Years later [after