His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [247]
“He sent his driver out to every pharmacy in town to buy up hundreds of bottles of vaginal sprays and douches and wrote a note to Maxine saying she would know how to use those products and why. He asked me to have them delivered to her at The Washington Post, and I thought, Oh, God, not this on top of everything else. So I called Rudin and told him what had happened. Mickey told me to just say I did it, but not to do it. He said he had too many problems with him as it was and that he didn’t need that one. So I didn’t send them, although Frank thought I did.”
The attack on Mrs. Cheshire seemed indefensible, even to Frank’s closest friends, and Edward Bennett Williams, the attorney for The Washington Post, asked Mickey Rudin for “an acceptable apology,” which was not forthcoming. Mrs. Cheshire threatened to sue for slander, if for no other reason than to force that apology.
“If he had attacked me as a reporter, I would have taken it, but he attacked me as a woman,” she said. “I feel I owe it to my children to sue. I’m square enough that virtue means something to me. I take my reputation and the sanctity of my home very seriously.”
In the end, she decided against a lawsuit, but Frank never apologized for his vulgar tirade against her. In fact, he laced into the press months later.
“I call them garbage collectors: the columnists without a conscience, the reporters who take long shots based on the idea that where there’s smoke there’s fire, all for the sake of a story,” he said. “I’m blunt and honest. I could easily call them pimps and ‘hos’ [whores]. They’d sell their mother out. How dare they say what they do about me?”
As always, Frank’s seventy-nine-year-old mother back in Palm Springs supported him. Dolly Sinatra listened to the graphic details of his performance in Washington without raising an eyebrow. Nor did she blanch when told that her son had called Mrs. Cheshire one of the vilest words in the English language. In fact, she bristled only when she heard about the two one-dollar bills he had stuffed into the reporter’s glass.
“Hmmmpf,” she snorted. “Frank overpaid.”
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Frank had won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1971, and had received the annual Screen Actors Guild Award in 1972 for his generosity “to persons whom he has never even met.” A visiting Englishwoman who was forced by a New York cab driver to pay $237.70 for a thirty-dollar ride had received a check from Frank for $250 with a letter from his press agents: “Our client, who has always been royally treated by the English, was very upset about your experience with the taxi driver. He has asked us to send you this check to make up for the money you lost and he sincerely hopes the rest of your trip will be a pleasant one.”
When Mr. and Mrs. Sam Labeiko, an elderly immigrant couple, were to be evicted from their $46.80-a-month apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side because they couldn’t pay a ten-dollar rent increase, Frank provided them with a lawyer to fight their cause.
When Sharon Ehlers, a seventeen-year-old cerebral palsy victim, and her parents were stranded in New York City after a car thief stole their specially converted minibus, Frank dispatched his Gulfstream jet to fly them back to California. The girl, paralyzed since birth, could say only “mommy,” “daddy,” “yes,” and “no,” but her father expressed the family’s gratitude. “Whoever would think that a fellow like Frank Sinatra would think of a fellow like me,” he said.
When Judy Wyatt was a sophomore at a San Antonio school for the orthopedically handicapped and was to undergo a fourth operation on her paralyzed