His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [321]
After Kirk Douglas had submitted his article “Virtue Is Not Photogenic” to The New York Times, the newspaper’s associate editor, Charlotte Curtis, returned the piece to the actor, saying: “Warm and affectionate as the piece is, it won’t work either for Frank or for you, I’m afraid, and we are most hesitant to publish it.”
Information on Sinatra’s performances at the Fontainebleau Hotel was obtained from the Justice Department’s August 3, 1962, report on Sinatra.
On February 16, 1981, columnist William Safire printed Norman Mailer’s response to Sinatra’s comments about the attaché case he was carrying in Havana. “I’ve been doing some calculations on how many one-hundred-dollar bills can be fitted into a Samsonite attaché case twelve inches by fifteen inches by five inches deep,” he told Safire. “A one-hundred-dollar bill measures 6.2 inches by 2.6 inches. You can squeeze 350 bills down to one inch. That’s thirty-five thousand dollars to a one-inch packet. You can lay six of those packets along the seventeen-inch axis and four others lengthwise into the space that is left on that first layer. And there is still overage. Let’s see: ten packets per layer make $350,000. Multiplied by five one-inch layers that makes $1,750,000…. Make half-inch packets and tilt them sideways. I’ve worked it out: you can fit two million twelve thousand dollars into an attaché case.”
During the author’s interview with Phyllis McGuire, McGuire commented on how Frank’s friendship with Jack Entratter ended. Frank had cast other friends aside as cruelly as Jack Entratter. Men like George Evans, Hank Sanicola, Nick Sevano, Joe DiMaggio, Brad Dexter, and Peter Lawford, who had loved Frank and stood loyally by his side suddenly found themselves frozen out of the Sinatra circle for some real or imagined slight. Some, like Brad Dexter, didn’t let it bother them. Others, like Peter Lawford, never survived the hurt.
“I tried several times to apologize for whatever it was that I had done to Frank, but he has not spoken to me for over twenty years,” said Lawford in 1983. “He wouldn’t take my phone calls and wouldn’t answer my letters. Wherever I saw him at a party or in a restaurant, he just cut me dead. Looked right through me with those cold blue eyes like I didn’t exist. Friends of mine went to him to patch things up, but he’d always say, ‘That fucking Englishman is a bum.’ I even talked to his daughter, Tina, about it, saying what a waste it was to squander a good relationship on a misunderstanding. She agreed with me and said to write Frank again, so I did, but he never responded. … I don’t want to go to my grave having been responsible for someone being so disturbed that he carried a grudge all his life.”
On January 15, 1979, Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly published a letter to the editor from Mickey Rudin under the heading “Sinatra’s Mouthpiece.” Rudin sued for libel, saying it conjured up images of “shyster.” The case went to trial in U.S. District Court in New York. Rudin lost.
CHAPTER 34
The author interviewed Richard Condon, Steven Green, Gloria Massingill on June 27, 1983, and a guest at Judy Green’s 1983 Southhampton barbecue, who requested anonymity, on October 9, 1984. Various newspaper articles were also consulted. The author also obtained a copy of Sinatra’s $16 million Golden Nugget contract, correspondence between Sinatra and the Golden Nugget’s vice-president and general counsel, and a stock option agreement between Milton Rudin and the Golden Nugget. The author interviewed a friend of Sinatra’s concerning his charitable deductions. This person also requested anonymity. Additional information on the Golden