Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [110]
Frank, meanwhile, was standing behind George yelling, “You tell that son of a bitch!” to which George turned around and replied, “I’m telling him, Frank.”
The man countered, “You’ll tell him he’s rude?” George assured him he would, in between assuring Frank behind his back that he’d sort the man out. “And another thing,” started Frank. George said, “No other things, Frank. Please, no.” He then turned and offered the aggrieved party a stack of signed Sinatra albums. Eventually, Frank cottoned on to what George was doing, and that tickled him so much, the drama was over. Jolene and I drained our glasses and suggested we leave.
With the help of our friends, I’d try to come up with all sorts of ways to entertain Frank on the road and keep him out of trouble. It didn’t always work out. On a tour of the Far East with George and Jolene, Frank had a surprise lined up for me. At the hotel we’d booked months in advance, he’d asked for the best suite, which had an enormous balcony overlooking Hong Kong Harbor. He’d been in it once before and couldn’t wait to share its incredible views with me. I knew nothing about that, but I did know Jolene had planned a kimono party in which we were all to dress up and eat Asian food.
Everything started to go wrong when we arrived at the hotel to discover that a group of Arabs had been booked into our suite before us and ruined it. The manager, who was Swiss, claimed they’d had live animals in there, so it needed to be cleaned and redecorated. The work was almost complete, but the rooms smelled of fresh paint and we couldn’t possibly move in. The manager offered Frank an alternative suite and then compounded the problem by explaining that we couldn’t have the entire wing as planned because another guest was booked into an adjacent room and refused to move.
Frank hadn’t slept for almost twenty-four hours and had been drinking all the way from Japan. That wasn’t the time to be telling him bad news. His devoted assistant, Dorothy, always had the next room to ours for convenience, and he wasn’t prepared to accept anything less. At Frank’s request, Jilly knocked on the guest’s door and politely asked him to move to another room at our expense, but the man refused.
“You can’t stay in there!” Jilly told him, banging on the locked door. “You have to get out.”
The guy yelled back, “Go away! I like my room just fine. I’m staying put.”
Frank wasn’t in the mood for compromise and told Jilly to get a crowbar. Not surprisingly, as soon as the guest heard that, he called the manager and complained. By this time, Frank was cussing and going crazy at everyone. When the manager called up to the suite about the complaint, Frank pulled the telephone out of the wall and threw it at the window. It bounced off the plate glass and almost hit him in the face. “What kind of a joint is this?” he cried. “I can’t even throw a goddam phone through the window!”
In due course, the manager arrived reinforced by members of the Hong Kong police. Frank didn’t take to the manager on the grounds that he “sounded like a German.” While he launched into a tirade about the war, everybody scattered to hide. George Schlatter, dressed in a kimono, locked himself in his bedroom. I stayed on the periphery waiting for the storm to pass. I knew that if I could just take one step back and view the scene without tension and emotion, it was usually pretty funny. There had always been a sense of danger around Frank. By this time I knew that he wasn’t really dangerous, but I also appreciated that not everybody else knew that. As a consequence, I usually ended up the peacemaker, but I was no pussycat either;