Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [135]
“Where are you going?” they asked, surprised.
“To ‘21.’ Come and join us.”
“But we want to see the show!”
“There is no show,” I said, and so off we went to New York, where Frank was waiting at the bar with a drink and a cigarette.
“Bill forgot the damn music,” he told me. “What else could I do?”
Back at the arena, a hapless manager had to announce that the show was canceled because of “a technical fault.” The fans were offered a refund or a chance to reschedule the next time Frank came to town. Poor Bill Miller never forgot his lead sheets again. The man Frank named Suntan Charlie because he was so pale-skinned had it tough for a while after that, but at least he kept his job. Anyone else would have been fired. Bill had been with Frank since the 1950s, when Frank’s pianist walked out on him at the Desert Inn Hotel in Vegas after his wife asked him for a divorce. Frank asked Jilly to help him find someone, and Jilly took him to see Bill, who was playing on a funny little stage up over the bar. Frank, who hired him on the spot, always claimed he found Bill “on a shelf.” Not long after they met, Bill’s house was destroyed in a mudslide that killed his wife and put him in the hospital with badly broken legs. Not only was Frank a frequent visitor but he settled Bill’s medical bills and set him up with everything he needed to make a new start, including an apartment, clothes, and furniture, all hand-picked.
Frank couldn’t read music, so he learned everything by ear when Suntan came over to play for him. Listening to each number, Frank would memorize the melody, set the tempo, and work on the phrasing until they got it just right. Everybody loved Bill, especially Liza, Dean, and Sammy, who really appreciated his incredible musical talent.
Sammy was such a sweet little guy and utterly devoted to Frank, who’d first met him as a young fan waiting for Frank’s autograph at a stage door in 1945. I became very close to Sammy, who told me a lot about his early life. He was raised out of a trunk while touring in a vaudeville trio starring him, his uncle, and his father. I always thought the cheerful façade he put up stemmed from his tough childhood, but that was also why he was such a fantastic performer—he’d been performing his whole life. During the war he was the only black in his army unit, and his fellow soldiers teased him mercilessly. They even painted him white one night. In the end, he figured the only way he could get them to like him was to perform. He worked the racial abuse he’d suffered over the years into his act, claiming he’d been insulted in places “most blacks never get the chance to see.” The trouble with Sammy was that he was on, day and night. We were in Hawaii once, and he came running into our suite wearing tiny briefs, waving his arms around, and shouting, “The natives are restless! The natives are restless!” Then he ran out. Accustomed to his crazy antics, we looked up, laughed, and went back to our brunch.
It was such a shame that Sammy got hooked on cocaine and booze in the seventies, because that’s what really changed his relationship with Frank. Having married Altovise, one of his dancers, he turned her on to drugs too so that he’d have some company. That finally did it for Frank with what he called “this coke crap,” and he wouldn’t even speak to Sammy for three years, which broke his friend’s heart. Sammy was also in dire financial straits by then, and although Frank had helped him before, this time he cut him off completely. Sammy asked everyone including me to try to persuade Frank to let him back in, but it was no use. As far as Frank was concerned, Sammy might as well have been dead.
It was Alto and I who finally got them back together, having decided the silence had gone on too long. Just as Frank had gotten Dean Martin and his onetime comedic sidekick Jerry Lewis back together again (by walking onstage with Dean during one of Jerry’s muscular dystrophy telethons) and I’d