Lady Blue Eyes_ My Life With Frank - Barbara Sinatra [39]
There were plenty of others who were happy to throw parties for him anyway, so we were usually invited along to those. At one, I was introduced to the singer Judy Garland, an old friend of Frank’s and the woman who gave “the Holmby Hills Rat Pack” (as Frank and his pals were known) little rat stick pins. Frank hated the Rat Pack moniker almost as much as he ended up disliking being called “the Chairman of the Board”—a name his friend the New York radio presenter William B. Williams coined for him. “What does that mean anyway?” he’d ask, frowning. “Chairman? There’s nowhere to go after that.” I almost didn’t recognize Judy Garland; she was so enormous and puffy-faced. It was sad to see her like that. Frank didn’t seem to notice and was as protective of Judy as he had always been of Marilyn. He’d been with Judy the night her daughter Liza was born and ordered everybody pizzas during the labor. He claimed that Liza’s first cries sounded to him like music from an Italian opera—“a star had been born.”
The more I came to know Frank, the more I liked him. I was especially impressed by the way he treated others. Whenever we went out to a restaurant or club, I couldn’t help but notice how differently people behaved around him. The excitement was tangible; from the moment Frank walked into a room in that slow, easy way of his, there’d be a buzz. Everyone from the staff to the customers would stare, and they’d never stop. Sooner or later the paparazzi would arrive, peering through the windows with their lenses. Frank disliked most of the press, but he’d happily sign autographs for fellow diners or waiting staff and pose for photographs until everyone was happy.
When we went out to eat, Frank almost always picked up the tab. He couldn’t have cared less about money, and I honestly think he planned on spending every dime he ever made; he certainly spent cash like a drunken sailor. As Don Rickles once said, “Frank gets up in the morning and God throws money on him.” When we arrived anywhere, Frank would hand Jilly a stack of hundred-dollar bills (which he called “C-notes”) and say, “Take care of all the busboys and waitresses.” His tipping was legendary, especially to the little guys. At one restaurant we went to, we were waiting for our car afterward and Frank handed the valet parker two hundred-dollar bills.
“Thank you, Mr. Sinatra!” the kid cried delightedly.
“Is that the biggest tip you ever had?” Frank asked with a smile.
The young man looked coy. “Well, no, sir.”
Frank frowned. “What the? Who the hell gave you more than that?”
“Why you did, Mr. Sinatra. Last week!”
Perhaps not surprisingly because of the attention he attracted, Frank often preferred to stay home, but his dinners at the Compound were always fun affairs peppered with the most interesting guests. All the big names would be there, of course, the major stars and Hollywood producers plus numerous wives, girlfriends, and starlets. But then he’d throw industrialists like John Kluge, Laurance Rockefeller, or Kirk Kerkorian into the mix as well as Italian American friends of his and Jilly’s from the early days, men who stood or sat on the periphery, eating pasta and saying little.
I soon came to appreciate that Ermenigildo “Jilly” Rizzo was the brother Frank never had. They’d first met in Miami Beach in the fifties, and Jilly soon became one of the most important people in Frank’s life. Although Jilly had his own nightclub, called Jilly’s Saloon, on West Fifty-second Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan (the place for Chinese food), he gave it to his brother to run so that he could move with Frank to California. They both knew it was important that Frank have someone he knew and trusted watching his back as part of what he called his “Dago Secret Service.” Jilly was blind in one eye but could look at a stadium of twenty thousand people and pick out the sole troublemaker. He was a “deez,