Craig Brown - One on One

This year, Sinatra has been involved in any number of fights. In June, for instance, a businessman called Frank Weissman asked him and his party in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel if they wouldn’t mind piping down: Weissman ended the night in a coma at the emergency hospital.

Tonight, Dominick Dunne is out for dinner at the Daisy with his wife and a small group of friends after attending a wedding. He often eats here, and knows the staff. By chance, Frank Sinatra is sitting at the next table, along with his two daughters, Nancy and Tina, and his new wife, Mia Farrow, who at twenty-one years old is younger than each of them. Over the past months, Sinatra has come in for a good deal of ribbing about his child bride, which perhaps explains his bad mood. ‘Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces …’ one of his most vocal tormentors, the comedian Jackie Mason, joked in his stage act a few months ago, ‘then she takes off her roller skates and puts them next to his cane … he peels off his toupee and she braids her hair …’

It probably wasn’t a wise move. The next day, Mason received an anonymous call telling him that if he valued his life, he should consider changing his material. When he failed to follow this advice, three shots were fired through the glass door of his Las Vegas hotel room. But the police saw no reason to pursue an investigation. ‘I knew that Sinatra owned Las Vegas when the detectives there made me the prime suspect and asked that I take a lie detector test,’ said Mason, adding, ‘I have no idea who it was who tried to shoot me. After the shots were fired, all I heard was someone singing, “Doobie, doobie, doo”.’ Over the following year, Mason will have his nose and cheekbones broken, again by a complete stranger.

But, in the meantime, we must return to Dunne and his party as they sit there enjoying their dinner. All of a sudden, Dunne feels a tap on his shoulder. He looks up. The maître d’ of the Daisy is looking down at him, ‘very nice guy called George, Italian, we all knew him, gave him Christmas presents, wonderful man’.

George says, ‘Oh, Mr Dunne, I’m so sorry about this, but Mr Sinatra made me do it.’ So saying, he leans back, clenches his fist, and hits Dunne smack in the face. ‘It wasn’t a hit to knock me out, but it was embarrassing,’ recalls Dunne. The crowded restaurant falls silent.

Dunne looks across at Sinatra, who is looking back at him with a smile on his face. Dunne and his wife leave the restaurant. As they wait for their car to be brought around by the concierge, George runs out. He is sobbing, and afraid.

‘I’m sorry, so sorry. Mr Sinatra made me do it,’ he says. He tells the Dunnes that Sinatra tipped him $50. ‘It was the social talk of the town,’ Dunne recalls. ‘I was the amusement for Sinatra. My humiliation was his fun.’

Sinatra’s reputation for violence follows him not only to his own grave, but to the graves of others. On two occasions, he sets his men onto the same newspaper columnist, Lee Mortimer, because Mortimer has written unflattering remarks about him. After Mortimer’s death, Sinatra is travelling with his friend Brad Dexter when he insists they drive to his grave. As he stands on the grave, Sinatra unzips his trousers and urinates on it. When Dexter asks him why, he replies, ‘This cocksucker made my life miserable. He talked against me, wrote articles, caused me a lot of grief. I got back at him.’

‘Frank always had to settle the score,’ explains Dexter.

But Jackie Mason refuses to be silenced. ‘I love Frank Sinatra. You love Frank Sinatra. We all love Frank Sinatra,’ he says in his stage act for many years to come. ‘And why do we love Frank Sinatra? Because he’d kill us if we didn’t.’

Like Mason, Dominick Dunne outlives Sinatra, enjoying a highly successful second career as a newspaper columnist and author with a particular interest in seeing that the guilty are brought to book. He never forgives Sinatra for his behaviour that night. ‘It showed the kind of power Sinatra had, to make a decent man do an indecent act. And you know, I am aware totally that his voice is one of the great voices of his era, if not the greatest. And to this day, I can’t stand the sound of it.’

URINATES WITH

The Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, Los Angeles

April 2007

Forty-one years later, Vanity Fair magazine’s star columnist Dominick Dunne is covering the trial of Phil Spector, who is charged with the murder of the actress Lana Clarkson.

Short of acting jobs, Clarkson had been working as a hostess in the VIP room of the House of Blues, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. She hadn’t recognised Spector when he entered, even addressing him as ‘Miss’, perhaps misled by his size – he is only five feet five inches – and by his voluminous candy-floss wig, only marginally smaller. ‘Mister,’ he had corrected her.

This man, a fellow waitress had told her, was the famous 1960s record producer, ‘the tycoon of teen’, as Tom Wolfe once called him. He was known, she added, for his generous tips.

After a drink (he left $450 for a $13.50 bar bill), Spector persuaded the reluctant Lana back to his Castle. ‘Just for one drink,’ she insisted. Travelling back in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, they watched a James Cagney movie called Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

They had only been in the Castle a short time before Spector’s chauffeur, waiting outside in the car, heard a gunshot. After some delay, Spector came out and said, ‘I think I killed somebody.’ The chauffeur called the police, who discovered Clarkson’s corpse on a white French bergère chair.

‘The gun went off accidentally! She works at the House of Blues! It was a mistake! I don’t understand what the fuck is wrong with you people! I don’t know how it happened. It scared the shit out of me!’ Spector screamed, as a policeman held him down. Later, he claimed Clarkson had picked up one of his guns and shot herself in the face.

Ever since the man who murdered his daughter Dominique was given what he describes as ‘a slap on the wrist’, Dunne has had an abiding interest in reporting the murder trials of the rich and famous, among them O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow and the Menendez brothers. He is fuelled by outrage at the idea that money may buy an acquittal.

He is already convinced of Spector’s guilt, *and listens impatiently as Spector’s defence attorney complains, ‘The police had murder on their minds!’ He is unimpressed. ‘I should hope to God that the police had murder on their minds, with a woman less than an hour dead, shot in the face, bleeding from the mouth, her teeth all over the floor, life over, in a French bergère chair in the foyer of a castle, and an arrogant man in a house full of guns who had to be Tasered by police. I think that’s cause for having murder on your mind.’

The trial has been going for just a few days when the court takes a break, and Dunne heads for the men’s room. It is empty but for a single man standing at the central urinal, which is lower than the other two, as though designed for little boys.

Spector is wearing the Edwardian frock-coat in which he arrived at the court this morning. He has opened it wide to urinate, so that it billows out and blocks the remaining two urinals, one on either side. Dunne doesn’t quite know what to do, but decides to remain where he is. ‘I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to move his coat and free up a urinal, and I also didn’t really want to pee next to him, considering that he was on trial for murder just down the hall, and I was there to write about him. So I waited my turn in silence in the back by the sinks.’

After he has finished peeing, Spector, who is today sporting a blond pageboy toupee, goes over to the basins, carefully rolls up his sleeves and elaborately soaps and scrubs his hands in hot water. Dunne is reminded of the way germophobes wash obsessively after shaking hands.