This and other surprisingly personal anecdotes are revealed in another sensational biography Mr S-this time by the black valet who served Frank Sinatra for fifteen years-George Jacobs. He has co-authored this tell-all expos of Sinatra with Bill Stadiem and is a ribald story of Jacobs' stint for the singer after the latter won his Oscar in 1957 for his role in From Here to Eternity. Sinatra literally "stole" him from Swifty Lazar, one of Hollywood's most powerful literary agents, as soon as his career took an upward turn.
Sinatra couldn't stand being alone so Jacobs would spend hours phoning for women-call-girls or otherwise. Sinatra evidently was so well hung that "he had special underpants made, a cross between a panty girdle and jock strap." This was done to minimise the appearance of his size "..... so it wouldn't show through his tuxedo pants." Most of his Hollywood conquests however complained that all Sinatra ever talked about was his second wife and great lost love Ava Gardner-another hard-drinking out-spoken screen goddess.
But somehow everything seemed to change when the 19-year-old Mia Farrow arrived in Hollywood and held Sinatra in "total sexual enthrall". In the end the ageing singer-actor who was thirty years her senior couldn't stand the sight of her. Nevertheless in 1968, when Sinatra's spies reported seeing Jacobs dancing with the estranged Farrow in a Los Angeles nightclub, Jacobs was fired. (About the marriage Ava Gardner was reported to have said that Sinatra always wanted to sleep with a boy. However she said this in more racy language.)
Jacobs recalls in vivid and sometimes hilarious personal detail Sinatra's outrageous mid-life crisis and recollects his liaisons with call-girls, starlets as well as goddesses like Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Natalie Wood, Lauren Bacall and Grace Kelly. Even the sultry blues singer Peggy Lee did not escape Sinatra's amorous attention.
Involvements with the Kennedys when JFK was in the White House (1960-1963), the Mafia (Sam Giancana), and his escapades with the Rat Pack (Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr.) during Sinatra's most popular years make for outrageous reading. But for all his playboy antics Sinatra was "dead serious about his career, which he placed before everything else. By career, I mean singing." He knew movies were a "crapshoot", out of his control, but music was another matter. He had been at the pinnacle of pop music and he knew that as long as he had that remarkable voice he held the key to his stardom. Before every recording session "he'd religiously spend an hour listening to classical music (Richard Tucker and Lawrence Tibbett) and would rest as hard as he normally played-only drinking hot tea with lemon and honey. No Jack Daniel's and no cigarettes."
The Sinatra biography makes excellent reading entertainment, revealing something of the dedication and determination needed to get to the top in show business and the harder business of staying there. Talent and staying power were qualities Sinatra possessed. If nothing else, Mr. S is a tribute to these extraordinary traits.