Conservatory
Water in Central Park. 3:45 PM. Photo: JH.
Today
is the
ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Frank Sinatra who
died seven years ago. I met Mr. Sinatra only once, and very
late in his life when he was running on empty but still retaining
that bravado that made him a star and made him an admired, respected
and even beloved friend to a lot of people. There are a whole
generation of us who sang along with Sinatra’s recordings
for a lifetime, hearing his voice and his personality in our
voices imitating him. It was a powerful sound and a powerful
fury.
One of my favorite albums was “Where Are You?” which
came out when I was a teen-ager when the man’s voice and
the lyrics he sang evoked and articulated all the hormone-induced
passionate longings and intensely romantic notions of adolescence — all
heavily seasoned with the bittersweet. His was the stuff of poetry
to a very young man who knew little more than “how it felt” to
be alive. Almost a half century later, the same album of songs
returns me directly to all of those evocations and longings — as
well as the precious bittersweet.
Frank
Sinatra, 1970 (AP file).
My late friend
Ardie Deutsch knew Sinatra for many years and was part of a close-knit
group of friends that was the “social” (as
in “society”) side of his garrulous life. Ardie adored
Frank, enjoyed his extravagant camaraderie, and also knew his parameters
from experience. He once told me of a moment when the gang was
staying with Frank in Palm Springs. Ardie had been out somewhere
and had just entered the house when he saw Frank on the phone really
letting someone have it with a torrent of raging epithets that
could be most gently described as purple.
Before Ardie passed through
the room, the phone call was completed and Ardie, who was a mild-mannered
fellow and friend, asked with some some surprise in his curiosity: “What
was that about?” Whereupon the Chairman of the Board turned
on Ardie, unleashing the same shocking rage and profanity.
“Whoa!” thought
Mr. Deutsch who promptly left the room without another word. Mr.
Sinatra later apologized without explanation.
Ardie got the picture and his friend was promptly forgiven.
The man was a bundle of contradictions, the sum total of which
made him deeply attractive to many people, men and women for a
lot of reasons, although with women it often had to do with sex.
Janet de Cordova who with her late husband Freddie, was
very much a part of Sinatra’s Hollywood social circuit in
its heyday, once told me that when Sinatra entered a room and uttered “hiya
doll” to any woman, she wanted to go to bed with him. It
was an animal magnetism that was garnished with charm, looks, money
and power. There isn’t a man living today, no matter how
much he possesses of any of the aforementioned, who could match
Sinatra’s;
not a one. Furthermore he didn’t give a damn about it, unless
crossed.
He was a legendary friend. In the 1960s
he became very friendly with Bill and Edie Goetz who
were then the reigning social couple in movieland. Regular readers
know all this but I’m going
to thumbnail the following background: Mrs. Goetz (pronounced Gets)
was the eldest daughter of L.B. Mayer (as in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer),
and was the Hollywood version of to-the-manor-born. Mr. Goetz was
a very successful film executive who’d started out as a partner
with Darryl Zanuck in the original 20th Century-Fox Studios (thanks
to his father-in-law), and later acquired the failing Universal-International
Studios, which a few years later sold to Jules Stein and MCA for
a pretty penny. Goetz was also a favorite of all the guys and the
women. He had an outgoing personality, given to bon mots that were
a little on the blue side, a jokester who some believed wished
he could have been Jack Benny (a close friend) or George
Burns. He was very successful in business, and played the role of jester
to his princess. It was a very successful marriage where he played
foil to his wife’s social pretenses and they openly displayed
affection for each other by calling each other Snoogie. People
were amused by it and respected it. Together they entertained royally
(and exclusively) in their Holmby Hills mansion filled with an
extensive collection of Impressionist art.
Aside from his
tough-guy personality, Frank Sinatra, also liked the glittering,
sophisticated, and exclusive “society” of
the Goetzes. He pursued it and was welcomed with open arms. The
result was a coterie that became identified with him celebrity-wise
during that decade – Edie and Bill Goetz, Ardie and
Harriet Deutsch, Phyllis and Bennett Cerf, Rosalind Russell and
Freddie
Brisson, Jack and Mary Benny, Jimmy and Gloria Stewart, Leland
and Pamela (later Harriman) Hayward,
Claudette Colbert and Joel Pressman, Irving and Mary Lazar, Billy
and Audrey Wilder, and a
writer and wit named Harry Kurnitz.
This was a group far from the Mafia and Vegas
show-biz types that the press often rightfully associated with
him. Every New Year’s Eve Sinatra would fly them up to Las
Vegas in his private plane, put them up in a hotel, supply them
with a bag of chips for the gaming tables and entertain them ringside
at his performance. And they loved it; who wouldn’t? To borrow
the phrase from the late Katharine Hepburn referring
to the winning screen combination of Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers: they gave him “class” and he gave
them “sex.” Well, sort of: truth told, it was the sexiness
of being in his orbit that appealed to everyone.
When Bill Goetz became ill with stomach cancer in the late 1960s, Sinatra flew
him back and forth to the Mayo Clinic for treatment, and on his final trip back
to Los Angeles, Sinatra was with him and right by his side. Naturally unabashed
and unself-conscious about his affection for another, he was a loving and adoring
friend and he loved Bill Goetz.
When Goetz died in 1969, Sinatra mourned the loss deeply. He also took the widow
Goetz under his wing. It has been said that it was the habit of the Chairman
to comfort the grieving widows of his friends with intensely sincere attention,
also known, in the lingo of his buddies as: the mercy-fuck.
Edie
Goetz in her library
Edie Goetz was sixty-four when her husband died, and they had been a devoted
to each other for their almost forty years of marriage. Aside from her husband,
she was not a woman who attracted a lot of romantic male admirers, although she
had long had a politically powerful allure in the movie business for the obvious
reasons. So when Frank began looking after her and comforted her with his most
intimate attention, she was like a teen-age girl having her first affair. The
difference was her suitor was the sexiest, most attractive, most sought after
man she ever knew, saw or heard about. And ten years her junior.
Click
to order
No one who knew
both parties ever thought that Frank Sinatra was seriously interested
in Edie Goetz other than as a good friend. Mrs. Goetz, however, being the princess
that she had come to believe she was — over the course of several decades
of being on the top of the social heap, pampered, attended and paid homage to,
saw
an opportunity to experience youth again. She was taking a chance at the Big
Casino of Dolldom, and she was all shook up. For, of all of the gifts and privileges
that
Dad and Dame Fortune and her Snoogie had bestowed on her, she had never been
the recipient of the love, attention and carnal knowledge of a True Swain, let
alone the Idol of Millions.
All of this led Mrs. Goetz down the path of self-delusion, as it would many a
girl, thinking she might one day, (even in her mid-sixties), become the wife
of a man whose previous wife (Mia Farrow) was half his age.
Whatever Mr. Sinatra thought of this situation, is unknown, at
least to this writer. However, it is known that when he saw the
lady’s temperature rising,
he turned on the air-conditioning and began making himself a little scarcer,
as they say.
It should be noted that he did not entirely desert the grieving widow for, whatever
his failings, he was also a man true to his word. He continued to call and to
look after her, and, although a little more occasionally than before, escort
her to dinner.
His kindnesses were appreciated by Mrs. Goetz, to a
point. Because
underneath she was steaming in more ways than one: she wanted him,
and yet she knew she
had been rejected. The Hollywood of the moguls, which is what we’re dealing
with here, was a very small town of very big egos. Everyone knew everyone else’s
business be it monkey or big, or thought they did; and everyone had an opinion
about all of it, and never a charitable one. The fact that the community knew
Frank Sinatra was never going to marry Edie Goetz was not only an ego crusher
to the woman who really had been The Mrs. Astor of her time and place, but it
was also humiliating and infuriating, not to mention evidence that her reign
was
over: the good news: (Frank Sinatra’s attentiveness); was also the bad
news: (he wasn’t going to marry her).
The power of a woman, as defined by Edie Goetz, in her imagined
yet self-actualized
world, was the ability to “get a man.” “I could always get
a man,” she would recall looking back over her life. As much as some who
knew her might have scoffed at the idea, this was not an unrealistic self-assessment.
She had grown up in a world where her father had gone from owner of a neighborhood
nickelodeon to head of the greatest movie studio in the world – and with
his name on it. He was the most powerful man in the community for more than two
generations of stars. He was a father who also had idolized his coy and demanding
daughter. And, she then left Dad’s house to marry a man who despite his
own extra-marital affairs demonstrated undying loyalty and devotion to her and
made their marriage a paragon in that community that mocked the institution.
Otherwise, people could argue, the men were not banging down her
door – except
to be invited to dine, in a town where some men would sell their grandmother
for such an invitation.
And so it was that the Chairman of the Board, Frank, Francis Albert
Sinatra, the idol of millions, the man who could wither any dame
with two simple words “hiya
doll,” had (deeply) disappointed Edie Goetz, leaving her just another lonely
heart along the boulevard of broken dreams. But, as she was a true child of Hollywood
where thought and illusion are interchangeable, Edie Goetz was no dying swan.
Her natural self-defense was the same as that of Norma Desmond, the ex-film star
in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, who when confronted by a young, potential
swain with the lost magnitude of her former stardom, responded: “I’m
still big; the pictures got smaller.”
And so it was that one night under the stars of the desert sky
that is Los Angeles, with the jasmine in bloom filling the air
with exotic fragrance, Frank Sinatra
dutifully escorted Edie Goetz to a dinner party at the Bistro, then a popular
restaurant in Beverly Hills. And when they returned to her famous house on Delfern
Drive, she invited him in for a nightcap. And while they sat facing each other
in the famous Billy Haines-designed library under the shelves of the late William
Goetz’s collection of first edition books, Edie brought the conversation
around to “them.”
With nary a
word from Frank, she broached the subject of what (she or) some
people viewed as their “romance” and its future. And
without waiting for, or asking, his opinion of the situation, she
very coolly “explained” to this man — who probably had more women who wanted to marry
him in a
single average month than all the Impressionist paintings in the
Goetzes’ famous collection — that although many had
imagined that he and she would marry, and that she could understand
why
people would think that — because they had been friends
for so long, and because Frank loved Billy so, and because they
all loved
each other very much, and that she might be a perfect wife for
him (Frank) at this time in his life, etcetera; she continued:
“But what people don’t understand is that I could never marry you
Frank, because Deane Johnson (Edie’s lawyer) told me you were a hoodlum.”
A hoodlum.
Whereupon, Frank Sinatra, ladykiller without peer, idol of millions, turned several
shades of purple, (according to Mrs. Goetz’ memory) put down his drink,
and without uttering another syllable, got up, walked out of the room, walked
out of the house, slamming the door, got into his car, drove out of the driveway
and into the night, never to return to or speak to Edie Goetz again.
From her point of view, it had been a victory, albeit a hollow one. She lived
another fifteen years believing his departure and eternal estrangement was the
result of her uttering the truth. Whatever regrets she had were buried in the
backstory of her actions that night in her library. In retrospect, the move on
her part was a foolish one because Frank Sinatra had indeed been her friend and
defender, and in all likelihood would have remained so for ever after, even after
he married his wife Barbara. But as it happened, he could never abide even the
mention of her name.
Frank Sinatra’s fame, and the power that the legend of his personality
brought him, continued unimpeded, reaching far beyond anything Edie Goetz had
enjoyed in her heyday. Although the subject that Mrs. Goetz had chosen to even
the score, was his Achilles heel. He’d come a long, long way from Hoboken
and risen up more than once from the show business ashes. Kitty Kelley’s
scandalous best-selling biography of the man was so popular it made her rich,
and even his friend and admirer Ardie Deutsch testified that Kelley had “pretty
much got it right.”
The “getting it right” also includes a man who was loyal, devoted,
generous, self-indulged, egomaniacal, volatile, kind, gentle, complex, abusive
at times, mindful of his responsibilities to his wives and to his children, and
... The Voice. In memory, seven years on, those of us millions who, like Edie
Goetz
and
all those dames and all those devils who fell for his tough guy charm, and were
swept away by the voice, remain unabashed, his followers and his fans. Get out
one of your Sinatra albums and see for yourself.
I’ve
passed the place a million times. A number
of years ago when I was first writing the Social Diary for Quest, their
office was upstairs above the shop. So I’d seen the
windows and never really gave it more than a passing glance because
I don’t buy jewelry. Even the cufflinks I own (and now I
have several pair) were gifts from caring (and observant friends).
The studs I live without, although maybe this is a perfect opportunity
to do something about that since I have a frequent call for them.
Jaded
designers Joseph Curto and Giuseppe d’Arcangelo
at work
Jaded,
located on Madison Avenue between 79th and 80th
So I really
knew nothing about JADED except for their location and the fact
that they are jewelers on the west side of Madison
Avenue between 79th and 80th (just one door down from 80th).
It turns out they’ve been there for twenty-two years
(always a good sign)! And when I first spoke to them when they
expressed
interest in advertising on the NYSD, I asked a couple of women
friends of mine who really like jewelry and really use it to
accessorize their daily choices, and both reactions were exactly
the same.
“Oh I really like that store. They have beautiful things, sometimes
even one of a kind. They’re very wearable, and very good
prices,” with the same voice of enthusiastic approval.
And these are women who don’t kid around about their
choices.
Really. Well, I liked that. Sounds like a winner to me.
So JH and
I went over to meet the owners and have a look. They are a
couple
of brothers-in-law, Giuseppe d’Arcangelo and Joseph
Curto. Mr. Curto is actually American-born but he had
a mother who wanted to live in Rome and so they did. They design
most of their pieces, most of which are actually made by hand
in
their workrooms above the store.
Their distinctive signature look is semi-precious and pearl jewelry
in very special stones which include ruby, amethyst, peridot,citrine,
blue topaz, onyx, hematite, carnelian, quartz and crystal. Their
colors change seasonally to reflect fashion direction and trends.
And, as my friends had already noticed, many of their pieces
in their collection are one of a kind designs. They are known
for
their beautifully detailed Roman classic intaglios. JADED is
also known for their service and offers the opportunity for
custom made
pieces as well.
Joseph
Curto and Giuseppe d’Arcangelo
Talking
to the owners about their business was like talking
to my friends about it. They were telling us something I had
already been told:
the jewelry is significantly more affordable than most other
premier jewelers – a woman can go in and purchase a pair
of earrings or a necklace for herself as she would a piece of
clothing, and like the clothing, the jewelry is extremely wearable.
You’ve seen it in Vogue, W, Harpers Bazaar and WWD, and
now NYSD. Good company we’re keeping, wouldn’t you
say? Click on one of the ads on our Party Pictures pages and
visit their web site. Or, if you’re in the neighborhood,
stop by and have a look.
The collection is also sold at other elegant stores in Palm Beach,
LA, and other
cities in the U.S.
JADED
1048 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021 http://jadedjewels.com 212.288.6631 or
800.576.9166
The muses are heard.Last week I had lunch with Debbie
Bancroft at Michael’s. Mrs. Bancroft, mentioned here last Monday as
one of the Doug Hannant muses (I think she’s wearing his
jacket in the picture of us at Michael’s), is a longtime
and active member of New York and Southampton social circles. Mother
of two teen-agers, and married to William Woodward Bancroft, known
as Billy to their zillions of friends, a member of two old New
York families (the W’s and the B’s). You never see
pictures on the party pages of Billy Bancroft for two reasons.
One, he doesn’t like the party circuit except on rare occasions,
and two, he hates having his picture taken. Puts his hand in front
of the lens, runs from the camera. Just doesn’t like it.
Nice looking guy but as he would say himself: what does he care?
DPC
and Debbie Bancroft at Michael's
Debbie, on the
other hand, is one of the most photographed women in New York.
Oh, you’ve noticed? And one of the reasons is
because she is a major presence on the social and philanthropic
scene. Her name is often on list of chairs and co-chairs of many
charity benefits, from hospitals, to schools, to neighborhood houses,
to theatrical philanthropies such as the Drama League.
She’s a very friendly woman in the neighborly sense, and
because of it she has all kinds of friends from all walks of life.
As it is on the New York scene, there is a certain crowd (the Hamptons/New
York circuit) that she is very much a part of. The Bancrofts don’t
visit Palm Beach regularly although she’s been known to hitch
a ride down on a friend’s private jet for a weekend from
time to time, and last year during the school vacations, they managed
to hit both Aspen and Palm Beach. She’s one of those women
who has a lot of energy and a lot of ambition. In the past couple
of years besides her full social schedule, she’s put all
of it to tangible use: writing a monthly social column for Avenue
Magazine. So, here's Debbie ...
