Mob links? Frank Sinatra? He’s more like Mother Teresa in this memoir by the fan who turned into his Mr Fixit
By and large, Frank Sinatra has been given a rough ride by his biographers. Kitty Kelley’s His Way (1986) devotes 100 pages to establishing his connections with the Mafia, and only half a dozen pages to his singing. Sinatra: The Life, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan (2006), offers even more pages on the Mafia – and it doesn’t stop there. Under V for Violence, the book’s index lists separate headings for his violence against individuals, his fist- fights, his violence against women, his threats of violence, and so on.
Tony Oppedisano is having none of it. Sinatra was, he says, ‘by far the most generous human being I’ve ever known’. He was a man who ‘ genuinely wanted to do the very best within his power to make other people’s lives happier and better’. He also had ‘ a lot of respect for the fairer sex’ because, after all, ‘his heart was deep and tender, and at his core, he was a big softie’.
As for the Mafia, Oppedisano is convinced that ‘no evidence of Mob ties (or sex crimes) had ever been found’. Instead, he blames it all on rumour, gossip and innuendo, on the FBI and journalists being ‘deeply invested in the fiction that Sinatra was a major player in the Mob’.
That great comedian Jackie Mason used to tell his audiences: ‘I love Frank Sinatra. You love Frank Sinatra. We all love Frank Sinatra. And why do we love Frank Sinatra? Because he’d kill us if we didn’t.’
Mason knew what he was talking about. Once, after he’d continued telling jokes about the elderly Sinatra’s marriage to the 21-yearold Mia Farrow – ‘Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces’ – he received three gunshots through the glass door of his Las Vegas hotel room. The following year he was approached by a stranger who broke his nose and his cheekbones.
The ever-loyal Oppedisano blames it all on the over- enthusiasm of Frank’s fans. Mason himself was not quite so sure. ‘I have no idea who it was who tried to shoot me,’ he once said. ‘After the shots were fired, all I heard was someone singing, “Doobie, doobie, doo.” ’
Every now and then a crack suddenly appears in Oppedisano’s defence of his old friend and employer. At one point he says that ‘ Frank never wanted the Mob to do anything violent on his behalf. If Frank wanted d to punch somebody, he did it himself.’
But was this always the case? In September 1966 the distinguished journalist and author Dominick Dunne was dining with his family at a smart restaurant in Los Angeles. Sinatra, who had taken against him, was at the next table with his two grown-up daughters and Mia Farrow. At one point the manager of the restaurant, ‘ a very nice guy called George, wonderful man’, came up to him and said: ‘Oh, Mr Dunne, I’m so sorry about this, but Mr Sinatra made me do it.’ George then clenched his fist and hit Dunne smack on his face. The restaurant fell silent. Dunne looked over at Sinatra, who was looking back with a smile on his face.
As Dunne and his family left the restaurant, George rushed over in tears, visibly afraid. He apologised but said he had no choice. Dunne never forgave Frank Sinatra for his behaviour that night. ‘It showed the kind of power Sinatra had, to make a decent man do d an indecent act. And you know, I am aware totally that his voice is one of the th great voices of his era, if not the greatest. g And to this day I can’t stand the sound of it.’
Oppedisano doesn’t mention this particular incident, perhaps because it occurred before his time. He first met Sinatra in 1972, when he was 21 2 and Sinatra was 56. While others of his generation would have been into Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan, Oppedisano di only had eyes for Frank, so much so that he started going to a New York club called Jilly’s ‘ because everyone knew it was Sinatra’s favourite place’.
Oppedisano was a guitarist and a vocalist, ‘a baritone with, coincidentally, the exact same range as Sinatra, note for note’. He managed to befriend the eponymous Jilly – a heavy called Jilly Rizzo. Jilly was Sinatra’s best friend and right-hand man. He was soon t o become Oppedisano’s ‘ mentor, pal and one- man battalion of strength and unconditional friendship’. He was, argues Oppedisano, ‘a complex man who has been stereotyped and misjudged by virtually every Sinatra biographer’. He doesn’t say why. You’d have to look elsewhere to discover that Jilly had a history of violence, once setting off fireworks in a man’s pocket, shattering his hip, and later being convicted of both assault and fraud.
One night, Jilly told Oppedisano that Sinatra would be dropping by. Oppedisano was agog. ‘For a kid who’d been telling his friends for years that some day he’d be friends with Frank Sinatra, his hero’s imminent arrival was like the Second Coming.’
Oppedisano’s persistence paid off: Sinatra took him up and, after Jilly died in a car crash, asked him to take his place. ‘You know, you and I just lost the best friend we will probably ever know,’ he said as they sat together by Sinat
ra’s pool after the burial. ‘I think it would be a good idea if we start spending a lot more time together because I’m going to need you, and you may need me.’
So Oppedisano became a sort of paid companion to Sinatra, ostensibly his road manager, but as much a drinking buddy and a Mr Fixit, or, in a nutshell, a butcher, boozier version of a lady-in-waiting. After endless nights spent ‘ drinking Jack Daniel’s and reflecting on our lives’, he would be in charge of getting Sinatra into his pyjamas and making him a tasty sandwich, ready for when he woke up.
Other biographies have portrayed Sinatra as a mean, vindictive figure from The Godfather, but Sinatra And Me portrays him as closer to Mother Teresa, forever helping people in need and standing up for victims of injustice. If Sinatra was prey to what Oppedisano calls ‘surging emotions’, he maintains it was all down to his difficult birth. He’d been a 13 lb baby emerging from
a 90 lb mother, and this had caused significant damage to his head. This meant that ‘he spent his life dealing with surging emotions and the impulse to strike out’.
Even the devoted Oppedisano admits that, from time to time, Sinatra succumbed to that impulse, but only when absolutely necessary. ‘If he got angry and thought a guy deserved it, he’d deck him… If someone was nasty to him, you can bet he was going to be nasty back.’ He treats this as though it was all perfectly standard behaviour for any wellloved singer. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine Julie Andrews reacting in quite the same way.
Euphemisms abound. ‘ Frank wasn’t always good at discerning the line between good-natured teasing and hurting somebody’s feelings,’ he says after detailing a series of ‘pranks’, generally designed to humiliate their victim. Other understated allusions to his idol’s shortcomings include ‘ Being in Frank’s world wasn’t always a picnic’ and the generalised admission ‘He was no angel’.
Sinatra’s last few years read like a medieval morality tale, designed to show the fickleness of fame and fortune. ‘He was the most profoundly lonely person I’ve ever known.’ While the great singer grows ever more decrepit, his avaricious fourth wife, Barbara, sells his beloved house – ‘the pain… would never leave him’ – and spends the rest of her days keeping his children at bay. ‘Together, Barbara and the Sinatra daughters were like mixing bleach and ammonia… the dinners ranged from long and uncomfortable to downright toxic.’
Meanwhile, Sinatra was always taking Oppedisano to one side and asking ‘over and over’ whether he should go back to his first wife. Ever the diplomat, Oppedisano sat on the fence. ‘I always told him it was his decision, one I couldn’t make for him. Whatever he decided, I would support.’
Like Greyfriars Bobby, Oppedisano stayed with his master to the end, and beyond. The memoir closes with him opening the casket in the mortuary and placing Sinatra’s handkerchief in his breast pocket, along with a packet of Camels and a little bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘After I placed the items in the casket with Frank, I kissed him on the forehead and said my final goodbye.’