BEACH

said his natural good looks were “the effortless universal door opener” that provided “easy access to the good life of sun, sex and spaghetti.”

Lenzi told me his timing also was lucky: “No other place on the planet offered more opportunities of every kind than Beverly Hills from 1957-1992, the years I was there.”

But like any aspiring youth arriving in L.A., he had to pay some dues. “We were there for only five days when Red got homesick and said, ‘I’ve got to go home.’ I told him, ‘Red, I’m not going back.’ So he left and I got a tiny room in a hotel for $14 a week. It had bullet holes in the ceiling.”

Soon afterward, Lenzi said, “I got a job parking cars from ‘Billy the bull’ at a new restaurant, the Villa Capri. I was mesmerized by the people coming in. Frank Sinatra was going out at the time with Lauren Bacall; they had battles royale in the parking lot. She’s swearing at Sinatra; he’s saying: ‘Don’t give her the car! I’m taking the car!’ He had a beautiful new Cadillac. One night, he told me to go get some gas for it. So I’m driving around Hollywood in Frank Sinatra’s Cadillac!”

“Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin were constantly playing around. Sinatra would come into the place with a whole group of people at 2 o’clock in the morning. They’d sit at a booth and make a lot of noise.”

“Sinatra intimidated everybody,” Lenzi said. “Even Kirk Douglas was intimidated by him. The only person who intimidated Sinatra was Dean Martin. Dean was just naturally cool.”

Lenzi said he grew to love Sinatra because of his generosity. “Nobody on the planet was more generous. If you had a problem, he’d go looking for you. He was the biggest tipper of all, nobody came close. He’d give me $10, $20: ‘Here, kid.’ ”

Lenzi said he spent three days in Las Vegas with Sinatra, Mia Farrow (his wife at that time) and Lenzi’s girlfriend, Pamela Mason, who was divorced from the actor James Mason. “We’d drink ‘til 3 in the morning.”

Lenzi quoted Farrow saying: “Joe looks like a young Frank Sinatra.”

In 1959, Lenzi enrolled in an acting school, impressed a talent scout with 20th Century Fox and signed a contract to attend acting classes at the studio for six months. If he impressed the board of directors at a screen test, he would be signed to a seven-year contract. Lenzi seemed to be on the verge of fulfilling his dream of becoming a movie star.

“It was an incredible opportunity,” he noted.

But he got heavily involved with a gal named Dusty Miller, whom Lenzi described as “more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor.” After several months of a wild romance, “I learned she was being kept by a baron from Switzerland. I called my father, crying on the phone: ‘She’s not who she said she was.’ ”

“The next morning I was going to do my big scene for 20th Century Fox. I was a good actor. But I was so distracted. I hadn’t slept. I did one scene and I was a mess. I blew one of the biggest opportunities of my life.”

“I had all the potential to be a movie star,” Lenzi said, “but I struck out. I didn’t live up to my full potential. But if I had, I couldn’t have handled it. I’d probably be dead by now if I’d been a star.”

But he holds onto those Hollywood memories. Lenzi pulled out a loose leaf scrapbook filled with photos of him alongside Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kirk Douglas, Phyllis Diller and others. They’re included in his paperback book (available via Amazon), which he admits is filled with typos. “I’m a grammatical nitwit.”

After his acting dream died, Lenzi got into real estate sales. In 1991, he pulled off a big deal, selling a Beverly Hills mansion to the Sultan of Brunei for $12.5 million. This was his path to early retirement.

These days, at 81, Lenzi reads philosophy in bed at night, does laps at IKEA on Sargent Drive and enjoys cozy days with his “Turkish delight,” whom he met in 2004 when she answered a personal ad he had placed.

In spite of all the Hollywood starlets he had flings with, Lenzi told me, “With Esmahan, I’m blessed. These have been the best years of my life.”