They were also the most interesting 14 years of Jacobs’s life, since his subsequent valet assignments (for Steve McQueen, George Hamilton and Bill Cosby) proved an anticlimax. Yet although Jacobs loved Sinatra, warts and all, he is anything but reticent about those warts.
Jacobs was born in New Orleans in 1927. His mother was half- Jewish, half-Creole, while his father had a Jewish grandfather (hence the surname). He joined the Navy as a cook in 1945 and travelled to Europe, where he mastered Mediterranean cookery. After being discharged, he married his college sweetheart, the first of three wives. He moved to Los Angeles, where he worked briefly as a Beverly Hills gardener, a process-server, a film extra and a waiter for a Hollywood party caterer. He was first taken on as a valet by Irving P “Swifty” Lazar, the Brooklyn-born literary agent who specialised in selling books to Hollywood studios. Lazar was an inveterate Anglophile, an unashamed arriviste and a cheapskate: he sent Jacobs to buy caviar and warned him not to help himself because blacks had an enzyme that meant they couldn’t digest sturgeon roe. Lazar wanted him to dress up in a livery for chauffeuring, but Jacobs drew the line at that.
While working for Lazar, Jacobs met Ernest Hemingway and was propositioned by Noël Coward and Cole Porter. This was as nothing compared to what happened while he was working for Sinatra. He listened to Joe Kennedy spout racist venom; watched Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo canoodling at Sinatra’s Palm Springs home; caught JFK doing coke with Peter Lawford (“For my back, George . . . National Security”); went round a golf course dressed as Giancana accompanied by the mobster’s bodyguards, so as to fool an FBI surveillance team; observed Sinatra go down on a beautiful model under the table in a restaurant; acted as a decoy with Prince Rainier when Sinatra and Princess Grace disappeared for trysts; and was propositioned by the bisexual English actor Laurence Harvey (“You’re like a box of chocolates, George. I’m dying to take a bite”).
During one overseas trip to Israel in 1965, Sinatra encouraged Jacobs to rediscover his Jewish roots. He sent him on a three-day crash course, got him a quickie bar mitzvah and took him to “a brothel filled with frock-coated Hassidic diamond dealers drooling after the blond Polish hookers”. The next morning Jacobs woke up to find that he had been abandoned, relieved of his credit cards and left with only $50 in cash. “It took me three days, and a lot of fast and heavy bullshit to get a series of cheap flights that took me back to London, where they had just left, then on to LA,” he recalls. The purpose of Sinatra’s practical joke was to make Jacobs realise what sort of Jew he was — “a scrambling Jew”. On his return home, Sinatra rewarded him with a $1,000 bar mitzvah present for his resourcefulness.
It all came to an end in 1968 at an LA nightclub called the Candy Store. Jacobs bumped into a stoned Farrow, by then divorced from Sinatra, who dragged him onto the dance floor. This became a speculative gossip-column item and Sinatra summarily fired his valet. Jacobs was paid off but ostracised. When he ran into Sinatra in a Palm Springs bar in 1978, he burst into tears and Sinatra put an arm around him. “Forget about it, kid,” he said. “It isn’t so bad.”
As Jacobs explains, Sinatra didn’t do remorse: “It just wasn’t his style to express regrets, outside of his music.” (Indeed, one thinks of that lyric from My Way: “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again, too few to mention.”) An intriguing subtext of ethnic distrust runs through this book. Sinatra would use disparaging terms (such as “scumbag kike”) for certain Jews; he sent his son to a private school near Palm Springs to keep him away from the “spoiled Jew brats” of Beverly Hills; and when he excised former lover Lauren Bacall from his life, she became “the Jew bitch”.
His nickname for Jacobs was the racist term “Spook”. When he took Jacobs to meet his parents in New Jersey, Dolly Sinatra’s reaction was: “You never told me he was a nigger! Who do you think you are, Ashley Wilkes?” (the decent Wilkes was the object of Scarlett O’Hara’s affections in Gone with the Wind.) However, Dolly subsequently almost adopted Jacobs as her “Jigsilian”, or black Sicilian, teaching him how to make Italian dishes and remaining in touch after Sinatra fired him.
Graduates in Sinatra studies will appreciate the many intimate revelations that this memoir has to offer. We learn that Sinatra acquired his one-take approach to film acting from Boris Karloff, who gave him lessons; that the only times Sinatra went to pray at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills were when he was nominated for an Oscar and when his son was kidnapped; and that the increasingly booze-raddled Judy Garland, an old flame from the 1940s, would come round to Sinatra’s Bowmont Avenue house to perform oral sex, which seemed to ease her anxiety — Sinatra joked with Jacobs that his address should be renamed “Blowmont”.
We also learn that Sinatra, who hero-worshipped the jazz singer Billie Holiday, visited her as she lay dying from cirrhosis of the liver in a Harlem hospital, and that Holiday begged him to get her one last fix of heroin. Although he disapproved of drugs, he made the necessary arrangements, but was upset when she died before the dope could be delivered.
One curious omission from Jacobs’s memoir is the moment when his boss came close to murdering him. There was a group on board Sinatra’s private plane, and Sinatra had a floozy in his lap when he asked Jacobs to fetch him a hard-boiled egg. By mistake, Jacobs brought him a raw one. When Sinatra opened it, the contents spilt over him and the girl. In a fit of rage, Sinatra grabbed Jacobs and dragged him over to the door, which he proceeded to fling open.
Dean Martin managed to put Sinatra in a headlock, while another passenger pulled Jacobs to safety. “Who knows if he would have thrown George out?” Sammy Davis Jr told Sinatra biographer Michael Munn. “Personally, I don’t believe he would have, but it scared the shit out of poor George. Thanks to Dino, we’ll never know. But I can’t see Frank, even at his worst, killing his trusted valet George.” It is strange, though, that Jacobs should have had amnesia about such a nasty incident.
Jacobs’s ghostwriter, William Stadiem, is well versed in Hollywood folklore and has supplied much depth of context. Apart from a few lapses in punctuation and grammar, he has enabled the ex-valet tell his remarkable story in an authentic voice.
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Read on... websites:
www.sinatrafamily.com
Sinatra family site with links
