The one lover more obsessed with sex than Sinatra: Ol' Blue Eyes' biographer on the crooner's VERY carnal relationship with actress Lana Turner 

By Adapted From A Book By J Randy Taraborrelli

Published: 18:06 EST, 31 July 2015 | Updated: 18:18 EST, 31 July 2015

When Frank Sinatra saw the film The Postman Always Rings Twice, his eyes were on stalks. The film’s curvaceous star, Lana Turner, in white shorts and a halter top that set off her tan, had never looked more alluring. ‘I have to have her,’ said Sinatra.

It was 1946 and he’d only recently moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Nancy, and two children after his success as a singer had led to offers of roles in Hollywood movies.

In a matter of minutes, he’d obtained Lana’s phone number through a mutual friend.

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It only took Frank Sinatra a matter of minutes to find out Lana Turner's, pictured, phone number from a friend

It only took Frank Sinatra a matter of minutes to find out Lana Turner's, pictured, phone number from a friend

By then, Lana had made more than 20 films. She was very successful, very rich and — after two marriages — once again single, with more suitors than she could count.

Sinatra would later say he’d never been with anyone quite as carnal as Lana Turner. She seemed uninterested in anything other than going to bed. If he tried to engage her in small talk, she was indifferent.

World events? Forget it. She didn’t want to talk about movie-making or her career or his, and she definitely wasn’t interested in his family life.

All she wanted was to have sex with him — and as often as possible.

Sinatra was fascinated. He’d never known a woman so at ease with her sexuality that she didn’t care if a man saw her as nothing more than a sex object. In fact, she encouraged it. For a man so used to being the hunter, not the prey, it was a remarkable turnaround.

As one of Frank Sinatra’s boyhood friends once remarked: ‘He was a skinny guy, ordinary looking, gawky, his Adam’s apple protruded and his ears stuck out. But he had more charisma and magnetism than anyone around. The broads — they swarmed all over him.’

In fact, as I discovered when researching my biography of Sinatra, he’d started having sex at around the age of 13. A sweet-talker even then, he found he could have pretty much any girl he wanted.

Was it his confidence that women found so appealing? Certainly, his talent alone can’t explain why he attracted some of the greatest love goddesses of the 20th century.

Frank Sinatra, right, started having sex at 13 and added Lana Turner, left, to the long list of women he bedded

Frank Sinatra, right, started having sex at 13 and added Lana Turner, left, to the long list of women he bedded

Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, Jackie O, Mia Farrow . . . he bedded them all.

Today, 18 years on from my original biography of Sinatra — who would have been 100 this December — I have filled in a great many of the missing gaps about his legendary womanising.

Much of the new information has come from people who contacted me to say I’d missed them the first time round, while others agreed to speak to me for the first time.

The portrait that emerges is of a man who found beautiful women utterly irresistible — but seldom treated them well.

Within two weeks of starting his affair with Lana Turner, Sinatra was so enamoured that he asked his wife for a divorce.

‘Hell, no,’ Nancy told him. She certainly wasn’t going to abandon her comfortable life just for one of his passing fancies. Instead, she summoned Sinatra’s publicist, George Evans, and asked him what he could do to help.

Two weeks after starting the affair with Turner, pictured, Sinatra asked his wife Nancy for a divorce

Two weeks after starting the affair with Turner, pictured, Sinatra asked his wife Nancy for a divorce

Easy, he said. He phoned Lana and warned her that if she didn’t stop seeing Sinatra, she’d find herself in violation of the morals clause in her movie contract.

Lana laughed. ‘You’re so cute to threaten me like this,’ she told him. ‘Why, you’re just adorable, aren’t you?’

She reminded him that she’d thus far made a fortune exploiting her bad-girl image.

No one at MGM, she said, would be the least bit taken aback by her having a romance with any man, married or otherwise. ‘In fact, they hope I do,’ she exclaimed. ‘More box-office dollars for them if I do!’

That same night, Sinatra and Lana brazenly attended a Hollywood party together. Then he took her back to a flat he’d rented — and furnished with $30,000-worth of antiques — just two days earlier, simply for the purpose of entertaining her there.

Lana wasn’t impressed. As soon as she walked into his new love nest, she took one look around and said: ‘Who needs this dump! I’m not sleeping here.’ Then she threw her wrap over her shoulder, raised her chin and headed for the exit.

‘You’re right, it is a dump,’ said Frank, anxious to placate her. He whisked her to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he rented a pricey bungalow.

Later, he rounded on his publicist for threatening his lover. ‘How could you use the moral-clause card on her?’ Sinatra wanted to know. ‘It’s because of broads like her that the f****** moral-clause card is even in the f****** deck,’ George Evans exclaimed.

But there was nothing Evans could do: Sinatra insisted on a public announcement that he was separating from his wife.

Not for the last time, Nancy packed his bags, threw them out on the front lawn and vowed never to give him a divorce.

Once the announcement had been made, Sinatra joined Lana at a house she owned in Palm Springs.

That weekend, they danced at the Chi Chi Club and seemed not to care about the stares and whispers.

Lana Turner was also two-timing Sinatra, pictured, with the equally married film star Tyrone Power

Lana Turner was also two-timing Sinatra, pictured, with the equally married film star Tyrone Power

However, the next day, Lana attempted to deny the affair, calling the gossip columnist Louella Parsons to say: ‘I’m not in love with Frank, and he’s not in love with me. I’ve never broken up a home. I just can’t take these accusations!’

What she didn’t mention was that she was also two-timing Sinatra with the married film star Tyrone Power.

Two weeks passed, and the glow between Lana and Sinatra began to dim. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to end her affair with Power, and she’d heard that Sinatra was still seeing an actress called Marilyn Maxwell.

After a blazing row, the ever-mercurial singer walked out on Lana, saying he was finished with her. ‘Oh, you’ll be back,’ Lana told him, certain that the curtain was only going down on Act One.

She had reckoned without the intervention of Sinatra’s mother Dolly, a formidable Italian-American who had once performed back-street abortions in New Jersey.

Summoned to a kitchen-table meeting with his parents and his publicist, Sinatra cringed as Dolly punched him in the arm, whacked him twice over the head and told him to shut up.

A few days later, at a nightclub engagement, he sang Going Home while looking directly at his wife in the audience. She cried and they hugged. He went home the next day.

Lana didn’t know she’d been dumped until she read about it in the papers. ‘To think he could do that to a woman like me!’ she told her friend Ava Gardner — the woman who, with exquisite irony, would soon replace her in Ol’ Blue Eyes’ bed.

If Lana was left wounded by her dalliance with Sinatra, then it was as nothing to the humiliation endured by Lauren Bacall a decade later.

After Humphrey Bogart died from cancer of the oesophagus in January 1957, his widow leaned heavily on Frank for comfort. He’d been a close friend of the couple’s for several years, so nothing could have been more natural.

But within weeks, Lauren — or Betty, as all her friends knew her — was in love. ‘I wanted to wake up smiling again,’ she said. ‘I hated feeling that my life was over at 32.’

After Humphrey Bogart died of cancer, his wife Lauren Bacall leaned on Sinatra, picture for emotional support

After Humphrey Bogart died of cancer, his wife Lauren Bacall leaned on Sinatra, picture for emotional support

Soon she was hosting Sinatra’s dinner parties. And, because she was no pushover, she was also fighting with him about everything from the weather to her clothes, his choice of friends and her spending habits.

Bacall was particularly irked by the way he flirted with other women. ‘I’m a star,’ she said imperiously, ‘and let me tell you something, Frank Sinatra. If that’s not good enough for you, then screw you.’

Within a couple of months, she was thinking about marriage. Sinatra wasn’t so sure: apart from anything else, he was apprehensive about becoming a father to Bacall’s two children.

Still, he wanted to move forward with his life — and, in March 1958, he proposed and was immediately accepted. The debacle that followed was widely retold after Bacall’s death last year — but with the actress widely getting the blame.

This is what really happened.

That night, the couple asked the Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar to join them for a private celebration at a restaurant on the Sunset Strip.

The next day, before Sinatra left for a club date in Miami, he told Bacall to keep their engagement top-secret.

He didn’t want to have to deal with an avalanche of Press interest while he was working, he said. ‘I was giddy with joy,’ Betty recalled, ‘and felt like laughing every time I opened my mouth. The children would have a father, I’d have a husband, we’d have a home again.’

That night, while seeing a play, she was shocked to be approached by gossip columnist Louella Parsons, who asked if it was true that she was going to marry Sinatra. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ snapped Bacall.

Later, she saw Parsons deep in conversation with Swifty Lazar and wondered if he’d kept her secret.

Sinatra, seemingly, was reluctant to become a step father to Lauren Bacall's, pictured, two children

Sinatra, seemingly, was reluctant to become a step father to Lauren Bacall's, pictured, two children

He hadn’t: the following day’s paper carried the headline: ‘Sinatra to marry Bacall’.

Worse, Parsons reported that Bacall had ‘finally admitted that [Sinatra] had asked her to marry him’. She’d done no such thing, but she was nevertheless worried about Sinatra’s reaction. ‘I’m so sorry about this,’ she told him on the phone. ‘I hope it’s all OK.’

Sinatra was curiously noncommittal. Which seemed fine, until a week ticked by without any further phone calls. By this time, Bacall was growing anxious.

In fact, Sinatra was having second thoughts. He suspected that he and Bacall were united more by mutual grief for Bogart than true love, he told his lawyer, and he was still uncertain about becoming a stepfather.

His lawyer laid it on the line. ‘Divorce at your level of income is a pain in the ass,’ he said. ‘If you’re not sure about this thing, for God’s sake, Frank, don’t do it.’

When he finally called Bacall, Sinatra sounded angry. ‘Why did you do it?’ he demanded to know. Bacall protested that it was Swifty who’d blabbed, not her.

But Frank didn’t believe her — and the myth that she destroyed their engagement by bragging about it remains widely believed in Hollywood to this day.

‘Damn it, Betty, I haven’t been able to leave my room for days; the Press are everywhere,’ Sinatra told her. ‘Now we’ll have to lay low for a while — not see each other.’

Weeks went by, but he couldn’t muster the courage to be honest with her and say he wanted to end it. Bacall spent night after night in tears. Then, one night, they turned up separately to a dinner party that they’d both been invited to a month earlier.

‘Frank didn’t acknowledge my existence,’ Bacall recalled. ‘Not a flicker of recognition . . . He looked right past me, as though my chair was empty. I would have preferred him to spit in my face — at least that would have been recognition.’

Her humiliation was complete. Pulling their host into the kitchen, she told him she had to leave.

‘My God. You think you know someone,’ she whispered through tears, ‘then it turns out you don’t.’

They really were just good friends. Hard to believe, perhaps, but Frank Sinatra had no intention of seducing Marilyn Monroe, then one of the sexiest women on the planet.

In 1954, both were going through painful divorces — hers from baseball player Joe DiMaggio and his from Ava Gardner. As friends do, they consoled each other over their mutual heartbreak.

Sinatra was later married to Ava Gardner, left, who he divorced, despite being still in love with her

Sinatra was later married to Ava Gardner, left, who he divorced, despite being still in love with her

Worried about Marilyn’s emotional state, Sinatra asked her to move in with him for a while.

He knew he wouldn’t be giving in to temptation: not only was he still in love with Ava, but nothing seemed to interest him any more.

There was just one problem with this. Marilyn enjoyed wandering around naked; indeed, she liked to surprise visitors by suddenly materialising in a room with nothing on but a smile. And she saw no reason to change her habits.

One morning, Sinatra woke up, went into the kitchen wearing just his boxer shorts and found Marilyn standing naked in front of the open refrigerator, her little finger in her mouth, trying to decide between orange and grapefruit juice.

‘Oh, Frankie,’ she said, ‘I didn’t know you got up so early.’ That moment marked the end of their platonic relationship.

A close friend of Sinatra’s revealed: ‘He told me that he took her right there in the kitchen, up against the closed refrigerator.’

It was the beginning of a long, on-again/off-again affair between them, which lasted until she died in 1962.

Sinatra found Marilyn intelligent, witty, sexy and exciting — but the passion he’d enjoyed with Ava simply wasn’t there. When she felt strong enough to move out, he was actually relieved.

But they continued seeing each other from time to time, even during her marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller.

In 1961, after learning that Marilyn was increasingly hooked on pills and alcohol, and had recently spent time in a psychiatric clinic, Sinatra invited her to stay with him in Las Vegas. He was now 45 and she 34.

After that, he took her for a cruise on his yacht. Witnesses say that Marilyn was popping pills more than ever and often disorientated.

When trying to recover from Ava, Sinatra began a relationship with Marilyn Monroe - which started platonic

When trying to recover from Ava, Sinatra began a relationship with Marilyn Monroe - which started platonic

Yet she apparently started talking to Sinatra about marriage.

‘I swear to Christ, I’m ready to throw her right off this boat right now,’ he told a friend. ‘By now, I would have cut any other dame loose. But this one — I just can’t do it.’

The following year, Sinatra told another friend that Marilyn wanted to kill herself. ‘I’ve been there,’ he said, referring to his suicide attempts during his relationship with Ava. ‘I didn’t know what to do about it then, and I still don’t.’

Yet despite Marilyn’s deepening problems, their love affair reignited in 1962 — to the point that he actually considered marrying her.

He asked his lawyer what he thought about the idea.

To which the reply was: ‘She’s so desperate, if you marry her and it goes sour, she’ll go off the deep end and self-destruct. Do you really want history to show that Marilyn Monroe killed herself while she was married to Frank Sinatra?’

But Sinatra wasn’t deterred. He told his lawyer he was going to talk to Marilyn about getting married, and asked him to find them a quiet wedding venue in Europe.

Did he ever propose? No one knows. But whether he did or not, the affair continued.

That summer, Marilyn joined him at the Cal Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, where he had a singing engagement. When she arrived, Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, recalled: ‘She looked bad. She had on a black scarf, no make-up, just very washed out-looking.’

She was taken to a VIP chalet next door to that of Sinatra’s friends Peter and Pat Lawford.

Not long afterwards, however, both Lawford and Sinatra were calling the lodge kitchen and screaming for coffee to be sent round.

The valet remembered seeing them both walking Marilyn round and round the chalet, trying to wake her up. Marilyn revived, but seemed a pale shadow of herself. Guests noticed that her hair was in disarray, and that she wore the same green dress all weekend.

One day, in Sinatra’s presence, she opened her bag and brought out some syringes while searching for something at the bottom. According to a friend, he turned white. ‘Oh, those are for my vitamin shots,’ she said. In fact, she’d developed the alarming habit of giving herself injections of the sedative phenobarbital.

Next, she produced some capsules from her bag and pricked one with a sewing pin. ‘Gets into your bloodstream faster that way,’ she said cheerfully.

Sinatra had visions of Marilyn killing herself while he was on the premises. His compassion for her had its limitations: he asked Pat and Peter Lawford to take her straight back to Los Angeles.

Less than a week later, on August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead at her home.

‘Frank was in shock for weeks, distraught,’ his valet recalled.

Later, Sinatra travelled to her funeral at Westwood Memorial Park, only to discover that Marilyn’s ex-husband, Joe DiMaggio — who believed that the singer had let her down — had told security guards to bar him entry.

Out of respect for her memory, Sinatra left without making a scene.

Adapted by Corinna Honan from Sinatra: Behind The Legend by J. Randy Taraborrelli, published by Sidgwick & Jackson on August 13 at £20. © J Randy Taraborrelli 2015. To pre-order a copy for £16, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Offer until August 8, p&p is free.

 

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