I celebrated my 95th birthday during our summer hiatus with a big chocolate cake shared with my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But I was shocked a few weeks later to learn of the deaths of two much younger friends, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, as well as the passing of Lee Solters, last of the colorful Broadway and Hollywood publicists.
I remember taking my very young children to a Sunday afternoon party at Michael Jackson’s Encino home when Michael was a teenager full of enthusiasm and a love of life and his sky-rocketing career.
And there was the day I first met Farrah, with her then-boyfriend Lee Majors, when they turned up for tennis at Jim and Jane Brolin‘s Chatworths home. She had that fresh Texas beauty, the most gorgeous Hollywood blond since Grace Kelly.
I guess if you live long enough you can look back on Hollywood’s Golden Era and also mourn the deaths of those much younger than yourself.
For instance, I often doubt that Clark Gable, the Number One super-star, ever knew knew how big he was.
In 1935 he won the best actor award for It Happened One Night, in which he took off his shirt and revealed no undershirt. I told him more than a decade later that the undershirt industry nearly went out of business after that scene. He pooh-poohed that idea as “poppycock”. Later he rejected the whole idea of the Academy Award system itself. Gable said he believed that the actor award should be by popular vote.
“Actors should be counted only on their ability to act,” he told me. “Let there be five Hamlets and pick the best one.”
Gable’s remarks caused great controversy at the time. But, looking back, it seems logical. He believed that the best Hamlet should win, but the Academy of Motion Picture Acts and Sciences rejected his idea. He would end up being judged the traditional way. Since he won, he went along with it.
It should be noted here that the movie was punishment for a contract dispute at his home studio MGM. MGM was the top-of-the-line studio at the time. But an angry studio boss, Louis B. Mayer, accepted a bid for Gable and sent him off to the then Poverty Row studio, Columbia Pictures, to do It Happened One Night. The deal backfired when Gable won the Academy award.
Frank Capra, the young Sicilian director of It Happened One Night, later told me that Gable refused to read the script, “So I read it to him,” Capra said. “Gable sat in my office the whole time with his head bowed. He never lifted his head during the whole reading. But after hearing the script, he raised his head and said, ‘I’ll do it.’”
Not only did Gable win, but both Capra and the film itself won Academy Awards.
During the summer, I read several rave reviews of Angie Dickinson‘s performance in a Hallmark Western for television. Angie just defies a Hollywood tradition than an actress’ career is over when she hits 35. The reviews were so great that Angie herself couldn’t have written better ones. Watching her performance, I agreed with them.
Of all the cast, she was the only one singled out for such a great review.
Although Angie herself admits to being in her seventies, and her performance as a grandmother was right on, in real life she still retains that underlying sex appeal that attracted men ranging from President John F. Kennedy to Frank Sinatra.
I first met Angie in 1959 when famed director Howard Hawks cast her in the John Wayne western Rio Bravo. The Duke predicted that Angie would become very big in Hollywood. And he was right.
As a loyal member of the University of Notre Dame Class of 1937, I’m a faithful viewer of fellow alumnus Regis Philbin‘s daily TV show. But I’ve got to say that of all the summer fill-ins for Regis, the standout was CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who has a great deal of easy charm.
Although I’ve never met Cooper, I do know that his mother, heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. She’s also very charming, but doesn’t always appreciate being reminded of her own early foray into Hollywood.
Some years back, I ran into her at one of Wendell Niles‘ celebrity tennis tournaments in Monaco. Prince Ranier had thrown a big pool party and when Gloria walked by with photographer Harry Benson, I invited them to join my wife and I poolside.
The four of us chatted awhile until Gloria asked me whether this was my first time in Monaco. I replied no, that I’d first visited Monaco in 1958 with Frank Sinatra. At this, she fled in panic. I had inadvertently brought up a painful incident in her life.
Gloria, then an aspiring actress, was among the women Frank dated in his bachelor days in the 1950s. Frank had wrangled a small part for her in one of his movies, but she didn’t make it to the screen. She was coincidentally fired from the film on the very day I visited the set. The director said she couldn’t act.
Gloria and Frank split up shortly afterward and Frank began a serious romance with Lauren Bacall, widow if his good friend Humphrey Bogart.
Gloria went back to the East Coast and alter married Anderson Cooper’s father, Wyatt Cooper.
During this magazine’s summer hiatus, I lost a great friend, publicist Lee Solters, who was the last of the old time press agents and by far one of the most colorful.
Lee has long established himself on Broadway representing almost every major Broadway show. He came to Hollywood with Barbara Streisand and and quickly signed two of the biggest names in show business, Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra.
As a Sinatra friend, I spent a lot of time with Lee. We traveled all over the world with Frank—to such venues as the Las Vegas style casino in South Africa’s Bophuthatswana native enclave, the pyramids of Egypt and Rio de Janeiro’s famed Copacabana. They led to some memorable moments.
Frank has a way of attracting controversy, but Lee dealt with it magnificently.
I’ll never forget our trip to Rio in 1976. Brazil has a big population of people of Italian descent. Fervent Sinatra fans, they’d been trying for some 30 years to get Frank to appear there.
You can imagine the ferment when Frank arrived at his hotel on Copacabana Beach. Ropes held back the mob of reporters and photographers, but they were closing in on Frank. His aide de camp Jill Rizzo was doing his best to keep them from smothering him. It drove Frank nuts.
Frank had agreed to perform three nights of cabaret at the hotel’s night club and one final performance at the immense Maracana soccer stadium.
Frank, miffed at the press mobbing, refused to do any interviews with anyone. Daily, reporters clamored for interviews. Daily, Lee told them, with his tough Brooklyn charm, “Tomorrow.” But tomorrow never came.
It got so bad that Il Gobo, Brazil’s leading newspaper, splashed a giant headline, in English, across the front page, “LEE SOLTERS GO HOME!” Lee loved it. He bought a slew of copies, framed one for his office wall and, when I reminded him of it years later, sent me a copy, which I still have.
For my wife Doris and I, who coincidentally were celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary that February week, it was a memorable time. We’d spent part of our honeymoon in Rio during Carnival. I’d danced with one of the samba clubs before the storied parade; afterward we’d journeyed down the Amazon. But the Sinatra trip almost had it beat. Almost.
At 1 a.m., after Frank’s final cabaret performance, he said he wanted to scope out the stadium for his appearance the following night. Lee commandeered a couple of cars. Frank, Lee, Frank’s attorney Mickey Rudin, my wife and I, Jilly and a little Brazilian beggar boy whom Jilly had befriended rode, through the quiet streets to the deserted stadium. There wasn’t a Brazilian newsman in sight.
It rained on and off the day of the Maracana concert. Frank and his entourage used the soccer team’s locker as a dressing room. Just before showtime, Mickey Rudin went upstairs to check the weather. The clouds parted. Sinatra started singing. The crowd joined in a sing-along 200,000 fans strong. The Guiness Book of World Records would later call it the biggest crowd to ever attend a concert.
For that entire week, Frank Sinatra had received front page coverage. But Lee’s one headline was in bigger type. As always, Lee had done his job superbly. A real pro—and a great guy.