The Cool School (47 page)

Dougie
—Yes but

SPF—Do you know my stepfather ate chocolate pudding and ground chuck steak every night for years and years and years.

Dougie
—You mean he lived to be a ripe old age?

SPF—No, he’s, I don’t know. Well I mean he was addicted to that y’know, he really was. And he decided to stop, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t. Say an addict decided to stop.

Dougie
—Well let’s take chocolate pudding and narcotics. And you take both of those men; strap them down.

SPF—Did you say pot head?

Dougie
—No, narcotics.

SPF—What do you call narcotics?

D—Ondine.

Dougie
—Narcotics.

SPF—What? What’s a narcotic?

Dougie
—To me a narcotic is a man who takes drugs.

SPF—Any kind of drugs? I mean aspirins are drugs.

Dougie
—Takes drugs to feel high, takes drugs to feel no pain, takes drugs to make him do what he really wants

SPF—Narcotics are opiates. Aren’t narcotics opiates?

D—Oh, I really don’t know. I don’t think about it.

SPF—And opiates are addicting.

Dougie
—I’m not really deeply familiar. I have never read on it y’know.

SPF—Narcotics are opiates and opium nerivatives, and they are addicting like opium, uh, methadrine, heroine y’know.

Dougie
—Yeah.

SPF—And then you have a few other things that are addicting like cocaine, that’s addicting after awhile. But the rest of the things are not narcotics, like pot or amphetamine are stimulates like benzedrine; they are not addicting and yet people do take these things.

Dougie
—Yes.

SPF—And pot’s not addicting you know.

Dougie
—No, not pot.

SPF—And I’m scared shit of needles. Do you like needles?

D—Uhh, no I

SPF—The whole thing about needles upsets me. I think very graphically of muscle tissue and the cold steel forcing it’s way through and the blood, skin, and. It’s frightening.

DD—It’s a good thing that you couldn’t see yourself.

SPF—Why?

D—When?

DD—When you were filled with

SPF—Filled with what?

D—Needles.

DD—Needles.

SPF—(
walking away
) I was never filled with needles. I never have had a needle in my life.

DD—I didn’t say filmed, I said filled.

D—Was he really very serious?

SPF—I was never

DD—I was too! But it was a good thing you couldn’t see yourself.

SPF—I was unconscious and I did’nt know about the needles.

DD—It was a god thing you couldn’t see them.

SPF—In a hospital you see I don’t mind needles. I mean they’re slightly unpleasant in a hospital, but you know when you tie up

DD—I never had any experiences.

SPF—and the eye dropper and the fountain of blood rushes towards y’know it’s all just a little bit afraid. Have you ever seen anyone want to gouge their vein? I mean searching for a vein?

DD—No, I have not. I have not.

SPF—Gouging with a safety pin?

DD—No no, but you have your junkie friends that are here.

SPF—Have you ever seen that? Gouging themselves with a safety pin and stuffing the shit in their arm?

D—Oh I

SPF—You know that’s frightening! I mean it’s not frightening to them because they realize what’s happening. They associate needles with pleasure. I don’t associate them at all. (
Conversation and music.
)

SPF—I mean sleeping pills are the greatest test because with sleeping pills you just fade out. I mean you’ve gone to sleep and then. I mean if you are gonna do away with yourself I think an overdose is
the
way to do it—the way to die.

D—Oh I uh, I actually think just uh staying up and getting a heart attack is the best way.

SPF—Heart attack.

DD—Staying up? But how long do you have to stay up?

SPF—Don’t you realize how painful that is?

D—What? A heart attack?

SPF—First of all, you have a stroke which means that you can’t talk or walk.

D—Not all the time.

SPF—For twenty-five years.

D—Not all the time.

SPF—Twenty-five you won’t be able to walk.

D—Oh Ondine! what are you doing?

(Delightful music
.)

D—Oh, tomorrow’s Friday, oh.

SPF—I worry about you.

D—What?

SPF—I worry about you.

D—Oh.

O—Are you going out for sandwiches you think? I, ooh, OW! Oh, I’m sorry.

RR—Listen, I would like to order. I think we should get Reubens on the telephone.

O—Yes, let’s.

a: a novel
, 1968

A poet and photographer, Gerard Malanga was Andy Warhol’s painting assistant and general handyman during the Silver Factory period, as well as the handsome, leading-man superstar of the early Factory’s films, and the whip dancer of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a Happening starring the Velvet Underground. Malanga was also the only character in Warhol’s
a: a novel
to appear under his own name. But before all that he was a poet, mentored by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Eberhart. Malanga has written more than a dozen poetry books, and his portrait photos—many of which have become iconic—have been widely published. This is a poem from a 1971 book with one of the most timely titles of all time:
Chic Death.

for Andy Warhol

He lies on bed— white walls

behind him:

furniture scarce.

Illustration of shoe

horn hangs on wall behind

and above him. He has

dark hair. He holds Siamese

cat in arms. It’s 1959.

“I grew up in Pittsburgh

after the war: ate soft

boiled eggs every day for two years:

attended Carnegie Tech;

went to New York: lived

with ten dancers on the upper West Side;

free lanced in shoe illustration

with I. Miller Shoe.”

Beyond the slow introduction

to refinement, the development of character,

it’s not easy to breathe. He is

the invisible and unimaginable journey

through colors silk-screened on canvas

what he or the boy may have seen

years before, standing there

in the field, young, innocent, speechless.

Chic Death
, 1971

Like many of the interesting writers of his generation, Nick Tosches started out writing for rock and roll magazines like
Fusion
and
Creem
where writers were allowed to let it all hang out with writing as experimental as the music it covered. Tosches has made a specialty out of profiles of dangerous characters, from Jerry Lee Lewis to Arnold Rothstein to Sonny Liston, and dangerous institutions, from the Vatican to the record business. Along the way he acquired a bit of a dangerous aura himself Here is a selection from
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,
which transforms Dean Martin from a cliché into an unintentional hero.

S
INATRA
AND
M
ARTIN
:
There was something about them that brought out the biggest gamblers. What the Sands paid them, they brought back in spades. It was common knowledge: “Dean Martin is back in the Copa Room,” said
Variety
in December 1959, “and the casino execs are happy—because Dino pulls in the same type heavy player as does Frank Sinatra, another of Jack Entratter’s surefires.”

It was not just the dirty-rich
giovanostri
and
padroni
who were drawn to them, to their glamour, to the appeal of darkness made respectable. The world was full, it seemed, of would-be wops and woplings who lived vicariously through them, to whom the imitation of cool took on the religiosity of the Renaissance ideal of
imitatio Christi.
The very songs that Sinatra and Dean sang, the very images they projected, inspired lavish squandering among the countless men who would be them. It was the Jew-roll around the prick that rendered them ithyphallic godkins, simulacra of the great ones, in their
own eyes and in the eyes of the teased-hair lobster-slurping
Bimbo sapiens
they sought to impress.

Both Dean and Frank owned stock in the Sands. By the summer of 1961, Sinatra would hold a nine-percent piece of the operation. Of the other sixteen licensed Sands stockholders, only Jack Entratter, who had succeeded Jake Freedman in 1958 as president, with twelve percent, Freedman’s widow, Sadie, with ten percent, and the Sands’ vice-president and casino manager, Carl Cohen, with nine and a half percent, owned larger shares; one, Russian-born Hy Abrams, who had been a partner of Bugsy Siegel in the original Flamingo and moved to the Sands in 1954, held an equal, nine-percent piece. Dean, who was granted a gaming license on July 20, 1961, was one of three one-percent owners. His privileged price for that percentage was $28,838, which by then was less than a week’s pay.

Despite their immense popularity and the success of Sinatra’s albums, neither Dean nor Frank was selling many singles as the decade drew to a close. Sinatra had done well with “Witchcraft” in 1958; Dean had done better that year with “Volare.” Since then, neither had broken into the Top Twenty. Sinatra’s best-selling record of 1959, “High Hopes,” had risen only so far as number thirty. On January 2, 1960, at a news conference in the Senate Caucus Room, John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. “High Hopes,” with new lyrics tailored by Sammy Cahn, would become Kennedy’s campaign song. Along the way, it would become the anthem of a time’s dumb optimism.

High hopes were what Sinatra had. He envisioned Kennedy, somehow, as his man. He envisioned too an empire of his own—his own casino, his own record company, God only knew what else. And Dean was along for the ride.

JFK and the Rat Pack: These were the symbols, image and spirit, of that carefree time. Even their smiles were alike. In January, while Kennedy got his campaign formally underway, the Rat Pack made the movie that would become its most celebrated legacy.

In 1956, Peter Lawford had been told an idea for a story about a
precision-timed robbery sweep of the Las Vegas Strip. Sinatra had bought the rights to the story, with Lawford retaining a share, and hired Harry Brown and Charles Lederer to write a screenplay from it. As it developed,
Ocean’s Eleven
became the tale of eleven World War II army buddies reunited for one last maneuver, a multi-million-dollar five-casino heist. Sinatra, who made the picture through his own Dorchester Productions, played ringleader Danny Ocean. They were all in it: Dean, Sammy, Lawford, Joey Bishop. Angie Dickinson played Danny Ocean’s wife. Richard Conte, Henry Silva, Akim Tamiroff, and Buddy Lester had key roles. George Raft showed up as a casino owner. Shirley MacLaine had a cameo scene with Dean.

“I used to be Ricky Nelson,” Dean tells her. “I’m Perry Como now.”

Lewis Milestone, who was already a seasoned professional when he made
All Quiet on the Western Front
in 1930, was hired to direct.

“They say this is hard work, this acting. What bullshit,” Dean said. “Work? Work my ass.”

Dean and Richard Conte—Nick Conte, as those close to him knew him—got along well. Conte’s background at the fringes of Jersey City’s
malavita
was not dissimilar to Dean’s; and both were the sons of old-fashioned Italian barbers. The production and the partying flowed together. From January 26 through February 16, the Rat Pack filmed by day and took the stage of the Sands by night. To Jack Entratter, the sign outside—it would appear at the closing credits—was like a dream come true:

FRANK SINATRA

DEAN MARTIN

SAMMY DAVIS JR.

PETER LAWFORD

JOEY BISHOP

The newspapers had been full of the upcoming Paris summit conference being planned by Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and De Gaulle. Well, Sinatra declared, they would have their own summit conference
of cool. Newspapers across the country began publicizing it as the Rat Pack Summit. By the night they opened, every hotel room in Las Vegas was booked for the duration. Entratter was more than happy to go along with their setup: At least one of them would perform every night; sometimes two or three or four of them, sometimes all five.

Even Kennedy himself showed up at ringside one night. Sinatra introduced him from the stage. Dean came out: “What did you say his name was?” Then Dean picked up little Sammy and held him out to Sinatra: “Here. This award just came for you from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Later, Kennedy joined the Rat Pack upstairs for drinks. Lawford took Davis aside and whispered to him:

“If you want to see what a million dollars in cash looks like, go into the next room; there’s a brown leather satchel in the closet. It’s a gift from the hotel owners for Jack’s campaign.”

There were broads that night as well: blowjobs on the house, all around, for the New Frontiersman and his Democratic crew. One of the women Sinatra introduced to Kennedy was a twenty-five-year-old would-be starlet named Judith Campbell. Sinatra had been fucking her for a while. So had Johnny Rosselli, the West Coast’s lord of darkness. Now Campbell would begin a two-year affair with Jack Kennedy. Sinatra liked the idea: the two men bonding their friendship through a woman.

Most mornings, they would come offstage at half past one or a quarter to two, drink till dawn, and begin filming.

“It wasn’t that it wasn’t professional,” Angie Dickinson said of the movie making; “but you’d have to look hard to find a camera to prove to you that they weren’t playing. They really had fun together. The director was very easy. He knew exactly who was signing his check.”

On their closing night, old-time movie-gangster Jack LaRue was introduced in the audience among a crowd of other celebrities. “Why don’t you come up here and kill somebody?” Dean called out to him. Later, when he stumbled on a sentence, he remarked, “I got my nose
fixed, and now my mouth doesn’t work.” He urged the audience, “On your way out, please buy a copy of my latest book,
The Power of Positive Drinking.”