Running with Mr. S

Sinking into a big living room sofa, George Jacobs is ringed by a lifetime of mementos, his Palm Springs apartment a shrine to koo-koo years of highballs, high rollers and voluptuous dames overflowing strapless gold lame. There are snapshots of Marilyn Monroe, signed publicity portraits of Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow and scores of images -- movie stills, lobby cards, even a poster-size mug shot of Sinatra -- arranged collage-style on the wall.

On a cluttered bookcase, bottles of Sinatra Cabernet and Marilyn Merlot stand side by side. “I’ve got boxes and boxes -- I don’t even know what to do with them,” says Jacobs, who came into this stash by way of the years he spent as Sinatra’s valet, his go-to guy during the singer’s heady comeback years.

Jacobs’ business card announces him as “The Last of the Rat Pack.” And his flinty new book, “Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra” casts him in the familiar role of caretaker -- not to the man, this time, but to his memory.

“Mr. S,” written with William Stadiem, is a complex portrait of two complex men at a crossroads in history. Already, the book is gathering flattering reviews, and it popped up to No. 3 on The Times’ bestseller list the week of July 13. It’s full of the expected tantalizing tidbits about Sinatra, his women, the mob, Joe and Jack Kennedy, Dino and Sammy. Ava Gardner’s presence haunts the memoir like lingering perfume.

The requisite sex and drink and dusk-to-dawn parties are in there. So are hinted-at liaisons and bracing scatological details. But what makes “Mr. S” compelling is Jacobs’ unique view not just of his boss’ comings and goings but of the intricacies of their relationship and the changing social landscape they traversed. The book is about Sinatra, yes, but it’s also a look into an upstairs-downstairs world and Jacobs, the man who navigated it.

“Mr. S” was kind, Jacobs recalls -- and not. There was the Sinatra who on their first, chance encounter in a parking lot returned Jacobs’ boldly casual request for a smoke by bringing a gold bowl heaped with cigarettes -- for a black chauffeur he didn’t know. And there was the Sinatra who in “rambunctious” moments would refer to Jacobs as “Spook.”

An old playground

Though he may reside only minutes down the road from his old life, Jacobs, 76, has a day-to-day routine a lifetime removed from the Chairman of the Board’s high-security compounds, his Cadillacs and sporty Chevy woodys. As Jacobs prepares to take yet another curious set of eyes on a nostalgia spin he peeps over a gate near his front door to point out his wheels -- a motorized cart. “That’s my little scooter,” he says. “I can get around for three hours on a charge.”

He might have slowed some, but he still flashes a sporty, just off-the-links profile in a canvas ball cap, tan slacks, off-white guayabera shirt and white shoes, sans socks of course.

On a sticky early-July day, Jacobs, Stadiem and a guest pile into a car and consider lunch. “Lot of places are closed. This is off-season,” Jacobs explains. The car trundles past more than a few businesses that are shuttered for the summer: a deli, a chophouse -- vestiges of the Palm Springs that thrived before the chains and spas and golf tournaments re-imagined the desert. “There wasn’t anybody here. There was nothing. This was a celebrity playground.”

He knew it like the back of his hand. For 15 years, Jacobs was in name Sinatra’s personal valet. But in practice, he did much more: He was the head chef who could whip up an Italian feast, the escort for Sinatra’s estranged lovers, buddy to his mother, the filament that lit up the party, confidant to his love-wrecked boss in the wee, small hours -- and, though Sinatra’s drink of choice was Jack Daniels, the maker of a mean martini.

Just off the main drag, Jacobs settles into lunch -- salad and half a dozen oysters -- at one of his favorite seafood restaurants. “Pass the Tabasco, baby,” his patter peppered with endearments, “babys” and “sweethearts” as pretty as the iron lace of the French Quarter neighborhoods he wandered in his New Orleans youth.

“When we first came to Palm Springs,” Jacobs recalls, “I told him, ‘I don’t see any of my people here.’ He said, ‘I’ll get you some friends. I’ll get two white boys and spray-paint ‘em black!’ I always took it as a joke. Just Frank.”

His attitude was more than a coping mechanism. It was, maintains Jacobs, a layer of understanding -- particular to the men and the moment.

Indeed, one would be mistaken to judge his book by its cover: the beaming Jacobs -- in sharp, thin-lapelled suit and skinny tie -- smiling, it seems, almost a little too broadly over Sinatra’s shoulder. There’s nothing fawning or obsequious about Jacobs in person. He’s as salty as the oyster brine he’s now working through. He may have been hired help, but his paycheck, he makes clear, didn’t buy his pride. “He never treated me like a servant.”

Another odd job

With the distance of years, Jacobs isn’t simply candid -- he’s stripped down and unadorned. He has only a few good words, for instance, about Sammy Davis Jr. (“Until I got to know him ... he was the only person in Mr. S’ world who made me aware of being black and made me feel second-class for it.”) Jacobs had his rounds with Sinatra too. One evening, he whipped up spaghetti marinara for dinner for guests -- Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Sinatra flew into a rage, claiming the pasta wasn’t al dente and threw it at Jacobs. A hurt and enraged Jacobs walked out. He made his way to a nearby haberdashery, gathered up $2,000 in clothes -- and charged them to Sinatra.

Sinatra never apologized, but he never said anything about the bill, either. “This was the only time he ever abused me,” writes Jacobs. “Being Frank Sinatra meant never having to say you’re sorry, but it didn’t mean he was without remorse. You just had to know how to read his Remorse Code.”

Jacobs had wanted to be a performer. He’d studied piano and guitar, loved to sing. But real life intervened. After serving time in the Navy, he ended up in Watts with a wife and kids, in need of a steady paycheck. A revolving door of odd jobs finally opened up to a stint as a gentleman’s gentleman, working for super-agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar and, finally, Sinatra.

In that setting, says Jacobs, “I never missed singing. I had all I wanted. It was the people. The travel. I loved geography. I got to see all those places. Look. Look at the goose pimples.”

Throughout those adventures, he says, “I would just jot things down.” Periodically, potential collaborators crawled out of the woodwork, hoping to coax the inside Sinatra story out of him. He met Stadiem through a mutual friend, and over lunch at Matteo’s, Sinatra’s old Westwood haunt, they swapped stories, dropped names. “We just clicked,” says Stadiem, whose bestseller “Marilyn Monroe Confidential” had corralled a similar cast of intersecting characters and scenarios. “I was familiar with the era and had a lot of background, the milieu.”

Jacobs had navigated that milieu with ease. His suits as sharp as his talk, he was making $1,500 a week, plus benefits. “I wasn’t a rich man, but I might be.”

A wrong-place-wrong-time scenario toppled everything: An errant piece of gossip twined Jacobs with Mr. S’ just out-the-door wife -- Mia Farrow -- and only for one dance. The news shot back to Sinatra before Jacobs could get home with his version of the story. And when he arrived, he says, “I found that my key to the Sinatra compound didn’t fit the lock.”

Jacobs says he lived his immediate post-Sinatra years in a fog. “I did carpentry. Opened a little shop which I ran out of the garage.” He worked for other stars, but it wasn’t the same.

The loss still stings. He admits it’s taken him some time to figure out when fury stopped and hurt took over. Writing the book “took a lot off my mind,” he says. “It relieved a lot of my thoughts and tensions. I used to sit and cry a lot. I wasn’t keepin’ it goin’. So this really helped.”

Anger still flashes, but the memoir is ultimately a compassionate portrait of Sinatra. And how might it have settled with his old friend?

“He would have liked it,” says Jacobs, “because it is honest.”

The compound

There is one last matter of business, one more stop on memory lane: A glimpse of Sinatra’s first Palm Springs hideaway -- open for tours, parties, shoots -- just minutes away from where Jacobs now lives.

He enters through the service gate, which opens onto a circular drive and a stately manzanita tree. Stepping into the kitchen, Jacobs points out his old quarters. “That’s where I stayed. Just behind that wall.” When asked for a peek inside, he waves away the notion with his cane: “It’s an office now. Small little place. Not that interesting to see, sweetheart.”

The AC isn’t working, but somehow, the stillness and the heat only add to the time-capsule quality. Everything has been redone to look as if Frank still entertained, crashed and loved here -- down to the gin and vodka on the cocktail cart.

Stadiem good-naturedly tries to nudge Jacobs into a riff. Jacobs isn’t biting. Not at first anyway. “It’s in the book!”

But after casting his gaze about, Jacobs begins to animate the room. “If the sun hits that overhang the right way, the shadows look like piano keys. I’d wear an orange jacket, and make drinks over there....” He leans forward on his cane and gestures vaguely outdoors toward the cabanas on the other side of the piano-shaped pool: “Against that wall, where that table is, there was an orange piano.” He cocks his head toward one of the living room walls: “That’s where he’d run through the scales. I’d serve him tea with lemon and honey -- there was no drinking when he was working.”

Slowly the room fills with people, laughter. After a long pause he stands. “OK. I’m ready to go.”

The car turns left on Frank Sinatra Drive, heading home. “All this used to be just tumbleweed and rock. There used to be dates in those palm trees,” he says, eyes trained on the road. “This used to be a playground.”