When dudes my age think “sex appeal” most of us think Marilyn Monroe, easily the sexiest screen goddess Hollywood ever manifested, but as beautiful and sexy as Marilyn was, she wasn’t known as the best person in bed in Hollywood, far from it, in fact. That particular honor actually fell to Angie Dickenson, as revealed in Paul Anka’s stunning new tell-all book, My Way. When Anka asked both Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin who the best lay in town was, neither hesitated for even a second: “Angie.”
I already ordered a copy of Anka’s book and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s obviously creating problems for the Sinatra estate, as they would like to keep some of this gossip out of the press, but apparently Frank pretty much lost it by the end of his life and became a haunted shadow of his former self. While Bobby Darin easily made the paradigm shift in the 1960s, growing long hair and become a peace activist who loved hippies and wrote songs about world peace, Sinatra never found a way to connect with the emerging paradigm and its messages of universal love.
According to Anka, Sinatra was enamored of his connections with the Sicilian men-of-honor society, although Frank never seemed to realize he was just a pawn really, and not an actual member of the gang. According to Anka, Sinatra tried to get a casino head whacked who wasn’t giving him enough free chips at the gambling table (he was used to getting $50,000 in chips every time he showed up). But then when Howard Hughes started buying up Las Vegas, he didn’t extend those perks to anyone. Sinatra had a hard time during the late 1960s as the world changed all around him while he didn’t. But the Sicilian fathers refused to whack a member of their tribe just because Frank was pissed at him.
I’d sure like to question Anka about whether Sinatra ever mentioned Bobby Fuller, who was about to become the biggest rock star in America when he was murdered. That crime has never been solved, but one rumor had it that Sinatra had ordered the hit on Fuller because he’d introduced his daughter Nancy to LSD. If you know anything about Nancy, though, that story seems ridiculous as she was always a goodie two shoes, and certainly never showed any signs of having tripped on anything. At one point I thought I’d actually cracked the case when Bobby’s only child, his son John Novak, told me that his grandfather might have killed Bobby as revenge for impregnating his underage daughter. John was raised in a foster home and his identity as Bobby’s son was not revealed to anyone for decades.
Some people ask me, “Steve, why do you call the mafia ‘the Sicilian men-of-honor society?” Well, I do that for the same reason I call the Lakota by that name, instead of calling them Sioux like most everyone else. I prefer to call tribes and secret societies by the names they use for themselves and not the names put on them by their enemies.