More on Sinatra, Wood and Wagner from the Finstad. piece...

[quote]Two years after I published Natasha: The Biography of Natalie Wood, Frank Sinatra’s right-hand man of 15 years, George Jacobs, wrote the memoir Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra. Jacobs, who worked for Sinatra from 1953 to 1968, was a silent accomplice to his boss’s sexual assignations. “One affair that, unlike the others, was conducted in top secret was with Natalie Wood,” Jacobs wrote in 2003, “because she was a minor at the time, either 15 or 16, though she didn’t act like it.” According to Jacobs, “Sinatra adored this tiny beauty, but he didn’t want to go the way of Charlie Chaplin or Errol Flynn or, later, Roman Polanski.” Jacobs says he mixed the drinks when Natalie’s “insanely ambitious Russian mother” brought her to Sinatra’s apartment for a cocktail in 1954 and “pushed her on Frank, who needed no pushing.” Sinatra told Jacobs that he had been “taken by” Natalie since Miracle on 34th Street, a film she made when she was eight. Sinatra’s procurer, Natalie’s mother, Maria Gurdin, “had her kid all dolled up,” recalls Jacobs, “total jailbait, in a form-fitting black party dress, and Mr. S went for it in a big way.”

[quote]Sinatra’s MO with Natalie was like a playbook for aspiring Humbert Humberts. “Nothing dirty-old-mannish,” his valet boasts, “he was never like that. He played them cuts from his upcoming album, provided career suggestions.” That was the quid pro quo for Gurdin. After cocktails Sinatra arranged for Natalie to return regularly—alone—for “singing lessons.” “Mr. S would send me away when she was there,” says Jacobs. “ ‘I don’t want you to testify,’ he joked. He wanted to be ‘in Like Flynn,’ but he didn’t want to be ruined for it.”

[quote]Jacobs observed what I also found. “Mr. S truly cherished her, and whatever went on in private, he was also a father to her more than her own father, very protective.” The 38-year-old Sinatra’s “seduction” of 15-year-old Natalie, tragically, would have been both child molestation and statutory rape. Actor Scott Marlowe told me he had observed signs that she’d been molested.

[quote]Post-autopsy in late 1981 Sinatra, enraged that Noguchi disclosed at a press conference that Sinatra’s great friend R.J. had a heated altercation with Walken before Natalie disappeared, pressured the Board of Supervisors to fire Noguchi in a scathing letter, insisting that coroners “should be seen and not heard.”

[quote]By R.J.’s own description, he had made a career from the favors and good graces of famous friends, names he liked to drop, like Fred Astaire, Clifton Webb, and “Spence” Tracy. According to Jacobs, R.J. ingratiated himself with Sinatra so deeply that Sinatra “always gave him ‘a pass.’” By precipitating Noguchi’s firing, Sinatra shut down the last hope for any of Natalie’s truths to be known in an official investigation of her death.