Beverly Hills, California. June 8th, 1966. 11:20 p.m. The pink telephone was still warm. That is the detail that Franklin Fox could not get out of his mind in the years that followed. Not the sound, not what he saw, not the man on the floor. The warmth of the pink telephone on the table closest to where it happened, still holding the heat of the hand that had used it, while the man who had been struck with it, lay on the green carpet of the polo lounge, breathing in the shallow, irregular rhythm of someone whose brain was bleeding. Fox was a businessman from New York. He had come to Beverly Hills for a quiet dinner. He did not know Frank Sinatra. He did not know Dean Martin. He was two tables away from everything that happened, which was close enough to see all of it, and far enough from the center of the room’s power that no one thought to warn him about what the price of seeing things in the Polo Lounge actually was. He would
learn. Before I show you exactly what happened in the polo lounge on the night of June 8th, 1966, and what the five words that ended it cost the man who whispered them, if you love these stories about the real price of power in old Hollywood, the nights that were erased from records, the witnesses who forgot what they saw, the silences that were paid for.
Subscribe to this channel right now. This is what we do here. the stories that didn’t make the newspapers, the rooms that didn’t have cameras, and hit that like button because the man who whispered those five words deserves to be understood. Now, back to Beverly Hills, June 8th, 1966. Dean Martin’s 49th birthday, the Polo Lounge, and a pink telephone that was about to change everything.
The Beverly Hills Hotel had been Hollywood’s living room since before most of Hollywood existed. Stars had been checking in under false names since the 1920s. Deals had been made over breakfast that changed the trajectory of the American entertainment industry. Affairs had begun and ended between courses, and the particular discretion of the staff, the practiced blindness, the selective memory, the service that included, as a feature not having seen anything was part of what the hotel charged for and part of what its guests returned for. But the polo lounge was different from the rest of the hotel in the specific way that throne rooms differ from ordinary rooms. The green leather booths along the walls had held every major figure in American entertainment for 30 years. The lighting was calibrated to make everyone look 10 years younger and 10% more glamorous than they actually were. The waiters moved with the silent precision of people who had served Clark
Gable and Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe, and had learned from this service that the primary function of good staff in a room like this was to be present without existing and on every table. A pink telephone, not for decoration, though they decorated, not for function, though they functioned. The pink telephones of the polo lounge were instruments of the specific kind of power that this room housed.
The power to close a deal while someone sat across from you. To accept a call that everyone at the table understood was more important than them. To demonstrate with the simple act of reaching for a receiver that your world was larger than the room you were sitting in. In the right hands, a telephone was a symbol.
In the wrong moment, it was something else. June 8th, 1966 was Dean Martin’s 49th birthday. He had arrived at the Polo Lounge at 9 in the evening with Frank Sinatra, Jilly Rizzo, Richard Conte, and a group of women whose names the management knew and did not discuss. They occupied their usual booth, the one that had been theirs by informal claim for years, the one the management held regardless of reservation requests from civilians who did not understand what usual meant in this context.
The champagne arrived without being ordered. The evening had the quality of a birthday that is being celebrated by people who celebrate everything as though it might be the last celebration, which was the particular quality of nights in the ratpack’s orbit during these years. the compressed energy of men who worked hard, played harder, and had built an entire public mythology around the idea that this was how life was supposed to be lived.
Dean was 49 years old. He had been performing since he was 17. He had been famous since he was 30. He had been for the past several years the most watched television personality in America. his weekly variety show drawing audiences that the network’s accountants discussed with the reverence of people describing a natural phenomenon.
He was by every available measure at the apex of something. He was also on this night simply a man having his birthday dinner with his friends in his regular booth at his regular restaurant. Frederick Rand Wiseman was 54 years old. He was the former president of Hunt Foods, the brother-in-law of Norton Simon, one of the wealthiest men in California and a figure in the institutional life of Los Angeles that had nothing to do with entertainment. He collected modern art.
He sat on the boards of museums and philanthropic organizations. He attended the right gall and shook hands with the right senators and conducted himself with the particular authority of a man who has spent decades operating at the upper levels of legitimate power and has developed from this experience a settled conviction that he is the kind of man that other men defer to.
He was at the polo lounge with a dinner companion for what was supposed to be a quiet evening. The noise from Sinatra’s booth was not quiet. Jill Rizzo’s laugh carried. Richard Ky’s voice was built for rooms larger than this one. The women were having a good time in the specific audible way of people who have been given champagne and the company of famous men.
And Frank Frank held court the way Frank always held court, which was as though the room existed for this purpose, and the other people in it existed as an audience for it. Wiseman tried to ignore it for 20 minutes, then 30. His dinner companion leaned across the table at one point. Don’t. not worth it. Wise men had heard the stories.
Everyone in Los Angeles had heard the stories about Sinatra’s temper, about his connections, about the particular risks of crossing a man whose friendship extended in certain directions that polite conversation did not acknowledge. He stood up anyway. He walked to the booth.
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He stood there, his shadow falling across the table, his face showing the controlled expression of a man accustomed to boardrooms who has decided to treat this situation like a boardroom situation. He said to Sinatra, “You talk too loud. Some of us are trying to have a civilized dinner.” The table went quiet the way a room goes quiet when a weather system changes.
Jill Rizzo’s hand stopped mid-motion. Richard Ki’s smile fixed itself to his face without connecting to anything behind it. The women found things to look at that were not the booth or the man standing at it. Frank leaned back. What did you say? Wiseman said it again, and then he added something that the people who were present in the polo lounge on June 8th, 1966 would disagree on in every subsequent account.
the precise words that came next, the exact insult, but that everyone agreed crossed a line that even in a room where lines were regularly crossed was understood as a line. He used a word. It was a short word, an ugly word. The kind of word that Italian-American men who had grown up in cities where it was thrown at them by people who wanted to diminish them, who had spent careers building personas that existed in specific defiance of everything that word was meant to imply, did not receive quietly. Dean’s voice was barely a whisper. Frank, let it go. Frank didn’t let things go. The sequence of what happened next took less than 45 seconds. Later in the police reports, in the witness statements, in the biographies written over the following decades, the precise sequence would be disputed, adjusted, hedged with the words allegedly and reportedly and according to some sources. But Franklin
Fox, two tables away, saw it. and Fox in the private accounting of what he had witnessed that he maintained for the rest of his life without ever fully disclosing it was clear about the sequence. Sinatra moved first, a sharp, precise jab from the table, the kind of punch that is thrown by someone who has thrown punches before and knows which kind arrives before the other person has finished processing the situation.
Wiseman stumbled. His arm caught a champagne bucket. Ice and water and glass went across the floor with the particular violence of things that were expensive and are now broken. He didn’t fall. He caught himself on a chair. And then, in the specific error that comes from a man who has never been in a real fight and does not understand the difference between a boardroom confrontation and this, he swung back.
He missed Sinatra. He hit the table. His hand connected with the pink telephone. It was not the telephone that mattered. What mattered was Jill Rizzo, who was standing by then, who had the telephone in his hand, who used it. The sound it made was not loud. That was what Fox would remember.
In a room that had been full of the noise of the birthday party, the sound the telephone made when it connected with Wiseman’s skull was not loud. It was specific, a particular dull sound that contained inside it. For anyone who understood what they were hearing, a great deal of information about what had just become true.
Wiseman went down. He did not go down the way men go down in movies. Dramatically, with effort, with the attempt to stop the falling, he simply went from standing to not standing with the liquid immediacy of someone whose body has ceased to receive instructions from the brain.
He lay on the green carpet of the polo lounge. His eyes were open. His mouth was moving. The sound coming from him was not words. The waiters did not move. The bus boys did not intervene. The guests who had not witnessed the sequence directly found things to look at that were not the floor. This was the polo lounge.
You did not see things here. You did not remember things here. This was the price of admission to rooms where power was not decorative. Franklin Fox could not look away. Dean Martin’s hand was on Frank Soninatra’s shoulder. Dean said five words. Let’s get out of here, Frank. Five words. And this time, perhaps because it was Dean’s voice, or because it was Dean’s hand on his shoulder, or because something in Dean’s voice contained information about the situation that Frank’s own assessment of the situation did not yet contain. Frank listened. They left through separate exits. Frank went through the kitchen. Dean went through the front, nodding to the metrada with the ease of a man leaving after any other evening, his face showing nothing, his body moving with the ease that had been built to show nothing. The ambulance arrived 11 minutes after Wiseman hit the floor. The paramedics found him unconscious, surrounded by broken crystal and
overturned chairs and a pink telephone receiver that someone had carefully wiped clean. His pulse was weak. His breathing was shallow. His pupils were different sizes. They took him to Cedar’s scenai. The doctors found no obvious skull fracture on initial examination. They admitted him for observation.
By midnight, he was conscious. By morning, he was asking for breakfast. The doctors called his wife and said the crisis had passed. They were wrong. 48 hours later, Frederick Weisman collapsed in his living room. The emergency surgery that followed revealed what the initial examination had missed. A subdural hematoma, bleeding deep in the brain that had been building pressure for 2 days while everyone, including Wiseman himself, believed he was recovering.
For 3 hours, surgeons worked to save his life. For 3 weeks, his family sat beside his hospital bed. He woke up, but he didn’t remember. The doctors called it retrograde amnesia. the complete erasure of the hours surrounding the trauma. Wiseman remembered arriving at the polo lounge. He remembered ordering a drink.
He remembered seeing Sonatra’s table across the room. He did not remember walking to it. He did not remember anything he said. Anything that was said to him, anything that happened after the 3 hours that contained everything, the confrontation, the fight, the fall, the flaw, was simply gone.
Frank called it luck in private to the very small number of people he discussed it with at all. The police investigation produced nothing that could be acted on. Sinatra was questioned twice and denied everything. Without the victim’s testimony, without the victim’s memory, there was no case. The investigation went the way that investigations go in cities where certain people are known quantities to the people who conduct investigations.
The Wiseman family talked about pressing charges. They talked about civil suits. They talked about going to the press. Norton Simon, Wiseman’s brother-in-law, had money and lawyers and the particular kind of institutional leverage that could make a man like Frank Sinatra very uncomfortable. And then they stopped talking. No charges were filed.
No lawsuit was pursued. No press statements were given. The journalists who called the wise men home were told the family had no comment. The comment they had no comment to make was purchased with something that was not money because money leaves records and what happened in this situation left no records.
Franklin Fox was contacted by a reporter in 1978 12 years after the night in the polo lounge. Fox said he didn’t remember the details. He said it had been a long time. He said he had probably had too much to drink. He was lying. He knew he was lying. The reporter who interviewed him knew he was lying.
But some lies are safer than the truth, and Fox had a business to run and a family to protect, and had spent 12 years understanding exactly what the price of a different answer would be. 3 weeks after the Polo Lounge, Frank Soninatra got engaged to Mia Pharaoh. She was 30 years younger than him.
She had been a child when he was already a legend. Dean Martin made the calls not because it was his job, not because Frank asked him to, because this was what Dean did, had always done would continue to do. The thing that the public persona of Dean Martin, the ease and the charm and the glass of scotch and the look of a man for whom nothing cost anything, was designed not to show.
He was the person Frank called when things needed to be done. He was the person who showed up. He was the person who made the calls no one else wanted to make and carried the weight no one else was willing to carry. He called Nancy Sinatra Jr. He called Frank Jr. He called Tina.
He told them their father was getting married. He told them today right now and no they weren’t invited to the ceremony. He did not tell them about the polo lounge. He did not tell them about the man on the floor. He did not tell them about the pink telephone or the five words or what it cost to whisper them into the ear of the most powerful man in the room and have the most powerful man in the room finally listen.
Frederick Wiseman lived until 1994. He died at 82 peacefully in his sleep. He never recovered the memory of that night. For him, it was a permanent blank space. 3 hours of his life that simply did not exist. He went back to his art collections, his charity boards, his dinners in Beverly Hills. He went back to his life as though the night of June 8th, 1966 had never happened.
For him, it hadn’t. For everyone else who was present, it had happened completely. And the five words Dean Martin whispered, the five words that ended the night, that cleared the room, that sent two men through separate exits into separate cars toward the airport and away from what they had left on the floor of the polo lounge.
Those five words lived in the specific way that things live, which cannot be written down or officially acknowledged, but which are true nonetheless. Let’s get out of here, Frank. The words of a man who understood that staying was worse than leaving. who understood that the situation on the floor of the polo lounge could not be helped by presence, who understood that the particular mechanics of the world these men inhabited, the lawyers, the arrangements, the payments, the selective amnesia of institutions and individuals, would function better in their absence than in their presence. The words also of a man who spent the following years carrying what that night had cost. Not legally, not publicly, in the specific interior way that things are carried when they cannot be put down. In the weight of the calls he made and did not make, in the knowledge of what he had seen and what he had done and what he had said and what those words had set in motion. Dean Martin was
49 years old on June 8th, 1966. He was celebrating his birthday with his friends at his regular restaurant. A man walked to the wrong table and said the wrong word, and the evening became something else, and Dean Martin, who had grown up in Stubenfill, where men fell in bar fights and card games, and you learned what you could and could not stop, put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, whispered five words, and the room erased itself. the way rooms do.
When the right person says the right words at the right moment, in a voice that the right people know how to hear, the pink telephones are still there at the polo lounge on every table, elegant, warm to the touch, as they were that night, as they have been ever since. There is one more thing that belongs in this accounting.
Franklin Fox lived until 2003. He was 81 years old when he died. He had spent 37 years carrying the knowledge of what he had seen in the Polo Lounge on June 8th, 1966, and had spent those same 37 years telling no one. In 1998, 4 years after Wiseman died, and 3 years after Dean Martin died, Fox gave a single interview to a journalist who had been researching the Sinatra biography that would eventually be published in 2005.
The journalist had found Fox through a chain of connections that Fox considered impossible and had driven to his home in Connecticut and knocked on the door. Fox spoke for 90 minutes. He told the journalist everything he had seen. He asked that none of it be published while he was alive.
The journalist honored this request. The account that Fox gave in 1998 included one detail that had not circulated in any of the stories that had passed through Hollywood’s informal information network. in the years since 1966. He said that in the moment after Dean Martin whispered the five words and Frank Sinatra stood and moved toward the exit.
In the 15 seconds or so between the decision to leave and the actual leaving, Dean Martin stopped at the table nearest to where Wiseman lay on the floor. He did not kneel. He did not speak to Wiseman. He did not stay long enough to be registered as having stopped. But he stopped and he looked at wise men on the floor for a moment with an expression that Fox, who had spent 90 minutes trying to describe the events of that night accurately, found the hardest thing to describe. Not guilt, Fox said.
Not the expression of a man performing remorse for an audience. Something quieter and more private. The expression of a man looking at the consequence of something and knowing he cannot undo it and knowing he must leave anyway. Then Dean Martin walked out the front door of the polo lounge.
He nodded to the matraars. The ease never left his face. But Fox, who had watched him for the 15 seconds of the stop and the moment of the look and the walk to the door, said that the ease on Dean Martin’s face that night was the most expensive thing he had ever seen a man wear. “It cost something,” Fox said.
“You could see that it cost something. You could see the cost of it in the 15 seconds when he stopped and looked and then put the ease back on. He put it back on perfectly and walked out. That is the five words. That is the birthday. That is the pink telephone. And that is Dean Martin who spent 40 years performing the ease that cost everything to maintain and maintained it anyway on the night of June 8th, 1966.
All the way to the door.
