In this Extra Extra! bonus, Alicia tells the story of the feud between our man Nick and Frank Sinatra, which led to a bizarre altercation at The Daisy, the “it” place for Hollywood’s movers and shakers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Eighty-Two Very Good Years (newyorker.com)
Excerpt: Craig Brown on Frank Sinatra, Dominick Dunne, and Phil Spector (vanityfair.com)
The Daisy in Beverly Hills (martinostimemachine.blogspot.com)
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold – Gay Talese – Best Profile of Sinatra (esquire.com)
Dominick Dunne: After The Party (amazon.com)
I was “the record guy” (d.j.) at The Daisy in ’65-’66, having gotten the job through my then best friend, Curtis Hanson. On the night of the encounter between Sinatra and writer Harlan Ellison, I heard from one of the waiters there’d been some sort of kerfuffle at the pool tables. Writer Gay Talese’s famous piece about it mentions one of Ellison’s friends as trying to break the tension by saying “C’mon, Harlan, let’s get out of here.” I brought up this moment to Curtis years later and he said, “That was me.” Curtis Hanson of course went on to be a distinguished movie director, most notably of “L.A. Confiential”…