Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

In March 1960, there had been a flap when Frank announced he was hiring Albert Maltz to write the screenplay for a planned movie. Fifteen years earlier, Maltz had worked on The House I Live In, but he had subsequently been exposed as a communist and sent to prison for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee. The selection of Maltz, the conservative press suggested, tainted not only Frank but his friend John Kennedy. Frank fought back for a while, then dropped Maltz— under pressure from Joe and Robert Kennedy. Frank was enraged, according to George Jacobs. He got drunk for three days, tore up scripts, threw furniture around, and swore he would get out of show business.

  Frank had again drawn conservative fire when the Rat Pack began to be dubbed the “Jack Pack.” There were fears in the Democratic camp, once again, that the association with Frank would hurt Kennedy. “It is hoped,” wrote an aide, “that Sinatra would . . . keep his distance from the Senator.” Jacqueline Kennedy let it be known that she thought the same. Word was passed to Frank, and he obliged by making himself less visible.

  What really galled him was Kennedy’s backsliding on the race issue. Sammy Davis had been booed by Southerners at the Democratic convention, not merely because he was black but because he had announced plans to marry a white woman, the Swedish actress May Britt. A month before the election, with the wedding imminent, the press suggested that Davis’s links to the Democratic campaign would cost Kennedy votes. Joe Kennedy applied pressure again, and again Frank obliged him. He asked Davis to postpone the marriage until after the election, and Davis agreed. Their reward was an outrageous snub.

  Three days before the inauguration, Davis received a call from John Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. The president-elect, she told him, had asked her to say that “he does not want you to be present at his inauguration. . . . He very much hopes you will understand.” Minutes later Peter Lawford called with the same message. Davis canceled his trip to Washington.

  Frank was appalled, quarreled furiously with Lawford on the eve of the inauguration gala, and had to be dissuaded from abandoning the whole thing. Days afterward, when Frank sang at a benefit for Martin Luther King Jr. in New York, he was drinking hard. Peter Levinson, a publicist admitted to his dressing room, saw Frank down twelve shots of bourbon before walking on stage to sing.

  Despite it all, Kennedy phoned Frank occasionally, and came on the line when Frank called on his birthday. “Happy Birthday, Prez!” was his precise greeting. Frank visited Kennedy in the White House, though only once on his own. Yet his hope of sustaining the friendship alternated with rage over continuing slights.

  Joe Kennedy ordered footage of Frank removed from the film of the inaugural gala, then grudgingly had it put back in again, then failed to invite Frank to a viewing. Joe told Frank he was welcome to join him on vacation on the Côte d’Azur and then, responding to fresh barbs in the press, let it be known that there was, after all, “no room” for Frank at his villa.

  In the fall of 1961, the Kennedys received Frank at the family compound in Massachusetts. The alcohol flowed and, Joe’s chauffeur recalled, women who “looked like whores” arrived. One, seen being pawed by Joe Kennedy in the evening, was wrapped around one of Frank’s friends the next morning. Frank was “loud and obnoxious,” and White House press secretary Pierre Salinger went out of his way to say he had been the guest not of the president but of Peter Lawford.

  Frank was received at the White House that month, but as part of a group and only by mischance. “Frank Sinatra is also coming,” the president’s secretary noted in a memo. “Tish [Baldrige, Jacqueline’s social secretary] said there was no way she could keep from asking him as he was in Peter Lawford’s room when she called.” Princess Helen Chavchavadze, who was present when he came to the White House, remembered Frank as “showing off, being quite objectionable.” Lounging on a balcony with a Bloody Mary, Frank seemed oblivious to the disapproval. “All the work I did for Jack,” he said to Dave Powers. “Sitting here makes it all worthwhile.”

  In early 1962, however, Frank dropped the pretense that all was well. “He was in a snit,” arranger Billy May recalled of a recording session on March 6. “We had done ‘The Boys’ Night Out,’ and all during the recording Frank just glared. . . . Then it came time to do the second song, ‘Cathy,’ which was a pretty song—a waltz. Frank did a rehearsal, and then looked over at Van Heusen and said, ‘Tell you what, Chester. Why don’t you get Jack Kennedy to record this fucking song, and then see how many records it sells?’ ”

  Two days later, Frank’s office announced that he would not be flying to Florida to sing at a dinner for the president’s friend George Smathers. Though Frank’s voice had seemed fine in the studio that week, his spokesman claimed that he had a bad throat. He was backing away from a commitment he had made to Kennedy personally, almost certainly because he knew outright humiliation was imminent.

  Even before the president took office, Frank had ordered extensive construction work at his Palm Springs house. “He spent thousands,” Peter Lawford recalled, “put in guest quarters, extra telephones, even a helipad. All to accommodate the President. Sinatra had it in his head that his house would become sort of the Western White House.”

  With Kennedy due to spend a weekend in Palm Springs in late March, Frank had made frantic preparations. Parties were planned, guest lists drawn up. Then Frank was told the president would not be staying with him, would not even be dropping in. He would instead be staying at Bing Crosby’s Silver Spur Ranch.

  Peter Lawford delivered the bad news, initially by telephone, and Frank exploded. He tore a phone from the wall, then tried unsuccessfully to get through to the White House. Lawford then arrived in person, and Sonny King witnessed what happened. “Frank grabbed him by the neck. He didn’t hit him but he threw him down some stairs, told him he never wanted to see his face again. . . . Frank went into a rage like one of those maniacal kings in the movies.”

  According to King and George Jacobs, Frank kicked at a door, smashed photographs of the Kennedys, and pounded the concrete helipad with a sledgehammer. Lawford was once again expelled from the Sinatra magic circle.

  Frank laid the blame on Robert Kennedy. “He was madder than hell that Bobby wouldn’t let the president stay at his house,” Shirley MacLaine remembered. “But he adored JFK.” Frank spoke fondly of John Kennedy to the end of his days. He cherished mementos of their friendship—a telegram, an inauguration-issue book of matches, even the red phone he had installed for the visit that never took place.

  Yet the president had agreed with the decision not to stay at Sinatra’s house. Months earlier, during a previous presidential visit to California, Marilyn Monroe had been present as the Kennedy brothers discussed Frank. She told the journalist Sidney Skolsky, a confidant, how the conversation had gone. “Jack,” she quoted Bobby Kennedy as having said, “you can’t have him coming in the front door or the side door of the White House. You can’t stay at his house, can’t pal around with him.” The president’s friend Red Fay recalled Bobby having used almost identical words: “Johnny, you just can’t associate with this guy.” According to Myer Feldman, a special assistant at the White House, the president concurred.

  “It meant nothing to him,” said Richard Goodwin, another special assistant. “If Kennedy thought about it in any way, if he thought it would in the slightest way wound his presidency, of course he would cut it off. He would cut off people a lot closer than Sinatra if he had to.”

  “I don’t know if Frank got it,” said MacLaine, “but he had met his match in terms of theatrical manipulation . . . in terms of the code of ‘This is what I want, this is what I’m gonna do.’ It was up for grabs who was going to be the most cruel.”

  The message Lawford delivered had included a specific explanation. “Peter told him,” said Sonny King, “that JFK couldn’t come because of his association with the guys I prefer to call ‘the gentlemen of notoriety,’ because of the situation between Frank and Sam Giancana.” Myer Feldman insisted, “It was a question
of whether or not it might damage the nation. The personal damage to him never concerned him so much.”

  Yet Frank’s entanglement with Giancana was inseparable from the involvements of the Kennedys themselves.

  27

  Paying the Price

  AS JOHN KENNEDY SETTLED IN for the weekend at the Crosby estate, Bobby had been announcing victories in his very personal war on organized crime. New laws and specialized intelligence, Bobby told a crime prevention conference, had top gangsters on the run. Three hundred and fifty mobsters were indicted that year alone, 138 of them convicted. Some mobsters were fleeing the United States rather than face justice.

  Luciano and Adonis were still in exile. Frank’s friend Skinny D’Amato reminded Joe Kennedy that D’Amato’s help in the election had been against a promise of intervention on Adonis’s behalf. Robert Kennedy, however, had no intention of allowing Adonis to return, and D’Amato himself was indicted on tax charges. The attorney general also pressed for the deportation of any other mafiosi who could be shown to be aliens. There were new efforts to expel Costello and Rosselli. Early on, New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello had been bundled into a plane, flown out of the country, and dumped in Guatemala.

  Giancana could not be deported, for he had been born in the United States, but he, too, was vigorously pursued. On a visit to Chicago, Bobby surprised FBI agents by how much he knew about the Mafia boss. Messages from Washington urged “all-out” pressure against him, and soon it was reported that Giancana was becoming “highly concerned.”

  Some mafiosi turned to Frank in the belief that he had the ear of the president. Frank’s attorney Milton “Mickey” Rudin, characterized by a senior officer in the Los Angeles police intelligence division as a “hoodlum lawyer,” interceded on D’Amato’s behalf. To indict him on tax charges, he said, was “unfair . . . a political act.” On “instructions” from the Mafia, a senior FBI agent reported, Frank tried to help Costello in his fight against deportation. The transcript of an FBI surveillance tape indicates that Frank spoke on Marcello’s behalf with both the president and his brother. All to no avail.

  Giancana and Rosselli hoped for special treatment, because both had been involved in CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and, as Giancana put it, considered they were “working for the government.” Giancana felt, too, that he had an assurance of leniency because of his help during the campaign. He asked Frank to intercede.

  Los Angeles boss Mickey Cohen said, “Sinatra went to President Kennedy. . . . John says to him, ‘Go talk to Bobby. . . .’ But Bobby was really insulting to Frank and very unreceptive. So Frank went back to John Kennedy. . . . John told Frank, ‘Why don’t you go see Dad, go talk to Father about that.’ ”

  Frank claimed he went to both Bobby and Joe Kennedy, according to a conversation picked up by an FBI bug in December 1961. Giancana’s Las Vegas operative Johnny Formosa reported back that Frank had described how he lobbied the attorney general and his father, taking pains to avoid electronic surveillance. As Formosa relayed it:

  [Frank said] “Johnny, I took Sam’s name and wrote it down, and told Bobby Kennedy, ‘This is my buddy. . . . This is what I want you to know, Bob.’ ” . . . [and] Frank saw Joe Kennedy three different times. . . . Joe Kennedy called Frank three different times.

  Formosa said Frank was “starting to see the light,” to realize that the Kennedys were “not faithful to him.” Giancana groused that his “donation” had been in vain, that “if I even get a speeding ticket, none of these [obscenity deleted in FBI transcript] would know me . . . they just worry about themselves, keep themselves clean, take the heat off of them.”

  Giancana himself no longer believed a word Frank said, he told Formosa:

  One minute he tells me this and then he tells me that. The last time I talked to him was at the hotel in Florida. . . . And he said, ‘If I can’t talk to the old man I’ll talk to The Man [the President].’ One minute he says he talked to Robert, and the next minute he says he hasn’t talked to him. . . . So, he never did talk to him. It’s a lot of [obscenity deleted]. Forget about it. Why lie to me? I haven’t got that coming. . . . I don’t think that [obscenity] did a [obscenity] thing.

  Giancana ordered Formosa to book Frank and Dean Martin for a two-week run of performances at a mob-controlled venue, and added a threat. If either star should fail to comply, he said, “We’ll give them a little headache. . . . All they know is the arm. . . . If you ever hit that guy you’ll break his jaw. Then he can’t sing.”

  Two weeks later, Rosselli reported to Giancana that Frank seemed to be avoiding his calls. He promised to “punch the [obscenity] out of him in Palm Springs if I don’t like the way he talks.” Even junior White House officials had no time for Frank, Rosselli told Giancana. “They don’t want him. They treat him like you’d treat a whore. You [obscenity] them, you pay them, and they’re through. You got the right idea, Moe [familiar name for Giancana]. Go the other way. [Obscenity] everybody. . . . They only know one way. Now let them see the other side of you.”

  Giancana was furious. “Lying [obscenity]!” he exclaimed to another associate. “If I ever listen to that [obscenity] again. . . . I figured with this guy [Sinatra], maybe we’ll be all right. I might have known, this guy’d [obscenity] me. . . . When a guy lies to you . . .”

  Any hope Frank may still have had of deflecting the gangsters’ rage by getting Joe Kennedy to intervene had just been extinguished. Shortly before Christmas 1961, the president’s father had suffered a cerebral thrombosis that left him crippled and unable to speak. “Why, oh why,” George Jacobs heard Frank exclaim, “did Joe get that fucking stroke?”

  “PEEL THE BANANA,” Robert Kennedy had told his organized crime team, “attack the ‘respectable’ associates of the Mafia.” Early in 1962 one of Kennedy’s young lawyers, Dougald McMillan, kept coming across Frank’s name as he worked on a case involving Joe Fischetti. “Sinatra’s affiliation with the mob was so blatant,” he recalled, “you couldn’t miss it.” He began building a file on him.

  Soon McMillan’s superior, Edwyn Silberling, recommended to Bobby that Frank’s tax affairs be thoroughly investigated. He was turned down. Later, during a staff meeting, McMillan drew Kennedy’s attention to the FBI’s discovery that Judith Campbell was in touch with both the president and Giancana. He thought Campbell should be given immunity and compelled to testify before a grand jury. The proposal was rejected.

  Later, when Frank tried to avoid appearing before a grand jury—he asked a White House staffer to intervene—McMillan threatened to resign. When Frank did testify, but evasively, McMillan requested that he be called back for a second appearance. The request was refused. Frank had by then hired a lawyer who also represented Giancana.

  William Hundley, who became head of the Organized Crime Section of the Justice Department at the time, had said his team “considered Sinatra very bad news . . . a tool of these people.” Even so, Bobby never gave the go-ahead to pursue Frank. “I believe there was an enormously compelling reason beyond his authority that prevented him from saying yes,” McMillan said. “It was fear that deterred him from approving an investigation of Sinatra. Fear of exposure. . . . It would have been politically devastating to JFK.” Bobby, McMillan thought, was “between a rock and a hard place,” between his commitment to crush the Mafia and the fact that his own family was hopelessly compromised.

  EVEN AFTER THE TROUBLE it had brought him, Frank continued to keep company with Chicago-based gangsters. In Florida, FBI agents and informants saw him with Joe Fischetti time and again. One Miami Beach source said simply, “Fischetti is Sinatra.” Whatever his motivation, and in spite of his anger at Frank over the failed intercession with the Kennedys, Giancana himself also stayed close. Frank was seen with the Mafia boss in Atlantic City, “in a private dining room on Sinatra’s floor of the Claridge Hotel.” In September, Giancana was at Palm Springs, phoning “the unlisted number of Frank Sinatra” and visiting “Frank Sinatra’s residence.” In November,
with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Frank sang to capacity crowds at Giancana’s Villa Venice supper club outside Chicago, a command performance.

  Frank spent Christmas of 1962 in Acapulco with Giancana and a group that included the Maharani of Jaipur, the French industrialist Paul-Louis Weiller, the Anglo-Irish businessman Loel Guinness and his wife, Gloria, the Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, and Yul Brynner, who had brought his son Rock along. “I think Giancana introduced himself as ‘Dr. Moody,’ ” Rock said. “I turned sixteen that Christmas, so it became legal for me to drive, and I was recruited to drive ‘Dr. Moody’ around the watering holes of Acapulco. There I was, roaring around in a pink-and-white-striped jeep with this scary guy.” Brynner thought Giancana and Frank seemed to “trust each other, but there wasn’t the feeling that they were very close, or part of anything together.”

  In February 1963, Giancana and Sinatra dined in New York. In March they were seen together in Palm Springs, and in May in Hawaii (Giancana called himself “J. J. Bracket” there). By June, when he and Frank spoke on the phone, he had become “James Perno.” Frank also brought Giancana home to New Jersey that month, to sample his mother’s cooking.

  Contrary to Rock Brynner’s notion, Frank and Giancana had long since secretly been part of something together. They were both involved in the Cal-Neva Lodge and Casino, a cluster of mock rustic buildings overlooking Lake Tahoe, on California’s border with Nevada. There, too, there was a Kennedy connection.

  JOE KENNEDY had frequented the Cal-Neva for decades, since the days when it had been merely a refuge for hunters and fishermen. He liked it so much that in the mid-1950s, using an old business contact as a front, he bought into it—whether in part or outright is not clear. Then, during the 1960 campaign, Frank and several others purchased a 49.5 percent interest in the lodge.

  The true owner of Frank’s share in the Cal-Neva was almost certainly Giancana. According to FBI documents, the Mafia boss admitted as much. The irony is striking: Giancana effectively co-owned a gambling casino with the father of an attorney general dedicated to destroying everything the mafioso stood for.