“I’m sixty-one years old,” he said in 1977. “I’ll continue what I’m doing for another five or six years and then get the hell out before becoming a bore. . . . I’ll pick up my Social Security and go home when the time comes.” He told another interviewer, more accurately as things turned out, that he would not give up until “I just cannot work anymore.”
Frank now spent far less time in the recording studio. His three new albums in the fourteen years to 1990 would make the charts, but only one, Trilogy, would be a major success. One single, “New York, New York,” was a blockbuster song, his last, and became an indelible part of his legend:
. . . if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere, It’s up to you, New York, New York.
Frank first sang the song in public in October 1978, during a charity event at the Waldorf-Astoria. The previous year, when it had been the theme song for the eponymous movie, it had not really taken off. Performed live by Frank, it became a show-stopper. It was in 1979, in Los Angeles, that he made the recording that endures today. It came over as a new, defiant personal statement as much as a paean to a city.
In June 1980, in a fever of anticipation, New Yorkers thronged to hear Frank at Carnegie Hall. San Diego Union-Leader columnist Don Freeman recalled how on hearing the first tentative sounds of the song the audience “erupted into a thunderclap of loving recognition. Sinatra the wise showman allowed the applause and the cheers to reach a high-decibel peak, and descend into a deliciously tense, expectant silence. Sinatra the artist would bring the audience along to the heights again, but on his terms. He puffed on a cigarette, sipped from a glass of wine. And then he sang ‘New York, New York.’ . . . Unforgettable.”
Millions around the globe were to hear Frank perform the song live—he usually made it his finale—as he sang on and on. He made his long last stand as he had begun, on stage. There were international performances that made news: before royalty and assorted glitterati at London’s Royal Albert Hall—wags said it should be renamed the Francis Albert Hall; in the Egyptian desert at night under the nose of the Sphinx—“the biggest room I ever played,” Frank said; and before some 175,000 people at Rio de Janeiro’s Maracaña Stadium—at the time, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the largest audience ever drawn by a solo performer.
It was a rare month when Frank was not on the road somewhere, from the big venues in Las Vegas, New York, and Los Angeles to smaller cities like Saratoga, New York, Devon, Pennsylvania, Clarkston, Michigan, and San Carlos, California. Americans may have seen more of him in his last two decades than in his entire previous career.
MANY HEARD FRANK PERFORM a song entitled “Barbara”:
. . . the song I’m singing my whole life long. There’s no one just like her, like Barbara. . . .
Frank had commissioned the song in honor of his new wife. The music writer Will Friedwald, who called it “disappointingly subpar,” was being polite. Barbara traveled with Frank almost everywhere he went, and he described her as “the sunshine of my life.”
Barbara greatly changed the Palm Springs compound, and her husband’s old coterie no longer had the same access. Yul Brynner, a friend of twenty years’ standing, no longer felt welcome. Eventually even Jilly Rizzo would become persona non grata. With the help of her friend Bea Korshak, interior designer to the smart set, Barbara had given the property a new look. She remodeled the main house, installing a many-mirrored suite for her personal use. She got rid of much of Frank’s all-pervasive orange—the orange furniture, carpeting, drapes, towels, the orange refrigerator. Buildings and rooms were purged of the names Frank had given them. “Most of those friends weren’t living anymore,” Barbara pointed out, and she and Korshak renamed them after his songs. The main building became “The House I Live In,” the projection theater “Send in the Clowns,” two of the guest houses “High Hopes” and “Young at Heart,” and another—the quarters John Kennedy had once used—“The Tender Trap.” Frank’s office became “My Way,” a separate bedroom he maintained “I Sing the Songs.” In a corner of the bedroom, according to Architectural Digest, stood a statuette of St. Francis. Barbara’s bedroom was christened “True Love.”
“All she wants is to make Frank happy,” Barbara’s mother, Irene, said, “that’s her one goal in life.” No one talked now of Frank having extramarital affairs. Frank was reported to have moderated his drinking, to be sleeping better, to have calmed down. “He seemed to have nothing like the level of nervous energy one had come to expect,” the author Charles Higham recalled of a meeting in 1982. “He was quietly courteous.”
Here at last was a woman who could challenge Frank’s authority and, much of the time, get away with it. “Barbara began sorting out whom Frank could and could not see,” Leonora Hornblow remembered. Yet Barbara did not always have things her own way. One summer she tried to get her husband to vacation at the tony end of Long Island. “Can you picture me in the fucking Hamptons?” Frank asked Larry King off-camera. “Sinatra in the Hamptons! . . . The only thing they do that I like to do is drink.”
If Barbara thought Frank was being overly generous, she intervened. Over dinner one night, when Merv Griffin admired Frank’s exquisite gold lighter, Frank characteristically told him to keep it. By the time the meal ended, however, Barbara had gotten it back. “Frank,” she said, “isn’t always right.”
Nancy and their daughters were outraged to learn that he was planning a legal adoption of Barbara’s twenty-six-year-old son, Bobby. He abandoned the idea, but upset the family even more when he obtained an annulment of his Roman Catholic marriage to Nancy. The first they knew of it of was when they read it in the newspapers. Nancy felt “betrayed,” Tina said, “by both the man she loved and the church she’d believed in.” However the annulment was dressed up in church verbiage and formal legitimacy, it mocked most Catholics’ concept of marriage.
Barbara, meanwhile, had converted to Catholicism, making it possible to marry Frank in church. For the rest of the family, the ceremony added insult to injury. The marriage endured, though not without serious problems and a brief separation. Tina, who had been made an executor of her father’s will, began to worry that “Dad’s legacy” would be dissipated. It was the start of an ugly, protracted feud.
Dolly Sinatra, meanwhile, had died at the age of eighty. Six months after Frank’s marriage to Barbara, her chartered jet had smashed into Mount San Gorgonio, near Palm Springs. She had been on her way to Las Vegas to see her son perform, and her death left him grief-stricken. For some time afterward he would sit for hours at a time looking hopeless, saying nothing. “They’d fought through his childhood and continued to do so to her dying day,” his daughter Nancy has written. “But I believe that to counter her steel will he’d developed his own. . . . Now there was a gap. A vast void of love.”
“He was a different man after Dolly passed on,” Sonny King said. “Frank was not a churchgoing man. But two weeks after she died I was at church in Vegas—the Guardian Angel Cathedral—and I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around and there were Frank and Barbara. I grabbed his hand and he grabbed mine. He was crying. . . . Though he got out of his shell after a little while, that’s how devastated he was.”
34
The Photograph
EARLY IN 1976 A GUEST AT A PALM SPRINGS HOTEL, a concert promoter named Tommy Marson, asked to use the telephone at poolside. The employee who brought him the phone then overheard one end of an odd conversation. Marson sounded irate, peremptory.
“He dials the number,” the employee said, “and then I hear him say, ‘Frank, I need you at the Westchester [Premier] Theater’—he specified exactly when he needed him—‘Frank, I don’t give a fuck what you got to do. You be there.’ And he slams down the phone. It was not a request. It was an order.”
The theater was in Tarrytown, New York, and Frank performed there as demanded on ten nights in April 1976, nine nights in September and October, and eight nights in May of the following year. Soon, though, in spite of his
appearances and those of other stars, the brand-new theater folded. It had been a Mafia operation funded with Mafia money, and the protracted investigation that followed led to a series of trials involving stock fraud, racketeering, and profit-skimming offenses. Eleven defendants eventually went to jail or paid hefty fines.
Though not charged, Frank and two close associates came under suspicion. Assistant United States Attorney Nathaniel Akerman said he had testimony that Jilly Rizzo had received a share of the skim, and “tape-recorded evidence” that Frank’s attorney, Mickey Rudin, received $5,000. Information gleaned from the wiretapping of one of Frank’s secretaries, according to documents related to the first of the trials, showed she had been “knowledgeable about one aspect of the ticket skimming. . . .” In a legal brief, Akerman wrote that another person, “one of the accomplice witnesses,” had stated that “Sinatra had received $50,000 in cash under the table for the first series of concerts.”
Another wiretap recorded a conversation between two of the men who were later jailed, mafioso Gregory DePalma and theater president Eliot Weisman, who was to become Frank’s manager after serving his time. DePalma told Weisman:
You should’ve seen the nice time I had with [Sinatra] last night. . . . Him, Barbara and Jilly. . . . I was talking to Frank all about the joint. . . . If we could get some financing. About seven and half million dollars. He says, “We’ll talk a little bit. Me and you. . . . I got the gist of it in the dressing room.” He says, “You must be responsible for ninety percent of the money here.” I says, “Oh, yeah, easy, believe me.” . . . I could jockey this guy into position.
Exhibit 181, produced by the prosecution at a pretrial hearing in November 1978, was a photograph of Frank, in open-necked shirt, and eight other men wearing suits. Frank was smiling broadly, as were almost all the others, and his arms were draped around the shoulders of the two men closest to him.
Third from the right, in the back row, was New York Mafia boss Carlo Gambino. At the far left was his chosen successor, Paul Castellano, and seated in the foreground was his nephew Joseph Gambino. Also in the photograph were Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, a senior Mafia figure from California who later turned FBI informant, and Salvatore Spatola, described at the time as a “reputed member of organized crime” and later identified by the FBI as a Gambino soldier. Kneeling beside him was Richard “Nerves” Fusco, who managed ticketing at Westchester and would go to prison for his role in the scam.
The men Frank had his arms around were DePalma, the Gambino man who ran concessions at the theater, and Tommy Marson. Three of the men in the photograph were defendants in the case, and no one disputed the fact that the picture had been taken in Frank’s dressing room at the Westchester. The negative of the photograph had been destroyed by the time the FBI obtained the picture from an informant. The man who had taken it, the United States attorney recalled, was “scared shitless” when subpoenaed by the prosecution.
Frank had no comment when the picture was made public. His publicist, Lee Solters, responded to a reporter’s question by saying, “I didn’t hear a word you said,” then, when pressed, said, “I can’t say anything. ” Two years later, when the Nevada Gaming Control Board asked about the picture, Frank said he was forever being asked to pose for photographs with people. Someone would say, “Would you take a photograph with three Chinamen from Hong Kong,” he said, “and I say, ‘Fine.’ So, they take a picture. I wouldn’t know their reputation. I am not about to ask for a sputum test, because it would embarrass everybody.”
Frank offered the board his version of how the Westchester photograph came to be taken. “I was asked by one of the members of the theater—who he was doesn’t come to me—he told me Mr. Gambino had arrived with his granddaughter, whose name happened to be Sinatra. Her daddy is a doctor in New York, not related at all . . . and they’d like to take a picture. I said ‘Fine.’
“They came in and I took a picture with the little girl, and before I realized what happened there were eight or nine men standing around me, and several other snapshots were made. That is the whole incident.”
Frank said he had known nothing at the time about the backgrounds of the men in the photograph, and still did not. He had never met Carlo Gambino. Frank acknowledged that he knew Marson and that he had met Fratianno—whom he claimed he knew only as “Jimmy”—just once, at Marson’s house. He had been entirely unaware of the crooked goings-on at the theater, he said.
Fratianno was to say that Frank had welcomed Carlo Gambino to his dressing room “with a kiss and hug” on the night the photograph was taken. Gambino’s son-in-law meanwhile, the New York doctor Frank mentioned, should have been familiar to him—he had been on the board of the American-Italian Anti-Defamation League. Fratianno said he had seen more of Frank than Frank admitted. They had first met, the mobster said, not in the late 1970s but in the early 1950s. DePalma and Frank, FBI wiretap evidence indicates, had substantive conversations at least twice.
The prosecutors were especially interested in a defendant not in the photograph. This was Louis “Louie Dome” Pacella, a New York restaurateur jailed for evading taxes on $50,000 skimmed from the Westchester proceeds. Pacella, the prosecutor said in a court brief, had knowledge of the “involvement of Frank Sinatra, Mickey Rudin, and Jilly Rizzo in the skimming of receipts.” Pacella, however, refused to answer the grand jury’s questions about Frank, and his silence led to a contempt charge and additional time in jail.
Asked about Pacella by the Nevada Gaming Control Board, Frank admitted that he was a good friend. He had become fond of the man, he said, during visits to Pacella’s Manhattan restaurant. Pacella’s attorney put it more strongly. “You will find,” he told the court, “that Frank Sinatra and Louis Pacella were very, very, very close and dear friends. In fact, the evidence will show to you that they were brothers, not because they shared the same mother and father but because they shared love, admiration and friendship for many, many years.”
Pacella was reportedly a capo in the Genovese crime family and, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, a heroin dealer. He had inherited a special assignment. “After Sam Giancana was murdered,” said Philip Leonetti, a high-ranking mafioso who later turned FBI informant, Pacella “took over control of Frank Sinatra.”
In January 1981, on the eve of his inauguration, President-elect Reagan was asked what he thought about Frank and the Westchester case. “We’ve heard those things about Frank for years,” the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Reagan as saying, “and we just hope none of them are true.” It was not a ringing statement of belief in Frank’s innocence. Already, however, Reagan had asked Frank to stage his inaugural gala.
All had been harmony between the two men since 1970, when Frank backed Reagan for reelection as governor. Reagan had gone out of his way to demonstrate friendship for the man who had once excoriated him as a buffoon. He attended both Frank’s wedding to Barbara and Dolly Sinatra’s funeral.
In the presidential campaign the previous year, Frank had derided Jimmy Carter, the Democratic incumbent, as “our President the tooth fairy,” otherwise known as “Mickey Mouse,” while raking in large sums for the Republicans by appearing at fund-raisers. “It isn’t every candidate,” said Reagan, undeterred by the headlines about Frank and the Mafia, “who has a king in his corner.”
Frank was “jubilant,” the columnist James Bacon reported, about being asked to produce the gala. Though dismissed as “a trashy Las Vegas floor show” by the critic Rex Reed, and as a “Grecian Formula homecoming” by the columnist Rex Winston, the show raised $5.5 million for the Republican Party. Frank doled out engraved cigarette boxes to fellow participants, just as he had after the concert for Kennedy in 1961, and went home happy.
Months earlier, Frank had applied to the Nevada gambling authority for a new license, and the pivotal hearing before the Gaming Control Board took place only three weeks after the Reagan inaugural. The board’s chairman declared as he opened the meeting that “the burde
n of proof is on the applicant to prove suitability.” Yet Frank was given the easiest possible ride. Asked about mob-related episodes, he responded time and again with denials or bland “don’t knows.” No one challenged him. Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas said what a good fellow he was and praised Frank’s work for charity and his generosity. Not a single specialist on organized crime was called to testify. One board member declared himself “satisfied” by all this, another voiced the hope that Frank had “changed some.” The chairman said that “in the gaming business we aren’t necessarily going to have a group of choirboys.” The board awarded Frank his license and wished him good luck. Those present clapped. Robert Lindsey of the New York Times reported that the board’s fact-finding “appeared to have been naively superficial.” Frank, Lindsey thought, had been treated with “a kind of awe.”
Reagan’s attorney general-designate, William French Smith, who weeks earlier had attended Frank’s sixty-fifth birthday celebration, had said shortly before the hearing that he was “totally unaware of any allegations about Frank Sinatra’s background.” This after more than two years of publicity about the Westchester case.
When applying for the license, Frank had listed Reagan as a reference. That, a Reagan aide said at the time, had no more significance than the use of a man’s name in an application for a Sears, Roebuck card. Then, on the morning of the gambling authority’s decision, the papers reported that Reagan had told the board through his attorney that Frank was “an honorable person—completely honest and loyal.”
The Reagan-Sinatra relationship continued to flourish. The month after the granting of the license, when the president was shot and wounded, Frank canceled his run at Caesars Palace and flew to Washington to comfort Nancy Reagan. Later, during an awards ceremony for the National Sclerosis Society, of which Frank was campaign chairman, he presented the president with a sculpture of a bucking bronco inscribed: “To the American in the White House, our President, who has straddled courage and rides it hard.” Frank was put in charge of the inaugural gala for Reagan’s second term. In the spring of 1985, Reagan awarded him the nation’s highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom, praising Frank as “one of our most remarkable and distinguished Americans.”
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