by Shawn Levy
“Frank snapped his fingers, and people fell into line,” recalled Peter’s manager, Milt Ebbins. “He’d get on the phone to somebody and before you knew it he’d be saying, ‘Gotcha down for ten thousand,’ and that would be the end of it.”
Lawford, of course, was already enlisted in the campaign, but Frank put the finger on all his chums, among whom Sammy was the most receptive. “My role was ‘Let Sammy take care of all the ethnic people,’” he remembered. “Wherever I was playing, a campaign official would give me a list of rallies and cocktail parties at which I could sing a song or just mix and shake hands and add to the excitement that was building around the figure of JFK.” He caught a buzz off the communality of the joint effort. “There were always groups huddling, planning activities, and it was exciting to be there, everybody knew you and you knew everybody and you were all giving yourselves to something in which you deeply believed.” He enjoyed brushing up against Jack—“John came out of one room as I arrived and it was ‘Hi, Sam…’ with two jokes and he was off into another room”—but he was wary of kid brother Bobby: “Bobby was not as enamored of the group, or of show business, as John was,” he reflected. “He was courteous, appreciative, but all business, and I had the feeling that though he recognized our value at rallies he also saw a negative that our flashy show business association brought to the campaign.”
Not everybody was as quick as Sammy to follow Frank’s lead. Shirley MacLaine, so liberal that she’d petitioned the governor of California to stay the execution of Caryl Chessman, saw Jack Kennedy for the calculating political schemer that he was. Even after being personally politicked by Jack in a convertible on Mulholland Drive (she thought for sure he was about to get frisky), she preferred the idealism of Adlai Stevenson. Frank tried to talk her out of it. “He said Jack knew how to use power and Stevenson didn’t,” she remembered. “He said it took greater courage to go for Jack because he was more political, which might be more suspect, but was more effective.” But she held firm until the Democratic race was decided.
As for Dean, Frank probably knew better than even to try. Dean made it clear that he had no more interest in presidential politics than he did in local water district elections. He’d met Jack Kennedy in Chicago about a decade earlier when he was still with Jerry, and the three of them scammed broads together. He wasn’t terribly impressed with the guy then, and he certainly wasn’t willing to jump onto Frank’s bandwagon, even if the Rat Pack had been renamed the Jack Pack. As far as Dean was concerned, power was the ability to be left alone. Who needed to go beg votes for some spoiled irizaccio? He’d show up. Period.
But Frank did swell elsewhere in Hollywood, bringing such high-wattage liberals as Judy Garland, Angie Dickinson, Tony Curtis, and Janet Leigh aboard. They hosted fund-raisers for the campaign throughout Los Angeles, several of which were held at Peter and Pat Lawford’s beach house, including one that fermented to such a madcap pitch that Teddy Kennedy delighted the assembled movers and shakers with a belly dance.
That, of course, was just the sort of thing that Kennedy’s political opponents were hoping the presence of Sinatra in the senator’s campaign would provoke. Estes Kefauver, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey were Jack’s chief rivals for the Democratic nomination, and their organizations tried to draw as much attention as possible to the intimacy of Kennedy and the Rat Pack. It had to be done just right: They couldn’t exactly discuss the relationship of a promising opponent with the most popular entertainers of the day out loud—they might as well have sent money to Kennedy’s campaign themselves—but they could quietly remind key supporters that the senator’s friends included Sinatra and, worse, Sammy, political poison in the South.
The race remained perilously close for months, requiring that Frank and his cronies be kept under wraps. After the Summit, for instance, a Kennedy team descended on Vegas to spirit away photographic evidence of Jack’s having partied with the boys. They didn’t want the world to learn how close the candidate was to Sinatra: “We wouldn’t let him campaign openly in the primaries,” said a Kennedy aide. “We couldn’t even let Peter Lawford in because of the Rat Pack image.”
Frank was allowed to make a single public contribution, a novelty record of “High Hopes,” his hit tune from the previous year’s film A Hole in the Head, rewritten at Jack’s request by Sammy Cahn with special lyrics for the election—“Everyone wants to back Jack/Jack is on the right track.” Perfect, optimistic fun, it became the unofficial anthem of Kennedy’s bid.
Still, even at arm’s length, Frank could bring sufficient heat onto the campaign as to threaten its viability. There was his decision—just after the Rat Pack Summit—to make a film of The Execution of Private Slovik, a World War II story about an American G.I. put to death for desertion; Frank would produce, direct, and star. For screenwriter, he made a bold choice: He would defy the Hollywood blacklist by hiring Albert Maltz, his old The House I Live In collaborator, who had been jailed for refusing to testify before Congress about communist infiltration of the film industry and had been living in Mexico since 1951.
There were already holes in the blacklist. Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas had both hired Dalton Trumbo, another member of the Hollywood Ten, to write Exodus and Spartacus, respectively. And Trumbo and several other writers had continued to produce work for Hollywood throughout the previous decade under assumed names, even winning Academy Awards, pseudonymously, for their screenplays. So Frank’s decision wasn’t some kind of thunderbolt.
But neither Preminger nor Douglas was intimately linked in the press with a presidential campaign, and if Hollywood was ready to forget the Red Scare, the rest of the nation, and the conservative press in particular, weren’t.
Frank—or somebody close to him—realized that there might be a political cost to Jack Kennedy once it became known that Maltz had been hired; they deliberately waited until after the New Hampshire primary of March 8 to announce it. Frank was still in Miami then, and Maltz, who’d acceded to a delay in the announcement of his employment even though he was eager for its squelching effect on the blacklist, called him there from New York. “I asked him openly if he wanted to delay because he was raising money for Kennedy,” Maltz remembered, “but he said, ‘No, I support Kennedy because I think he’s the best man for the job, but I’m not doing anything special for him.’ So I suggested we make the announcement right away, and he said fine.”
Kaboom: On March 12, the New York Times reported that Maltz was working for Frank. Within days, conservative pundits across the nation (many working for the rabidly anti-Red Hearst chain) were denouncing the decision (“Dump Maltz and get yourself a true American writer,” read an editorial in Hearst’s New York Journal-American); a Senate subcommittee declared that it would start looking anew into communist infiltration of the film industry; and Hollywood’s number one flag-waver, John Wayne, chimed in: “I wonder how Sinatra’s crony, Senator John Kennedy, feels about him hiring such a man.”
This sort of stuff brought out the scrapper in Frank. He took out an ad in the Hollywood trade papers declaring his prerogative to hire whomever he chose and adding that both he and John Kennedy were their own men: “I do not ask the advice of Senator Kennedy on whom I should hire. Senator Kennedy does not ask me how he should vote in the Senate.”
But the uproar would not die. More editorials and denunciations followed. General Motors threatened to cut its sponsorship of a TV show being produced by Peter’s company and of three specials Frank was set to make for ABC-TV (“Fuck ’em,” said Frank of the auto giant, “there’ll be other specials”). Colonel Tom Parker threatened to pull his gold mine, Elvis Presley, from Frank’s “Welcome Home” show. Frank’s kids were needled at school.
Then, most alarmingly, Catholic priests around the nation spoke out against Frank in their Sunday morning sermons, going so far as to accuse Jack of softness toward communism.
“God, was that a mess,” recalled Peter Lawford.
Joe Kennedy had sat silently b
y watching the spectacle, but when the cardinals of Boston and New York told him that Jack could lose the Catholic vote if such prominent supporters as Sinatra were insensitive to the church’s position on communism, he called Frank on the carpet.
“It was almost the end of Frankie-boy as far as the family was concerned,” Lawford remembered.
Old Joe was blunt: “It’s either Maltz or us, make up your mind.”
And for one of the very few times that anyone could remember, Dolly’s boy caved. Maltz was paid his entire fee—$75,000—and let go. Frank issued a public statement declaring that he was bowing to “the reaction of my family, my friends, and the American public” in firing the writer. In the wake of the fiasco, he neither spoke with Maltz nor pursued the film further. But he maintained a relationship with the Kennedys, who were satisfied that they could control him.
Most of the time. In an ugly coda to the Maltz affair, Frank ran into John Wayne a few days later at a Hollywood nightclub. Frank, into his cups, called out to the hulking western star: “You seem to disagree with me.” Wayne backed away, “Now, now, Frank, we can discuss this somewhere else,” and friends separated them. But Frank wasn’t done. He hissed at a nearby newsman—“I guess you’ll write all this down!”—and then caused a melee in the parking lot, attacking a valet with the aid of Sammy’s bodyguard Big John Hopkins and screeching away in Sammy’s Rolls-Royce after shouting, “Tell that guy not to sue me if he knows what’s good for him! I’ll break both his legs!” Sue him that guy did, and Frank settled the mess out of court.
It was exactly the sort of thing that had the Kennedys worried.
If Frank wanted to pitch in, he would have to do so in other, quieter ways.
The most exciting assignment of my life
The Making of a President, 1960: Through March and April, the talk went back and forth, back and forth, between the Kennedy camp, the Outfit, and their liaisons, Frank Sinatra and Judy Campbell—one savvy and proud enough to think he was not an instrument of powerful men but their peer, the other a fetish object almost entirely unaware of the glutinous web she’d been sucked into. Jack Kennedy assured both Frank and Campbell that he was relying on them; Sam Giancana pretended to want nothing but their friendship. And perhaps neither of those princes of power realized that they were on a collision course that would traverse the bodies of their two starry-eyed go-betweens.
Their first collaboration came that spring. The May 10 primary in West Virginia was shaping up as one of the most crucial moments in Jack’s burgeoning campaign. Though he’d beaten his strongest opponent, Hubert Humphrey, in Humphrey’s backyard state of Wisconsin, Kennedy’s religion and privileged northern background worked heavily against him in an impoverished state that was only 5 percent Catholic. The Kennedy family launched one of its vaunted wall-to-wall assaults on the state, with Bobby virtually taking up residence there, the sisters and wives hosting teas with local women, and Jack even pressing a mine safety bill in the Senate. Joe Kennedy sat down with Richard Cardinal Cushing in Boston and made up a list of Protestant churches in the state to which to donate money (“What better way is there to spend campaign money than to help a preacher and his flock?” the cardinal asked). Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. showed up on the stump and told the coal miners, whom his parents had fought to grant the right to organize, that “my daddy and Jack Kennedy’s daddy were just like this,” holding up two entwined fingers to get his patently untrue message across.
Even less honest, of course, was the help that flowed from Frank and his pal Giancana, who, with his large sums of untraceable cash and connections to the West Virginia political machine, suddenly had the chance to become a kingmaker. He was already well known to the Kennedys, of course. Over the years, Old Joe had sought favors from him, and Bobby had mercilessly grilled him in front of the McClellan Committee hearings the previous June. Giancana, like so many other mobsters before him, responded to every question by invoking the Fifth Amendment, even laughing as he did so, provoking Bobby to ask, “Are you going to tell us anything or just giggle? I thought only little girls giggled.” It made great TV, and it added to the public impression that the Kennedys were the mob’s worst nightmare.
But that was for the public—part of the hypocrisy of politics. Privately, Giancana believed that he could buy some security for himself by aiding Jack’s campaign; he even had Frank’s word on it. So when he was asked to help in West Virginia, he forgot Bobby’s preening and set to work. He gathered a $50,000 war chest, using money, it was whispered, from the ever-flowing Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, and dispatched Skinny D’Amato, who knew all the sneak joints in the state, to distribute it.
It was an uphill struggle. The anti-Catholic prejudice in Appalachia was no myth, as Bobby Kennedy learned to his shock when he came to Wheeling to register Jack for the primary—“They actually shrunk up against the wall, as if such a Catholic might be contagious,” recalled a campaign aide. Tavern owners had to be bribed to put Sinatra’s “High Hopes” pastiche on their jukeboxes; D’Amato had to forgive gambling debts beyond the money he spread around. “We’re gonna have to buy every fuckin’ vote in the state,” Giancana groaned. Humphrey’s people were spreading around their own lucre, despite their guy’s sniffling that he couldn’t “afford to run through the state with a little black bag and a checkbook.” When it came down to it, Humphrey spent plenty and the Kennedys just plain outspent him. As one small-town politico told the local Humphrey organization, “You gave us five and Kennedy came in with ten.”
All the spending proved worth it: Kennedy won 60–40, and Humphrey responded by quitting the race. Jack was now the Democratic front-runner, and Giancana reckoned it was largely his doing. So he determined to keep a careful eye on his investment: That hot number that Jack was doing? Divorced, Liz Taylor looks, friend of Frank’s? Momo had his hooks in her but good.
Frank had introduced Judy Campbell to Giancana in Miami. The mobster introduced himself as Sam Flood. He courted Campbell with assiduous consideration, reserve, and modesty. He sent her yellow roses each and every day, but he respected her desire not to be given gifts of significant value such as cash, trips, or jewelry. She said she took him for a widowed old businessman, even though she knew that he was friendly with Sinatra’s shady Miami buddy Joe Fish, that he was treated with astounding deference wherever they went, and that he had lots of friends in Chicago with thick necks, broken noses, and names like Potatoes, Crackers, Monk, Smokes, Teets, Nags, Fifi, Horse, Needles, Cowboy, Turk, and Dutch. Maybe she didn’t recognize him for what he really was: As she wrote with plausibility after his death, “Outside of Chicago, in 1960 how many people had heard his name?” But by the same token, she couldn’t have been exactly the wayward Catholic schoolgirl her memoirs would make her out to be.
Campbell had been part of a swinging Hollywood scene during her marriage to actor Billy Campbell; she’d rubbed elbows with swells in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, Palm Springs, and Miami; she’d gotten intimately involved with several powerful men, including Jack, who was famously married, and Frank, who’d tried unsuccessfully to introduce her to the pleasures of three-way, interracial sex (she once lay in bed with him pretending to sleep while a black prostitute performed oral sex on him). Moreover, she was a savvy judge of her surroundings. She was sensitive to the ways in which the wives of men like Dean, Peter, Jack Entratter, Sammy Cahn, and Jerry Lewis (who wanted to sleep with her and gave her a meaningless job as bait) snubbed each pretty new girl on the scene. And she was especially keen on reading Frank’s moods and his deeply fractured sense of himself: “He wants to be so many people,” she observed, “that he doesn’t know who he is.”
She went along with it all not because she was naive but because it was too rich to resist. She was granted a spectacular lifestyle that seemed to harmonize with the tenor of the times and beat the hell out of living off a modest inheritance and pretending to make a career as an artist. She simply denied, even to herself, that, like Frank, she was a playthi
ng to both Giancana and Jack Kennedy, something they used and discarded willy-nilly.
And Frank was no different: As Johnny Rosselli said bluntly of Sinatra’s standing with the Kennedys some months later, “They treat him like a whore. You fuck them, you pay them, and they’re through.”
The Kennedys had, in fact, kept Frank and his pals at arm’s length until they were assured that Jack had the nomination in his pocket, and then they enlisted them in an all-out electoral blitz. But the Democratic National Convention would mark the big public arrival of the Rat Pack on the bandwagon.
On Sunday night, July 10, 2,800 people attended a $100-a-plate dinner at the Beverly Hilton. Frank had beat the drum and turned out a dazzling array of celebrity flesh: Sammy and Peter, of course, and Judy Garland, Angie Dickinson, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis, as usual, but also Shirley MacLaine (who had finally hopped the bandwagon), Milton Berle, George Jessel, Joe E. Lewis, and Mort Sahl.
The following day, Frank and Sammy, along with Curtis and Leigh, led the assembled convention in the national anthem. When Sammy was introduced, a chorus of boos rose up from the Alabama and Mississippi delegations. He was staggered; what should have been a crowning moment had become yet another slap in the face.
“I focused on a flag in the back of the hall and clung to it, standing there, torn to shreds inside, hurt and naked in front of thousands of people, in front of the world,” he remembered. He tried to maintain a posture of dignity, but he began to cry.
Frank could sense his anguish. “Those dirty sons of bitches! Don’t let ’em get you, Charlie,” he said.
But the bigots had hit the mark. After choking his way through “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Sammy left the convention hall. Frank and the others stayed on to politic, taking the floor to mingle with the delegates and tilt the vote toward their man—who was so sanguine with the inevitability of his nomination that, at least according to Peter and Judy Campbell, he spent his time in L.A. lining up trysts with on-again, off-again flames like Campbell and Marilyn Monroe.
