Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  Soon after he got out, all the shit about Jack Kennedy and Judy Campbell and Sam Giancana and Havana and Dallas and all that started hitting the papers. Rosselli got called in to Congress to testify in closed session: three times. That was too many, even for a loyal guy like that.

  They found him in an oil drum in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami, chopped up, done.

  And Giancana they found in his own basement, his head full of .22 slugs, sausage and beans still frying on the stove where the killer got him.

  He had maybe fallen worst of all, and he’d asked for it. He wanted to show the feds what a big deal he was, so they hounded him out of business. In the summer of 1963, just before Cal-Neva, they lockstepped him, walking a pace or two behind him wherever he went—airports, restaurants, office buildings, bars, men’s rooms, everywhere. (Poor Mo was shy at urinals; he never could get the hang of relieving himself with an FBI agent lurking right beside him.)

  They followed him onto golf courses and played in foursomes right behind him; the mighty Bill Roemer delighted in yelling “Fore!” just as Giancana hit the top of his backswing or in hitting his ball onto the green while the mobster was settling in over his putts.

  The pressure of twenty-four-hour tails practically in his pants drove Giancana crazy. He tried all his driving tricks, all the ruses he could think of, and they’d still be there, waiting for him or beside him, watching, saying nothing.

  The feds were emboldened. They followed him into the Armory Lounge, his clubhouse and office, and sat there sipping beer and enduring the grumbled jibes of a dozen or so of his mob cohorts.

  When they left to resume their surveillance from their cars, they were followed by Giancana’s lieutenant, Chuckie English.

  “Sam wants to give you a message.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “He says if Kennedy wants to talk to him, he knows who to go through.”

  “Sounds like he’s talking about Frank Sinatra.”

  “You said it.”

  Word about Frank’s estrangement from the White House hadn’t, apparently, spread to Chicago; he certainly wasn’t bragging about it, and the Kennedys couldn’t tell the world about the sordid reasons they’d given Frank the high hat. So everyone in town thought that Frank was still the conduit between the president and the Outfit. And when word got around that Giancana had revealed as much to the FBI, his colleagues were aghast.

  Outfit underboss Strongy Ferraro visited political fixer Murray Humphries’s apartment, which had been bugged since before it was even built, to talk it over.

  Humphries hit the ceiling: “For Christ sakes, that’s a cardinal rule! You don’t give up a legit guy! He tells Roemer that Sinatra is our guy to Kennedy?”

  “More or less, for Christ sakes,” Ferraro replied. “I’m so fucking mad I could jump out your fucking window!”

  They eased Sam out.

  He hid for nearly a decade in Mexico, bribing the authorities for a shot at peace and quiet. Eventually, someone there turned on him: Government agents rousted him in the middle of the night, then hustled him off to the Texas border, still in his pajamas.

  Soon after, the same congressmen who’d been talking with Rosselli subpoenaed him. Then somebody sent the guy with the .22 to make sure he had no more secrets to leak.

  And Frank was still playing around with gangsters.

  In 1976, he debuted at the Westchester Premier Theater, a Gambino family operation built on a landfill in Tarrytown, New York. The next year, with the theater—which had been built almost solely for the skimming possibilities it presented—on the verge of going bust, he returned, this time with Dean. No one thought the thing could be saved. It was built with the proceeds of a rickety stock scheme; its managers paid Vegas-sized salaries to entertainers without the prospect of turning gambling profits on showgoers; its parking lot, built over a marsh, filled with water whenever it rained. But Frank and Dean could help with one final score before bankruptcy—a Villa Venice-type last hurrah.

  They arrived in May for a twelve-night run at a cost of $400,000 each. Dean had a nineteen-year-old girlfriend in tow; Frank had his new bride of eleven months, Barbara.

  As soon as they hit town, Frank began telling the wise guys that he was worried about Dean: “You’ve got to get him out of his fucking shell,” he told Gambino soldier Gregory DePalma, who ran the theater’s concession and security operations.

  But getting a sign of life out of Dean, whose boozing had evolved from stage joke to the real thing and had been supplemented with a Percodan addiction, was no easy chore. “I’m supposed to play golf tomorrow with Dean Martin,” DePalma bragged on an FBI wiretap. “But he’s drunk as a fucking log. He wanted to play today. He can’t. So he wanted to play the other day, forget about it.”

  DePalma had a theory: “The broad. He’s flipped out over the broad. He’s gone, this guy. He’s fucking gone. He came into the dressing room, he says, ‘Hey, Greg, what’s the password?’ I says, ‘What password?’ He says, ‘Don’t you know the password?’ I says, ‘No.’ He says, ‘It’s swordfish tonight.’ This is a sick fuck.”

  When they finally did get Dean out onto the course, disaster: “This guy’s on pills. Forget about it. He’s got the shakes. His fucking head’s gone. He played horrible … He hit a fucking house.”

  DePalma and Frank both tsked at Dean’s errant shot.

  But Dean said nothing.

  He never did care what mobsters thought of him.

  I wanna go home

  It was 1987, autumn; you could feel winter coming on—and the big winter they would all have to face. Dean and Frank were in their seventies; nimble little Sammy, a decade younger, had just had hip surgery.

  Earlier that year, Dean Jr., the golden son whom Dean always loved, was killed when his Air National Guard F4-C Phantom smashed into Mount San Gorgonio near Palm Springs. (Just as Dean and Frank had become inseparable as performers in the public eye, so did this tragedy mark another curious connection between them: Frank’s mom, Dolly, had died in a plane crash on the very same mountain ten years earlier.)

  Even before his boy had died, Dean had been receding from work, friends, life itself, but in a genial way that people recognized as part of his lifelong desire for peace and quiet. After the crash, however, his introversion became more pronounced and had more of a tragic tinge to it; people worried.

  Frank had him and Sammy out to the Springs for a weekend, and Sammy—always ready to turn a moment’s pleasure into a show—thought it would be great if the three of them could work together again, maybe on the Strip. They’d done little benefit appearances together in recent years—fifteen-minute spots for black tie charity affairs—but he was talking about a real gig, like back in the day.

  “Why don’t we find a good bar instead?” Dean asked.

  But Frank liked the sound of it: a customized train, a tour of the hinterlands: Houston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Oakland … He and Sammy talked about it like some fabulous dream.

  A few days later, Frank was still thinking seriously about it: “Smokey, let’s do it,” he told Sammy. “I think it would be great for Dean. Get him out. For that alone it would be worth doing.”

  Sammy didn’t need convincing. He and Frank had been estranged for several years because of everything that Frank had heard about Sammy and drugs. (When they finally reconciled, just-say-no Frank kept Sammy out all night at a bar in Vegas.) Now that he’d been sober for nearly three years, Sammy was eager to take on big things—and the big money that went with them.

  Dean, though, would be a hard sell. He’d virtually stopped working even before the plane crash. He hardly played Vegas anymore, and whenever he did perform anywhere, he preferred single-night performances to extended runs; his agent had been telling people point-blank, “He doesn’t need a job.” He had last recorded in 1983, the same year that he, Sammy, Frank, and Shirley MacLaine made The Cannonball Run II, easily one of the worst films of the decade, a bomb so awful that the producers opened it i
n Japan and didn’t bring it to America until six months had passed; it would be Dean’s last film.

  Still, Frank had a way of convincing people. He had Dean and Sammy over for dinner and laid out a plan: forty dates in thirty cities, with the tour broken into spring and fall portions; a full orchestra and tech crew; two private planes for the stars (Frank had his own, they’d rent one for Sammy and Dean); they’d play big auditoriums, just like rock stars—fifteen, twenty thousand seats.

  Dean still wasn’t enthusiastic: “Do you think we can draw that much?” He hated the road, he didn’t need the money; it struck him as pointless.

  “Dean didn’t really want to do it,” Sammy admitted, “but we were all aware that much of the allure was the return of the Rat Pack thirty years later and he didn’t want to let us down.”

  In December, they told the world their plans. At a noon press conference at Chasen’s, they kicked off what they called the “Together Again Tour,” sponsored by American Express and Home Box Office. Wearing tuxedos and smoking, they fielded questions and, naturally, slipped into familiar roles—Sammy the eager kid, Frank the padrone, Dean the wiseass in the back row.

  “Is there any way we can call this off?” he shouted out early on, and, later, asked how he felt about the tour, he responded in a mumble, “We’re happy to be doing this thing. What the hell.”

  They joked about cigarettes, about Michael Jackson, about booze. The show would be spontaneous, they said, like the Summit had been. Scripts bored them. “That’s like doin’ a Broadway play,” Dean said. “Which I hate.”

  A reporter asked a question with the words “Rat Pack” in it. Frank, who had politely deflected a question about Kitty Kelley earlier, sneered about “that stupid phrase”; the official publicity for the tour never used it.

  They rehearsed a few times, first at Sammy’s house, then on a rented stage in Hollywood. In March, they opened before 14,500 people in a sold-out Oakland Coliseum. Before the show, Dean asked aloud, of no one in particular, “Will someone tell me why we’re here?” Then he took the stage.

  The same old stuff: “When you’re drinkin’…”; “Each time you drink it rains bourbon from heaven.…” Other words he just plain forgot.

  He was having trouble with his voice, or, rather, he wasn’t really using it; he mumbled into the mike. People shouted out to him, “We can’t hear you!”

  “I wanna go home,” he said, and he wasn’t kidding.

  He drank his drink, he smoked, he looked out at the audience—the biggest he’d played to since Martin and Lewis headlined the Texas State Fair—and he knew deep inside that he didn’t care: He flicked a lit cigarette at them.

  Sammy was on next, then there was an intermission, then Frank, then all three of them at once for jokes and goofs and a medley.

  Dean kept looking at his watch; Sammy sang “Hava Nagila”; they closed with the “Fugue for Tinhorns” from Guys and Dolls: “the oldest established permanent floating crap game.” They weren’t kidding.

  Backstage, Frank made it clear that he was ticked off at Dean’s surly behavior, but he’d get no satisfaction. Within the week, they were in Chicago and Dean was at it again. Frank didn’t like the hotel accommodations waiting for them and ordered Dean and Sammy to pack up and go somewhere else with him; Dean didn’t budge. Frank complained to Dean’s agent that he wasn’t really singing or trying hard enough. “I can’t take this,” Dean said, “I’m getting out of here.”

  He chartered a plane to L.A. and made a show of checking into the hospital for what they said were kidney problems. Frank and Sammy went on to Minnesota without him, then put the tour on hiatus. They reopened it in New York with Liza Minnelli in Dean’s place; nobody was calling it the “Rat Pack Tour” anymore.

  And Dean barely waited a decent interval before opening by himself at Bally’s on the Strip, all better.

  Part 5

  Not a moment too soon

  Blink, and it was the spring of 1990, and Vegas was another world.

  In that thirty-year-old photo of Frank and Dean and Sammy and Peter and Joey standing in front of Jack Entratter’s marquee, there had been an endless horizon and a crystalline sky; cars could park right there on the road in front of the casino; beyond the handful of trees: nothing.

  But those days were over. The beautiful old sign was gone—no room for it beside the new tower that was erected just before Howard Hughes bought the hotel. And the brilliant sky, once dotted only by lampposts, was blocked out by concrete slabs—gigantic new hotels owned not by shady guys and their slightly less shady front men but big corporations, bigger even than Hughes.

  The Strip was more choked with commerce and traffic than any suburban shopping district; even downtown had been gussied up. Vegas was legit, corporate, and booming; any sense that it had once been an adult playground was strictly nostalgia.

  Theme parks: That’s what these new joints were. Across the street from the Sands, where there’d once been little motor courts, there was a casino with a volcano out front, spewing fire all night long for the out-of-state yokels to gape at with their kids.

  The old guys wouldn’t have believed it: “If you told the old bosses you wanted to put a fucking volcano in front of their joint they woulda thrown you out on your ass,” an old casino hand surmised. “They’re probably dropping dead all over again in their graves.”

  But guys like that were finished. For new Vegas to even think of looking back, it had to be some kind of special occasion.

  Like May 18.

  That night, after dark, the lights on all the Strip’s marquees were ceremoniously dimmed for ten minutes, the first time since Jack Kennedy was killed.

  This time it was Sammy who was dead—and the town that he had helped build and integrate squelched its glittery facade to mark the passing of one of the most glittering spectacles it had ever seen.

  Throat cancer: all those cigarettes.

  A grueling year: chemo, radiation, pain, weight loss, grief.

  He was down to maybe ninety pounds at the end.

  A big, public funeral, the type they used to have in Hollywood in the old days. Frank and Dean were honorary pallbearers; Jesse Jackson spoke; “I Gotta Be Me” on the PA.; Altovise, the widow, wore white; he was buried alongside his dad and Will Mastin in the Hollywood Hills.

  He had never really gained the absolute control he’d hoped to have, never quite sat comfortably atop that mountain that he’d built himself. Styles changed even faster than he could adapt to them; markets dried up; the IRS hounded him, even after he was gone. He had become a beloved figure, yes, but a mocked one as well: Showbiz turned out en masse to celebrate his career on TV (Sammy, obviously ailing, danced with stunning verve alongside Gregory Hines—an old Moulin Rouge performer!—who humbly kissed the master’s shoes), but lots of bad comics made hay imitating his obsequious talk show mien, hepcat lingo, the infernal monster hit “Candy Man.” As widely as his stunning achievements were recognized, he became a shorthand punch line for all that was tacky and passé in showbiz, he who had once been the living embodiment of hipness and the Now.

  Still, he’d been blessed. All the things he had against him, all the barricades in front of him, all that was inside him that made him fight against himself, all the twisted support he got from Frank and a handful of others—who else had ever done all that he had despite it? If he had come to look foolish and dated and stale, so what? He had lived it his way before Frank had ever come across the song.

  Pound for pound, he was the best of them: not the most consistent or productive or successful or coherent, but the one who’d come from furthest and who had most fully lived what they were all reputed to be.

  It had cost him: health, security, money, love—he was always in jeopardy. But his cakewalk along the ledge was so vital for its unlikeliness, so daring and unique, that even Frank had to realize that although he was himself the brains of the operation, Sammy was its soul.

  And more: He was their baby brother, pitiful
ly dead before them.

  They knew what was coming: Days in the desert could be so hot, the nights … so cold …

  Dean never did get over his kid.

  A few more years of pretending to play Vegas and he just drifted off into himself altogether, a zombie, complete with gray flesh, wandering in and out of restaurants and country clubs without talking to anyone or even, it seemed, knowing why he was there.

  That tenuous string that had kept him barely anchored to the world—he simply let it fall from his fingers, as much from indifference as from dotage.

  He faded from life while he was still living it, a ghostly presence even in old movies and on old records where he’d once seemed impossibly real. He came to look superimposed on the world, not so much of it as above it and apart from it, living it at a remove no one else could approach. As much had always happened to old men, true, but how many had ever dallied at such Olympian heights?

  Always graceful, always adroit, always ready with the perfect line, the perfect double take, the perfect excuse to get away and be alone: He had never wanted to conquer anything. It had all just come to him, thrust on him by ambitious friends who expressed their adoration for his lordliness by sharing the good fortune they busted their asses to achieve.

  Those last few years, people imagined him lonely, lost, confused, sad.

  They couldn’t have been more wrong.

  For the first time ever, he did exactly what he wanted.

  When everyone else was eating Christmas dinner, he slipped away for the last time …

  And Frank was eighty. Eighty.

  And finally he, too, surrendered.

  Oh, he put up a fight as long as he could: concerts and touring and benefits and even records for at least a decade after nobody could imagine that he could do it or need it or want it.

  It wasn’t without embarrassment: forgotten lyrics, strange lapses in stage patter, physical collapse. They gave him a special Grammy for everything he’d ever done, and, accepting it on national TV, he ad-libbed, meandered.