by James Kaplan
But the fact that she had the technical potential to sing rings around Frank put him on his mettle. That June night at the Copa, Ella had wowed a house full of prom-night celebrants, but their demands for encores were starting to wear her out when she called Sinatra up for a duet that would give her an easy bow off. The crowd went nuts when he strolled onto the floor to join her. It made sense that the number they chose to do together, “Moonlight in Vermont,” was one they’d sung together recently; they’d duetted it on a May Frank Sinatra Show, probably the best musical episode of the series. At the same time, the song was an interesting choice. It’s a pretty tune, evocative without being emotionally compelling, and the rhymeless lyric—the only one in the entire Sinatra canon—follows suit. The words (“Pennies in a stream/Falling leaves, a sycamore”) are richly scenic, cinematic, yet completely impersonal. No one in the audience had to worry their heads about any hint of a love lyric between a white man and a black woman, and neither Frank nor Ella had to bother about emotional content. All they had to do was let those gorgeous instruments run free.
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Depending on who’s telling the story, Don Rickles insulted Frank Sinatra for the first time either at Murray Franklin’s, a tiny nightclub in Miami, or at the Slate Brothers, a small nightclub on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. By Rickles’s account, his mother, Etta, met Frank’s mother, Dolly, while Sinatra was playing the Fontainebleau in Miami and persuaded her to persuade Frank to catch her son’s act. Sinatra walked into Murray Franklin’s with an entourage, whereupon the young comedian spotted him and uttered the immortal words, “Make yourself comfortable, Frank—hit somebody.” The entourage caught its collective breath and watched for Sinatra’s reaction. He howled with laughter, and a career was born.
On the other hand, Rickles is known to have been insulting Frank at Slate Brothers before he ever played the Fontainebleau: a photograph in the February 3 Life literally caught the comedian in the act. And a June 22 wire-service report about the La Cienega club—where Rickles had been hired to replace the controversial stand-up comic Lenny Bruce, whose raw language had been offensive to some patrons, even by West Hollywood standards—noted that the comedian had recently asked Sinatra, “Remember the good old days, Frank, when you had a voice?”
It was a toothless barb: his voice was back, and he was singing better than ever. “Gone with the Wind” was one of six numbers Frank recorded when he returned to Capitol on the nights of June 24 and 25 to finish Only the Lonely, and any one of the songs—besides “Wind,” there was “Blues in the Night,” “What’s New?,” Gordon Jenkins’s “Goodbye,” “It’s a Lonesome Old Town,” and “One for My Baby”—can be read as a gloss on a relationship that refused to resolve itself, for either party. Any of the lyrics could have been spoken by Frank to Ava, or vice versa. (“What’s New?,” Johnny Burke and Bob Haggart’s devastating dirge of ex-love, was said to be Gardner’s favorite song.)
Sinatra had recorded the saloon number of saloon numbers, Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” once before, for Columbia in 1947, which, in all fairness, was at least a year before the affair with Ava began. Sounding as though he had a head cold, and backed by a Dixieland-like small orchestra and rhythm guitar, Frank turned in an upbeat if slick rendition that owed a lot to the vocal stylings of Mercer himself—who was no mean vocalist but no Sinatra.
Yet eleven years later, Frank was a different man, one both hardened and softened by heartbreak, and a mature artist at the top of his game. On the night of the twenty-fourth, he recorded a rehearsal version of the song, accompanied only by Bill Miller; on the next night (the date is sometimes given as the twenty-sixth, because the session extended past midnight), he laid down the subtly orchestra-backed album track. But it was the hauntingly spare voice-and-piano-only version, the one most consonant with the saloon lyric, that stayed with Frank and over the years became a signature number.
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In the middle of July, Sinatra hosted a large party—including the Lawfords, Harry James and Betty Grable, and Jimmy Van Heusen—at Louis Prima and Keely Smith’s opening at the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. As the resort’s name indicated, Cal-Neva straddled the California-Nevada state line, which was painted on the bottom of the swimming pool and across the floor of the cavernous Indian Room in the main lodge. Gambling was allowed only on the Nevada side of the resort.
Cal-Neva was a glorious, secluded spot, set in pine forest over a mile above sea level, alongside the huge, pristine alpine lake. Besides the lodge, there were twenty guest cabins, known as chalets, scattered around the grounds. It was an ideal hideaway, reachable only by a single, curving mountain road. The air was cool—cold at night—and clear as a bell in the summer months. Frank had vacationed there for years, as had Pat Lawford’s father, the investment banker, former movie executive, and former ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joseph P. Kennedy. In the summer of 1958, the elder Kennedy was deeply involved in his son John’s campaign for reelection to the U.S. Senate and also laying the groundwork for his presidential run. But in June and July, Joe Kennedy took some time off from the stress of political machinations to relax at Cal-Neva, where he visited with his daughter and her husband and their friends, including Frank Sinatra. (Around this time, behind the cover of a front, Joe Kennedy also bought a share in the resort.) Frank and the Ambassador, as he was called, seem to have hit it off from the first moment they met, and they loved Cal-Neva for many of the same reasons. Kennedy’s biographer David Nasaw writes,
The principal owner of the lodge, at the time Kennedy stayed there, was “Wingy”…, the nickname cruelly given Bert Grober, the shriveled-arm gambler and owner of the Park Avenue Steak House in Miami. The Cal-Neva, or “Wingy’s place,” as Kennedy would refer to it, was a first-class resort that had everything Kennedy required. It was on the water…; the rooms were large and the dining superb; there were trails for horseback riding, a bay and pools for swimming, a fine golf course, a casino, which Kennedy did not patronize, and attractive, available women in no short supply.
Wingy Grober was the front for Joe Kennedy’s stake in Cal-Neva.
Also in abundant supply at the resort were the louche characters who frequented Nevada casinos—including, now and then in the pre–Black Book days of 1958, another fan of Cal-Neva, Sam Giancana. The Black Book was the popular name for the list, first published by the Nevada Gaming Control Board in 1960, of individuals prohibited from setting foot in the state’s gambling establishments.
But Nasaw, whose mission seems to be to rehabilitate Joseph Kennedy’s considerably tarnished image, goes to preemptive lengths to distance the Ambassador from organized crime and criminals. “There was nothing very remarkable about Kennedy’s summers at the Cal-Neva,” he writes.
Only in the middle 1970s, as journalists, historians, and conspiracy hunters looked high and low for clues to tie John F. Kennedy’s assassination to organized crime, would attention be paid to his father’s stays at Cal-Neva and the “gang” connections he supposedly made, renewed, and exploited there. Joe Kennedy did not go out of his way to avoid the presence of unsavory characters, nor did he stay away from the places they frequented: Cal-Neva, Hialeah [racetrack], and nightclubs and restaurants in New York, Chicago, Miami, and Palm Beach. But neither did he seek their company.
Perhaps. But what Joe Kennedy was adept at was having others seek their company on his behalf.
At around the same time as Joseph Kennedy was enjoying himself at Cal-Neva, his two older sons were beginning to investigate some of the very characters whose company his father ostensibly did not seek. Senator John F. Kennedy was one of four Democrats on the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, popularly known as the Senate Rackets Committee, chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas. Robert F. Kennedy was the chief counsel for the high-profile committee, whose investigations into labor racketeering put a particular focus on the activities of James R. Hoffa,
head of the Teamsters.
Joe Kennedy, who feared losing union support for Jack’s presidential run, was bitterly opposed to his sons’ involvement with the Rackets Committee. He and Bobby Kennedy argued furiously about it; Bobby refused to back down.
In July, the committee opened hearings on alleged Mob control of Chicago’s restaurant industry. Among the witnesses under subpoena were former Al Capone associates Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo and Paul “the Waiter” Ricca. “Committee counsel Robert F. Kennedy,” reported a wire-service dispatch of July 7, “said agents of the investigating group have been trying to locate several men wanted as witnesses. Describing them as lower echelon hoodlums, Kennedy said they are Gus Alex, Joey Aiuppa, Sam Battaglia, and Sam Giancana. Giancana also goes by the name of Tom Mooney, Kennedy said.”
It would have been too ironic if Giancana had been cooling his heels at that moment on the picturesque shores of Lake Tahoe. But Sam Giancana—a man of many aliases, honored early in his career with the nickname Mooney because even gangsters saw him as a crazed killer—would make an appearance soon enough.
—
Dean Martin, who much of the world thought would sink out of sight after the breakup with Jerry Lewis, was doing quite nicely, thank you. His records were selling, he was wowing the crowds in Vegas, his television specials for NBC were beginning to make the world think of him as a star in his own right. And by the spring of 1958, to everyone’s surprise, he suddenly had a real movie career.
It didn’t hurt a bit that he had some powerful friends. For one thing, he was represented by Hollywood’s leading music-booking agency, MCA, whose boss, the legendary Lew Wasserman, had taken Martin on as a personal project. It was Wasserman who’d come up with the idea of putting Dean in his first post-Jerry movie, the romantic comedy Ten Thousand Bedrooms; when the picture tanked, the agent simply brushed off the failure and looked for an even bigger opportunity. He found it in The Young Lions, the World War II picture in which (after MCA muscled Tony Randall out of the project) Martin co-starred—and held his own—with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
When Frank Sinatra announced that May that his first film in a new three-picture deal with MGM would be an adaptation of the James Jones novel Some Came Running, it made perfect sense that Frank, who was co-producing, would stipulate Dean Martin as his co-star. Not only had Frank and Dean been running together for a while, in L.A. and Vegas, but Dino now had proven dramatic chops. It was just another reason for Frank to admire him extravagantly.
Some Came Running was yet another doorstop by Jones (the joke about From Here to Eternity had been that it took an eternity to read); this time, though, the reviews ranged from very bad to savage. The novel was once more World War II based and autobiographical, an attempt to take on Important Themes: the protagonist, Dave Hirsh, is a failed writer who comes back from the war to his small Indiana hometown (Jones was from a small town in Illinois) with a chip on his shoulder about his family and life in general and, through many turns of plot and subplot, finds his disillusionment confirmed. He befriends a fellow cynic, the gambler Bama Dillert, and falls in love with Gwen, a refined schoolteacher; in the meantime, though, a floozy Dave has picked up, Ginny Moorehead, falls in love with him. Trouble ensues. Dean was to play Bama, and for the plum role of Ginny, Frank selected the twenty-four-year-old Shirley MacLaine, whom he’d met in 1956 while doing a cameo in the film Around the World in Eighty Days and with whom, his makeup man Beans Ponedel later said, he’d had a fling.
Both turned out to be inspired choices. More problematic were Some Came Running’s director, Vincente Minnelli, and the film’s shooting location, the tiny southern Indiana hamlet of Madison, where, in the stifling heat of August 1958, Frank Sinatra found himself stranded—desperately bored as always with the process of filmmaking but, dangerously, with nowhere to go to amuse himself.
The production began amid great excitement among the locals, many of whom were recruited as extras or hoped to be, and Indianans from all over who drove down to see what the Hollywood people were up to. “Nothing so exciting had happened to the green, hilly little Ohio River town,” Time reported in typically florid style, “since P. T. Barnum brought Jenny Lind to sing in the Pork Palace in 1851.”
Disenchantment set in at once. Frank was openly scornful of the townsfolk and the town. “This place is worse than skid row in Los Angeles,” he proclaimed for all to hear. Shooting the first scene, in which Dave Hirsh arrives by bus in his hometown, Sinatra smiled through the window at the local extras, “but back of the sound-killing glass he was snarling out of his hangover: ‘Hello, fat boy…Look at that ugly broad over there. Hello, you horrible bag.’ ” The magazine’s 1955 cover story on Frank had been tough but grudgingly respectful; the latest dispatch was an out-and-out slam.
Frank didn’t help his own case. He drank steadily on and off the set. Feeling that someone was listening in on his calls, he ripped a telephone out of the wall of the hotel he was staying in. He smashed the screen of a TV set with a beer bottle. And then there was the hamburger incident. Late one afternoon, the Sinatra group—Frank, Dean, and Dean’s manager, Mack Gray—called the elderly clerk at the hotel desk and ordered three hamburgers. The order was then changed to four burgers, then to five. The clerk got flustered, and Sinatra and Gray came down to confront him. Gray called him an old bastard. Frank grabbed him by the shirt collar and started dragging him around. The clerk cried on the manager’s shoulder and went home for the rest of the week. Word got around fast. (And Frank and Dean moved to a rented house.)
“The violent displays of temper,” Sinatra film chronicler Tom Santopietro writes insightfully, “often seemed to start when Sinatra sensed weakness on the part of others, as if the sight of such weakness infuriated him, perhaps because it reminded him of weaknesses within himself.”
Nor did things go easily with Minnelli. The acclaimed director of musicals (An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, Kismet) and emotionally pitched dramas (The Bad and the Beautiful, Tea and Sympathy) was fussy and painstaking, qualities guaranteed to drive Sinatra up a wall. When Minnelli’s slow pace caused the shooting schedule to fall days behind, Frank—who after all was a co-producer—ripped twenty pages out of the script and refused to film any of the excised scenes (one of which was MacLaine’s biggest in the picture: Sinatra compensated by suggesting her character instead of his die at the end, a change that garnered the actress an Oscar nomination).
And in a famous incident, after the director spent hours arranging the camera setup for the movie’s climactic sequence—in which Ginny’s old boyfriend, a Chicago gangster, pursues her and Dave through a carnival—Minnelli announced that the Ferris wheel had to be moved six feet (or three inches, depending on who’s telling the story). Frank pulled a Carousel, walking off the set (taking Dean with him) and flying back to Los Angeles. “He did not return for several days,” Santopietro writes, “until producer Sol Siegel reassured him that there would be no further instances of such directorial obsession.”
Minnelli’s wasn’t the only obsession Sinatra had to deal with. “Outside Frank’s door, there was constantly a crowd of eight hundred people, mostly women,” the actress Martha Hyer recalled. “Some had songs they wanted him to listen to. Others had won a beauty contest and were waiting to be discovered.”
Nor was Minnelli unsympathetic to Sinatra’s claustrophobia. “We were virtual prisoners in Madison,” the director said. “We couldn’t go to a restaurant. It was a terrible way to live. And Frank was all cooped up in that little bungalow, along with Dean and a couple of characters from Chicago. You know, he attracts characters.”
He certainly did. Among the visitors to the little bungalow were Jimmy Van Heusen, Leo Durocher, a couple of redheads imported from Los Angeles, and those characters from Chicago: Sam Giancana and several associates, who had apparently made the long drive to southern Indiana not just out of friendly feelings for Frank. Rather, as Momo and his friends explained to Shirley MacLaine, who at first h
ad no idea who these dead-eyed, well-dressed men were, they were “on the lam”—presumably from the long arm of the Senate Rackets Committee.
Life in the bungalow was a strange combination of fun and games and tense machismo. Van Heusen played piano and served as all-around court jester, MacLaine recalled, while “the nightlife of poker, jokes, pasta, and booze went on until five a.m. Our calls were at six a.m.”
It was like a frat house, except the fraternity brothers were movie stars, gangsters, and hulking hangers-on. The gamine MacLaine was accorded the ambivalent role of house mascot—the one woman allowed on the premises except for sexual purposes. As such, she saw and heard a lot. “One evening during a night shoot, as we sat around Frank’s house waiting for director Vincente Minnelli and his camera crew to call us to the set, there was the sound of screaming and a door being crashed open,” she recalled.
One of the legion of women who surrounded the house twenty-four hours a day had broken through security and into the house. She barreled down the hallway and into the living room looking for Frank. “Frankie, I love you!” she wailed as she spotted him teaching me gin rummy. She pounced on him, began kissing him all over, and ripped off his shirt.
After a security guard pried the woman off, Frank threw the torn shirt under the coffee table and straightened his hair. “I feel dirty,” he said. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“There was something chauvinistic about the way he said he felt dirty…as though women soiled a man’s existence,” MacLaine wrote. “I remember wondering why he didn’t at least crack a smile or feel a little flattered that someone was that crazed for him.”
