by James Kaplan
But it was racy, vivid, real talk. It does no harm to learn of some of the odd folkways in Palm Springs (“The house dick rides around on a burro,” said Sinatra of a certain motel) but most of all, it was a joy to hear TV talk that did not sound “scripted” by six gag writers.
UPI’s Fred Danzig was rubbed the wrong way. “Of course, a meeting of Bing and Frank also serves to advise us of the latest ‘in’ conversational devices,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, their chit-chat Tuesday night produced no new fetishes, only a sordid plug for a chain of health clubs and poorly-timed Sinatra-isms about motel living. The lad does seem to be enjoying his bachelor status.”
A couple of weeks later, The Frank Sinatra Timex Show aired, the first of the four hour-long musical specials Frank had vouchsafed ABC after the collapse of his weekly series the year before. The October 19, 1959, broadcast, co-starring Bing Crosby and Dean Martin and featuring an aggressively perky Mitzi Gaynor (Jimmy Durante also showed up for a surprise cameo at the end), was everything the series hadn’t been—tight, energetic, funny, and exciting. It seemed to help greatly that the network had hired a dynamic thirty-six-year-old director-producer named Bill Colleran, who had proven himself on Crosby’s ABC series. Frank also brought in talent of his own: not only was Nelson Riddle back to arrange and conduct, but Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen executive produced—which meant, of necessity, a lot of sprightly special lyrics.
The reviews were ecstatic, if slightly hedged. “One of the brightest and most thoroughly enjoyable special programs television has produced this season,” the Associated Press’s Cynthia Lowry wrote. “The singing was handled effectively by the three eminent baritones, all of whom kept ‘inside’ jokes to a minimum and stuck to amusing, nonribald remarks.” UPI’s Danzig struck a similar note. “Fortunately, the trio managed to avoid embarrassing, or ultra-inside ad libs,” he wrote. “Working in front of proper, dignified and sedate sets, [they] frolicked in a carefully carefree fashion and displayed huge quantities of personal magnetism. These three men can entertain just by snapping their fingers.”
“Carefully carefree”: an interesting concept. But then, carefulness was a quality much prized in 1950s America—and one that reviewers had missed on Sinatra’s ABC series, where Frank often seemed underprepared and overfond of the kind of ring-a-ding-ding humor that grated on the sensibilities of Middle America. This time around, just for the moment, Sinatra seemed committed to behaving himself. It undoubtedly helped him to be working with his pals and personal hit makers Cahn and Van Heusen, two expert courtiers who knew how to twit but never defy him.
But first old demons had to be exorcised. The show began with Bing, Mitzi, and Dean singing a parody of “High Hopes” that referenced Frank’s notorious unreliability when it came to television work and struck Sammy’s familiar note of respectful weariness when it came to all matters Sinatra. (The old Spanish proverb “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience” could have been inscribed on the lyricist’s coat of arms—along with an addendum: “and a lot of deference.”)
When you’re working with You Know Who,
You show up and so does the crew…
You Know Who finally showed up as the second chorus began, standing with his back to the camera, beckoning the trio with an imperious finger. Then he turned, looked at the audience, and barked, “Who are all these people, and what do they want here?”
Cut to a close-up of Frank’s face as he sang,
I just dropped by to have a chat
Nothing more than that
Call me devil-may-care.
And with that, looking like the essence of devil-may-care—tanned, handsome, and endlessly, shamelessly pleased with himself—he gave a boyish fake laugh: hah-hah!
To which wise old Bing responded, “Oh, you’re a colorful gypsy.”
—
Two weeks later, the TV roundelay continued, as Frank and Mickey Rooney joined Dean on his NBC hour, Ford Startime—prompting UPI’s Danzig to crack, “Gee. Dean is the only one on-stage who hasn’t married Ava Gardner.”
Sinatra and Martin had officially become a team. It was just an act—they weren’t teaming up on the golf course or in after-hours high jinks—but the act took an instant and powerful hold on America, or at least that part of America that paid attention to star behavior, which was much of America. The Associated Press’s Lowry dubbed the two the Rover Boys. “If the boys keep up their busy schedule of visiting around on musical specials we will await their appearances with the same keen anticipation we accord the fastest gun in the West,” she wrote. (It was also an era in which television Westerns were enormously popular.) “The two singing stars acquitted themselves professionally when they were singing old songs, but the show sagged mournfully in the gay banter department. It was a ragged show.”
She neglected to mention Dean’s drunk act.
Danzig didn’t. He observed that “some disciplinary problems were evident” on the show, which “wasn’t one minute old before reference was made to Martin’s tippling. Such things, strangely enough, didn’t happen the last time Martin and Sinatra were seen on the TV tube together.”
The disciplinary problems, the drunk act—the whole thing was a dress rehearsal for what was soon to come.
—
John F. Kennedy at least got to visit Disneyland. At the end of October, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination traveled to California to gather support in a key state whose enormously popular governor, Edmund “Pat” Brown, stood squarely in his way. Brown, who seemed a shoo-in as a favorite-son candidate, had already served notice to the young upstart that he would get short shrift if he entered the state’s winner-take-all primary in June.
Kennedy was out to prove Brown wrong. Over two days, he made a lightning-like north-to-south swing through Oakland, Fresno, Bakersfield, Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, San Diego, and Riverside, drawing big crowds that “grew visibly warmer as he spoke,” according to Relman Morin, the Associated Press’s Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter. Stopping by Walt Disney’s four-year-old fantasy park, Kennedy smiled for photo ops next to Snow White and the Mad Hatter, then stepped into a helicopter that wafted him to Los Angeles. There he met with representatives of minority groups and labor leaders and gave talks at UCLA and USC, where his receptions “were little short of spectacular,” Morin wrote.
At UCLA, 1,900 people filled every seat of the auditorium. Hundreds milled around outside. When he emerged, a student called out, “Come back again and speak to the 1,000 who couldn’t get in.”
Without advance publicity from the campus newspaper, and speaking in the afternoon well after classroom hours, Kennedy filled almost as big an auditorium at U.S.C. “I’m still a Republican,” a pretty co-ed told him, “but I think you’re marvelous.”
On Monday, November 2, he spoke at the Jefferson Jackson Day dinner at the Beverly Hilton. Governor Brown, who attended the fund-raiser, was the event’s honorary chairman.
Kennedy gave a tough, stirring speech that night, charging that the love of luxury was undermining America. “The harsh facts of the matter,” he told the $100-a-plate audience, “are that as a nation we face a hard, tough course ahead for perhaps a generation or more but also, as a nation, the harsh facts of the matter are that we have gone soft—physically, mentally and spiritually soft.”
He cited breakdowns in self-discipline among U.S. troops taken prisoner in the Korean War, as well as alarming rates of desertion among American forces. “What has happened to us as a nation?” Kennedy asked. “Profits are up, our standard of living is up, but so is our crime rate. So is the rate of divorce and juvenile delinquency and mental illness. So are the sales of tranquilizers and the number of children dropping out of school.”
The words on the page don’t do the man justice: Jack Kennedy was simply a spellbinding speaker, with an impact on listeners not dissimilar to Sinatra’s when he sang. That star quality had been there since the beginning of his political career: in 1946, duri
ng Kennedy’s first congressional campaign, girls at a Boston high-school appearance gathered around him chanting, “Sinatra! Sinatra!”
Relman Morin, who attended the UCLA and USC speeches and the Jefferson Jackson dinner, wrote afterward that he had discovered two things:
1. Women get starry eyed over the boyish-looking Bostonian. They either sat looking mesmerized as he spoke or murmured, “terrific…cute…wonderful.”
2. His youthful appearance may be his greatest handicap. “He looks awfully young…is he really 42?” people commented.
Two nights before the youthful candidate decried America’s loss of Pilgrim spirit and Spartan devotion, he attended a glittering party for Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II at the Bel Air home of Merle Oberon and her husband, the Italian industrialist Bruno Pagliai. Hedda Hopper was present. Among the other guests was Mrs. Alfred Bloomingdale, “in a divine Sophie gown highlighted by a new diamond necklace,” Hopper wrote. “Joan Cohn in a Fontana gown, so was Merle…Frank Sinatra in a gay mood, everybody was. Sen. John Kennedy arrived at midnight, two of his sisters beat him there by three hours.”
As he always did while in Los Angeles, Jack Kennedy stayed at the beachfront house of his sister and brother-in-law Pat and Peter Lawford in Santa Monica. And as always, he meant to enjoy himself while he was in town, in ways that had nothing to do with the Pilgrims or the Spartans. One night—by process of deduction, probably Sunday, November 1—Frank Sinatra, whom Kennedy had found to be a reliable guide to such pleasures, took the candidate to dinner at Puccini, the Beverly Hills restaurant that Frank co-owned with Peter Lawford.
We have an account of the evening from Nick Sevano, Frank’s old Hoboken homeboy and former gofer, who claimed to have been present. We must parse Sevano’s words with care. During the late 1940s, he served as a traveling pal and valet to Sinatra until Frank had one too many tantrums about over-starched shirts and misplaced cuff links. A few years later, Sinatra apparently hired Sevano back to work alongside Hank Sanicola in a semi-managerial position, but it’s important to realize that Frank had many hangers-on, titled and untitled, at all times and that details grow vague in the case of people who were tangentially associated with him and subsequently traded on the association. What we do know is that in the late 1950s, Sevano worked as an agent, then manager, for Nelson Riddle. Eventually, he would fulfill some of the same functions for Glen Campbell. Having been around Frank Sinatra got Nick Sevano far in Hollywood.
Sevano claimed to Sinatra biographer Anthony Summers that he had accompanied Frank and Jack Kennedy to Puccini on that early-November night. He asserted “that Kennedy and Frank took a great interest in two women seated at another table—the actress Angie Dickinson and a dark-haired beauty named Judith Campbell. ‘Frank sent a note to me saying “Bring the broads over,’ ” Sevano said.”
Dickinson and Sinatra had first met six years earlier, when Frank was doing a guest spot on The Colgate Comedy Hour. During a commercial for the sponsor, Halo shampoo, he warbled the jingle “Halo Everybody Halo,” while the gorgeous twenty-two-year-old beauty-pageant winner from North Dakota smiled and showed off her silky tresses for the camera. Later, she and Frank—and then she and Frank and Jimmy Van Heusen—struck up a conversation backstage. Angeline Brown Dickinson was very young and, as she remembered vividly many years later, “bursting with awe” at being in Sinatra’s presence. She had a humorous, easygoing way about her that he liked a lot. She was witty but not caustic; she knew how to talk, but she knew how to listen, too. It turned out she was married in an informal sort of way, yet she was also an extremely practical girl, and her sights were set firmly on Hollywood. Chester asked her for her number—for Frank, of course—and of course she gave it to him.
Angie Dickinson could easily have gone the way of so many beautiful girls who made the hopeful journey from the provinces to Hollywood. Instead, she steadfastly built an acting career, mostly on television for the first few years, bootstrapping her way up from credits like Party Guest and Cigarette Girl to featured roles—often, because of her rawboned prairie features, cast in Westerns. She also built a unique, triangular relationship with Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Van Heusen. In an arrangement that remains striking to this day, both singer and songwriter seem to have been able to maintain their interest in Dickinson, and she hers in both of them, without anybody’s getting hurt. “They both loved women; that was something very much in common,” she said. “And yet, never in competition. I saw both of them alternately. I mean, I just adored them both. When Jimmy asked me out, it was a natural. You don’t have to plan to marry somebody to go out. Sometimes I’d say, ‘Yes, I’m free, Jimmy,’ and then, ‘No, I’m not.’ Whatever. I was very, very happy with either one, whomever I was with.”
Judith Campbell—born Judith Eileen Katherine Immoor in 1934, and later to become infamous as Judith Campbell Exner—is a massively controversial figure. The light of truth bends around her presence in any historical narrative, because of the gravity of her known associations—with Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, and John F. Kennedy. And also, it appears, with Joseph P. Kennedy. In his memoir, George Jacobs bluntly maintains that Campbell was “a major player”—a prostitute, in plain English—and claims that the elder Kennedy patronized her, gratis, courtesy of Sinatra, more than once in Palm Springs.
One would scarcely have picked her for whoredom. Judith Immoor grew up in a strict and well-to-do Catholic household in Pacific Palisades—her father was a successful architect—and she carried a quality of girl-next-door innocence into young womanhood, when she blossomed into a beauty. Remarkably, though she lived so close to Hollywood, she showed no interest in modeling or acting. Her older sister, Jacqueline, was the star of the family, a promising actress with a contract at Paramount.
In 1952, against her parents’ wishes, Judith married an up-and-coming young movie actor named William Campbell. She was eighteen. As the wife of a contract player, she began to attend premieres and parties and to be noticed. “I’d say she was in the Elizabeth Taylor category,” the reporter James Bacon, who covered Hollywood for the Associated Press, told Seymour Hersh. “She was a gorgeous, gorgeous girl.” By the time she was twenty-four, her young marriage had soured, and she and Campbell had divorced.
“For the first time in my life,” she wrote in her memoir, “I began dating the way most girls date when they’re in high school.” But she was also on her own in a tough company town. Could she have somehow wandered, through financial need or perverse interest, into prostitution? We are in the shadow world: precise map coordinates and passenger manifests are unavailable. Nick Sevano’s Puccini story chimes precisely with Peggy Connelly’s Villa Capri tale of a few years earlier: two attractive young women out on the town, one of them more than eager to meet Sinatra. A very interested Frank sends an intermediary to their table. It doubtless happened dozens of times. Many young women were extremely eager to meet Frank Sinatra, and both Betsy Hammes and Gloria Franks, who spent considerable time in Campbell’s presence in Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the late 1950s, observed that she seemed particularly determined to get close to him.
Judith Campbell. Her dark beauty and air of girl-next-door innocence beguiled Frank Sinatra, Sam Giancana, and John F. Kennedy and led to the split between Frank and JFK. (Credit 12.3)
“I just was aware of her being around quite a bit,” Franks recalled. “It was almost like somebody hanging around behind a pole, waiting around to be called to the table or go off with somebody.”
Did Campbell seem like a prostitute to her?
“Growing up the way I grew up, as a young lady from a proper background, and being around Las Vegas with all those terribly weird people and all these people who seemed a little dangerous, [I thought] she seemed like somebody that was part of that ilk,” Franks said.
On the other hand, it was a different era. Hammes, who earned a solid living as a nightclub singer, recalled, “I was working at the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, and a friend of mine, a guy who owned a ra
cehorse, said he wanted to give a party for around a hundred people. He asked me to arrange it, and I said, ‘Great, I’ll do it.’ He gave me $5,000 and a gold watch! I never even kissed him on the cheek. Guys were throwing money around a lot in those days.”
Especially Sinatra.
Who exactly was present on that November night at Puccini? Since Angie Dickinson has kept her counsel about most of the particulars of her relationship with Sinatra and has stayed entirely mum about her connection to JFK, we have only two unreliable narrators to attest to the particulars of this crucial evening. Sevano may be exaggerating his role; Judith Campbell Exner may be diminishing hers. In her highly selective and frequently ambiguous 1977 memoir, she leaves Kennedy entirely out of the anecdote, making it instead all about Frank. “The first indication I had that Frank Sinatra was interested in meeting me was when Nick Sevano approached me one night while I was having dinner with friends at Puccini’s [sic],” she writes.
Nick said, “I really would like you to meet Frank.”
I said, “Thanks, but I’ve met Frank at parties.”
Nick laughed. “You know what I mean. Would you like to go out with him?”
“Yes,” I said, without hesitation. “I’d like to go out with him.”
Given Jacobs’s testimony, “parties” can’t help but have a loaded sound. And apparently Sevano’s functions weren’t just managerial. By his account, he then took Campbell and Dickinson to Sinatra’s table. “I brought them over, and we wound up at Frank’s house until three in the morning, watching movies. [The girls] didn’t stay there—just watched the movies.”
Come to think of it, “movies” has a loaded sound to it, too.
—
Between the night of Monday, November 2, and the night of Thursday, November 5, when he took his campaign to Oregon, John F. Kennedy—who had been stirring up crowds wherever he went in California, who had had reporters and fellow politicians hanging on his every dynamic word (“He had a big success,” even Pat Brown had been forced to admit; “I admire him very much”)—went off the radar screen. The press, even the gossip columnists, who saw him as a star among stars, seemed to lose track of him entirely. On November 3, the Associated Press reported, the Republican front-runner, Richard Nixon, took a “folksy stroll around Beverly Hills…and discussed sports with construction workers, visited a brokerage office, kibitzed with a lady supporter, joshed a waitress and ate a hamburger.” Kennedy was nowhere in sight.
