by James Kaplan
Frank Sinatra, too, seems to have gone missing. Can-Can had just wrapped, and he had a few weeks off before his late-November opening at the Sands. In the first week of the month, news tidbits and gossip items about him, usually abundant, dribbled down to next to nothing. His faithful shadows Louella and Hedda were mum. In New York, Dorothy Kilgallen could find nothing to tut-tut about. All Earl Wilson could manage was a paragraph about the nightclub act of a Sinatra look-alike named Duke Hazlett.
Frank was busy, but what he was busy with was nobody’s business. His new best friend in show business might have been Dean Martin, but in real life—or what passed for real life in Frank Sinatra’s strange orbit—he was head over heels for John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whom he hosted at his desert home for a lively, but thoroughly clandestine, couple of days that week.
JFK’s pal and campaign aide Dave Powers gave Kitty Kelley a brief but rhapsodic account of the sojourn. “We stayed with Frank in Palm Springs one night in November 1959 after a big fund-raiser in Los Angeles,” Powers said. “You could tell when Sinatra got up in the morning because suddenly music filled the house, even the bathrooms. Frank was a terrific host and we had a great time. When we left, he gave me, not Jack, a box of jewelry to give my wife to make amends for keeping us the two extra days.”
The extra time away was probably not all Powers would have wanted to make amends for. An FBI memo of March 29, 1960, reads, in part,
The Los Angeles Office, by letter dated 3/22/60, advised that a criminal informant indicated that the editors of Confidential Magazine have had a reporter in the Los Angeles area during the past few days for the purpose of checking into a rumor regarding an alleged indiscreet party recently held at Palm Springs in which participants were said to be Senator John Kennedy, his brother-in-law Peter Lawford, the actor, and Frank Sinatra. The informant said that the last time Senator Kennedy was in California for a visit he stayed in Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs.
The indiscreet party can only be imagined. And we will remember, in passing, that Jack Kennedy was an avid reader of Confidential.
More than a year later, Frank would have a gold plaque put on the door of the bedroom in which JFK stayed. The plaque read, “John F. Kennedy slept here November 6 and 7, 1960.” The dates were wrong: on November 6 and 7, 1960, Kennedy was in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with his pregnant wife, the rest of his family, and his campaign staff, preparing for Election Day on November 8. Kennedy would return to the West Coast several times during his campaign, but there was only one November when he stayed in Palm Springs. In trying to tell one story, Frank was actually telling another one entirely.
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No one alive can tell us whether Judy Campbell was part of that indiscreet party in Palm Springs, but it is striking, if she’d been on only one date with Frank—and if sitting around the Bowmont Drive house watching movies can even be considered a date—that he invited her, just days later, to accompany him to Hawaii.
By Judith Exner’s own account, she hadn’t even gone to watch the movies. In her memoir, Sevano approaches her at Puccini, asks if she’d like to go out with Sinatra, she says yes—and that’s it. Frank then calls her a couple of days later and invites her to dinner, but she already has plans for the evening. “A few nights later, again at Puccini’s, Frank himself approached our booth,” she writes.
He had been sitting at a large table with a group of friends and I could feel that he was watching me. He sat down and we talked briefly. He was extremely charming. Before going back to his table, he said he’d call me again, and I didn’t discourage him…
Frank called me the very next day and he didn’t waste any time. He said he was going to Hawaii, and would I like to go with him. We had quite a discussion. I liked the prospect of going to Hawaii and of seeing Frank, getting to know him, but I wasn’t giddy about it.
I refused to go on the same plane with him but I promised to meet him there.
It’s a strange little verbal meringue: some substance but a lot of air, and a bit too sweet. Who was the hunted, and who the hunter? Exner is at great pains to stress her passivity and her propriety. She agrees to go to Hawaii with Frank but has to negotiate the terms. She is ultra-concerned about appearances. Still, who was going to pay for her plane ticket? Her hotel room?
Guys were throwing money around a lot in those days.
“I took the midnight flight on November 9, 1959, and I arrived at 6:45 the next morning,” Exner writes. “I went directly to the Surfrider Hotel. They didn’t have a reservation in my name, but they gave me room 1509. I just stretched out on the bed until Frank called me later in the morning and asked me to come up to his penthouse suite.”
There she found quite a crew: Sinatra, Peter and Pat Lawford, the Beverly Hills obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Leon “Red” Krohn and his wife, Esther, and a coarse, paunchy man named Al Hart. Both Krohn and Hart were longtime pals of Frank’s and men of considerable power in Los Angeles. Red Krohn was the ob-gyn to the stars who’d tended to Ava after her 1952 miscarriage (and performed several abortions on Marilyn Monroe); Al Hart was the founder of the City National Bank of Beverly Hills, an institution that was famously resistant to IRS intrusion and allegedly did a large volume of business with organized crime. Frank Sinatra was a major depositor.
A round of hedonistic days and nights ensued, filled with little but sunbathing, swimming, shopping, dinner parties, and lots and lots of alcohol. “We sat in the sun—Frank worked hard on his tan—and drank Jack Daniel’s,” Exner recalled. “One day flowed into the other without any noticeable transition.” Slack afternoons, Sinatra and his courtier Lawford bantering in Rat Pack–ese. “Their favorite words were gas and gasser, clyde, bunter, cool, crazy, Harvey, fink, mother, hacked, smashed, pissed, charley, and of course, ring-a-ding, or ring-a-ding-ding, depending on the enthusiasm of the moment,” she remembered. “The meaning of many of these expressions seemed to change daily.”
She and Frank became lovers then, she writes: “He was very gentle, romantic, expressive, sensual, and very active when we made love, and very loving afterward. He seemed genuinely concerned that I was happy and just kept his arms around me all night long. We made love again during the night and when we awakened in the morning.”
Intimacy sharpened her perception of him. “I was not totally unaware of his reputation as a tough guy,” she writes. “I had read about his bodyguards and his fights in public places. Without trying to analyze him [!], it’s possible that much of it has to do with the fact that he’s a tiny man with a big man complex. Frank gets considerably shorter when he takes his shoes off…[H]is bone structure is small. His wrists are delicate. In his mind he feels he’s a big man, that he has power, and the way he proves it is to push people around.”
Sinatra was tender when needy, callous when not, Exner recalled. Lawford was often his abettor and partner in crime. “One afternoon, while everybody was sitting around in the living room, two Japanese girls—pretty, delicate little things—were escorted into Frank’s bedroom,” she writes. “Frank and Pete stood up and Frank said something about it being time for their massage…Pat was furious.”
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An acute analyst of power, Campbell watched with fascination as the crowd swirling through the Surfrider penthouse danced attendance upon the mercurial Great Man. “Everybody around Frank walks on eggs all the time,” she observed. “Everybody is smiling and happy when Frank is smiling and happy, but the minute Frank starts to frown, everybody is quiet and fearful. No one dares talk back to him. He berates everybody mercilessly and they take it and take it. It’s a very distasteful atmosphere to be in…Frank knows what he’s doing. He was always careful about what he said to Pat, since she was a Kennedy, but he just pulverized Pete at will.”
The tropical idyll was full of strange crosscurrents. While Pat Lawford gazed adoringly at Frank, he flirted with her just enough to keep her hopeful (and keep himself in the Kennedy mix). Meanwhile, his attentions flickered in every direction. At a
barbecue one evening, Exner writes, Sinatra was attentive and charming, humming along as his records played in the background. Then someone put on No One Cares, and Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen’s great “Here’s That Rainy Day” came on. “For some reason,” she recalled, “I had the feeling that he associated it with Ava Gardner. He became quiet, very sad looking, as he listened to it. Later he said the song had a special meaning for him, but I didn’t pursue it.”
And yet—calculating that Campbell was of little real worth to Sinatra—Lawford pursued her one night after the Chairman retired unusually early, saying he wasn’t feeling well. Campbell rebuffed him and soon came to feel that Lawford, by way of retaliation and self-protection, had sold her out to Frank as the sexual aggressor in their brief encounter.
With the expectable result. Sinatra’s Mr. Hyde side emerged, he began to freeze her out as only he could, and she decided to go home. Absurdly, she was given a going-away party in Frank’s suite. He was in a vile mood. “I didn’t even want to sit next to him,” she writes.
It was a long evening. I just couldn’t wait to get out of there, but finally it was time for my exit and I didn’t even say goodbye to Frank…
I don’t have an ounce of respect for Pete Lawford. I think he’s an ass. He makes the best flunky in the world because it’s important to Pete to be with important people. He’ll sacrifice himself, take a tremendous amount of punishment, just to be there with Frank. When Frank gets into one of his black moods and turns on him, Pete just sits there and takes it. And when Pat talked, he listened.
It’s difficult to find good reviews for Peter Lawford as a human being, contempt and pity being the almost universal notes sounded. His louche parentage did him no favors. He allegedly pimped for both Sinatra and JFK, allegedly procured cocaine for (and used it with) Kennedy, was allegedly a sexual masochist and a serial customer of whores. He apparently never saw a check that he didn’t allow someone else to pick up. “Cheap, weak, sneak, and freak” was Frank’s summary judgment. Dean Jones, a kind man and one of Lawford’s co-stars in Never So Few, said, “I felt kind of sad for Peter. He just seemed like he was lost—he was unsure of himself.” But in the end, the harshest judgment on Lawford might have been his own. “I was a halfway decent-looking English boy,” he once said, “who looked nice in a drawing room standing by a piano.”
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After two weeks of sun and fun (the second week Judy Campbell–free), Frank returned in triumph to Vegas. “Frank Sinatra’s big one week stand at the Sands is a hypo for business all over town,” Variety reported on the thirtieth. “The Sinatra stint was sold out weeks in advance, and there are still local VIPs with juice who are trying in vain to get into the show before Tuesday’s closing. Frank winged in from Honolulu for this one—he’s rested and never was in better voice.”
While he was playing the Sands, he got a telegram from the topical comedian Mort Sahl. “Schweitzer said because of nuclear tests he didn’t know what was going to happen to the world’s population,” the wire read. “That’s easy—they’re all gonna be in ‘Ocean’s 11.’ ”
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Judy Campbell reentered the picture in early December—after, she says, Frank phoned and “sort of apologized” for his miserable behavior in Hawaii, then barraged her with calls until she agreed to meet him in Palm Springs on the seventh. “I wanted to see him,” she writes, “but I didn’t want to just go rushing in.” The woman who claimed never to have been a game player in any relationship had apparently hit on exactly the right strategy for keeping Frank Sinatra interested.
In her memoir, Campbell alternates between elaborately defending her honor—she isn’t a courtesan!—and raising tantalizing questions about the source of her income. On December 7, she checked in to the Racquet Club (where, she writes, she had become a regular weekend guest; she doesn’t say of whom), had dinner with friends, then drove to Sinatra’s house on Wonder Palms Road, alongside the seventeenth fairway of the Tamarisk Country Club, in Palm Desert. She’d never been there before, and the house surprised her. “It was nice and comfortable, but compared to the opulent homes I had lived in and the homes of others I knew, it was a modest, quite ordinary house. It certainly was not the home of a famous movie star,” she writes, rather sniffily.
Even the living room was small. There was a wall bar and a piano at one end. Two beige couches faced each other in front of the fireplace, with a large coffee table between them. There were sliding glass doors leading out to a patio and pool, and the motif was orange and black Oriental.
The only impressive thing about Frank’s bedroom, as I was to discover later that evening, were twin beds and a glass shower in the room itself. Luckily, there was another bathroom connecting with the bedroom which had a shower and tub. There was no way I would have used the bedroom shower.
Frank’s houseboy, George, opened the door and Frank was right behind him.
Relaxed and in fine spirits, Sinatra kissed her on the cheek and gave her a big wink. “I’m glad you could make it,” he told her, taking her elbow and guiding her into the living room. There she saw Pat and Peter Lawford, Jack Entratter, Jimmy Van Heusen, and Johnny Formosa, “who, as best as I could make out, had some connection with the Chicago underworld,” she writes, ingenuously. “Frank walked very carefully around him.”
After introductions were made, Campbell says, Sinatra and Van Heusen went back to a song they’d been working on for the upcoming Ocean’s 11. The process was also very much a performance: as Chester sat at the piano, Frank moved around the room singing, now and then stopping by the sofa and resting his hand on Campbell’s shoulder, flirting with her as only he could, gently but with a twinkle.
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Quite a scene: that kinky glass shower, that grab-bag cast of characters, that twinkling performance by Frank. It’s hard to imagine what song he and Chester were working on, since the only two Cahn–Van Heusen numbers performed in Ocean’s 11 would be sung by Sammy (“Eee-O-Eleven”) and Dean (“Ain’t That a Kick in the Head”).
And there in the same room were the sister of the president-to-be and a high-ranking Chicago gangster. For reasons that would become clear a couple of years later, Frank had good reason to walk carefully around Johnny Formosa, a henchman of Sam Giancana’s and, as the newspapers referred to him, “alleged Lake County prostitution king”—the putative owner of a Gary, Indiana, brothel.
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With her Racquet Club check-in shielding her respectability, Campbell stayed at Frank’s that night. (“We made love and it was the same as it had been before. He was very gentle, very attentive, very loving, and very active. He did not expect to be made love to.” Even in her sex descriptions, she’s at pains to seem the lady.) The next evening, they went to dinner with the Lawfords at Romanoff’s-on-the-Rocks. The table talk was all politics, and Pat Lawford, her father’s daughter and her brother’s sister, held the floor. “Frank was all ears as Pat analyzed Jack’s chances in the coming primaries,” Campbell recalled. “He seemed so subdued and respectful…After we made love that night Frank still had Jack Kennedy on his mind. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ll bet even money Jack gets the nomination.’ ”
If Campbell’s quotation is accurate, the usually immoderate Frank was being a cautious gambler. As of that day, December 8, 1959, the nation’s newspapers were calling Kennedy the man to beat.
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According to Tina Sinatra, Joe Kennedy summoned her father to the family compound in Hyannis Port late in 1959—possibly in mid-December, the one relatively empty spot in his busy schedule that season—with a delicate proposal. “Dad was more than willing to go,” Sinatra told Seymour Hersh.
He hadn’t been to the house before. Over lunch, Joe said, “I think that you can help me in West Virginia and Illinois with our friends. You understand, Frank, I can’t go. They’re my friends, too, but I can’t approach them. But you can.” I know that it gave Dad pause. But it still wasn’t anything he felt he shouldn’t do. So off to Sam Gi
ancana he went.
Sinatra said that her father met with Giancana on a golf course, away from the prying eyes and ears of the FBI, and told him, “I believe in this man and I think he’s going to make us a good president. With your help, I think we can work this out.”
Of course, Giancana and the men he represented would want something in return.
13
What will probably be the wildest bill ever to hit a café floor is slated for the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, starting Jan. 20 for four weeks. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., charter members of Hollywood’s “gas-house gang,” will appear simultaneously at the Jack Entratter–operated inn.
—VARIETY, NOVEMBER 4, 1959
Never So Few premiered at Radio City Music Hall three weeks into the new decade. It was a load of tawdry nonsense, war as it had never existed on any planet, and the critics said as much. The public would mostly stay away.
Never So Few was sheer claptrap from the get-go—from the moment Sinatra, as the OSS commander Captain Tom Reynolds, first swaggers into his Burmese guerrilla camp wearing an absurd, all too goatlike goatee and a big, Aussie-style campaign hat that somewhat dwarfs the head he himself once described, painfully but rather accurately, as walnut shaped. Was there no one on the MGM back lot to tell him? Frank, Frank, lose the chin whiskers and the big hat; they make you look like a little kid playing dress-up!
