Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  And yet Frank continued to campaign for Kennedy like a man possessed, singing at fund-raisers, leaning on the wealthy for contributions (“He’d get on the phone to somebody,” Milt Ebbins recalled, “and before you knew it he’d be saying, ‘Gotcha down for ten thousand’ ”), rallying his fellow celebrities to the cause. “If he asked people to go somewhere, they’d go,” said Rosalind Wyman, a key West Coast campaign organizer. “Sammy Davis, Jr., Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Milton Berle, Bobby Darin, Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows. Frank got them all to do events for us.”

  “We’d spread out,” Sammy recalled. “I’d do rallies in L.A., San Diego, and up the coast to San Francisco, then we’d meet back at Frank’s. ‘How’d it go? What happened?’…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.”

  Frank, perhaps needling Kilgallen back, came up with a new label for his crew: the Jack Pack. Dean Martin, who was cynical about politicians in general and about Kennedy in particular, was conspicuously absent. “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,” Shawn Levy writes. “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.”

  Frank might have done well to cultivate a little more cynicism himself.

  —

  The Summit show at the Fontainebleau wasn’t the only big news out of Miami that spring. The previous October, Frank had made a deal with Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker (born, in 1909 in the Netherlands, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk), for the Pelvis to appear on Sinatra’s final Timex special on ABC. The occasion was Presley’s mustering out of the U.S. Army in March, a national event as far as his fans were concerned. Parker drove a legendarily hard bargain: the twenty-five-year-old superstar would be paid $125,000 for his appearance, more than Frank was earning for the entire show.

  It was an epochal event in more ways than one. In appearing with Elvis, Sinatra would be not only acknowledging but in a way deferring to an artist whose records, to Frank’s great chagrin, outsold his own and who was the chief exponent of a genre that only two years earlier Sinatra had called a “rancid smelling aphrodisiac” and a “brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression…sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons.”

  As George Jacobs recalled, “Mr. S hated Elvis so much that he’d sit in the den all by himself at the music console and listen to every new track over and over, ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ ‘All Shook Up,’ ‘Teddy Bear.’ He was trying to figure out just what the hell this new stuff was, both artistically (though he’d never concede it was art) and culturally (though he’d never concede it was culture). Why was the public digging this stuff? What did it have? What was the hook? These questions got the better of Mr. S. I knew he was in trouble when he said he preferred Pat Boone.”

  But—Frank shrewdly calculated, putting his taste aside—Pat Boone didn’t sell records like Elvis, and Pat Boone wouldn’t draw television viewers the way Elvis would.

  The show, titled “It’s Nice to Go Traveling; or, Welcome Home Elvis,” was taped at the Fontainebleau on March 26, in front of an audience liberally salted with adolescent girls, whose presence would quickly become apparent. First, though, Sinatra and company—Nancy junior (making her professional debut), Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., and the Tom Hansen Dancers—delivered a Vegas-style opening, coming out onstage one by one, each singing a couple of lines of a special-lyrics version of Cahn and Van Heusen’s “It’s Nice to Go Trav’ling.”

  Frank, looking lean, tanned, and handsome (and only lightly toupeed), led off with

  It’s very nice to go travelin’, to join the Army and roam,

  It’s very nice to go travelin’, but it’s so much nicer, yes, it’s so much nicer to come home.

  Then the petite, nineteen-year-old Nancy, who’d recently announced her engagement to teen idol Tommy Sands, emerged, looking all grown up in a white décolleté gown and white gloves. She sounded a bit less than grown up, however, as she linked arms with her father and sang, in a pleasant but little-girlish voice, how nice it was to play hostess and help Daddy to welcome Elvis home.

  And then, after the full ensemble gave a transcendently corny lead-in, complete with “drums…drummin’ ” and “guitars…strummin’,” a prop door opened, and the girls in the audience screamed dutifully (but not uncontrollably) at the first sight of their idol, emerging in a dress uniform and hat and strolling downstage as the ensemble parted to form a worshipful aisle.

  Towering over Frank, especially in that dress hat, Elvis faced the camera—the army had slimmed him, heightening his cheekbones and his long-lashed, Adonis-like good looks—and gamely but shyly sang, “It’s very nice to go travelin’, but it’s so, so, nice to come home,” before a bevy of young ladies, including Nancy, whisked him offstage.

  And then he was gone for the next thirty-five minutes of the show, while Frank sang a few numbers and made corny chitchat with Joey Bishop (“I was just going to tell Elvis what happened to the record business while he was away: albums started selling again—my albums”), and Sammy Davis Jr. sang and danced, and the Tom Hansen Dancers danced, and Peter Lawford (who wasn’t mentioned in the credits) came out and danced with Sammy and made more corny chitchat.

  It was all pretty pallid fun—which Frank seemed to realize as he finally, rhetorically asked the audience, in quasi–Amos ’n’ Andy accents, “Now, folks—what would you say if I was gonna sing another song now?”

  “Nooo,” the teenagers obediently groaned, segueing into a chant (was it all coached?)—“We want Elvis”—that didn’t have to go on for long before their idol reappeared, dressed in a tux this time, his sideburns still cut military short (“It made a man of me,” he’d said of the army, “and I don’t intend to raise sideburns again”) but the trademark pile of black hair, miraculously regenerated in the twenty-four days since he’d flown home from Germany, rising skyward with a life all its own. He gave the camera a knowing look—the dress uniform had seemed to inhibit him; now he was free—and then, with a slight smirk, went into his first number:

  Fame and fortune,

  How empty they can be.

  It was a slow ballad, not much of a song, and the camera only showed him from the waist up. From the waist up, singing a ballad, he was just a handsome ballad singer. But when he started his next song, the rocker “Stuck on You,” the angle lengthened to show him full body, and he began to snap the fingers of both hands (wrists close together), shake his hips, and rock that big heap of hair, which took on a life all its own. Now the screams were in earnest. As they had every right to be. Even through the grainy blur of a fifty-year-old kinescope, his charisma pops from the screen. He radiates total authority.

  As he finished, Frank and Joey emerged from stage right, two oldish, baldish guys in tuxes clapping dutifully, like members of the show-business Politburo. Frank shook Elvis’s hand. “Elvis, that was great, and I’m glad to see the army hasn’t changed you,” he said. “Wasn’t that great?” he asked Joey.

  “That’s the first time I ever heard a woman screaming at a male singer,” the comedian deadpanned. Broadly.

  Frank put his hands on his hips and gave him a look. Elvis laughed.

  Then Joey teed up another one. “Excuse me, Mr. Presley,” he said, “but would you think it presumptuous of Frank if he joined you in a duet?”

  And so it happened: what the world wouldn’t quite have been able to believe would ever happen. As Nelson Riddle swung the band into an upbeat tempo, the two of them traded fours, Frank singing a bar of a jazzed-up “Love Me Tender,” Elvis singing a rockabilly bar of “Witchcraft.” Endearingly, Presley mocked himself with exaggerated head shakes and grimaces, and Frank grinned with
what looked like real delight. Both seemed to be having the time of their lives.

  Then Frank put an arm over Elvis’s shoulder, Elvis put an arm over Frank’s shoulder, and as the tempo slowed, they harmonized on the last line of “Tender”:

  For my darling, I love you—

  Frank brightened. “Man, that’s pretty,” he interjected.

  And I always will.

  Then, as the band went into the final chords, the two of them freed their arms, danced in place—Frank wriggling into a brief Elvis imitation—and it was done. They were equals onstage.

  Elvis had been on, in aggregate from the start of the show, for a grand total of seven and a half minutes.

  Clash of the titans: Frank and Elvis on Sinatra’s final ABC television special, March 26, 1960. Sinatra swallowed his intense dislike of Presley to score a big ratings hit. (Credit 13.5)

  —

  There’s a tiny moment, three-quarters of the way through the duet, when Elvis goes cheekily off script, throwing in a word change: singing, instead of “there’s no nicer witch than you,”

  there’s no nicer witch than—witchcraft.

  And Frank takes it right in stride—more than takes it in stride: gives Elvis a foxy, appreciative laugh—hah-ha!—and, total pro that he is, goes on smoothly with the last bit of “Love Me Tender.”

  In that moment, Sinatra is welcoming Presley to the Great Showbiz Fraternity, and at this crucial hinge point in his career Elvis is headed straight to Hollywood and Vegas.

  —

  Cahn and Van Heusen, who contributed plentiful special material to the Frank and Elvis show, were also credited as the program’s producers, and both were present in Miami Beach from rehearsals to broadcast. Sammy and Jimmy, as well as Sammy’s wife, Gloria, were also present for Sinatra’s final-weekend appearances with the Rat Pack at the Fontainebleau, as were Jack Entratter and Juliet Prowse and Judy Campbell and many others. It was a gala stand, every show packed to the gills.

  Also present was Sinatra’s good pal, the Fontainebleau’s “entertainment director,” Joe Fischetti. It’s doubtful that Joe Fish, as Frank had introduced him, troubled himself much with booking singers and stand-up comics. Rather, the hotel was his Miami base of operations, as it was for his close associate Sam Giancana, and in March of that year Sinatra appears to have been eager to enlist their aid in the Kennedy campaign. In typically tortuous FBI syntax, a bureau report from March 1960 quoted an informant as saying that Frank was “being made available to assist Senator Kennedy’s campaign whereby Joe Fischetti and other hoodlums will have an entrée to Senator Kennedy.”

  Being made available by whom? There’s a hint in a recollection of Sammy Cahn’s, portraying Sinatra as a matchmaker between two Joes, Fish and Kennedy: “Frank asked me, ‘Sammy, take Papa Joe down the hall and introduce him to Mr. Fischetti.’ So there I was, walking through the hotel, taking the father of the soon-to-be Democratic nominee down the hall to meet Mr. Fischetti. I mean, one of the best-known criminals in the United States!”

  Cahn always was prone to bombast—in fact, Fischetti was more under the radar than a lot of other mobsters, and Joseph Kennedy wasn’t exactly a Sunday-school teacher when it came to consorting with criminals. Just possibly, Papa Joe had asked for the introduction. In any case, the point was clear: Sinatra, the senior Kennedy, and the Chicago mobsters were playing “a dangerous game,” in Sammy Cahn’s words, mixing the volatile elements of politics, organized crime, and show business.

  Judy Campbell was now deep in the mix. For all the emotional candor of her memoir (the facts are a different matter: Judith Campbell Exner would later tell Seymour Hersh that she had “deliberately fudged” some of the details in her book “out of fear”), her recollections of Sam Giancana betray a surprising credulity. “I paid a terrible price for my association with Sam,” she writes, “but I have never been one to judge people because of what others have said about them. I believe in finding out for myself.”

  What she failed to find out was that when Frank introduced her to the well-dressed Mr. Flood, Giancana was poised to pull her into an extraordinarily audacious and cynical scheme. “In March, when Mooney learned that Kennedy was bedding Judy Campbell on a regular basis, he was close to ecstatic,” Sam Giancana and Chuck Giancana, Momo’s godson and brother, write in Double Cross, their chronicle of the gangster’s peak years. “He wanted Kennedy to have a ‘regular,’ someone he could eventually manipulate and use to his own advantage. With Judy Campbell, it appeared he’d struck gold.”

  The details of the setup, as recollected by Exner herself, are chilling. She was at a party in the French Room of the Fontainebleau with her date, the Texas oil heir and playboy Bob Neal. Suddenly, as if by chance, Neal spotted Joe Fischetti and Skinny D’Amato and steered her toward them. Behind D’Amato stood Sinatra, in conversation with a man she had never seen before. Frank smiled at her. “Come here, Judy,” he said. “I want you to meet a good friend of mine, Sam Flood.”

  “I offered my hand, but instead of shaking it, Sam Flood held it in his two hands,” Exner writes.

  “It’s a pleasure, Judy,” he said, giving my hand a little squeeze but still holding on. He was middle-aged, of medium build and ruddy complexion, but with penetrating dark eyes. “Do you mind if I say something, Judy?”

  “Not at all—I think.”

  He laughed, and it was a hearty laugh, the kind you hear from people who laugh a lot. “You’re far too beautiful to be wearing junk—excuse me—I mean costume jewelry. A beautiful girl like you should be wearing real pearls and diamonds and rubies.”

  “A girl like me does sometimes.”

  She recounts the episode without a trace of irony, the lamb going blithely to the slaughter. Frank, on the other hand, knew all too well what he was doing when he made the handoff. Still, it must be asked: Did he fully understand the transaction’s implications? Not to mention the extent to which he himself was being used?

  —

  The FBI’s informant went on to claim that “Fischetti and other hoodlums”—for this, read Giancana and his minions—were “financially supporting and actively endeavoring to secure [Kennedy’s] nomination.” Yet organized crime continued to be deeply divided about JFK. There were many important figures—notably, top Chicago gangster Murray “the Camel” Humphreys and Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa—who hated the Democratic candidate for his tough stance on labor unions and for his and his brother’s anti-Mob crusading on the McClellan Committee. (Hoffa would become a fervent Nixon supporter.) With this kind of opposition stacked against him and with key presidential primaries coming up, Kennedy needed all the help he could get. West Virginia—heavily Protestant, intensely anti-Catholic, and looking to be the key battleground between JFK and Hubert Humphrey—was going to be a special challenge.

  —

  As Lew Spence told the story, while he was in Las Vegas in early 1960, he played “Nice ’n’ Easy,” the song he’d written with Alan and Marilyn Bergman, for Hank Sanicola, and Sanicola loved it. Unfortunately, Frank didn’t. Spence recalled to Will Friedwald that when he played the song for Sinatra during a break from the filming of Ocean’s 11, “the singer’s initial reaction was to pick up the music with the tips of his fingernails and let it fall to the ground like so much garbage.”

  Sanicola told him not to be discouraged and to play the tune whenever Frank came into the Sands lounge, where he often went after a show in the main room. “Sinatra finally asked, ‘What is that cute little thing you keep playing?’ And, as Spence recalled, ‘Hank told him it was my song and that he was recording it in a couple of weeks. Frank said, ‘Well, I better get Nelson and give him a key. I don’t remember giving him a key on that one.’ Frank not only recorded it but decided that he would make it the title of an album.”

  Sinatra recorded the number at Capitol on the night of April 13, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman were present, though it was a near thing. “Frank said, ‘I don’t like writers at sessions, but you guys can come,’ 
” Marilyn Bergman recalled. “He told us where to sit, right in front of the glass in the [control booth].”

  “He said, ‘You kids can go there,’ ” Alan Bergman added. “And from then on, he called us ‘the kids.’ ”

  “When we were in our seventies he called us ‘the kids,’ ” Marilyn said.

  The Bergmans, who would go on to win three Oscars and pen the lyrics for numerous Barbra Streisand hits, were then in their twenties and virtual unknowns. They were surprised at Riddle and Sinatra’s playful take on the song, which they had conceived as a sultry number about slow lovemaking. “I don’t think we knew whether we liked [Frank’s version] or not,” Marilyn Bergman recalled. She was sitting in the booth with her husband, frowning with concentration as Frank sang, when he stopped a take and fixed them with a blue glare. “What is that, the Finch jury in there?” he asked. (Dr. Bernard Finch, a West Covina orthopedist, was then a defendant in a headline-making trial, accused of conspiring with his lover to murder his wife.)

  As was usually the case at his Capitol sessions, Frank had an audience: some twenty friends, acquaintances, and ornamental females in folding chairs at the periphery of Studio A. The Bergmans were the only spectators in the booth but were clearly expected, like everyone else, to praise, rather than appraise, Frank’s performance. The unspoken subtext was that he was learning a brand-new song at the same time he was trying to set it down for posterity: a high-wire act he was capable of but nervous about. As always, he covered his insecurity with bluster.