by James Kaplan
He did twelve takes of “Nice ’n’ Easy” that night, and he was well aware of the song’s sensual subtext—and well aware of his audience, both the appreciative ones on the floor and the judgmental ones in the booth. So he played with the number a little bit, toying with the melody and rhythm here and there (and going slightly flat here and there, too).
—
After take eight, producer Dave Cavanaugh spoke through the intercom. “Okay,” he said. “Rolling right away. E 33650, take nine.”
Frank pushed right back. “Ho! Ho! Wait!” he yelled in that big voice. “Ho! Time! What’s the matter?”
“Oh, just a couple—” Cavanaugh began.
“Notes? Clams?” Sinatra said. “Whaddya expect? I don’t know the song!”
It took him a while, but by take twelve he had it down cold, now interjecting the finger snaps in the second chorus that make the song so beautifully and finally deciding on the double entendre that seals the coda: “Like the man says, one more time.”
To listen to the final take is to be unaware of the prickly Sinatra, the vain and insecure Sinatra, or the petty Sinatra: all one hears is hair-raising magnificence, the difference between art and life.
And that twelfth magnificent take changed the course of recording history: all at once, The Nearness of You was out as album title and concept (as was the song itself, not to be restored until the 1991 CD reissue of the LP), and suddenly an album of standard ballads was capped with one hell of a lightly swinging love song. It could have not worked, but instead Nice ’n’ Easy simply did work, and superbly: after its issue in July, it spent nine weeks at number 1 on the Billboard chart and thirty-five weeks in the Top 40.
—
“Hollywood is talking about: The man of the week—ex-GI Elvis Presley back in Hollywood to start ‘GI Blues’ for Hal Wallis Monday morning, Elvis’ first movie in over two years,” Louella Parsons columnized on April 24.
So you think his long stint in the army may have quelled the Presley craze? There’s more press and TV attention centered on the return of the original rock ’n’ roll kid than any local event since Vice President Nixon toured Disneyland.
And—the girl of the week—pixie-faced French [sic] Dancer Juliet Prowse who picked off the lead with Elvis over the native talent which may make up to Juliet for the cooling of her romance with Frank Sinatra which started in “Can-Can.”
“Welcome Home Elvis” aired on Thursday, May 12, and drew a gigantic audience: more than 40 percent of the American TV-watching public—a far greater rating than Frank had ever drawn by himself. It was event television, but it wasn’t particularly good television. Variety’s reviewer pinned the blame equally on Sinatra and Presley: “Elvis Presley hasn’t changed much in the two years since he went away, but the U.S.A. has,” wrote “Tube.”
Officially returning to civilian service via “The Frank Sinatra Timex Show,” the pomp-adored singer popped out of the picture tube like a pooped caricature of an outmoded image. It was the most significant facet of an hour-long exhibition of embarrassing self-idolatry mixed with occasional, but well-spaced, flashes of grace and talent.
Elvis might have been headed downhill, but Frank was at the top of the heap in every one of his enterprises. The wonder was that television kept throwing so much money at him when it so clearly wasn’t his medium.
—
One year after Frank and Sammy Davis Jr. mended fences at the SHARE Boomtown benefit for retarded children at the Hollywood Moulin Rouge, Frank caused a melee at the same event. The benefit was once again a costume party with a western theme, and once again the evening was bibulous. Sinatra, never one for political correctness and apparently quite secure in his masculinity, came dressed as an Indian squaw, replete with a headband and a feather.
After the party broke up, in the early hours of Saturday, May 14, Frank, somewhat the worse for wear, headed out to the parking lot with Sammy Davis’s bodyguard, the six-foot, 220-pound Big John Hopkins. There Frank spotted John Wayne, whose recent public critique of his hiring of Albert Maltz was still fresh in his mind. In the department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Frank, still in his squaw costume, stalked up to Wayne—who of course was dressed in full western regalia, complete with neckerchief and ten-gallon hat—and stood squarely in the much larger actor’s path.
“You seem to disagree with me,” Frank said.
The fact that Wayne had nine inches in height (more with the hat) and seventy pounds in weight on him meant nothing to Sinatra. It would probably have meant nothing even if he’d been cold sober. But John Wayne, to his credit, spoke conciliatorily. “Now, now, Frank, we can discuss this somewhere else,” he said.
At this point, though both principals later denied it, a witness (a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald-Express) said that Frank shoved Wayne and that Wayne shoved him back. Friends separated them; Wayne walked away, and Sinatra turned to the newsman. “I suppose you’ll write all this down,” he said.
Still steaming, Frank stepped—whether intentionally or not isn’t clear—into the path of a moving car being driven by a parking attendant named Clarence English. The car screeched to a stop. “Hey, Charley!” Sinatra yelled. “You almost hit me! You know what I’m insured for?”
English shook his head, and Frank raced around to his side of the car. “Can you fight? You’d better be able to,” he said to the attendant. He reached for English through the driver’s window, and another attendant, twenty-one-year-old Edward Moran, remonstrated with him: “Aw, Frank, he wasn’t trying to hit you with the car. He’s only trying to make a living.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Frank said and pushed Moran, who then made the mistake of trying to defend himself, striking Frank.
Big John Hopkins stepped in and began raining blows on Moran, while Sinatra, the squaw costume dressing the scene, danced up and down, shouting, “Tell that guy not to sue me if he knows what’s good for him! I’ll break both his legs!”
Presently, Frank and Hopkins got into Sammy Davis’s Rolls-Royce and drove away.
Moran, who was treated for facial cuts and bruises, disobeyed Frank’s order, bringing a $100,000 suit against him for violent assault. Sinatra settled out of court.
* * *
*1 According to Havers (p. 254); Friedwald (p. 256) says, “Nobody remembers what the original title for the project was, although it may well have been The Nearness of You.”
*2 In fact, Kirk Douglas had hired Trumbo to write the screenplay for Spartacus a year earlier but revealed the fact later. And Stanley Kramer had recently hired the blacklisted Nedrick Young to write the script for Inherit the Wind.
14
He’s no friend of mine, he’s just a friend of Pat and Peter.
—JOHN F. KENNEDY, ABOUT SINATRA
The golf-course conversation between Frank and Sam Giancana seemed to have worked wonders.
On May 10, even though West Virginia was 95 percent Protestant and fervently anti-Catholic, John F. Kennedy somehow managed to defeat the Protestant Hubert Humphrey soundly in that state’s key Democratic primary. Kennedy’s victory finally crushed Humphrey’s presidential hopes and proved that a Catholic was electable to the highest office in the land.
It was like the cautionary tale in Guys and Dolls about the jack of spades jumping out of a brand-new deck of cards and squirting cider in your ear: it couldn’t have happened, it shouldn’t have happened, but it did happen.
How? Start with a state whose politics even the relentlessly dignified Theodore H. White called “squalid, corrupt, and despicable.” Having just squeaked past Humphrey in Wisconsin, the Kennedys did not want to leave anything to chance. In West Virginia, Seymour Hersh writes, the family “spent at least $2 million [comparable to nearly $16 million as of this writing]…and possibly twice that amount—much of it in direct payoffs to state and local officials.”
A popular version of the story has it that this was Mob money, ordered up by Joe Kennedy in a chain of communication that went fro
m Frank Sinatra to Sam Giancana to Skinny D’Amato. One writer asserts, “Giancana sent Skinny D’Amato to West Virginia to get votes for Jack Kennedy. He was to use his influence with the sheriffs who controlled the political machine of the state. Most of them had been customers at the 500 Club, and according to Skinny, love[d] him like a brother. Whether he helped turn the tide for Kennedy in that crucial primary state is not as important as the fact that Giancana sent him there on Kennedy’s behalf.”
And the fact that Frank got the ball rolling.
Even by his friends’ estimation, Skinny was no political mastermind. Though folklore depicts him roaming West Virginia like a wiseguy Johnny Appleseed, “spreading money around like manure,” he only owned up—in an FBI wiretap—to spending $50,000 in the state, “not for direct bribes, but to purchase desks, chairs, and other supplies needed by local politicians.”
The bureau also overheard D’Amato talking about Las Vegas cash going to the Kennedys. Sammy Davis Jr. seemed to confirm the story. In a memoir, he wrote that while JFK amused himself in Sinatra’s suite at the Sands in February 1960, Peter Lawford took Davis aside and whispered, “If you want to see what a million dollars in cash looks like, go into the next room. There’s a brown leather satchel in the closet. Open it. It’s a gift from the hotel owners for Jack’s campaign.”
But the Sands pit boss Ed Walters, who was privy to the dealings of the casino’s real owners, vigorously disputes the idea that they would have backed Kennedy so heavily. “I’m positive it never happened,” he insists. “Jack Entratter would have nothing to do with it”—primarily because the Teamsters, whose support was so important to the Sands and other casinos, were passionately anti-Kennedy. “We would have lost all our loans, all our power,” Walters says.
As for that delectable vision of $1 million cash in a brown leather satchel, “It’s a joke,” says the former pit boss. “That’s ten million today. We wouldn’t give a million dollars to anybody.”
And in any case, why would the Kennedys have needed money from the Mob? Joe Kennedy’s fortune was vast, and he spared no expense in buying the presidency for his son. In late 1959 and early 1960, Teddy and Bobby Kennedy roamed West Virginia greasing the palms of committeemen, sheriffs, and clergymen—quite liberally. One estimate has the Kennedys’ overall outlay in the state at between $3 million and $5 million. Wisconsin had depleted the war chest of Humphrey, a tough campaigner who was not averse to buying votes when it was necessary. The Kennedys simply outspent him.
Skinny D’Amato might have been more eyes and ears than pocketbook in West Virginia. And as crucial as that primary was, the true burden of Frank and Mooney’s golf-course parlay was the election in Illinois.
—
Maybe the romance with Juliet Prowse had cooled; maybe it hadn’t. The gossip columns were hinting something was going on between Prowse and Elvis on the G.I. Blues shoot, but then rumors like that were the stock-in-trade of the gossip columns, not to mention the Paramount publicity department. For his part, Frank, who could blow hot and cold from minute to minute, appeared less than obsessed with the leggy South African, never a good sign. As Judith Campbell Exner noted of Prowse’s presence along with her own at the Fontainebleau in March, “Each girl in Frank’s life has a certain amount of time allotted to her.” Except for Ava, of course, who lingered like a haunting refrain.
At the end of May, with George Jacobs and Jimmy Van Heusen in tow, Sinatra flew off on a bachelor jaunt to the Far East. When a reporter for the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes asked for his impressions of Japan, he seemed quite content to be away from home.
“I dig the sake and the kids,” Frank said. And the women? “We had to travel around the world to learn that girls can be girls,” he replied. “Japanese chicks don’t have nicotine stains on their fingers. They don’t wear trousers and you don’t smell of Chanel Number Five after shaking hands with them. I’m not interested in defending individuals. If the boot fits—c’est la vie.”
That last bit was strange and a little chilling. Whoever could he have been talking about?
He brought Prowse back a jade bracelet and a double string of matched pearls, but his main interest upon coming home was returning to the Kennedy campaign. This was where the action was—the grandest on earth that summer—and recording, filmmaking, and nightclub appearances would have to wait. Frank Sinatra (those distancing official statements of the campaign, no doubt generated by Bobby Kennedy, notwithstanding) had another key role to play, right in his hometown.
The Democratic National Convention was to be held in Los Angeles at the brand-new Memorial Sports Arena beginning on July 11, and the metropolis was at peak receptiveness as 45,000 visitors, including 4,509 delegates and alternates and 4,750 news representatives, streamed in to take part in and witness a pivotal moment in history. The weather was perfect that week, as Theodore H. White wrote, in The Making of the President, 1960: “Smogless and milk-blue, the skies stretched on day after day, as gentle and pure as they must have been a generation ago, before industry and the automobile fouled the air of the city with their wastes.” The delegates were scattered in hostelries across the city, but the grand old Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A., not far from Union Station and overlooking seedy Pershing Square, was the convention’s nerve center.
Norman Mailer, on assignment for Esquire, observed,
The Biltmore [was] where everybody gathered every day—the newsmen, the TV, radio, magazine, and foreign newspapermen, the delegates, the politicos, the tourists, the campaign managers, the runners, the flunkies, the cousins and aunts, the wives, the grandfathers, the eight-year-old girls, and the twenty-eight-year-old girls in the Kennedy costumes, red and white and blue, the Symingteeners, the Johnson Ladies, the Stevenson Ladies, everybody.
The severe, fifty-nine-year-old Stuart Symington was a very dark horse at this point; the fifty-one-year-old Lyndon Johnson had recently entered the race; and sixty-year-old Adlai Stevenson, who’d lost by landslides in 1952 and 1956, was the sentimental—if not the practical—favorite of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. But forty-three-year-old Jack Kennedy, who’d won seven primaries coming into the convention, was the man to beat. As of July 1, he had 550 delegates locked up, of the 761 necessary to capture the presidential nomination, and realistic—but by no means definite—hopes of capturing the remainder. (Predictably, if defensibly, Johnson was forecasting that Kennedy would lose on the second ballot.) JFK’s young and dynamic campaign team, led by his relentless brother Bobby, would have to shift from its customary overdrive into an even higher gear to lock down the nomination for their man.
Theodore White wrote that he had discerned an emerging theme during those first days in July. “From the sounds and sights, from the hundreds of lost and milling faces in the Biltmore,” he wrote, “the press distilled a swift truth that was a remarkably accurate historic assessment: that this was the convention where the young faced the old, this was the convention where one generation gave way to another, this was—in [the New York Times columnist] James Reston’s felicitous phrase—the assembly that witnessed the Changing of the Guard.”
Mailer was the sharpest of all witnesses. On Saturday, July 9, he trained his gimlet eye on Kennedy’s arrival at the Biltmore. “He had the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor,” he wrote in his piece “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,”
and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards…[A]nd then with a quick move he was out of his car and by choice headed into the crowd instead of the lane cleared for him into the hotel by the police, so that he made his way inside surrounded by a mob, and one expected at any moment to see him lifted to its shoulders like a matador being carried back to the city after a triumph in the plaza…And suddenly…I understood the mood of depression which had lain over the convention, because finally it was simple: the Democrats were going to nominate a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, was i
ndisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.
This was the man with whom Frank Sinatra had thrown in his lot.
It is important to recognize the depth of Frank’s discernment in this regard—a level of acumen not inferior to Norman Mailer’s. The Jack Kennedy who dazzled Sinatra was the whole package: the radiantly charismatic superstar; the pussy-obsessed hound who showed George Jacobs his most merrily vulgar side; the man whom Theodore White observed quoting Churchill’s history of Marlborough, citing Theodore Roosevelt’s report on the funeral of Edward VII, and shifting
from Marlborough and the writing of history to the personality of Adlai E. Stevenson and the quality of the American intellectuals. Then to a long, tender and perceptive disquisition on the Irish and the Jews in American life. From that to the American Negroes and what their problems were—and their search for leadership. Did so-and-so really control in Harlem? Was so-and-so really a reader of history, as reported, or was it just a story? Then to the Chinese again.
Kennedy’s erudition was truly stunning (and try to imagine its like in any political candidate today). And Sinatra, an insecure autodidact, was stunned by it.
Leave the last word to Mailer. “Since the First World War,” he writes,
Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics, which is concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.
Ever since his Hoboken boyhood, the son of the Democratic ward boss and all-around fixer Dolly Sinatra had understood acutely what politics was all about. “He was born into a family that was very politically motivated,” Tina Sinatra said. “Dad says that he was carrying placards for candidates when he couldn’t read what was on the signs.” But from the first moment Frank encountered Jack Kennedy, he knew he had met a man whose political expertise far outweighed his—and the one other man in America whose connection with the nation’s dream life was as deep and powerful as his own.
