by James Kaplan
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First the parties: a bash for Jack’s sister Eunice Shriver on the night of the ninth at the Lawfords’ Santa Monica beach house (Senator and Mrs. Kennedy were present, as was Frank); and then, the next evening, a $100-a-plate*1 Democratic fund-raiser at the Beverly Hilton—twenty-eight hundred of Hollywood’s elite were in attendance, including Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Sammy Davis Jr., Angie Dickinson, Milton Berle, Judy Garland, George Jessel, Joe E. Lewis, Shirley MacLaine, and Mort Sahl.
Santa Monica, Beverly Hills: the other side of the city from the Biltmore, the other side of America’s political double life.
All the candidates were present at the glittering dinner. Symbolically, Jack Kennedy had been seated at the head table on the dais, next to Garland; Frank sat on the other side of the rostrum with Johnson, Stevenson, and Symington. It was a buoyant occasion, replete with proclamations of party solidarity. “For the candidates, the hour of unity is at hand,” Jack Kennedy announced, and he could afford to be upbeat: California’s governor, Pat Brown, had just endorsed him, though he had not yet released the state’s eighty-one delegates. Just under the veneer of Democratic happy talk, though, was the customary political dissension and jostling. The former president Harry Truman, a Stevenson supporter, had elected not to attend the convention, because, the Los Angeles Times reported, it was dominated by Kennedy supporters. “I cannot lend myself to what is happening,” Truman said.
When Eleanor Roosevelt made a surprise appearance, escorted to a head table seat between Senator Kennedy and Judy Garland, she “was wearing a lilac-flowered hat and print dress with a small Stevenson button,” the Times noted. “She greeted her favorite candidate warmly and later moved to the other side of the rostrum to a seat between Sen. Symington and Gov. Brown”—and close to Sinatra, her friend, her television host, but not her political ally. He would have been less comfortable than she with the ambiguity.
Lyndon Johnson, the closing speaker, was making a final charge, “still trying hard to sink Kennedy without a trace,” the Times said. “Speaking without any advance text, Johnson warned that ‘Premier Khrushchev seeks to raise over the world a roof of rockets’ and said the nation must choose new leadership which has ‘the wisdom and soundness of the years.’ ”
That was Sunday night. Then came convention Monday.
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Frank was among a star-spangled chorale scheduled to sing the national anthem at the televised opening session. The other performers included Ralph Bellamy, Nat King Cole, Tony Curtis, Sammy Davis Jr., George Jessel, Peter Lawford, Janet Leigh, Shirley MacLaine, Lee Marvin, Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, and Shelley Winters. Edward G. Robinson got a big hand when he was introduced from the rostrum, as did Janet Leigh, along with wolf whistles for her low-cut Don Loper gown. But when Davis was introduced from the rostrum, a deep sound welled up from one section of the vast convention floor: it was the sound of booing, coming from the Mississippi delegation.
Sammy had long been a lightning rod—among blacks and whites, in the press—for his relationships with white women. Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn had had a mobster friend threaten to put out his good eye if he didn’t break off his relationship with Kim Novak, whom Cohn considered studio property. But then, after a short-lived sham marriage to a black woman, Sammy had found another white goddess, the blond, long-legged Swedish actress May Britt. The two announced their engagement in the spring of 1960, and in those racially benighted times much of the nation, not just the South, was scandalized and repelled.
But the Mississippi delegation was vociferous, and Davis was stunned at the eruption of raw racism at a forward-thinking political convention in sunny Los Angeles. As he blinked back tears, Frank whispered to him, “Those dirty sons of bitches! Don’t let ’em get you, Charley. Hang on. Don’t let it get you!”
It got to him, though afterward, as his fellow stars tried to console him, he did what he felt he had to: suck it up. “I don’t know why they booed me,” Sammy told a reporter. “But I can’t blame anyone for the way they feel.”
The booing returned on Tuesday night during the reading of the party’s civil rights plank. Frank made his entrance around the same time, signing autographs in front of the California delegation. “Sinatra is for Sen. John F. Kennedy and wanders freely about the convention floor as the guest of Peter Lawford, the senator’s brother-in-law,” wrote United Press International’s Merriman Smith. It wasn’t just Frank. Although access to the floor was strictly limited to those with a pass, a certain core of celebrities—the Jack Pack—had carte blanche to roam the aisles, kibitzing and boosting their man. Sinatra, Peter Lawford, and Shirley MacLaine carried stopwatches, clocking the applause for each nominee. Adlai Stevenson, the sentimental favorite, drew the biggest ovations of all, but—especially after Kennedy held his own against Johnson in a televised debate—the only question now was on which ballot the charismatic young candidate would be chosen.
And as the torch passed to a new, camera-ready generation, technology came right along. Because it was 1960 and because it was Los Angeles, the capital of show business, this convention was more TV-friendly than any political gathering in history. Fifteen hundred correspondents, commentators, technicians, directors, and producers had descended on L.A. We take it for granted now; then it was all brand-new. “When the Democrats convene in the new blue and white Sports arena in Los Angeles…the searching eyes of 100 television cameras will be upon them,” the Milwaukee Journal’s Don Dornbrook wrote.
This will put an estimated 92 million home viewers at the convention. It also will raise hob with the delegates’ privacy.
Suppose, for example, that a delegate tries to remain inconspicuous on the floor of the 18,000 seat arena. He can be ferreted out by the creepy peepy portable TV camera. It has a pistol grip and can be aimed into the middle of a dramatic huddle on the convention floor to give the viewer at home a close-up of a key figure caught at a historic moment.
Portable TV cameras on the floor of the sports arena were a big step toward a future of omnipresent surveillance. But then, Sinatra was used to controlling his image. “Conscious of television,” Kitty Kelley wrote, “Frank had painted the back of his head black so that the cameras would not pick up his shiny bald pate.” In fact, there was no need for such a contortion: George Jacobs had been performing this service for his boss for quite some time. “Every morning after he shampooed,” the former valet wrote, “I’d have to spray hair coloring on the ever-expanding bald spot on the back of his scalp.” Jacobs also recalled another part of Sinatra’s daily toilette, something Frank did himself: applying pancake makeup to the scarred left side of his face.
On the morning of Wednesday the thirteenth, Jack Kennedy addressed six caucuses, trying to nail down the votes he needed for a first-ballot victory, before returning to his rented hideaway, an apartment in the Hancock Park district. It was 3:30 p.m., half an hour before nominations were to begin. To his chagrin, he’d been discovered: the sidewalk in front of the place was packed with print and TV reporters. A few minutes later, Kennedy and his pal Dave Powers descended the fire escape in the rear of the apartment, climbed over the back fence, and drove to the Beverly Hills mansion that Joe Kennedy had rented from Marion Davies. (As a controversial figure, the elder Kennedy kept a low profile during the campaign.) JFK “spent the rest of the afternoon there at the swimming pool, dining on Irish stew with his father, his mother, Dave Powers and his cousin, Anne Gargan,” Theodore White writes. Frank was also there—tending bar, to the surprise of another visitor, David McDonald, president of the steelworkers’ union, who was handed a cold one by Sinatra himself.
As afternoon turned to evening, JFK stayed at the house to watch the nominating speeches on television while Frank returned to the sports arena. There he witnessed what White called “the high point of drama in the Los Angeles Convention…the placing in nomination of Adlai E. Stevenson by Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.” Stevenson, who had decided not to run a third tim
e, had nevertheless said that he would accept a draft. (He had also refused to support Kennedy, incurring the lasting enmity of the candidate and his family.) The erudite Illinoisan was a kind of prophet, and a kind of great man, heaped with honors—and heaped with scorn by much of the country as the original egghead. He was a great sentimental favorite among liberal Democrats, but at sixty he was a man of yesterday rather than a man of tomorrow. That man was Kennedy, whose nomination was now all but inevitable.
“This the delegates knew; but not the galleries,” White wrote. As McCarthy concluded his speech, the floor erupted with a roaring chant: “WE WANT STEVENSON!” The tumult continued for five solid minutes. Conductor Johnny Green—the former musical director of MGM and the composer of “Body and Soul”—struck up the convention band to try to quell the tumult; someone even had the lights turned out. Frank sat backstage, watching the demonstration and shaking his head. He gave his friend Green the “cut” sign, drawing his hand across his throat; the band stopped playing, but the pandemonium continued.
When it finally died down, Minnesota governor Orville Freeman—scarcely as riveting a presence as Gene McCarthy—stood and placed Jack Kennedy’s name in nomination, and then the chairman began to call the roll of states in alphabetical order. By the time Wisconsin cast its 23 votes, Kennedy’s total of delegates stood at 748. Then came the last state, Wyoming.
“ ‘Wyoming,’ chanted Tracy S. McCraken, Wyoming’s national committeeman, ‘casts all fifteen votes for the next President of the United States.’ ”
Now the pandemonium was Kennedy’s. Across the floor, his supporters chanted, “All the way with JFK!” Backstage, Frank and the Jack Pack jumped up and down with excitement, pounding each other on the back. “We’re on our way to the White House, buddy boy,” Frank told Lawford. “We’re on our way to the White House!”
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Ambivalent about yielding his immense power as Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson had entered the presidential race late, and the Kennedy campaign machine simply mowed him down. At the convention, Johnson predicted that the power of his Stop Kennedy coalition—Stevenson, Symington, and Humphrey were all on board—would give him a second-ballot victory, but there was no second ballot: he received 409 votes to JFK’s 806.
Then came the question of the vice presidency.
After losing the nomination, Johnson conferred with his close friend and mentor, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, and decided he wanted the office that former vice president John Nance Garner had once described as “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Once in office, LBJ reasoned, he could transfer his power as majority leader to his new position as president of the Senate. It would not work out that way.
The story of John Kennedy’s surprise selection of LBJ as his running mate is a tangled thicket. A simple version is that despite JFK’s apparently strong preference for Symington, and Bobby Kennedy’s detestation of Johnson (who had all but called Joe Kennedy a Nazi during his sharp-elbowed campaign), Jack Kennedy’s need to have LBJ’s southern Democrats with him in what was anticipated to be a very tight race against Richard Nixon led him to make the practical, rather than the sentimental, choice.
A less simple version is that Johnson blackmailed his way into the vice presidency.
A senior campaign aide to JFK, Hyman Raskin, told Seymour Hersh that Kennedy had admitted as much to him soon after selecting LBJ. “You know we had never considered Lyndon, but I was left with no choice,” the candidate said to Raskin. “He and Sam Rayburn made it damn clear to me that Lyndon had to be the candidate. Those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems and I don’t need more problems. I’m going to have enough problems with Nixon.”
And in 1995, John F. Kennedy’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln told Anthony Summers what problems had been threatened: J. Edgar Hoover, a friend and political ally of Lyndon Johnson’s, had fed Johnson scandalous, FBI-sourced information about the Kennedys “during the campaign, even before the Convention. And Hoover was in on the pressure on Kennedy at the Convention…about womanizing, and things in Joe Kennedy’s background, and anything he could dig up. Johnson was using that as clout. Kennedy was angry, because they had boxed him into a corner. He was absolutely boxed in.”
If indeed he was boxed in, Frank Sinatra had helped put him there.
On the other hand, Lyndon Johnson’s biographer Robert A. Caro devotes many thousands of words to the complex mystery of Kennedy’s selection of Johnson without ever mentioning the extortion scenario. The decision was tortuous, Caro writes, and Bobby Kennedy bitterly opposed Johnson, but in the end it was John Kennedy’s pragmatism that prevailed. It wouldn’t be long before that same pragmatism would come back to bite Sinatra.
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“It is my earnest conviction, as I depart” the convention, syndicated columnist Inez Robb wrote, “that the endorsement of the Democratic party by Frank Sinatra is not an unmixed blessing or any assurance of certain victory in November.”
And the Washington columnist Drew Pearson wrote in his convention wrap-up, “Sen. Jack Kennedy passed the word through his brother-in-law, movie actor Peter Lawford, that he would rather singer Frank Sinatra didn’t throw a party for him in Los Angeles…Kennedy is worried about Sinatra’s association with notorious mobsters and connections with the Las Vegas gambling interests. Sinatra owns 4 per cent [sic] of the Sands at Vegas. Kennedy welcomes Sinatra’s support but just doesn’t want it advertised.”
This was serious business. Not long after the convention ended, the Kennedy campaign sent an envoy to Las Vegas to pick up any photographs, and negatives, that showed the candidate socializing with Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, and friends.
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On the very day that John F. Kennedy received the presidential nomination, a small wire-service dispatch, tucked back amid the entertainment items and gossip columns in many newspapers, reported that Frank and Dean Martin had applied to buy a majority stake in Cal-Neva.
“[Nevada Gaming Control] Board member Ned Turner said the singers and two associates—Henry W. Sanicola of North Hollywood and Paul E. D’Amato of Atlantic City, N.J.—seek 57 per cent of the plush Cal-Neva Lodge at Crystal Bay,” the dispatch reported. “Sinatra already owns 6 [sic] per cent of the Las Vegas Sands. Now he is applying for 25 per cent in the Cal-Neva. Martin wants 3 per cent, Sanicola 16 and D’Amato 13.”
However finely the numbers were parsed, they were largely window dressing. Frank—whose application was approved, along with Dean’s and Hank’s; Skinny’s was held up—was fronting for Sam Giancana, who now effectively co-owned Cal-Neva with Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the former chief counsel of the McClellan Committee, Robert Kennedy, soon to be the attorney general of the United States.
And Frank’s friendship with Mooney had advanced: now they were also business partners.
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“Frank Sinatra is extremely close to Paul D’Amato, who runs the 500 Club in Atlantic City,” read a memo from Virgil Peterson, the operating director of the Chicago Crime Commission, to Charles LaFrance, chief investigator of the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
Sinatra is trying to get a joint in Nevada which he wants to have operated by D’Amato. D’Amato is associated with all the big hoodlums such as Jerry Catena, Longie [sic] Zwillman and Willie Moretti in New Jersey [sic: Moretti had been dead since 1951]. It is stated that Sinatra has been very close to D’Amato for a number of years. The 500 Club in Atlantic City has not been too successful, but D’Amato gets out of the hole each year when Sinatra appears as an entertainer for a couple of weeks gratuitously.
On July 20, Frank arrived, solo, in Atlantic City, two days early for his annual stand at the 500 Club. He and Skinny had business to discuss. Under too much heat from the Nevada Gaming Control Board, D’Amato had withdrawn his application for part ownership of Cal-Neva. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be intimately involved in the casino’s workings: Skinny’s years of running back-room cards and dice joints in Je
rsey made him the ideal candidate to supervise Cal-Neva’s gambling operations. And as the man who had given Martin and Lewis their start, he was also perfectly qualified to oversee entertainment at the Lake Tahoe establishment. Whether or not he had an official piece of the action, Frank would see he was well taken care of.
From the twenty-second through the thirty-first, Sinatra worked his magic at the 500 Club, disrupting traffic on South Missouri Avenue and packing the Five to the rafters for four shows a night, the last at 5:30 a.m. The future New York City talk-show host Bill Boggs, then an eighteen-year-old college student, sneaked into the eleven o’clock show dressed as a busboy, and—never having been in a nightclub or seen Sinatra before—was mesmerized. “It wasn’t a big room—maybe three, four hundred people,” he recalled, “but the energy was unbelievable. Women with plunging necklines and blond hair, guys with giant cuff links, everybody smoking, drinking, screaming. I thought, How could a guy come out and sing with all this going on? And then he comes out, and everyone goes wild, then silent. He transports these people instantly. What really got me was the sense that he was really conveying real emotions—I could feel these emotions coming off him. The songs themselves were like a preview of adult life.”
Over the nine nights, Sinatra grossed $400,000, taking home nothing but Skinny’s undying gratitude.
Atlantic City loved him, but much of the world continued to give him a fishy eye. In his August 6 column, Leonard Lyons told of a recent high-powered dinner gathering he’d attended with, among others, the producer and screenwriter Charles Brackett, the impresario Billy Rose, the actress Ruth Gordon, and an unnamed TV bigwig. “A new arrival joined us, up from Atlantic City where he’d seen Frank Sinatra entertain at the 500 Club,” Lyons wrote. “Sinatra, he said, plans to [continue to] campaign for Kennedy. ‘No, he won’t,’ said the TV executive. ‘He’s too vulnerable. If they could make Joe Kennedy disappear, they could make Sinatra go ’way too.’ ”
