by James Kaplan
Norman Granz had the other kind of strong personality, but Sinatra met with him anyway, and, according to Ostin, the meeting ended with a handshake. Also, apparently, with a degree of uncertainty. Frank wanted Granz to keep running Verve, but Granz wanted to get out of the business and move to Europe. As Hershorn writes, “The one thing Granz did not want to do was run a label and possibly take orders from Frank Sinatra.”
The matter was left in Mickey Rudin’s conflicted but adept hands.
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Frank continued to campaign passionately for Kennedy, but his colorful activities continued to pose a problem. In mid-August, the conservative New York Daily News ran a two-page Sunday spread on the “gang of Hollywood fun and money seekers” soon to be widely known as the Rat Pack, which at this point most journalists were still calling the Clan. The piece’s first sentence: “One question which will be answered once and for all by the 1960 Presidential campaign is: Can a man whose brother-in-law is a member of the Clan be elected President of the United States?”
Frank objected strongly enough to the term and the characterization that he was moved to issue a press release through his PR man, Warren Cowan. “ ‘The Clan’ is a figment of someone’s imagination,” the release read, sounding a little like Sinatra but less so as it went along. “Naturally, people in Hollywood socialize with friends, as they do in any community. But we do not get together in childish fraternities, as some people would like to think.”
On the one hand, he was protesting too much—enough to make people feel certain that the opposite must be true. On the other, he had a point. The Rat Pack was a myth, an act, a concoction. The cast of characters sitting around Frank’s table every night—even sitting around him in the Sands steam room—varied widely, and some of them didn’t like their names in the papers. The reality of his life was grittier and more complex than what the press prated about—but then, his reality was just what Frank wanted people to know less about, rather than more. What he really wanted was to be left alone.
Of course that was just a dream. Hanging around with Kennedys doubled the attention usually paid him. And the standard was double: politicians of the day were permitted to misbehave in private; show people, not so much. The mixture of the two groups was unstable—combustible—and the Kennedys were feeling the heat. Someone in the campaign, celebrity journalist Joe Hyams reported in the New York Herald Tribune, had warned Frank that he and his pals would be a liability to the cause unless they started acting like “serious citizens.”
That warning sounded a lot as though it had come from the second (living) Kennedy son rather than the first. And Frank could have been forgiven for thinking (if not saying) that he would when Jack did.
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Neither the first nor the second Kennedy son was present at the September 7 Key Women for Kennedy benefit at the Beverly Hills house of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. But the third was: young Ted Kennedy, the campaign’s western states coordinator, who was there to certify the occasion, along with Peter and Pat Lawford and the controversial one himself, Frank Sinatra. Two thousand loyalists, mostly women, paid $5 a head to listen to a lot of speeches and hear Frank sing poolside, backed by the Red Norvo Quintet. A Life magazine photograph taken on that sunny afternoon shows Ted leaning over the back of the speaker’s platform, in earnest conference with Frank, who stands behind and below. With his dark suit and furrowed brow, Sinatra looks the very model of a serious citizen—as does the menacing, crew-cut man standing next to him, puffing on a cigarette and glaring at the photographer.
This was clearly not a posed photo, and Frank and Teddy Kennedy were clearly not discussing monkey business. Whatever the papers (and the Kennedys themselves) were saying, Sinatra was still deeply enmeshed in this campaign.
As Dorothy Kilgallen—unfriendly but by no means unintelligent—would point out in her column of September 22,
Only a few months ago Sen. Jack Kennedy had the crying towel out because “those columnists” were linking him with Frank Sinatra, and the Senator protested the association was unfair because he “had only met him a few times in California…” So last week the Democratic candidate for the presidency was guest of honor at a private little dinner given by Frank. No reason why he shouldn’t of course—but why try to kid the press?
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On Sunday, September 11—the day after that private little dinner—Frank gave his older daughter in marriage to Tommy Sands in a civil ceremony in the Emerald Room of the Sands. Nancy Sandra Sinatra was twenty; Sands was twenty-three. The bride wore a white veil and street-length gown designed by Don Loper; the groom, just coming to the end of a two-year hitch in the air force, wore his airman third class uniform. The father of the bride wept unashamedly. Just before he walked her down the aisle, Nancy recalled, he presented her with a pair of diamond star earrings, “to match the stars in your eyes.”
“ ‘I love you, chicken,’ he said.
“I said, ‘I love you, too, Daddy.’ And off we went down the aisle, both in tears.”
Frank in earnest conference with the young Ted Kennedy at a Beverly Hills fund-raiser for JFK, September 1960. (Credit 14.1)
The sight of a darkly handsome teen idol in a military uniform in the year 1960 inevitably evokes thoughts of the recently demobilized Private Presley, and indeed the faint air of Elvis hanging over the proceedings wasn’t mere coincidence. Not only had Nancy briefly dated EP (and recently oohed and aahed over him when they both guested on Frank’s Timex special), but the clean-cut and engaging Sands, a southern boy who’d dabbled in rockabilly (and was sometimes known as the Poor Man’s Elvis), had been signed at age fifteen by Colonel Tom Parker—three years before Parker made his far greater discovery. In 1957, Sands played a Presley-esque heartthrob on an episode of Kraft Television Theatre, singing a song, “Teen-Age Crush,” that was subsequently released as a single by Capitol and became a million seller. The wedding to show-business royalty was Tommy Sands’s apogee: it would be all downhill from here.
Her father didn’t lecture her on the dangers of marrying a singer, Nancy recalled. She and Frank both saw the blatant parallels, but Hollywood was Hollywood.
Big Nancy, who attended the wedding with Frankie junior and a weeping Tina in tow, also saw the parallels. “It’s my own life happening twenty years later,” she said.
Except, as would soon become achingly clear to all parties concerned, Tommy Sands was very far from being Frank Sinatra.
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Frank spent the rest of September and all of October on Maui, shooting a potboiler for Columbia called The Devil at 4 O’Clock. Mervyn LeRoy, who’d directed Sinatra in The House I Live In, helmed the picture; the great Spencer Tracy, an old pal of Frank’s from the Bogart Rat Pack, co-starred. The story, such as it was—a burned-out, alcoholic priest (Tracy) develops an unlikely friendship with a convicted criminal (Sinatra) on a soon-to-erupt volcanic island in the Pacific—was a psychological drama grafted uneasily onto a disaster movie. Tracy was the piece’s center, and Frank, who idolized him, even ceded him first billing. But by 1960, the craggy actor, a tormented manic-depressive and alcoholic in a state of continual emotional and physical crisis, was “chronically tired, unhappy, ill, and uninterested in work,” as his biographer James Curtis wrote. And the sixty-year-old Tracy, a former MGM mainstay, was keenly aware of Sinatra’s status in the entertainment world. “Nobody had his power,” he said. “The Devil at 4 O’Clock was a Sinatra picture. Sinatra was the star.”
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Remarkably, Frank found time in between shooting his scenes to keep campaigning for Kennedy, flying around the islands with Brother-in-Lawford for personal appearances. On October 12, he gave a benefit concert at the Waikiki Shell in Honolulu, drawing nine thousand JFK supporters—and the ire of one Frederick J. Titcomb, Hawaii’s Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, who accused entertainers of making “a farce” out of serious politics.
Sinatra lashed back, a little illogically. “The Hears
t newspapers throughout the nation are campaigning for Nixon and throwing a lot of propaganda in,” he said. “If this organization of newspapers can do it, then why shouldn’t I just by singing?”
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Two weeks later, at an event in Newark, even singing proved a challenge. The occasion was New Jersey’s annual Governor’s Ball—a Democratic affair this year, with the former presidential candidate Robert Meyner in office, and therefore a de facto Kennedy rally. The place was the Essex Armory, where the rally turned into a near riot because of the presence of Sinatra and other luminaries. JFK wasn’t even there. Perhaps Frederick J. Titcomb had a point.
“Dozens of policemen had their hands full controlling a surging mass of humanity estimated at between 25,000 and 40,000 persons,” the Associated Press reported.
Fifteen women fainted. One man was carried out above the heads of the crowd. Cars crawled slowly along streets, looking for non-existent parking spaces.
The cause of the hubbub was not Adlai E. Stevenson, the featured speaker, but Frank Sinatra of Hoboken and Hollywood.
An ear-splitting shout came from the crowd as the singer and other celebrities were brought into the hall past girls trying to touch their idol.
Almost the entire crowd of 14,000 inside the armory—some in formal gowns and evening dress—stood on chairs to get a better glimpse of the Hollywood stars. Flash bulbs popped with machine-gun rapidity.
Sinatra tried to talk, but few could hear him…Sinatra made his way to the 14-piece orchestra stand. Introduced as “the next ambassador to Italy” he sang seven popular songs.
The affair was supposed to be the annual governor’s ball. No one could dance in the mob.
The received wisdom is that the televised presidential debates effectively sold the tanned, handsome, coolly authoritative Democrat over the sweaty, nervous Republican with the five o’clock shadow and the widow’s peak. (Nixon was a mere four years older than Kennedy, but it might as well have been twenty.) But the received wisdom focuses on the first debate, in which Nixon, who had recently been hospitalized with a staph infection, looked awful. (Many who listened in on the radio believed he’d won.) And the Republican candidate gained force and authority in the third and fourth debates.
Still, the genie was out of the bottle: the debates proved that the TV camera was no longer a mere recorder of events but an image maker. Jack Kennedy, the first show-business candidate, was a stylistic quantum leap past the previous president and vice president. And the youthful branch of show business (the John Waynes, the Ward Bonds, and their ilk were, after all, middle-aged or worse) that called itself the Hollywood Democrats, with Sinatra at the fore and Janet Leigh in her silver dress, chimed easily with the new brand. Poor Pat Nixon, in her good Republican cloth coat, was like one of the uncool kids in high school.
But not everyone was sold. Much of America distrusted the prospect of a young, Catholic, smoothly charming president. The country was deeply divided. The South feared the Democrats’ high-minded talk about civil rights: the way was paved for the imminent defection by many southern Democrats to the Republican Party. Organized labor, too, had good reason to fear the Kennedys. Nixon promised to be the second coming of Eisenhower, and what had been wrong with Eisenhower? He had kept us out of war, built a highway system, and fended off the Soviets. He had tucked us in at night.
Jack Kennedy knew the election was going to be a near thing. And—as much as he loved show business—he and his camp continued to be uncertain whether his star supporter was an asset or a liability.
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“It’s not Sinatra’s voice, it’s his stamina. I wish I had Sinatra’s stamina,” Bobby Kennedy said in another context—grudgingly, one assumes. Remarkably, Frank flew back to Hawaii from the Newark rally, finished his couple of days of location work for The Devil at 4 O’Clock, then, on November 1, did a quick pivot and returned to Los Angeles to appear on The Dean Martin Show, where, as Nick Kenny wrote in the New York Mirror, “the chief disciple made obeisance to the Leader.”
“We are dedicating our entire show to the one and only Frank Sinatra,” a tuxedoed Dean announced, with high smarminess, at the top of the show. “Yes, tonight we’re paying tribute to a man who has achieved fantastic success in every phase of show business—a man whose thinking is never narrow, but sees everything in terms of the broad.”
It got the expected laugh, as did Don Knotts, who after the big buildup came out dressed as Frank—fedora on his head, trench coat slung over his shoulder—and mangled a “ring-a-ding-ding.” The gimmick, whether true or not, was that Sinatra’s flight had landed late and that Knotts would have to impersonate him for a while. And so he did. The joke (that Don Knotts was the opposite of Frank Sinatra in every way) ran along in rather pallid fashion until the next thing, which was the cute, blond, and perky Dorothy Provine—currently starring in the ABC series The Roaring 20’s—doing a Roaring Twenties dance in a flapper costume. (As it turned out, Provine, along with Juliet Prowse and uncounted others, was also currently co-starring in Frank’s life.)
After the half-hour break, the Leader himself appeared, also tuxedoed, and burnished by the Hawaiian sun. Frank looked fantastic. A month shy of forty-five, he was at his physical prime: no longer too skinny yet still a few years away from middle-aged plumpness, and lit from within with a self-confidence that periodically flared into preening arrogance. A This Is Your Life takeoff, with Dean in the Ralph Edwards role, was low-wattage fun, with some roast-style gibes at bad Sinatra movies (The Kissing Bandit and Johnny Concho). But Frank’s Amos ’n’ Andy ad-lib, and his general cock-of-the-walk air of having just stepped off the stage at the Copa Room, conveyed a smirky authority that much of the TV-watching public hadn’t really bought before and wasn’t really buying now; the Hollywood Reporter’s critic would write that the show suffered from too many “inside buddy ribbings.”
And then came a truly strange moment. “Yes, Frank, it hasn’t always just been make-believe for you,” Dean/Ralph Edwards intoned. “You’ve always wanted your pictures to say something. And in a movie called Suddenly, your deep interest in the national scene came to the fore. What a moment when you stood there and patriotically shouted—”
Suddenly a clip of a much younger and thinner Frank as the would-be assassin in Suddenly appeared on the screen: looking grim, he aimed a rifle with a telescopic sight at the camera and growled, “We got just three seconds to nail the president.”
“How you gonna splain that to Peter Lawford?” Martin drawled, to uproarious laughter by Frank and the audience.
“Inside” was the word that critics of Sinatra’s forays into television kept using, again and again. The New York Journal American’s Jack O’Brian wrote that he’d been put off by “a sick joke or two and an inside dirty reference” on the Martin show. Then he got really critical. “Such dedication to the morally shabby and the humorlessly disreputable,” he huffed, “continues to infect the TV activities of the Rat Pack.”
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Debate will forever rage about whether John F. Kennedy stole the 1960 presidential election. It is widely agreed that there were substantial voting irregularities in Texas—laid by many at the feet of Lyndon Johnson—and even more substantially in Illinois, where Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, in combination with Sam Giancana, almost certainly engineered an astounding 450,000-vote margin for Kennedy in Cook County. What is open to question is whether these irregularities are what put Kennedy over the top.
What is certain is that Giancana firmly believed he’d been instrumental in electing JFK. “Listen, honey,” he liked to tell Judy Campbell, “if it wasn’t for me, your boyfriend wouldn’t even be in the White House.”
“Controlling Chicago’s powerful black wards and his own Mob wards—nine in all—Mooney had turned the screws with all the muscle he could muster,” wrote Sam and Chuck Giancana, Mooney’s godson and brother, in their exposé Double Cross.
To assure the election’s outcome, guys either trucked people from
precinct to precinct and poll to poll so they could vote numerous times or stood menacingly alongside the voting booths, where they made it clear to prospective voters that all ballots were to be cast for Kennedy. Occasionally, some misguided citizen declared his independence from such tyranny and in so doing drew the wrath of Mooney’s zealots; more than a few arms and legs were broken before the polls were closed that day.
Giancana was going to a lot of trouble because he expected a lot in return. Tina Sinatra’s account of her father’s golf-course speech to Mooney—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—omitted what this meant. William F. Roemer Jr., a special agent in the FBI’s Chicago office in the early 1960s, was privy to wiretaps that said exactly what it meant: “The agreement was that if Giancana used his influence in Chicago with the ‘West Side Bloc’ and other public officials on Kennedy’s behalf, Sinatra felt he could get Kennedy to back off from the FBI investigation of Giancana.”
It wasn’t just personal. Giancana was part of a directorate of Chicago mobsters that also included Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo, Frank “Strongy” Ferraro, Murray “the Camel” Humphreys, and Paul “the Waiter” Ricca. The leaders of the Outfit had to vote on whether to support Kennedy, and Humphreys, the lone non-Italian in the group, dragged his feet. “Humphreys had himself done bootlegging business with Joe Kennedy during Prohibition and did not trust him,” Seymour Hersh writes.
“Murray called him a four-flusher and a double-crosser,” [Humphreys’s widow] Jeanne Humphreys told me. Kennedy was involved in smuggling liquor from Canada into the Detroit area, Humphreys told his wife, “and hijacked his own load that had already been paid for and took it and sold it somewhere else all over again. He [Humphreys] never stopped talking about what a jerk [Kennedy] was.”
