by James Kaplan
Audiences felt the same. “Big doings in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra crowding them in at The Sands,” Louella Parsons wrote on February 8. “The whole Sinatra clan—Nancy, Frank Jr., 12-year-old Tina, and Mr. and Mrs. Tommy Sands caught Frankie’s act and were his weekend guests.”
He certainly was crowding them in. On the spur of the moment (and without the guy nobody knew), Ava had decided to fly out from New York to surprise Frank by showing up ringside at the Copa Room. The surprise, however, was on her: she arrived on the same weekend as Frank’s family. The situation declined rapidly from there.
Ava could come on the spur of the moment because she had nothing else going on; at thirty-eight, she had declared herself retired from motion pictures. Though she’d been widely praised for her performance in On the Beach, “the commendations sometimes included a blurring of the line between the thirty-seven-year-old performer and the bruised, blowsy character she portrayed,” writes Gardner’s biographer Lee Server. “One critic declared that she had never acted better or looked worse.”
The simple and brutal fact was that time and hard living had caught up with her. Not that they weren’t also catching up with Frank. A recent newspaper piece noted that he’d begun wearing glasses for reading, TV watching, and driving. And Peter Levinson recalled, of seeing Sinatra in the Sands steam room in late January 1961, “I looked at his face; I couldn’t believe it! Upper lip, all chewed up. Chin, all pockmarked. And then that scar…The booze, and sunken face…And of course, no hair. He had very little hair.”
But a hairpiece and makeup could restore him to a visually acceptable state of ruggedness. Things were different for a woman in the movies, and standards for one of the greatest beauties of modern times were impossibly high. No one was more aware of this than Ava herself, but at the same time she couldn’t help herself. “She lived now without plan or purpose, escaping the past, evading the future,” Server writes.
Happiness had proved elusive. Love didn’t last. Beauty and fame and success were not all they were cracked up to be. She wanted to forget everything, said a friend, wanted only “to drink and dance and screw”…
Impulse and indulgence became guiding principles. By day, like a beautiful vampire, she did little other than sleep; with nightfall came the drinking, and with the drinking came the taste for blood. These years—the early 1960s—played out like a very long lost weekend. There were scenes, reckless liaisons, unfortunate misadventures.
The spontaneous trip to Vegas was one such. “Apparently, she was much concerned about her looks as she traveled west,” writes Sinatra biographer Arnold Shaw, “for she monopolized the powder room of the plane to a degree that created talk among passengers. Then, in her nervousness, she left her coat aboard. Returning to find it, she missed Frank, who had come to the airport to meet her.”
Both Shaw and Lee Server claim that upon discovering that Big Nancy and the kids were in Las Vegas, Ava turned right around: checked out of her hotel and flew back to New York (and then home to Spain) without seeing Frank’s show—a sad enough story. But both Variety and the Associated Press assert that she did take in Sinatra’s show on Sunday the fifth, and, according to a “spokesman” quoted by the AP, she and Frank “were together a short while before she left Monday afternoon”—an even sadder story. To top it off, the dispatch reported that Ava hadn’t retrieved her coat at all: in fact, she’d “left her full-length mink coat on the plane and it had to be shipped back from Los Angeles.”
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It could almost be a Neil Simon comedy: the surprise arrival of the second wife, a faded movie star, and the logistical contortions the hero must go through to pay equal attention to the first and second wives (not to mention his current lover), and keep Wife One and Wife Two from encountering each other. Only it wasn’t a comedy at all: it was serious, even tragic. The clash of Ava and the mother of his children was the birthplace and the essence of his bad conscience.
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As soon as Ava and Nancy had left Las Vegas, Frank hosted Dorothy Provine. After the show, Provine would have found that her boyfriend had a new way of spending his off-hours. “We all had to sit around Frank’s suite at the Sands and listen to that record of Kennedy thanking him,” a lady friend of Jimmy Van Heusen’s told Kitty Kelley. “Frank would stand by the mantel and play it over and over, and we had to sit there for hours on end listening to every word.”
In the meantime, Mo Ostin was striving mightily to put together Reprise’s inaugural-gala LP. “Frank had me liaise with the White House on all things involving the recording,” Ostin recalled. His liaison was Joe Kennedy.
“I would talk to the Ambassador almost every day. He was courteous and formal. He always took my phone calls. And always had thoughts about what was going on in terms of the recording itself. Every time we’d finish one of the masterings of the record, he wanted to hear it, and also have the president hear it; he’d even apologize to me if the president didn’t have a chance to listen to it. He said, ‘You know, I’m sorry the president didn’t listen to this yesterday, but he’s been busy’—you know, dealing with Cuba or Lord knows what.
“Then he said to me, ‘Who do you think should write the text material, the liner notes for this recording?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Who would you recommend?’ He said to me, ‘How about Carl Sandburg?’ I said, ‘Sure, that sounds fantastic. How do I get him?’ He said, ‘I’ll give you [presidential press secretary] Pierre Salinger’s number in the White House and he’ll get you the number.’
“So I called Sandburg and told him what I was calling about. Sandburg said to me, ‘Mr. Ostin’—he had this sort of gruff, curmudgeonly voice. He said, ‘Before I respond, I want you to promise me that you will relate word for word what I am about to say.’ I said, ‘Of course I will.’ And then he went off on a tirade about the Kennedys. They can’t be trusted, they’re disloyal, they’re corrupt, the old man bought the election, they used all kinds of nefarious figures to help in getting votes; he must have gone on for several minutes! I was really taken aback, because he was so passionate.
“So I called the Ambassador back and merely said Sandburg had turned us down. Without batting an eyelash, the Ambassador says to me, ‘You know what? Get ahold of Theodore White.’ ”
Securing clearances from the various performers was equally complex. “Harry Belafonte, for instance, refused,” Ostin remembered. “He said, ‘Look, this money is going to go to the Democratic Party. It could go to some bigot in the South that hates blacks, and I don’t want to be party to that.’ He just turned us down.
“So I called the Ambassador, and the Ambassador then told me to call Bobby Kennedy, who had strong relationships in New York and apparently knew Belafonte. Bobby Kennedy talked to Belafonte, and then Steve Smith called me back and told me they’d gotten Belafonte’s approval. Then I went to Las Vegas with the documents for Belafonte to sign.
“This was Sinatra!” Ostin said. “His relationships ran the whole gamut. They could go from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high.”
In the end, though, not even Frank’s connections could untie the contractual conflicts that, according to Sinatra archivists Ed O’Brien and Scott P. Sayers Jr., “prevented many of the artists from signing release forms authorizing the use of their segments. A truncated seventy-five-minute version was mastered. It was never issued.”
The reason, as we’ll soon see, had nothing to do with release forms.
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From the highest of the high to the lowest of the low. From the end of February to the middle of March, Frank played the Fontainebleau’s La Ronde Room. “There would be long lines of fans in the lobby, desperate for tickets, and the only way to see the show was to discreetly tip the headwaiter $100,” writes John Glatt, a chronicler of the Novack family, the owners of the Fontainebleau.
“He’d make five thousand dollars a night when Sinatra was here,” said hotel bellman Floyd “Mac” Swain, “and he had to split the cash with security and [
Ben] Novack.”
Frank Sinatra was the engine driving the Fontainebleau, and whenever he was in residence, the money flowed. After the show, the action moved upstairs to the Sinatra penthouse suite, where anything could happen. The singer would party with his Mafia cronies Joe Fischetti and Sam Giancana, calling room service to send up the most beautiful girls from the Poodle Lounge, along with buckets of the best champagne.
“God, did they spend money,” Ben Jr. later recalled admiringly.
The wild nights often finished with a drunken Frank Sinatra and his Mob pals in hysterics, throwing cherry bombs off the seventeenth-floor balcony.
Sinatra and Giancana both enjoyed scaring the bejesus out of friends and acquaintances with cherry bombs: Frank might even have picked up the habit from the gangster, according to Shawn Levy. With Mooney, though, those big bangs had an extra kick; the first thought of anyone who knew what he did for a living would have been that firearms, rather than fireworks, were the source. But Giancana had more on his mind than fun and games in Miami that spring.
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While he was at the Fontainebleau, Frank allowed the celebrity journalist Joe Hyams to interview him for a new magazine, a G-rated (and short-lived) Playboy spin-off by Hugh Hefner called Show Business Illustrated. The breathless cover story, titled “Sinatra, Inc.,” opened with a scene of Frank, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, driving the writer around and talking business. An attaché case on the car floor “bulged with books, fan mail, a Government brief on the Appalachin [sic] hearings,*1 movie scripts,” as well as copies of the Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly. Wearily, Sinatra spoke of the pleasures and stresses of going it alone since the death of his William Morris agent, Bert Allenberg:
I haven’t had an agent since Bert. That kind of business I do myself. We have a standard per-picture, per-TV-appearance contract. It’s just a matter of going in and finding out what other points have to be settled. In the beginning I do my own representing, then turn it over to the lawyers.
But, I retain complete control of all final decisions in the end. I have to say the final yes or no. People have to get to me for that. I give the decision fast as I can. I don’t like things to lay over long.
The piece went on to enumerate Frank’s various businesses, which purportedly totaled “twenty-five million dollars’ worth of investments”:
Chairman of the board of a Beverly Hills savings and loan association, heavily invested in Reprise Records, four music publishing companies, a movie production company, the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, in which he is a vice president and nine-percent stockholder, real-estate developments in San Rafael and Santa Barbara, California, Cal-Neva Lodge on Lake Tahoe, three radio stations in the Pacific Northwest, shares of the Atlantic City Racetrack, numerous and sundry other adjacent investments.
Then, in an expansive mood, the Chairman of the Board speculated about what his life would be like as he got older. “Four years from now I’ll be 50 years old,” he mused. “By then I’ll have had it as an actor and singer. Not really had it, but…What the hell, when I get around that age there’s not much I’ll want to play or could play.
“When I think of myself five years hence,” he said, “I see myself not so much an entertainer as a high-level executive, interested in business, perhaps in directing and producing films. My eventual goal is to broaden in the administrative sense.
“This past year and a half or so I’ve been getting fascinated with finances in general. I like it. I think it interesting as hell…The things I’m involved in personally—such as acting and recording—steadily earn less money while the things I have going for me earn most. And that’s the way I want it to be.”
At least that was the way he said he wanted it to be.
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Frank closed at the Fontainebleau on March 13; the next night, in a suite upstairs, his friend Momo met with a representative of the Central Intelligence Agency and a couple of other men to discuss a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. Some disparaging jokes about Sinatra were part of the small talk.
When it came to Giancana, Frank didn’t entirely understand whom he was playing with. But then, in fairness, neither did the CIA.
Soon after Castro overthrew the Batista regime in early 1959, officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government began to fear, not unreasonably, that a Marxist-Leninist Cuba was going to help Russia extend its sphere of influence into the Western Hemisphere. Accordingly, in early 1960, President Eisenhower authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to bring down the Castro government. In August, with Eisenhower’s tacit approval, the CIA began forming a plan to assassinate Castro himself. The plan became known as the Cuban Project, or Operation Mongoose.
Political assassination is a dirty business, and the CIA devised what seemed at the time a brilliant strategy for covering its tracks in the Castro matter: the agency would enlist the aid of organized crime, which had suffered a huge financial loss in the Cuban revolution, and thus had as much to gain as the U.S. government from the new leader’s removal. If the Mob hit Castro (the thinking went), the government could plausibly deny any involvement, and everybody would be happy. To set the plan in motion, the agency called on a Washington private detective and former FBI agent named Robert Maheu.
In the summer of 1954, Howard Hughes, in a case of egregious overkill, had hired the high-level cloak-and-dagger man to surveil the Lake Tahoe cabin Ava Gardner was renting while establishing Nevada residence in order to divorce Sinatra. The madly jealous Hughes, whom Ava strung along because she liked the expensive gifts he bought her, was convinced a man was paying calls on her. He was right; it was Frank, hoping for a reconciliation. He didn’t get one, nor did Hughes get anything for his troubles except a bill from Maheu.
Because of his FBI background, Maheu was a man whom certain case officers in the CIA trusted—and one who, these officers knew, had connections to organized crime. Maheu’s main link to the Mob was the handsome and dapper Los Angeles gangster Johnny Rosselli, a mid-level hood whom Frank had met at the Havana Mafia summit in 1947. Rosselli had an affinity for the movie business; he and the late Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn had frequented the racetracks together and worn matching gold-and-ruby friendship rings. It has also been alleged, but never proven, that Rosselli got Frank his career-saving role in From Here to Eternity by threatening Cohn on behalf of Frank Costello. Johnny Rosselli’s chief use to Robert Maheu, and by extension to the CIA, was his close friendship with Sam Giancana.
And Giancana interested Maheu not only because of his high rank in the Chicago Outfit but also because of his connection with Santo Trafficante Jr., once the kingpin of organized crime in Havana and still in Florida. (Sinatra had also spent time with Trafficante at the Mob summit.)
Trafficante, Giancana, Rosselli, and Maheu were all present at the Fontainebleau meeting in March 1961.
Robert Maheu had an easy time enlisting Johnny Rosselli in the Cuban Project: having never bothered to obtain U.S. citizenship and under constant surveillance by the FBI, the gangster lived in perpetual fear of deportation. Doing his patriotic duty, he reasoned, would buy him a pass from being sent back to Italy. Sam Giancana, too, wanted the Feds off his back and was working all the angles: helping to put Jack Kennedy in the White House, he thought, would earn him a chit with the government, but participating in Mongoose would surely immunize him from prosecution altogether. Trafficante simply wanted to turn the cash valves back on in Havana. Eliminating Castro was the essential first step.
In the meantime, an absurdly spiraling chain of events would cause Operation Mongoose to explode in Sinatra’s face.
While Giancana plotted in Miami, he began to fret about a woman he liked in Las Vegas. The woman was Phyllis McGuire, the star of the singing McGuire Sisters, and Mooney—ignoring the inconvenient fact that she was engaged to the handsome comedian Dan Rowan—had begun wooing her early in 1960, “in part by having the Desert Inn tear up nearly $100,000 in gambling markers she’d run up at the blackja
ck tables,” according to Shawn Levy. This romantic gesture, Giancana felt, bound them together, Rowan or no Rowan.
The story will now begin to sound familiar. The jealous Giancana asked Robert Maheu if it might be possible to install electronic eavesdropping equipment in Rowan’s room at the Riviera—where the comedian was then performing—to determine if McGuire was two-timing Mooney with the man she was engaged to. Wanting to keep the important mobster happy, Maheu used some of his fresh CIA money to hire a Miami operative, one Arthur J. Balletti, to fly to Vegas, where “Balletti and a cohort wired Rowan’s room and telephone and took up a post in a room of their own,” Levy writes.
On October 31, 1960, they took a break from their work for lunch, leaving their recording and monitoring equipment out in plain sight on their beds. They forgot to hang the Do Not Disturb sign: A maid came in to make up the room, got a look at all those sinister wires and machines, and called the cops. When Balletti came back from lunch, alone, he was arrested. Rosselli arranged for the $1,000 bail to be paid by a Las Vegas gambling buddy, and the bumbling wiretapper split town.
When Rosselli told Giancana how spectacularly his mission had failed, Giancana had a peculiar reaction. “He almost swallowed [his cigar] laughing about it,” Rosselli recalled. To Rosselli, it was no laughing matter. “It was blowing everything, every kind of cover I had tried to arrange,” he said.
That was the difference between the two: Johnny Rosselli felt the plot against Castro could actually succeed; Sam Giancana, a cynical nihilist, was happy just to take the government’s money.
But now the cat was working its way out of the bag. And the absurd quickly turned serious. The famously tough Las Vegas sheriff Butch Leypoldt, proud of his control over the town, got annoyed at the incursion of this wild card from Miami, Balletti, and called the FBI. “The Bureau’s interest increased when they came across Maheu’s name in the case record,” write Rosselli’s biographers, Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker. When the bureau learned how Maheu was mainly spending his time these days, and whom he was working with, J. Edgar Hoover got personally involved.
