by James Kaplan
It was an association Lawford was eager to nourish. At the end of May, on location in Kanab, he’d phoned the White House to wish Jack a happy birthday—and then, as a special treat, patched the call through to Sinatra. “Happy birthday, Prez,” Frank chirped. The favor had the desired effect: the Leader was in a good mood for the rest of the day.
But trying to satisfy his wish to actually spend time with that other leader, the leader of the free world, was an increasingly tricky task.
President Kennedy was eager enough to see Frank. Judith Exner writes that since the beginning of their relationship the president had never been able to leave her alone when it came to Sinatra (“Every time we talked on the phone…he invariably would ask, ‘Have you seen Frank lately?’ ”) and that now that she’d begun paying regular calls on Kennedy in the White House, he was still obsessed. She describes a lunch on her second visit, one Saturday in May:
Almost immediately Jack started pumping me for gossip, most of it directed at Frank. What was Frank doing? Was it true that he was seeing Janet Leigh? We went through the same old routine. I denied I knew any gossip and he insisted that I knew plenty. It went back and forth in a lighthearted way until Dave [Powers] said, “You’re not going to get anything out of her, I can see it!” Jack said, “Come on, now, Judy, just a smidgen, nothing shocking or disgraceful, just something amusing.”
“As I’ve said before, Jack, pick up a movie magazine.”
“Thanks a lot,” he said, turning to Dave with a helpless gesture. “Doesn’t she remind you of a career diplomat?”
Mrs. Kennedy was of course not in Washington that weekend but at the family’s weekend home, a horse farm in Middleburg, Virginia. And it quickly became apparent to Peter Lawford that Frank Sinatra was going to have to be smuggled in to see the president much as Judy Campbell was. “Jack was always so grateful to him for all the work he’d done in the campaign raising money,” Lawford told Kitty Kelley.
He said, “I really should do something for Frank…maybe I’ll ask him to the White House for dinner or lunch.” I said that Frank would love that, but then Jack said, “There’s only one problem. Jackie hates him and won’t have him in the house. So I really don’t know what to do.” Here was the President of the United States in a quandary just like the rest of us who are afraid to upset our spouses. We joked for a few minutes about stuffing Frank into a body bag and dragging him around to the side door so the gardeners could bring him in like a bag of refuse and Jackie wouldn’t see him. We also talked about sneaking him in in one of John-John’s big diaper bundles.
But in the third week of September, the First Lady had to endure Sinatra’s presence twice in the space of three days—and the first time was at the White House. The occasion was a luncheon for the cast and director of Advise and Consent, an event to which she had no intention of asking him. Yet when Mrs. Kennedy’s chief of staff, Letitia Baldrige, phoned Peter Lawford at his hotel to make arrangements for the lunch, Sinatra was in the room, and there was no way to exclude him.
Jackie Kennedy was chagrined. She had worked hard to distance her husband from a man she felt would sully the president’s image. “In her view, that was even more true after the Bay of Pigs disaster,” writes her biographer Barbara Leaming. “The last thing Jack needed was to associate with a man linked in the public mind with the Mafia—certainly not in this of all weeks, as Jackie launched a full-scale rehabilitation effort.”
By the end of the summer of 1961, the new administration had undergone a series of defeats and fiascoes, the abortive invasion of Cuba not least among them. The Bay of Pigs invasion in April, planned by the Eisenhower administration but carried out by Kennedy, had failed to liberate Cuba, leaving the new president with egg on his face and the Caribbean open to Soviet incursion. At the Vienna Summit on June 4, JFK had struck Nikita Khrushchev as a lightweight, while Berlin hung in the balance and Western and Soviet missiles faced each other across Europe. Accordingly, the First Lady had decided to remake her husband’s image “as a mature, self-possessed leader who was already achieving great things” and, with her keen eye for appearances, to recast the image of the White House as “a symbol of national power and purpose.”
The place, “which Jackie had once believed ought to be comfortable, cozy, and inviting, would be deliberately formal, finished, and above all intimidating,” Leaming writes. “Rather than putting people at ease, those rooms would impress upon them the grandeur and power of the presidency—and of Jack. In her careful plans, she was doing everything possible to put Jack across as a statesman.”
But Jack, who hated being told what to do, insisted the invitation stand, and with the prospect of Frank Sinatra’s imminent arrival at the White House Jackie saw all her image-making efforts going down the drain. Hoping to keep the luncheon under wraps, Mrs. Kennedy sent orders that the occasion be strictly off the record. Meanwhile, the president couldn’t disguise his glee at the prospect of an afternoon with his friend Frank.
“Ordinarily, the Advise and Consent luncheon would have been the sort of private event at which Jack and Jackie seized the opportunity to shine together,” Leaming writes.
On this occasion, Jackie had no interest in performing. Instead, she planned to keep her eye on Sinatra…and on the clock. The Kennedys were due at the Peruvian embassy at eight, and the President was scheduled to deliver a critically important address at the United Nations the following week. Jackie hoped the luncheon would end before anyone in the press room got wind of it.
Things got off to a poor start when the Kennedys entered a quarter of an hour late and Sinatra called out, “Hey, Chickie baby!”
Three days later, she would have to see him again.
On September 24, at the invitation of the Lawfords (according to Peter Lawford) or Joe Kennedy (by other accounts), Frank headed to Hyannis Port aboard the president’s private plane, the Caroline, accompanied by Pat Lawford, Ted Kennedy, and the Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa and his fifth wife, Odile. With the Hyannis airport socked in by fog, the plane landed at New Bedford, fifty miles away, and the party, along with Frank’s cargo—twelve pieces of luggage, a dozen bottles of champagne, a case of wine, three cartons of ice cream in dry ice, and two loaves of Italian bread for the Ambassador—proceeded to the Kennedy compound in a pair of taxicabs.
Peter Lawford awaited them at Joseph Kennedy’s house, where the dinner table was set for twenty-six. The night was apparently eventful. In a tell-all memoir, Joe and Rose Kennedy’s chauffeur Frank Saunders recalled that Sinatra arrived with not just Pat, Teddy, and the Rubirosas but “a crowd of jet-setters and Beautiful People,” including some women who looked to Saunders like prostitutes. “The maids were buzzing,” he wrote. “But the star was Frank Sinatra.”
Intensely curious about the goings-on, the chauffeur took a pair of riding boots he’d polished for Joe Kennedy and, on the pretext of returning them, went over to the Ambassador’s house and entered by the back stairs. There he happened upon the old man, in a dim hallway, fondling a buxom young woman:
“I have your riding boots, Mr. Kennedy,” I said. I said it loudly, as if to assert my excuse for being there.
“My riding boots! Just in time!” The president’s father laughed. The woman giggled.
The woman, Saunders later discovered, had been Porfirio Rubirosa’s wife.
The next afternoon, a dozen members of the company, including Frank, went for a three-and-a-half-hour cruise aboard Joe Kennedy’s yacht the Marlin. “The Marlin cruised about eight miles to Cotuit Bay, and anchored in a sheltered spot,” an Associated Press dispatch reported.
Most of the guests remained aboard, but Mrs. Kennedy, who took up the sport this summer, water skied for a while despite the chill.
She wore a white petal bathing cap and the jacket half of a skin diver suit over her bathing suit, obviously as a protection against the chill.
Mrs. Kennedy showed the result of her weeks of practice as she slalomed, on a single ski behind a spee
dboat.
She smiled and waved as she sped past a nearby press boat.
[The White House press secretary Pierre] Salinger said Sinatra is not staying at the President’s house, but is visiting the Lawfords, who are at the home of the President’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy.
Salinger’s emphasis on Frank’s accommodations in Hyannis Port represented an important distinction. A public barrier, however slender, had to be maintained between President Kennedy and Sinatra, who, according to Barbara Leaming, was “loud and obnoxious” (translation: drinking) that weekend. For her part, Mrs. Kennedy, showing off on water skis, seems to have been putting on her own remarkable show—but only up to a point. Leaming writes, “Sinatra’s presence at the Cape [was] so disconcerting that, uncharacteristically, Jackie…failed to conceal her jealousy at Jack’s interest in one of the women Sinatra had brought with him. Jackie’s palpable upset had been so unusual that everyone noticed, representing a huge defeat for a woman who prided herself on her ability to disguise her emotions, particularly with regard to her husband’s other women.”
Which of “the women Sinatra had brought” so captivated Jack and so unhorsed Jackie? The simplest guess, based on documentation, is Odile, the beautiful wife of the playboy Rubirosa. The only other woman mentioned in press accounts is the president’s sister Pat. But if Saunders the chauffeur is to be trusted, and Sinatra really did bring along beautiful prostitutes, anything is possible.
—
Frank had other matters to attend to in Hyannis besides amusing himself. One concerned a film project that had hit a snag, an adaptation of Richard Condon’s political thriller The Manchurian Candidate. The best-selling novel, about the son of an important political family captured by the Chinese during the Korean War and brainwashed into becoming a presidential assassin, had attracted movie interest soon after its 1959 publication, but in the conservative climate of the final Eisenhower years the novel’s bleak vision of human nature and American politics—one of the key characters, Senator Johnny Iselin, was patently based on Joseph McCarthy—made it too hot a potato to be picked up.
The book lay dormant until early 1961, when the dramatist George Axelrod and the director John Frankenheimer bought the screen rights. Axelrod, who’d written The Seven Year Itch for Broadway (and the script for Billy Wilder’s film version), as well as the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was one of the highest-paid writers in Hollywood and a pal of Sinatra’s. Frankenheimer, a prolific and highly regarded young television director during the 1950s, was now successfully making his way into the movies: he’d made The Young Savages with Burt Lancaster in 1961 and was finishing production on two pictures that would have a great impact in 1962, All Fall Down, starring Warren Beatty, and Lancaster’s Birdman of Alcatraz. Frank was a fan.
In spite of Axelrod and Frankenheimer’s sterling track records, movie studios were still shying away from The Manchurian Candidate. It was a very dark book, and the subject of political assassinations was controversial in early 1961, when the causes of the recent killings of the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo remained murky. But when the writer and the director approached Frank Sinatra with the project, he immediately wanted in, even though the screenplay wasn’t yet complete.
Axelrod and Frankenheimer offered Frank the choice of playing the sleeper assassin Raymond Shaw or Shaw’s former platoon mate, the army intelligence officer Bennett Marco, a fellow brainwashing victim and the discoverer of the assassination plot masterminded by Shaw’s mother, Eleanor. Frank, who’d played a would-be presidential assassin once before in Suddenly, chose Marco, and Axelrod continued writing.
Sinatra, now a co-producer along with Frankenheimer and Axelrod, planned to have the film distributed, like his previous independent pictures, by United Artists. The only problem was that the president of UA, Arthur Krim, hated the project—hated it so much that he told Sinatra, Frankenheimer, and Axelrod that he “would try to dissuade any other studio they approached from backing it,” Sinatra film historian Daniel O’Brien writes.
According to O’Brien, Krim, who was about to become national finance chairman of the Democratic Party, “felt that the political storyline—complete with corruption, communist infiltration and assassination—could be both embarrassing and harmful to Kennedy, especially given the ongoing American-Russian negotiations over limiting nuclear tests.” To make matters still worse, Krim personally disliked Richard Condon, who had once worked for him as a publicity man (and had been unit publicist on The Pride and the Passion).
And so Frank took his case to the president of the United States.
When he wasn’t falling for pap like the musical Camelot, Jack Kennedy was a tough, cool realist in life and politics. He’d loved The Manchurian Candidate when the book came out—loved it so much that he’d told Frank, who’d loved it too. When Sinatra filled Kennedy in on the film project that weekend in Hyannis, the president’s first reaction was “That’s great—who’s playing the mother?”
And as to that little problem with Arthur Krim, Kennedy was glad to telephone the outgoing United Artists president and assure him that The Manchurian Candidate was a film eminently worth making. Unsurprisingly, Krim promptly changed his mind.
—
There was another problem to broach in Hyannis Port that weekend, one Frank had been avoiding because it wasn’t his own. Back in March, in between throwing cherry bombs from the seventeenth floor of the Fontainebleau, Sam Giancana had asked Sinatra to intercede with the Kennedys on a matter increasingly important to the Mob boss: getting the FBI off his tail. Bobby Kennedy was his biggest problem. As one historian wrote, “Ever since Prohibition…Attorneys General have been ‘declaring war’ on organized crime, but Robert Kennedy was the first to fight one.” Since Kennedy had taken office as attorney general, he had redoubled his efforts to bring Giancana in, and the pressure was beginning to get to Mooney, who felt that rather than persecuting him, the Kennedys should be thanking him for his financial help with the West Virginia primary and the election in Illinois. According to a December 1961 FBI wiretap of Giancana and an underling named Johnny—either Formosa or Rosselli—Frank had assured both men that there was nothing to it, he would talk to the Kennedys. But from the angry tenor of the hoodlums’ conversation, two months after Sinatra’s visit to the presidential compound, it appeared that Frank was full of empty promises.
JOHNNY: I said, “Frankie, can I ask one question?” He says, “Johnny, I took Sam’s [Giancana’s] name and wrote it down and told Bobby Kennedy, ‘This is my buddy. This is my buddy. This is what I want you to know, Bob’ ”…Between you and I, Frank saw Joe Kennedy three different times. He called him three times, Joe Kennedy, the father.
GIANCANA: Well I don’t know who the [expletive] he’s [Sinatra’s] talking to, but…after all, if I’m taking somebody’s money, I’m gonna make sure that this money is going to do something. Like, “Do you want it or don’t you want it?” If the money is accepted, maybe one of these days, the guy will do me a favor.
JOHNNY: That’s right. He says he wrote your name down.
GIANCANA: Well, one minute he tells me this and then he tells me that. And then the last time I talked to him was at the hotel in Florida…and he said, “Don’t worry about it, if I can’t talk to the old man [Joe Kennedy], I’m going to talk to the man [President Kennedy].” One minute he says he talked to Robert, and the next minute he says he hasn’t talked to him. So he never did talk to him. It’s a lot of [expletive]. Either he did or he didn’t. Forget about it. Why lie to me? I haven’t got that coming.
JOHNNY: If he can’t deliver, I want him to tell me, “John, the load’s too heavy.”
GIANCANA: When he says he’s gonna do a guy a little favor, I don’t give a [expletive] how long it takes, he’s got to give you a little favor.
JOHNNY: He says he put your name, buddy, on—
GIANCANA: Aw, [expletive]. Out of a jillion names, he’
s gonna remember that name, huh?
JOHNNY: What’s happened, Frank says to me, “Johnny, he ain’t being bothered.”
GIANCANA (pausing, taking a deep breath and then shouting): I got more [expletive] on my [expletive] than any other [expletive] in the country! Believe me when I tell you!
JOHNNY: I know it, Sam.
GIANCANA (still shouting): I was on the road with this broad, there must have been…twenty guys! They were next door, upstairs, downstairs, surrounded, all the way around! Get in a car, somebody picks you up. I lose that tail—boom!—I get picked up someplace else! Four or five cars…back and forth, back and forth!
JOHNNY: This was in Europe, right?
GIANCANA: Right here in Russia: Chicago, New York, Phoenix!
A little mobster black humor: How could such a thing happen in the U.S.A.? (And we see the inspiration for Uncle Junior’s immortal remark on The Sopranos: “I’ve got the Feds so far up my ass, I can taste Brylcreem!”)
Frank was playing a dangerous game. He knew Giancana was displeased with his failure to deliver (on the same wiretap, Johnny says, “He says he’s got an idea that you’re mad at him”; Giancana replies, “He must have a guilty conscience”), but he certainly hadn’t tried very hard. Rather than approach the Kennedys directly, he’d asked Peter Lawford to talk to Bobby Kennedy about laying off the Mob boss. Bobby had told Lawford to mind his own business, and that had been that. As Dean Martin once noted, “Only Frank could get away with the shit he got away with. Only Frank. Anyone else would’ve been dead.”
