Sinatra

by James Kaplan

According to Brownstein, Jack Kennedy had begun taking the final steps to dissolve his friendship with Sinatra soon after Frank’s eventful visit to Hyannis Port in September. “The split came in two stages,” Brownstein writes.

  That fall, Sinatra sent Kennedy several gifts; the return letters were brief and formal, no more expansive than “I am delighted by your very thoughtful gesture.” By 1962, the Justice Department had launched a formal investigation of Sinatra’s ties to organized crime.

  The last act began in the fall of 1961, when FBI wiretaps of [Johnny Rosselli] discovered six calls to Judith Campbell Exner, the woman Sinatra had introduced to both Kennedy and Giancana.

  The investigation began on February 27, 1962, when the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, “always the bureaucrat,” as Seymour Hersh puts it, sent a memo to Attorney General Robert Kennedy officially notifying him of something both men had known about for quite a while: Judith Campbell had also been making telephone calls to the White House.

  Hoover wasn’t just following protocol; he was also using his findings as a weapon in his battle for power with the attorney general and the president. And while Jack Kennedy seemed regally unruffled by Hoover, Bobby was all too aware of his brother’s exposure to “the extraordinary danger of blackmail.”

  In fact, the FBI had been conducting extensive surveillance of Campbell, Rosselli, and Giancana for years. A Mob informant had first brought Campbell to the bureau’s attention in early 1960, soon after then senator John F. Kennedy “had been compromised” with her in Las Vegas—having been introduced to Campbell at the Sands by Frank Sinatra. Rosselli and Giancana had been on the FBI’s radar since 1957’s Apalachin Meeting but came even more prominently to the bureau’s attention once they were recruited into Operation Mongoose, the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, in March 1961. And by now, the FBI was well aware of Judith Campbell’s friendships with Rosselli and Mooney Giancana—and with Sinatra. “A review of her telephone toll calls reveals four calls in December, 1961 to the Palm Springs, California residence of Frank Sinatra,” reads an FBI internal memo of February 26, 1962. She had also made calls to Giancana.

  “Now it was clear that President Kennedy was consorting with two people with mob affiliations—Sinatra and Campbell,” write Tom and Phil Kuntz in The Sinatra Files, their book about Frank’s FBI dossier. “The potential for a disastrous scandal must have been obvious to Hoover and the Kennedys, especially given what the FBI had been hearing about Giancana and Rosselli [and their involvement in Mongoose].”

  Seymour Hersh claims that Bobby Kennedy was reluctant—perhaps afraid—to tell his revered older brother “that he had to stop seeing a woman who gave him pleasure.” Instead, he asked one of his close associates, Assistant Attorney General Joseph Dolan, to order President Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln to stop taking Judith Campbell’s phone calls. Hersh says that “it was left to Hoover to give the president the bad news” about the explosive situation, at a lunch with President Kennedy on March 22.

  It was over two weeks earlier than that when Frank heard that the visit was off.

  He heard it from the man who had arranged it in the first place—Peter Lawford, to whom the president had given the unpleasant task of calling Sinatra with the news. Lawford had a cover story ready, and it made some sense: the Secret Service said that because of the open setting of the Wonder Palms compound, in the middle of a golf course, the place would be too difficult to secure. But Frank quickly got the truth out of Lawford: Bobby Kennedy didn’t want his brother staying at a house where Sam Giancana had also stayed.

  Frank smashed the phone against the wall.

  According to George Jacobs, he then went into another room and managed to reach the attorney general himself: “ ‘What is this shit?’ I remember him repeating. Unfortunately, this shit was all coming down on Mr. S.” Adamant, Bobby Kennedy hung up on Sinatra. “There went another phone, smashed to smithereens,” Jacobs writes. Frank called Lawford back to try to figure out a resolution, telling him desperately that he couldn’t afford to be humiliated this way.

  Then the hammer fell. Lawford told Sinatra that the situation was past solving: new lodgings for the president had already been secured. Where? Frank asked. “There was an endless silence,” Jacobs recalled. “Then Mr. S simply dropped the phone on the floor. He stood there staring out at the desert, as if someone had told him his folks had died. It took him about five minutes before he could tell me.”

  Jack Kennedy was going to stay at Bing Crosby’s house, in Palm Desert. His Secret Service detail would be billeted in Jimmy Van Heusen’s place right next door.

  Jacobs writes that part of Frank’s supreme humiliation was due to the fact that Crosby was a Republican, “an Eisenhower, Nixon guy.” In fact, Bing had been a Kennedy supporter. But despite Sinatra’s longtime veneration of Crosby and a veneer of friendship between the two men, the older man was no less aloof to Frank than he was to the rest of the world—and despite their brilliant work together in High Society, and on television and radio, the competition between Sinatra and Crosby ran deep. Now, in a very large and public sense, Bing had won and Frank had lost.

  Sinatra went into a towering rage, smashing his precious collection of JFK photographs, kicking in the door of the presidential guest room, even trying to wrest the gold plaque from the door. Legend has it (though Tina Sinatra denies it) that he took a sledgehammer to the concrete helipad. But the primary target of his anger was Peter Lawford, whose double game—trying to be a member of America’s royal family and the Clan at the same time—had finally come to an end.

  “When Jack got out here for that weekend, he asked me how Frank had taken it,” Lawford recalled.

  I said, “Not very well,” which was a mild understatement. The President said, “I’ll call him and smooth it over.” So he did. After the conversation Jack said, “He’s pretty upset, but I told him not to blame you because you didn’t have anything to do with it. It was simply a matter of security…” But Frank didn’t buy that for a minute, and with a couple of exceptions he never spoke to me again. He cut me out of all the movies we were set to make together—Robin and the 7 Hoods, 4 for Texas—and turned Dean and Sammy and Joey against me as well.

  Naturally, Frank hated himself for having hoped so high and been brought so low, but it was always easiest for him to direct his anger outward. Naturally, too, he was furious at Jack Kennedy, yet he seems never to have spoken a word against his idol. Peter Lawford, with his mild, self-deprecating manner, his indifferent career, and his bad habits, was the world’s best whipping boy.

  —

  On the night of March 6, Frank went to United Recording to sing a song he had no wish to sing. The tune was Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues,” and Sinatra was laying down the track for his about-to-be-former label. Capitol, in the person of Alan Livingston, was “rubbing salt in a sore wound…[insisting] that Sinatra provide them with one additional single, as specified in their contract,” Charles Granata writes. Frank had so had it with the company at this point that he refused to even set foot in its studios. But despite his temptation to deal a final screw-you to Livingston—and with due respect to Granata’s assertion that Sinatra’s rendering of “Blues” that night was “remote, affect-less”—Frank’s performance sounds slightly under-energized, more ambivalent than distant: too angry to help Capitol in any way, but too proud to be recorded singing badly.

  His emotions escape after Skip Martin’s*2 orchestra blares the song’s final bluesy notes: just audibly, Frank crows, “Awright, that’s it!”

  And that was it for Capitol Records.*3

  Yet “Sinatra’s petulance was plain to everyone in the studio that night, and the cause not merely Capitol,” Granata notes.

  His anger over recording the song was actually mitigated by the presence of producer Dave Cavanaugh—one of the few people from his former label with whom he was still friendly.

  But when the Capitol tune was dispensed with,
Cavanaugh left, and Sinatra and [Billy] May set out to record two songs by Cahn and Van Heusen: “The Boys’ Night Out” and “Cathy.” When Jimmy Van Heusen showed up in the control room, the singer’s already touchy mood darkened.

  Frank “was in a snit,” Billy May recalled. “We had done ‘The Boys’ Night Out,’ and all during the recording, [he] just glared at Jimmy in the control room. Then, it came time to do the second song, ‘Cathy,’ which was a pretty song—a waltz. Frank…looked over at Van Heusen, and said, ‘Tell you what, Chester. Why don’t you get Jack Kennedy to record this fucking song, and then see how many records it sells?’ ”

  —

  The next day, Wednesday the seventh, Frank headed to Palm Springs, reportedly suffering from an attack of laryngitis, the malady he periodically came down with—or came up with—when other matters were troubling him. On Friday the ninth, UPI reported, he was still in the desert recovering, and therefore unfortunately unable to make a scheduled appearance at a dinner in Miami Beach given by President Kennedy to honor his good friend Senator George Smathers.

  —

  On March 22, the president had his fateful lunch with J. Edgar Hoover, who, Arthur Schlesinger writes, brought along a memo about Judith Campbell’s phone calls. Schlesinger says that thenceforth “the Campbell calls ceased.” Campbell herself later maintained, “I saw Jack in March and April and the calls did not stop until sometime in June. And they stopped, not because of any outside force, but because of natural attrition. The specter of the White House killed the romance. Not J. Edgar Hoover.”

  On the same day as the JFK-Hoover lunch, “Frank Sinatra flew out of Palm Springs for Bermuda the day before President Kennedy arrived,” Louella Parsons noted in her syndicated column. “There is talk that Frank is very hurt, after he did so much to raise funds for the Democratic Party, that the President is not his houseguest.” There was more than talk. The news about the president’s change of plans had just begun to hit the papers, and the story was explosive. “Had the Kennedys sought deliberately to humiliate my father,” Tina Sinatra writes, “they couldn’t have done a better job.”

  The insult wasn’t just personal. Rosalind Wyman, a prominent California Democrat who’d been a West Coast organizer for the Kennedy campaign, worried that the slight could permanently disaffect Frank from the party. “Sinatra was a great Democrat,” she said. “He loved Harry Truman. He loved Roosevelt. Sinatra had performed for us before Kennedy, and we in the party were very grateful…We felt very strongly, and I did quite a few things to make our views known to the White House…Here was a man who had during the campaign done everything we asked him for and more.”

  The protests fell on deaf ears. The White House speechwriter Richard Goodwin recalled that the president didn’t think twice about banishing Sinatra. “It meant nothing” to him, he said. “If Kennedy thought about it in any way, if he thought it would even in the slightest wound his presidency, of course he would cut it off; he would cut off people a lot closer than Sinatra if he had to.”

  Like a spurned lover, Frank was haunted by the rejection. “If he would only pick up the telephone and call me and say that it was politically difficult to have me around, I would understand,” he told Angie Dickinson. “I don’t want to hurt him. But he has never called me.”

  A couple of months later, Sinatra would send Kennedy a flower-decked rocking chair for his birthday. He would get another polite note in response.

  —

  The presidential slight was not only a terrible loss of face for Frank but a public-relations disaster. Though the White House never commented explicitly on the reasons for Kennedy’s change of plan, editorial writers and opinion makers felt they knew perfectly well what had caused it, and said so in print, repeatedly.

  In early 1962, Sinatra’s press agent, Chuck Moses, summed it up. “The breach with JFK was brutal for him,” Moses said. “It gives the public a wrong impression. People think Frank and Dean and Sammy and a few others are inseparable. Sure, they’re good friends, but Frank has many other friends, interests, and activities.”

  Sure, but Mr. and Mrs. America knew what they read in the papers. It was time for some serious image repair.

  Sinatra’s charitable instincts were real and his good works often private, but the idea of doing some major public kindness had been in the air for several years. His former publicists Henry Rogers and Warren Cowan first came up with the vague but impressive idea of an international tour to benefit underprivileged children, and then Sinatra fired them, after Rogers made an intemperate remark about Frank’s being his own worst enemy. Chuck Moses took the ball and ran with it. The charity concerts for Mexican children the previous spring had been a kind of dry run, and a big hit, inspiring a tribute in the Congressional Record from California congressman James Roosevelt (son of FDR) that read, in part, “Sinatra’s humane contribution entitles him to applause beyond that given a great entertainer.”

  Mickey Rudin, who was a partner at his law firm but had a lucrative sub-practice as Sinatra’s consigliere, paved the way for the grand tour, going out and booking concerts for Frank in places in Europe and Asia where his bad publicity might have preceded him. “We went all over the world—to Rome and Tokyo and London,” recalled Rudin’s then wife, the cellist Elizabeth Greenschpoon, “and I watched Mickey create an atmosphere of demand for Frank. Never mind the henchmen and goons. Mickey made them book Frank. Because of my husband’s strong ties to Israel, he also managed to get a youth house named for Frank because supposedly this was a tour to benefit children and youth. I say ‘supposedly’ because the real purpose was to benefit Frank. He needed a good press at the time and Mickey saw to it that he got one.”

  This assessment contrasts sharply with Will Friedwald’s contention that the tour was “the largest humanitarian gesture of Sinatra’s career…distinguished by the remarkably high caliber of the music produced as well as the surprisingly low profile the tour itself and the documents of it…kept for the following thirty years.”

  As one who fully comprehended the positive and negative power of the media, Sinatra had to decide whether or not to inform the American press about this undertaking, and he chose to exclude them. If it was ever construed that he was doing it for a tax write-off or for the publicity (neither of which would have been as valuable to him as two months of paid work), it would have undercut the whole purpose of the project.

  The truth lies somewhere in between Greenschpoon’s unsympathetic personal view (she was understandably embittered after her breakup with Rudin) and Friedwald’s justifiably favorable musical take. In fact, a publicist and a photographer would accompany Sinatra on the trip, and Frank would receive respectful, if not awed, press coverage every step of the way: the kind of publicity that was worth far more than dollars. He would perform thirty concerts over two months, and every penny of the proceeds would go to children’s charities. Sinatra would cover all travel and living expenses of his musicians and entourage.

  But there was one other motive behind the trip: the newly single star was excitedly planning a reunion with his endlessly beguiling expatriate ex-wife in Spain.

  —

  With change in the air, and with a couple of days free in the week before he left, Sinatra went into the studio to make a new album with a new arranger, Neal Hefti.

  The thirty-nine-year-old Hefti was a brilliant jazz songwriter and arranger whose compositions and charts had been key to the success of the Count Basie Orchestra in the 1950s. “If it weren’t for Neal Hefti,” Miles Davis said in a 1955 interview, “the Basie band wouldn’t sound as good as it does.” This was extraordinary praise, yet it was well deserved. As a young big-band trumpeter, Hefti had listened deeply to bebop, but the tunes he wrote for Basie—numbers like “Splanky,” “Teddy the Toad,” “Little Pony,” and “Li’l Darlin’ ”—were as infectious as they were unpredictable, brilliantly bringing out the Count’s minimalist piano playing and his great horn and reed sections. As a composer, Hefti would
eventually become best known for his themes for Batman, the 1960s TV show, and the 1968 movie (and 1970s sitcom) The Odd Couple, the first showing off his gift for hard-driving horns, the second in the jazzy-wistful mood that also infused “Li’l Darlin’.”

  Frank had initially hired Hefti as a combination A&R man and producer, to replace Felix Slatkin, who’d recently gone to work at another label. But it was inevitable that Sinatra, an idolater of Basie, would turn to his new in-house talent as an arranger-conductor. It first happened with two singles recorded at the end of February 1962, though the work was less than distinguished all around: a regrettable throwaway called “Everybody’s Twistin’,” meant to capitalize on the current dance craze; and a pleasantly brassy but forgettable single called “Nothing but the Best” (“I like a new Lincoln, with all of its class/I like a martini, and bird under glass”).

  Things improved in April, when Frank and Hefti made the new album, Sinatra and Swingin’ Brass, a Billy May concept with a whole new sound. Though, regrettably, Sinatra selected none of Hefti’s own compositions for the LP (none had been lyricized to Frank’s exacting standards), he and the arranger did manage to bring new, swinging life to a dozen numbers that were well on their way to becoming oldies, including the Gershwins’ “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (1937), Cole Porter’s “At Long Last Love” (1938) and “I Love You” (1944), and, perhaps most notably, Matty Malneck and Johnny Mercer’s 1936 “Goody Goody,” one of the best (and most rousing) kiss-off songs ever and one that would quickly become a staple of the Sinatra repertoire.

  Frank’s tantrum about JFK’s snub and the snub itself were now weeks in the past, and making this cheerful album seemed restorative. Hefti later said that he found Sinatra “easy, very easy” to work with, and the evidence is audible, not just in the tracks themselves, but in the (always revealing) outtakes, where an artist who could be intensely perfectionistic in the studio sounds relaxed and happy to be doing what he’s doing with the people he’s doing it with.