by James Kaplan
In fact, jazz, as a salable entity, had been dying for years. Rock ’n’ roll, its ungrateful grandchild, was largely to blame. Billy Crystal, whose father co-ran a jazz record shop in Manhattan and an independent jazz record label, Commodore, recalled, “The bands that I loved, the music of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Sidney Bechet, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge…and all the others, were replaced now by the Duprees, the Earls, the Shirelles and the Beach Boys. These original American jazz giants, the men, and women, who gave birth to all the rest of our music, were now reduced to playing outside ballparks with garters on their sleeves, wearing straw hats.”
But Sinatra could afford to make his own rules, and one kind of music was verboten at Reprise—no ifs, ands, or buts. “Frank actually forbade us from signing any rock ’n’ roll artists,” Ostin recalled. “He was very strong about that.”
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Mickey Rudin sued Capitol on Frank’s behalf, alleging restraint of trade and violation of the Robinson-Patman Act. The lawsuit also demanded that the label be enjoined immediately from continuing the twofer campaign, which, Arnold Shaw writes, had jeopardized the fledgling label’s existence, bringing “dealer demands that Reprise adjust its prices to the level ‘fixed by the defendant.’ ” Sinatra sought $1.05 million in damages.
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Less than a year earlier, Frank and Marilyn Monroe had been lovers, lolling on his yacht and reading Look magazine; then they drifted apart. Her chaos had proved too much for him, and his engagement to Juliet Prowse hurt her badly, touching her deep insecurities about her age (Prowse was ten years younger) and her body (Marilyn feared that her legs, unlike Juliet’s long stems, were too short and fat). After the engagement was called off, Frank and Marilyn saw each other a bit, but by then both had found other distractions: Frank, his world tour (and Ava); and Marilyn, the president of the United States.
By all evidence, the relationship between Marilyn Monroe and Jack Kennedy, such as it was, was more a mutual fantasy, icon for icon, than anything else and more her fantasy than his. “Well, it wasn’t a big thing as far as he was concerned,” Kennedy’s close friend Senator George Smathers said of JFK’s involvement with Marilyn. The reality—despite the insistences of supermarket tabloids and myriad Monroe and Kennedy biographies, and despite Marilyn’s idolatrous musings about the president in a free-associative tape recording that came to light in 1997—appears to be that she and JFK met exactly four times: the first was in October 1961, at a party for Kennedy at Pat and Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house (to titillate his brother-in-law, Lawford also invited Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, and Angie Dickinson); the second, at a Manhattan dinner party for the president in February 1962. On neither occasion was she intimate with Jack Kennedy.
Their third meeting occurred during the infamous weekend of March 24 to 26: while JFK stayed at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Desert (and Frank sulked in Bermuda), Marilyn Monroe joined him—driven there by Peter Lawford—and for the first and only time she and Kennedy were together under intimate circumstances. “She spent the night in the President’s quarters,” according to Barbara Leaming. We can infer, but we do not know, that sex took place. The singularity of the occasion has been confirmed by several sources, including former Secret Service agents, Lawford, and Monroe’s masseur and confidant Ralph Roberts.*1 The episode was, in a strange way, a kind of double betrayal of Sinatra: a triangle with an absent leg.
Their fourth meeting, while Frank was in Athens, was the briefest of all. On the night of May 19, 1962, before fifteen thousand people at a Democratic fund-raiser in Madison Square Garden, Marilyn stood at a podium in a sheer, rhinestone-spangled, skintight dress (with nothing on underneath) and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in her trademark breathy purr. The entire presentation was so combustible that everyone there (Jacqueline Kennedy was not present) assumed, as many have assumed ever since, that the two were having the hottest of hot affairs. (Taking the podium after the song, the president said, “Thank you. I can now retire from politics after having had Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”) But they had had their fleshly moment; this was all show. After the gala, at a celebrity-packed party at the apartment of Arthur and Mathilde Krim (he was the United Artists chairman whom JFK had persuaded to release The Manchurian Candidate; she was a research scientist who would later do invaluable work on understanding AIDS), the Kennedy who paid the closest attention to her was Bobby.
According to Arthur Schlesinger, who was also at the Krims’ that night, this was RFK’s first meeting with Monroe. And according to Adlai Stevenson, also present, he and Bobby were both enthralled. In a letter to a friend, Stevenson described his own “perilous encounters” at the party with Marilyn, “dressed in what she calls ‘skin and beads.’ I didn’t see the beads! My encounters, however, were only after breaking through the strong defenses established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around the flame.”
“We were all moths around the flame that night,” Schlesinger wrote.
I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her—as if talking to someone under water. Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me—but then she receded into her own glittering mist.
There was something at once magical and desperate about her.
The strong pull that powerful and intelligent men felt toward her (include also Sinatra and Arthur Miller) went beyond the obvious but was always led by the obvious. The magic enticed, but the desperation appeared all too soon. And only Frank recognized something of himself in it, something he didn’t like at all.
As for the president, after that night, he and Marilyn never saw each other again. Concerned that her over-the-top performance at Madison Square Garden could escalate the gossip about him and Monroe from talk to print, he assigned staff members to kill news stories and distanced himself permanently from her.
Sewn into her skintight dress, she was an illusion; that spring and summer, she fought a desperate battle to hold on to whoever she might actually be. She was sick, lonely, and afraid; she was addicted to a wide array of dangerously interactive drugs prescribed by two different doctors (one of them her—and formerly Frank’s—psychiatrist, Mickey Rudin’s brother-in-law Ralph Greenson). Bound by an ill-considered contract to star in a movie she didn’t want to make for a studio that itself was falling apart, she grew increasingly unable to cope. The film—a remake of a 1940 Cary Grant–Irene Dunne screwball comedy, My Favorite Wife—was called, all too tellingly, Something’s Got to Give. Dean Martin was to co-star. The script was a rambling mess. The director was the great but fussy George Cukor; the studio, 20th Century Fox, was hemorrhaging money on two fronts: in Rome, where amid a tabloid frenzy surrounding a train wreck of a romance between Richard Burton and a chronically ill Elizabeth Taylor, production costs of Cleopatra had hit a mind-boggling $30 million; and in Hollywood, where Marilyn Monroe’s continual absences—she too was ill, with chronic sinusitis, with sleep deprivation and drug addiction and terror—had turned the production schedule into an expensive nightmare.
In the seven weeks since shooting had begun on Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn had shown up for a total of five days’ work. The picture was thirty-two days behind schedule and $2 million over budget. On June 9, the same day Frank was to perform at Princess Grace’s Monte Carlo gala, Fox announced that it was firing her and replacing her with Lee Remick. In the battle between the sick superstars, on a much less expensive picture, Monroe was simply more expendable. “It’s sad, but no studio these days can afford to have Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe working at the same time—especially at a studio that lost $25 million last year,” a front-office executive (probably a Fox mouthpiece) told the Associated Press.
The same executive, who asked to be anonymous, predicted that Marilyn’s firing could mean the en
d of a fabulous career.
“Marilyn claims she can’t work because she was sick. I actually believe Marilyn thinks she is sick.
“It’s all in her mind, of course, and maybe her mental condition makes her physically ill. I don’t think she can control herself. She wants to work, wants to be a great actress, and is a great star.
“But whatever her ailment is, it just won’t let her work.”
It was not all in her mind. Ralph Greenson and other doctors had addicted her to uppers and downers and antianxiety drugs whose side effects and aftereffects left her scared out of her wits. What’s more, Fox knew it had a dog on its hands with Something’s Got to Give. The script was beyond repair, and Cukor’s slow shooting was as much to blame for the delays as Marilyn’s absences. She was, as one of the movie’s producers later said, “a pawn—an interesting pawn, a sad pawn, it’s tragic, it’s funny—but a pawn. And that’s the real Hollywood story.”
Shortly after she was fired, Dean Martin, saying it was a waste of his time to make the picture with anyone but Marilyn, quit. The movie would never be completed.
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Sinatra, who loved her in his own way and understood Hollywood as clearly as anybody, spoke out soon afterward. “Frankly, I don’t know too much about it,” he said in New York on June 18. “But, it is my contention from afar that there is a slight possibility that Marilyn and Dean might be whipping boys. Maybe the company wants to satisfy the stockholders. All in all, the public profited. It was a lousy script.”
When he got back to Los Angeles, Frank did his best to help Marilyn out, putting his lawyers at her service and letting it be known that Essex Productions was prepared to make her next picture. “I think it would be good for Sinatra,” he said. “It is good company. It is good chemistry. The public would find it exciting.”
“In the meantime,” wrote David Lewin of the London Daily Express, “Marilyn Monroe goes quietly about her own affairs, which at the moment consist mainly of decorating her new Mexican-style home near the Pacific Ocean and reading the scripts which are offered to her every day.”
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A third problem for Frank that summer—more like an irritant at this stage—was Sam Giancana, still chafing under the FBI’s intense surveillance and furious that Sinatra’s promises about intervening on his behalf with the Kennedys had been empty. “Lying [expletive]!” he exploded in a wiretapped conversation with an associate. He was referring to Frank. “If I ever listen to that [expletive] again…I figured with this guy, maybe we’ll be all right. I might have known this guy would [expletive] me.”
At one point, Giancana’s underling (and Frank’s occasional houseguest) Johnny Formosa suggested a remedy. “Let’s show ’em,” Formosa said. “Let’s show those asshole Hollywood fruitcakes that they can’t get away with it as if nothing’s happened. Let’s hit Sinatra. Or I could whack out a couple of those other guys. Lawford and that Martin, and I could take the nigger and put his other eye out.”
“No,” Sam said. “I’ve got other plans for them.”
Mooney’s restraint was remarkable: the Feds had severely hedged his power. The previous year, when he tried to borrow $3 million from the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund for a major renovation of the Cal-Neva Lodge, Jimmy Hoffa turned him down personally. “Once I got $1,750,000 from him in two days,” Giancana whined to a friend. “Now all this heat comes on and I can’t even get a favor out of him now. I can’t do nothing for myself. Ten years ago I can get all the fucking money I want from the guy and now they won’t settle for anything.”
A number of large figures had been bandied about for the renovation: $3 million, $4 million; a newspaper piece in the fall of 1961 quoted Hank Sanicola spinning the daydream of a $10 million transformation of Cal-Neva, including a new hotel. When construction and organized crime are intertwined, all bets are off as far as budgetary accuracy is concerned. But apparently Giancana did manage to get a $1.5 million loan from the Bank of Nevada (Skinny D’Amato was wiretapped discussing it)—enough to trick the lodge out with a rooftop helipad, a high-end beauty parlor, an I. Magnin clothing store, and “a completely new swank showroom,” as a boosterish piece in the Nevada State Journal referred to the brand-new Celebrity Room.
The new showroom, part of the club’s current $3,000,000 expansion and remodeling project, will seat almost 500 for the first dinner show and more than 700 for the second no-food show. Seats in the room are on four levels, and the forward section of the stage is designed to be lowered to floor level for entertainers who like to work closer to the audience.
The piece did not mention the women who would be flown in from San Francisco to staff the prostitution business that would be run openly from the front desk.
Whether the remodel had cost $3 million or $1.5 million, a lot had gone into it, and Giancana was worried about what he was going to get out. “I am going to get my money out of there and I’m going to wind up with half of the joint with no money,” he told Johnny Rosselli, a little cryptically. (Maybe he meant “or” rather than “and.”) “Not going to make any difference…That joint ain’t going to be no good because it’s a very short season.”
This much was true. Heavy Sierra snowfalls could begin in October and continue into May, and the roads to the resort were narrow. Frank, Nancy Sinatra writes, decided the only way to turn a profit was to “help improve local roads and develop winter activities,” with an eye to turning Cal-Neva into a year-round business.
But Sam Giancana wasn’t talking snowshoes and ski lifts, and he was very much a partner (if not, as some have asserted, the outright owner), despite the officially listed troika of Frank (said to own 50 percent of the resort), Sanford Waterman (16 percent), and Hank Sanicola (33 percent).
Sinatra had high hopes anyway. Whatever his precise arrangement with Giancana, he was, for the first time in his life, taking an active role in the management of a hotel-casino (his stake in the Sands was just that: Jack Entratter and Carl Cohen—and the boys back east—were the ones actually running the show). Frank was proud of his new baby, as the Associated Press’s movie-television reporter James Bacon wrote.
The dawn mists had barely lifted from Lake Tahoe, high in the California Sierras.
And there, blueprint in hand, stood Frank Sinatra telling a carpenter where to build a partition.
It was quite a sight but not quite as astounding as one later in the morning.
There stood Sinatra in the midst of a group of busboys demonstrating the proper way to remove dishes noiselessly from a table.
Later, Frank walked Bacon around the grounds. “Next year we’ll have our eight-story hotel built, and we’ll stay open all year round,” he boasted. When the reporter asked about the heavy snows, Sinatra shrugged off the issue, saying helicopter service between Cal-Neva and the Reno airport, some fifty miles away, was the easy fix.
“As I say,” Frank told Bacon, “you gotta spend money to make money.”
Yes, but whose money?
Naturally, the casino, not the showroom or the hotel, would be Cal-Neva’s profit center. And where the casino was concerned, Giancana wasn’t taking any chances. In 2003, Anthony Summers interviewed Dan Arney, who co-piloted the Christina in the 1960s, about what Arney called “the skim run.” “They’d call up and tell us we were going to Truckee-Tahoe, and from there to the Sands and on to Burbank, which meant they were going on a money run,” the pilot said. “I remember once there were three briefcases, and I got to go back during the flight and see inside one of them. The cash was in $10,000 stacks.”
Another strategy for profitability.
Predictably, Frank’s June 29 opening was, as Variety would put it, boffo. “Frank Sinatra’s first business venture in northern Nevada is off to a swinging start,” the show-business weekly opined, noting that the opening had “attracted a more than capacity crowd including many top business and film names from Hollywood.” James Bacon noted in another AP dispatch that Juliet Prowse was present at ringside whe
n Frank began to sing. “The shapely South African dancer arrived in Sinatra’s private plane along with restaurateur Mike Romanoff, stylist Sy Devore, producers Bill Perlberg and Bill Goetz, actors David Janssen and Richard Conte and other Hollywoodites,” Bacon wrote.
While Sinatra was on a two-month world tour for the benefit of underprivileged children, Miss Prowse dated Eddie Fisher.
When Sinatra returned, he and Miss Prowse resumed dating. That rekindled romantic speculations but both claim the dating is all on a friendly basis.
At a post-midnight show Sunday, Sinatra barely opened his mouth before several tables of matrons started squealing like bobby soxers.
It was reminiscent of World War II days—probably the same girls—when Sinatra was reigning king of the swooners.
Once he yelled to the wings for a busboy to bring him some tea and honey.
Out strolled deadpan comic Joey Bishop, complete with white coat, napkin on arm and a cup of tea.
“Frank,” said Bishop, “you asked me to work at Cal-Neva but you didn’t say what I was to do. I gotta start reading these contracts better.”
The headline? Frank’s most passionate fans were now matrons. (The subhead: the Rat Pack wasn’t quite what it used to be. Responding to rumors that his friendship with Sinatra had cooled, Sammy said, “Everything’s wonderful. But I can’t hang out all evening anymore or meet people at 5 a.m. I’m a married man.”)
And the subtext was shifting alliances, with Cal-Neva the focus. No matter how scathing Giancana’s personal feelings toward Sinatra, the gangster’s weakness for Frank’s singing kept him coming back for more. Sometimes, despite the Black Book’s proscription, he came to Cal-Neva—sneaking in by helicopter, according to one source—not only to hear Sinatra, but to meet his girlfriend Phyllis McGuire and, of course, to check up on his investment.
