by James Kaplan
On that same night, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., along with an orchestra conducted by Billy May, made a recording of their popular nightclub duet “Me and My Shadow.” Despite the racist overtones, it’s a jaunty and infectious rendition; Frank and Sammy are in great voice, May’s arrangement kicks, and the harmonizing and clever (and updated) repartee are charming:
We’re closer than smog when it clings to L.A.,
We’re closer than Bobby is to JFK.
At the same time, Frank was preparing (as best he could) for nuclear war. Over the weekend, while he was in Palm Springs, White House press secretary Pierre Salinger had called to say there might be big trouble—a striking gesture from an administration that had officially distanced itself from Sinatra. Frank’s daughter Nancy remembered that her father phoned her and her husband, Tommy Sands, in New York, telling them to pack a suitcase and watch the president’s speech on television that night. They should be ready to leave, Sinatra said, the moment the broadcast was over.
What Frank knew was that President Kennedy was going to announce a military blockade of Cuba. Pierre Salinger had told Sinatra that if the Russians launched a retaliatory missile strike on Washington, missiles would hit New York, too. Frank told his daughter that he had a family survival plan in place: the Sinatras would fly from airstrip to airstrip aboard his jet, which he’d stocked with food and drink.
Tina Sinatra, then fourteen, remembered “fear and chaos [running] through the halls of Marymount,” her private school. Irving “Sarge” Weiss, Sanicola’s replacement as Frank’s factotum, took her home, and Big Nancy drove with her younger daughter to Palm Springs. “Dad flew in and met us at the Compound,” Tina recalled. “Nancy and Tommy were in from back east. We spent most of the weekend watching Huntley and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite, and I remember how somber Mom and Dad seemed for those few days. My father was calm but strictly business, as if gauging our next step.”
Unable to fathom the gravity of the situation, Tina writes, she mainly had a good time, enjoying the temporary family togetherness. But she also remembered “stores of canned food and water that had been laid in” and the map her father had drawn “of the region’s deserted airstrips, just in case we needed to use his plane.”
Methodical Frank even took the time to track down Juliet Prowse in Manhattan. “I don’t know how he found out where I was,” she recalled, “but he called me at my hotel and said: ‘I want you to get out of New York City because it’s going to be blown apart.’ ” She told him she planned to take her chances.
Prowse, and everyone else in the world, lucked out. On October 27, after a two-week chess game involving many bluffs and much maneuvering all around to save face, Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed to a truce. The Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade; the United States also secretly removed its missiles from Turkey and southern Italy.
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“On the set of ‘Come Blow Your Horn,’ Frank Sinatra is the most relaxed he’s been in years,” Louella Parsons wrote on October 29.
One reason has to be the dialogue dreamed up by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, which included a scene that repeatedly broke up Sinatra and the whole company.
Dan Blocker, who weighs in at 270 pounds and stands 6′4″, suspects Frank of making a play for his screen wife, Phyllis McGuire. Dan drawls: “If ah evva catch you ’round my wife, ah’m gonna stomp a mud hole in you and wade you dry!”
The inside joke, of course, being that in real life six-four and 270 pounds were as nothing next to Sinatra’s power.
Tony Bill, who would continue acting for a while after Come Blow Your Horn, then became a successful producer and director, has long remembered his first motion picture as one of the most pleasant shoots in his career. “It was low-key, it was fun, it was civil,” he recalled. He attributed this directly to the ease of Sinatra and Bud Yorkin’s collaboration.
“Bud was clearly not in control in the literal sense, because Sinatra had the power to overrule people,” Bill said. “But I didn’t notice him using that power very often.”
He didn’t have to. Yorkin amused him, the story amused him, and nobody had to kill themselves to make this picture. He could afford to treat the help well. A sensitive and bookish young man, Tony Bill was too naïve to be intimidated by Sinatra. “I came out of a Catholic men’s college,” he said. “I didn’t relate to dressing nattily. I didn’t relate to cool language, the Sinatra argot. I didn’t relate to gangsters and dangerous women. I didn’t relate to the trappings of that level of success.”
With his sensitive antennae, Frank picked this up and respected it, taking the quarter-century-younger actor under his wing. He was “kind of avuncular,” Bill recalled. “Thoroughly professional and courteous and often solicitous.” Frank now and then included Bill and his then wife in dinner groups; he even flew the young couple, on the Christina, out to the Palm Springs compound one weekend.
“It was like visiting a very, very posh hotel, the owner of which was home but busy,” Bill said. “I remember being enormously impressed by the fact that the bathroom was completely stocked with everything you could want. Not having been in any swell hotels in my life up to that point, it was a revelation that somebody could be that careful.”
The young actor took careful note of the contours of Sinatra’s superstardom. “He was the first movie star I met that had what I call the ‘invisible protective shield,’ ” Bill said. “It is permanent, as far as I can tell. It’s not something you turn on and turn off. It’s a natural human response to stardom—as natural as responses to brainwashing are. I don’t think that these people have become dehumanized altogether, but I think their ability to relate to other people on a totally non-star level becomes eroded to the point of nonexistence over a period of time—just like solitary confinement or torture. It’s a reverse torture—the torture of privilege. To be fawned over, to have all your jokes laughed at, to never be criticized, never wait for anything, never want for anything—all of that stuff I found to be kind of an embarrassment. But there is almost no human way to resist it.”
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For all Frank’s power, though, he had little control over those other plans Sam Giancana had made for him.
Villa Venice was a big, upscale Italian restaurant in the leafy village of Wheeling, Illinois, a dozen miles north of Chicago. In the 1920s, it had been a major nightclub, hosting many of the jazz bands of the era; then the club closed, leaving a cavernous space perfect for catered affairs. It was the kind of place where a gangland wedding reception might be held, and where more than one had been held.
Giancana was a part owner of the Villa, though as usual other men fronted for him. In early 1962, he spent a great deal of money—some reports said as much as $250,000—to restore the place to its former glory as a nightclub, with actual canals, to be plied by actual gondoliers, out front, and a showroom capable of seating eight hundred. He planned to recoup his investment, and then some, and his idea was simple.
History had shown that nightclubs were a dying business—except in Vegas and Tahoe, where legal casinos could make up the revenue that the showrooms lost to high-priced bookings. Mooney’s scheme (hatched, astoundingly, under the nose of Bobby Kennedy) was to open a distinctly extralegal casino in a Quonset hut two blocks from the Villa Venice, for one month only—blink and you’d miss it—and to draw the high-rolling suckers with two of the biggest acts in show business: first, Eddie Fisher, and then the Clan itself, Frank, Dean, and Sammy.
Giancana told Frank to take care of it; Frank took care of it.
“I was singing at the Latin Casino [near Philadelphia] when I got the call from Frank in August 1962,” Fisher recalled. “It was the day Marilyn Monroe was found dead, and he was very upset. He said he wanted me to open for him at a club called the Villa Venice in Chicago. I said, ‘Frank, I can’t do it. I’ve been working too hard. I’m too tired to go to Chicago.’ That wasn’t good enough for Sinatra. He persist
ed until I said, ‘All right. But I’m supposed to go back to the Desert Inn after I close at the [New York] Winter Garden. If you can get me out of that, I’ll come to Chicago.’ I thought I had the perfect excuse. Sinatra owned a piece of the Sands, one of the Desert Inn’s chief competitors, and I was certain there was no way the Desert Inn would let me go. But somehow Frank arranged it.”
Sinatra himself was not about to do Mooney’s bidding without making a few demands in return. For one thing, he wanted Reprise to record the Summit concerts: Frank figured the resulting LP would easily sell a million copies, netting him, at a profit of fifty cents per album, $500,000. In addition, he told the gangster, he and Dean would like a private train car to take them from Los Angeles to Chicago. In a wiretapped phone conversation, Giancana showed his frustration: “That Frank, he wants more money, he wants this, he wants that, he wants more girls, he wants…I don’t need that or him…I broke my ass when I was talking to him in New York.”
In the meantime, more than one newspaper declared that Sinatra was a partner in the Villa Venice, or even owned the place. (“Pretty soon, millionaire Frank will own everything,” Sheilah Graham wrote.)
It has never been entirely clear whether Giancana paid the entertainers or demanded they work gratis. The gangster certainly had grounds to feel that Sinatra owed him, big-time, for helping Frank’s buddy JFK win West Virginia and Illinois and for enduring the Kennedys’ ingratitude afterward. And the attorney general was turning up the heat. After Eddie Fisher’s October 31 opening at the Villa Venice, three FBI agents visited him in his hotel room, wanting to know what the singer could tell them about Giancana. The Feds were also curious about what Fisher was doing performing in Wheeling, Illinois. “Because a friend asked me to do him a favor,” the singer told the agents. “I was paid next to nothing and even got stuck with a huge hotel bill at the Ambassador East. Doing favors for friends can be very expensive.”
Sammy Davis (who himself owed Mooney $20,000, which the gangster had fronted him to buy jewelry) did a week at the Villa Venice after Fisher left, and then, on November 26, Frank and Dean joined him, filling out the Summit—and the showroom, in which, at least one article said, there had been empty seats during Sammy’s stand.
For Frank, Dean, and Sammy—doing sixteen shows over seven nights—it was standing room only. “Lines snaked around the block from the unlikely nightclub’s doors,” Shawn Levy writes. “The Quonset hut casino was packed. The opening night crowd included a rogue’s gallery of Chicago criminals: Marshall Caifano, Jimmy ‘The Monk’ Allegretti, Felix ‘Milwaukee Phil’ Alderisio, Willie ‘Potatoes’ Daddano, and, of course, Giancana, as well as Wisconsin gangster Jim DeGeorge and Joe Fischetti, Frank’s guy from the Fontainebleau.” The dapper crooks and their bouffanted dates sat in Italianate splendor in a showroom “sumptuously decorated with a thick burgundy carpet and discreetly tasteful wall furnishings.”
For Sammy’s week, the cover charge had been an already high $5 (the equivalent of about $40 today). For the Summit shows, the cover was doubled, and no smaller a party than ten could reserve a table; the Villa was making $100 a table per show before liquor and food were added. But Giancana made his real money at the Quonset hut, where the roulette wheels and craps and blackjack tables were all rigged.
Everything about the operation suggested an elegant sham; much of the show was done with a nudge and a wink. On opening night, Dean Martin ambled out onto the showroom floor, glass in hand, and, after delivering his usual line (“How long I been on?”), began to sing a parody of “When You’re Smiling”:
When you’re drinking, when you’re drinkin’,
The show looks good to you.
He then segued into a takeoff (special lyrics by his pal Sammy Cahn) on “The Lady Is a Tramp”:
I love Chicago, it’s carefree and gay,
I’d even work here without any pay.
The audience ate it up. Then, after Dean had mellowed them down with only half-joking renditions of “Volaré” and “On an Evening in Roma,” Frank came out and worked them up again, emerging to the bouncing beat of “Goody Goody”—Matty Malneck, the composer himself, was leading the band—as the men applauded fervently and the women screamed. As was so often the case when he performed this song, his pitch was all over the place, but it didn’t matter: it was Sinatra.
Among the ringside couples were Sam Giancana and Judy Campbell. The two had become deeply involved that fall, despite his continuing relationship with Phyllis McGuire; according to Campbell, Mooney had even helped her get an abortion for the child she claimed she’d conceived with Jack Kennedy. Now, as Sam and Judy listened to Frank working his magic, the mobster was as entranced as anyone else in the room: in the end, he too was a fan.
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The FBI also interviewed Frank while he was in town, but all he would tell them was that he was doing the shows as a favor for the nominal owner, Leo Olsen, who was an old Chicago friend. The agents tried to talk with Dean too, but he made himself scarce. Sammy, though, was just cowed enough by the pair of beefy white guys with suits and badges to let them into his suite at the Ambassador East one morning. When the agents asked him why he had turned aside lucrative nightclub gigs to work for free, he offered to fix them a drink—they declined—then took one himself.
“Baby, that’s a very good question,” Davis said. “But I have to say it’s for my man Francis.”
“Or friends of his?”
“By all means.”
“Like Sam Giancana?”
“By all means.”
The agents asked Davis to elaborate. “Baby, let me say this,” the entertainer said. “I got one eye, and that one eye sees a lot of things that my brain tells me I shouldn’t talk about. Because my brain says that, if I do, my one eye might not be seeing anything after a while.”
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The last show was December 2; the trio left town. Dinah Shore had been scheduled to open next, but she mysteriously canceled at the last minute. On the third, just before it was to be raided by the Illinois State Police, the Quonset hut shut down, and the Villa Venice closed its restaurant and nightclub operations for good. From that day forth, it would operate solely as a catering hall. FBI wiretaps later discovered that Sam Giancana had cleared $3 million, tax-free, in the course of his lucrative November.
“Good thing Peter Lawford did not appear at the Villa Venice in Chicago with others of ‘The Clan,’ ” Sheilah Graham wrote in her December 11 column. “Because of the current investigation of the nearby floating crap game, and the fact that the Villa Venice was reopened for only one month…Also I’ve been told that Sinatra picked up the hotel tab for his group, to the tune of $5,000 for one week. The whole business sounds somewhat odd.”
* * *
*1 Quite indiscreetly, Monroe phoned Roberts from Crosby’s for advice on “a friend’s” back problems; moments later, the startled masseur found himself talking with a man who sounded exactly like JFK.
*2 As well as the brother-in-law of Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson.
*3 Her last words to Lawford were “Say goodbye to Pat, say goodbye to the president, and say goodbye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.” Strangely, she then whispered, “I’ll see, I’ll see,” then was silent.
*4 The Count could read music, but just adequately: on numbers he was less familiar with, he ceded the keyboard to Miller. See Ed O’Brien, Sinatra 101, p. 128.
19
I don’t know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation.
—MIKE SHORE, WRITING AS FRANK SINATRA IN THE FEBRUARY 1963 PLAYBOY INTERVIEW
Ava had turned forty on Christmas Eve: a difficult enough age for any woman in that prefeminist era, but a crushing passage for a screen goddess. Her self-esteem and her professional ambitions sinking, she continued to drift, scattering picturesque wrecka
ge in her wake. In the latter half of the year, she’d made a rotten historical drama called 55 Days at Peking; in the course of the shoot, she had thoroughly alienated much of the cast and crew, especially her co-star Charlton Heston; possibly caused the director, Nicholas Ray, to have a heart attack; and suffered a kind of breakdown herself, suddenly finding it impossible to remember her lines.
She somehow finished the picture and even managed to get hired for a new one, Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther, but her outrageous demands and impossible behavior got her dismissed as a bad bet before shooting began. One night in Paris around this time, she went to eat at the fabled restaurant Tour d’Argent, where the tall and dashing owner, Claude Terrail, greeted her personally.
“Do you remember me, Claude?” Ava asked. “I came here once long ago.”
“I remember very well,” Terrail said. “You came with Frank Sinatra.”
They had a drink, a talk, and then they had an affair, for the next seven or eight months. “Claude Terrail was no naïf, no stranger to glamorous women or to the eccentric lives of show-business celebrities,” writes Gardner’s biographer Lee Server. He was an international playboy, he had seen and done many things, but he had never experienced anything like Ava’s enduring fascination with Frank. “She would put one of his records on and have a private talk with him, as he was singing,” Terrail recalled. “She would sit and listen and say, ‘Yes, yes, I know…’ or, ‘No, don’t say that…you must forget…’ She would have a talk with the record itself. It was something almost mystical.”
Theirs was a jet-set romance: in Paris, Madrid, America, the Pacific. “Always she liked to go,” Terrail said, “to run, run, run. Keep on running.” And even though she couldn’t quite quit her old ways (“Ava Gardner and Yves Montand raising Basin Street eyebrows in a secluded corner,” Walter Winchell wrote on January 16), the restaurateur managed to whisk her off for a charmed—and cursed—week in Hawaii. Ava shared one striking characteristic with her ex-husband: when she was sober, she could be sweetness itself, and when she wasn’t, the anger and craziness came on fast. And now that she feared her looks were going, she was drinking more than ever.
