Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  —

  Frank, of course, was out of state—in Manhattan, to be exact. On the night of the twelfth, he finally made it to the Americana to catch Frankie’s act, which he found wanting. “I’m going to kick you right in your Francis!” Senior yelled at Junior afterward. “Don’t ever let me catch you singing like that again, without enthusiasm.”

  The boy tried to explain. “I’m upset over something,” he said.

  “Get lost!” Frank replied. “No matter what your name is, you’re nothing if you aren’t excited about what you’re doing.”

  Unlike his father, Frankie hadn’t learned to shut out the world, which is a lot easier to do if you feel you’re at the center of it. After the show, reporters hit Frank with the inevitable questions about Cal-Neva. “There’s nothing I can say,” he told them. “I won’t know anything until I get back to Los Angeles and talk to my lawyer.” But, he said, “We’ll fight this.”

  The next day, with his old friend Skitch Henderson as piano accompanist, he was the featured entertainment at United Nations Staff Day. Secretary-General U Thant himself introduced Sinatra, as “the great uplifter of spirits.” To prove the secretary-general’s point, Frank looked around the great hall of the General Assembly and asked, rhetorically, “Do you mind if I smoke?” He lit a cigarette and looked around the big room. “It’s essential to relax, with the hot spots around the world,” he explained. “Vietnam…Congo…” He paused for an instant. “Lake Tahoe…”

  As the audience tittered, he added, in a stage whisper, “Anybody want to buy a used casino? I didn’t want it anyway.” It got a big laugh.

  —

  “There are legal brains around,” Earl Wilson noted on the eighteenth, “who think Frank Sinatra has a couple of legs to stand on in his battle with the Nevada Gaming commission.” The equally Frank-friendly columnist Louis Sobol concurred. “What the local gambling fraternity can’t understand,” he wrote, “is all this fuss about Sam Giancana’s stay at the Cal-Neva Lodge when it is no secret that he has financial interests in several casinos in Nevada and has occasionally lodged in Las Vegas hotels.” And attorney Greg Bautzer—who, oddly enough, had represented Nancy Sinatra in her 1949 divorce from Frank—also stuck up for Sinatra. “I don’t think it should be possible,” he said, “that an individual can lose a property right by virtue of having a friend. I can even have a convicted individual as a friend if I desire and there’s no law that says I cannot.”

  Nobody mentioned Frank’s threat to Ed Olsen.

  —

  At the end of September, as the Nevada Gaming Control Board prepared its case against Frank Sinatra, President Kennedy stopped in Las Vegas to give a speech about preserving the nation’s natural resources. As he rode to the Convention Center in an open car with Governor Grant Sawyer, Kennedy turned to him and said, “Aren’t you people being a little hard on Frank out here?” The governor replied, “Well, Mr. President, I’ll try to take care of things here in Nevada, and I wish you luck on the national level.” Taking this for the “fuck you” that it was, JFK pushed back. “Is there anything you can do for Frank?” he asked. “No,” Sawyer said.

  Ed Olsen, who later heard about the exchange from Sawyer, was impressed. “Now, that’s about the highest degree of political pressure that you could ever put into the thing!” he said. While there is no evidence that Sinatra asked for the president’s intercession, or that any political pressure ever came to bear, Frank did go to considerable lengths to prepare his defense before the Gaming Control Board, retaining a well-known Las Vegas criminal attorney named Harry Claiborne. Mickey Rudin consulted. The lawyer later told Nancy Sinatra he’d been ready to prove that Frank hadn’t invited Sam Giancana to Cal-Neva, that Giancana had not stayed at the resort in any case, and that Sinatra had had no idea Momo was in the area. Rudin said that even if he and Frank lost the disciplinary proceedings, he was fully prepared to make an appeal.

  On October 3, Harry Claiborne cross-examined Ed Olsen for four hours. Rudin, a daunting presence, was also there. The Gaming Control Board chairman, creaking in on his crutches, was unintimidated. He had come well prepared: he had a briefcase full of papers attesting to his investigators’ findings and his own recollections of the memorable phone conversation with Sinatra (which he’d transcribed after the fact, not recorded) and, just for insurance, a couple of reels of blank recording tape, which he placed conspicuously on the table.

  It was a brilliant tactic, but it would have taken more than a bit of stagecraft to stop Frank’s attack dogs. What it took, in the end, was the intercession of his new business partner. In the midst of the proceedings, Jack Warner phoned Mickey Rudin and said that if Sinatra were going to be associated with Warner Bros. as an executive, any publicity about Cal-Neva and Giancana was bad publicity. Unless Frank surrendered his casino license, the crusty studio chief commanded, the Warner deal was off. Rudin, who’d been itching to do battle with the Gaming Control Board, heeded his client and reluctantly threw in the towel.

  In the end, though, Sinatra claimed that any worries about losing the Warner Bros. deal had been secondary. The chief reason her father failed to fight the Control Board, Nancy Sinatra writes, was “because the investigation was potentially embarrassing to his friend President Kennedy.”

  Few people besides Frank Sinatra knew just how embarrassing “potentially embarrassing” might be.

  On October 7, Frank officially capitulated. Through Claiborne, he issued a statement saying that “not only as an entertainer, but as an investor and an executive,” he had long been planning—anyway—to divest himself completely from the gaming industry in Nevada and that besides, he had better things to do. “I have recently become associated with a major company in the entertainment industry,” he said, “and in forming that association, I have promised not only to devote my talent as an entertainer to certain of our joint investments, but I have agreed to devote my full time and efforts to that company’s activities in the entertainment industry. Accordingly, I have instructed my attorney to notify the Nevada Gaming officials that I am withdrawing from the gambling industry in Nevada.”

  He could afford to walk away. Not only did he have his Warner money and his Warner respectability, but, as Variety pointed out, “Even this enforced unloading of his Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe and his ‘points’ in The Sands, Las Vegas, will prove an economic windfall. He is certain to turn a capital gain profit on both. In the case of the 9% holdings in the Vegas hostelry, Sinatra envisions a $800,000 capital gain.” In the case of his 50 percent share in Cal-Neva, valued at $3 million, he theoretically stood to take out far more, though the uncertain size of Sam Giancana’s stake muddies the mathematics.

  —

  For all his high-sounding protestations, Frank was desolate about having to give up what his daughter Nancy called “his dream, Cal-Neva,” and furious with Giancana. “That fucker shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” he said. “Look at the trouble he caused. This is his fault, not mine.” For his part, Mooney was incensed with Frank for losing his temper at the chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, a tirade that wound up costing the gangster some $465,000. Sinatra “called Ed Olsen a cripple,” Phyllis McGuire said. “Sam couldn’t get over the fact that Frank had done that. Sam said, ‘If he’d only shut his damned mouth.’ But Sam never could figure out why Frank would deliberately pick fights…He would always say to him, ‘Piano, piano, piano’—‘take it easy, take it easy.’ Sam could never get over the hotheaded way Frank acted.”

  That a psychopathic killer had to tell Sinatra to curb his temper is a remarkable statement in itself.

  “That bastard and his big mouth,” Giancana told another friend. “All he had to do was keep quiet, let the attorneys handle it, apologize, and get a thirty- to sixty-day suspension…but no, Frank has to get on the phone with that damn big mouth of his and now we’ve lost the whole damn place.”

  Conveniently forgetting that it was his own temper that had led to the Chalet 50 f
racas and uncorked this whole bottle of woes in the first place.

  The relationship ended the same way most of Frank’s relationships ended: not with a confrontation, but angry silence. “Mr. S never met with or even called Mr. Sam to tell him he was going the Warner route,” George Jacobs writes. “He just stopped talking to him. He was dumping Sam the same way he dumped his mistresses. Unlike with the girls, he wanted to talk, he planned to talk to Sam, but it didn’t happen.”

  —

  A few months later, Ed Olsen took in Sammy Davis Jr.’s late show at the Sands with friends of his, a couple from California. After the show—which Olsen enjoyed greatly—he went with his friends to the lobby gift shop to buy a newspaper. To the couple’s delight, they spotted Sammy himself off in a corner, taking practice swings with a putter the store had on display. The man and woman took it into their heads to go introduce themselves to Davis, and before Olsen knew it, they were introducing him to the entertainer as well.

  As Olsen recalled, “And Davis looks at me for a second, then he turns to the California people, and he said, ‘I’d like to talk to this man alone.’

  “Then I thought, ‘Oh, God, here comes a brawl for sure.’

  “So they go on their way. Davis gets me off in a corner, and…he undertakes to tell me in many of the same four-letter words that Sinatra used what a great thing I had done. He says, ‘That little son of a bitch, he’s needed this for years. I’ve been working with him for sixteen years, and nobody’s ever had the guts to stand up to him!’ ”

  —

  By all accounts, Frank Sinatra’s relationship with Jack Kennedy was now nearly nonexistent: no more visits in Palm Springs or Washington or Hyannis Port; no more thrilling phone calls from “the prez.” Yet Frank’s telling his daughter that he’d given up on his Cal-Neva defense to avoid embarrassing the president, though self-protective (and self-aggrandizing) on the face of it, made a certain kind of sense. Despite the White House’s distancing—and Jackie Kennedy’s intensive behind-the-scenes efforts—some part of the public still saw Sinatra and JFK as friends. And no matter how venial his sin as Cal-Neva’s licensee, Frank (and the president, by association) had much to lose in the court of public relations if the full extent of his relationship with Giancana were brought to light.

  And of course the president of the United States stood to lose far more than reputation if the full extent of his own connection to Sam Giancana were brought to light.

  —

  Mickey Rudin maintained that the newspapers had sentenced Frank Sinatra to a lifetime of disgrace on two false charges: that he had invited Giancana to Cal-Neva, and that his gaming license had been revoked as a result. And Rudin was right. His client was innocent on both counts: Giancana had in fact invited himself to Cal-Neva, and Frank had surrendered his license voluntarily.

  But was Sinatra, as Cal-Neva’s licensee, responsible for upholding the rules of the Nevada Gaming Commission—the Black Book? He was. Had he used vile and intemperate language and threatened the chairman of the Nevada Gaming Control Board? He had. Would he have lost his license if he had kept fighting? We can’t know.

  Nancy Sinatra maintains that her father was persecuted, despite his alleged innocence, because he was “the single most visible figure in Nevada in those days” and that he never recovered from the Cal-Neva episode. “The press, of course, had a field day,” she writes. “Or a week or month.”

  Because of continual errors in newspaper accounts of the episode, she claims, Frank lost what remained of his naïve ideals and became more apt to carry grudges. He turned more vulnerable and pessimistic, even cynical. Mostly, though (Nancy says), her father was hurt.

  The image of Frank Sinatra as a starry-eyed naïf blinking back tears because those mean newspapermen had turned him into a grudge holder may be absurd; certainly Lew Wasserman, Peter Lawford, and Hank Sanicola would have found it so. But even if Nancy Sinatra understandably saw her father in the most forgiving light, she also knew him the best, and the fact that she now saw a change in him has real meaning. Staring down the barrel of age fifty (he would turn forty-eight in December), Frank was richer than he had ever been and—in part because of it—more isolated and suspicious than ever as well. As had happened with the legendary king, everything he touched turned to gold: he had achieved vast power, but love and nourishment were ever harder to come by.

  —

  Gene Kelly had left MGM in 1957, gradually transitioning from acting to directing and producing, his greatest years behind him along with the greatest years of the Hollywood musical. But in 1963, as Frank Sinatra proposed to revive the genre with Robin and the 7 Hoods (it would be his last musical), he turned to his old Metro stablemate for help.

  With his Warner Bros. deal newly in hand, Frank was feeling expansive. He not only wanted Kelly to co-produce Robin with him; he envisioned a three-picture deal: Sinatra would star in all three, of course; Kelly would co-star with him in the second and direct the third. Kelly, whose phone wasn’t ringing as often as it used to, was happy to play second fiddle.

  Robin and the 7 Hoods, starring Frank, Dean, Sammy, and Bing Crosby (to whom Frank apparently bore no ill will for lending his house to the prez), was to start shooting in mid-October, with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly listed as co-producers. But before the cameras began to roll, Kelly had, as Variety would put it, ankled the project.

  “The reason isn’t too hard to guess,” Dorothy Kilgallen wrote on the twenty-first. “Gene discovered, in discussions with Frank Sinatra, that he wasn’t exactly going to be given free rein as the producer. The star intends to get into that part of the act, too.”

  Kilgallen had guessed right. It was Frank’s picture, Frank’s money, and Frank’s rules. Kelly had told Sinatra he thought there were too many musical numbers in the picture; Sinatra had disagreed. No contest. There was another equally important disagreement: Kelly, a past master of the movie musical, felt rehearsals were crucial. Sinatra had long ago made clear his position on rehearsals.

  “I wasn’t making any decisions,” Kelly later said. “I was taking orders. Quietly, I like the boys, but friendship isn’t always everything in this business.” With Frank, it was far less than that. He took over as sole producer as well as star of Robin and the 7 Hoods, and the three-picture deal was quietly dropped.

  —

  He had long dreamed of being a Mob boss; now he was getting to play one in the movies.

  Turning the story of Robin Hood and his Merry Men into a gangster musical set in Roaring Twenties Chicago wasn’t a bad premise, as premises went—not much worse, say, than basing Guys and Dolls on Damon Runyon’s Times Square tales—and if Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, whom Frank had tapped to create Robin’s score, weren’t quite Frank Loesser, they weren’t far behind. Along with Sammy and Chester, the rest of the production team had also by now become Sinatra-movie regulars: Koch, the musical director Nelson Riddle, the director of photography and associate producer William H. Daniels. And back in the director’s chair was Gordon Douglas, who’d shown such remarkable tolerance for Frank’s unique style of moviemaking on 1954’s Young at Heart.

  Gene Kelly might have lifted the whole project to a different level, but Kelly had been insubordinate, and he was history. No one who was left was likely to repeat his mistake.

  The wispy plot of Robin and the 7 Hoods, cooked up by a sitcom writer named David Schwartz—his most extensive prior experience consisted of writing the 1950s television version of Frank’s boyhood radio favorite, The Amos ’n’ Andy Show—spun off from a gangland rivalry between Robbo (Sinatra), the boss of the North Side, and his South Side counterpart, Guy Gisborne (Peter Falk). There was some misplaced reward money; there was a romantic competition between Robbo and Gisborne over Marian (Barbara Rush), the daughter of a dead gangster. On paper, it was amiable nonsense, but what musical plot isn’t?

  The songs and the cast were the best parts. Dean played Robbo’s gambling sidekick Little John, Sammy was his machine-gun-ha
ppy aide-de-camp Will Scarlet, and Bing portrayed a charmingly corrupt orphanage administrator named Allen A. Dale—a role that had once, long before, been promised to Peter Lawford. Edward G. Robinson had a walk-on as Big Jim, the mobster who gets rubbed out, and veteran Hollywood tough guys like Victor Buono, Allen Jenkins, and Jack La Rue lent color.

  Production began on Halloween with location shooting in Chicago, then shifted to the busy Warner Bros. lot, where Sex and the Single Girl, My Fair Lady, Dear Heart, and John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn were all under way. Robin clicked right along at first, the agreeable and technically proficient Douglas executing his setups smoothly and making no unreasonable demands on the boss. Morale was high. The sixty-year-old Crosby, always on the verge of retirement in those days, was delighted to be in his first musical since High Society and elated at the camaraderie with Sinatra, Martin, and Davis. The only hint of tension came from May Britt, who refused to visit the set because her husband’s obsequiousness to the Leader—a posture Sammy had developed to a fine art—had begun to drive her to distraction.

  On the night of November 13 at Warner Bros., Frank recorded Robin’s one certifiably great song, Cahn and Van Heusen’s first-rate hymn to the Second City, “My Kind of Town.” He was in great voice, full of confidence. By the third week of November, the shoot was a day ahead of schedule.

  Then the unimaginable explosion.

  The story goes that Frank was filming a scene in a Burbank cemetery when the news came from Dallas, but the story is a little too good—or bad, in this case—to be true. On his audio commentary for the DVD of Robin and the 7 Hoods, Frank Sinatra Jr. says that in fact the cemetery location was shot on November 21 and that Frank, wandering off for a smoke between setups, leaned against a tombstone, then noticed its inscription: JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1873–1940.

  The truth appears to be that on November 22, Sinatra, the only star on the call sheet for the day, was filming a courtroom scene on a Warner soundstage (Mickey Rudin, his unlovely mug memorialized for all time, was playing a cameo as the judge) when word of the president’s assassination reached the set. Her father was stunned into silence when he heard the news, Nancy Sinatra writes. Then Frank ordered an aide to get him the White House on the phone. When he returned to the crew, he said, “Let’s shoot this thing, ’cause I don’t want to come back here anymore.”