Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  Production had stopped for all of half an hour. When the cameras started to roll again, veteran tough guy Jack La Rue fainted—perhaps the one honest reaction on the set to the day’s events—and had to be revived. Gordon Douglas shot nine more setups, nineteen takes, before Frank went home at 2:50 p.m.

  In Las Vegas, Variety reported, a twenty-four-hour blackout of all entertainment went into effect after news of President Kennedy’s death. “Casino execs reported gambling came almost to a complete halt early in the afternoon on the day of the assassination,” the weekly noted.

  Sinatra and George Jacobs retreated to Palm Springs, where even his daughter Nancy was unable to reach him by phone. For three days, “he holed up in his bedroom, watching the assassination circus, freaking out along with the rest of the world when Ruby shot Oswald, eating nothing but occasional fried-egg sandwiches, and drinking vast amounts of Jack Daniel’s,” the valet writes.

  He called Pat Lawford in Washington to express his regrets, though he still refused to speak to Peter. Nor did he telephone Jackie or Bobby, who, he said, “wouldn’t return my calls.” He sent an enormous floral display instead. For all his hatred of Bobby, for all the pain “TP” had inflicted upon him by cutting him dead, Mr. S would never say one unkind word about the man he once loved and continued to admire as a leader, if not as a man. “I really liked Jack,” I told Mr. S. I’d been crying. I couldn’t help it. “He liked you, too, George,” Sinatra answered sadly. “Probably more than me.”

  “Frank was pretty broken up when he talked to Pat and would have given anything to come back to Washington for Jack’s funeral, but it just wasn’t possible to invite him,” Peter Lawford recalled, with a certain amount of schadenfreude. “He’d already been too much of an embarrassment to the family.”

  When filming resumed on Robin and the 7 Hoods the next week, the set’s sense of high-spirited efficiency had evaporated. Suddenly the subject of gangland shootings had lost its humor. After Frank overheard some of the cast and crew making dark comments about Dallas and its citizens, he got on the soundstage’s PA system and gave an impassioned impromptu speech pleading for tolerance. There was a moment of stunned silence, then the group burst into spontaneous applause. The Hollywood trade papers picked up the story.

  —

  The nation had been through dark periods before, but nothing like this. Had the president been gunned down in the lobby of a building or at a private gathering, it would still have been awful, but it would have been different. Instead, it had been the most public and gruesome of murders. In a second, in the bright sunlight of an autumn midday in Dallas, the image of vigor and glamour that had inspired the whole world, whatever its true substance, had been replaced with one of pornographic violence: frame 313 of the Zapruder film, the pink flash. It was as though the jaws of hell had suddenly opened and Satan had laughed at the folly of human vanity. It was impossible to have lived through that day and not taken on a heightened sense of one’s own vulnerability and the transience and fragility of every human activity. Frank would have felt all this as he felt everything: in the keenest possible way.

  And who had done it? He knew things; he had been told things. To live alone with what he thought might be true seemed truly awful.

  But worst of all would have been the idea that all the power in the world ultimately meant nothing.

  —

  That was the Thanksgiving everyone sleepwalked through, and Sinatra was no exception. The assassination had shaken him badly; mortality was on his mind. He was going to be forty-eight in a couple of weeks, no longer on the green upslope of the decade, but headed toward a future of diminishing returns. The Camels and the Jack Daniel’s stayed with him longer; the first sight of his face in the morning was not encouraging.

  The holiday dinner, as always, was at the Palm Springs compound, Big Nancy and Frankie and Tina all in attendance. Nancy senior did the cooking: two tomasina (hen) turkeys, with yams, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, her special stuffing (with pecans, apricots, and celery, the top slightly burned), and pumpkin pie.

  To Frank it tasted like ashes.

  “Thanksgiving was a jovial holiday for our family, but that year my father was subdued,” Tina Sinatra recalled. “ ‘This shouldn’t be happening anywhere,’ he kept saying, ‘but certainly not here.’ ”

  —

  Did Frank have feelings for Dean, and did Dean feel for Frank? Surely; deeply. And either man would rather have had a molar extracted, sans anesthesia, than look the other in the eye and express feelings. The same, and then some, held true for the way both Sinatra and Martin felt about Bing Crosby. Both had long idolized him: Dean had stolen from him; and Frank had recently resented him. And Bing, the perfect idol, was even further—light-years away—from doing anything like expressing feelings like (as he thought of them) those warm-blooded Italian boys.

  The whole farrago is what makes the trio’s performance of Cahn and Van Heusen’s superbly stylish “Style”—

  A flower’s not a flower if it’s wilted,

  A hat’s not a hat till it’s tilted

  —so delicious. Wearing tuxes and boaters and wielding walking sticks, the three are the furthest thing from a crowd: each man is eye-catching in his own way, but nobody steals the show. And the feelings each had for the others are there too, only deep under the surface, which is, of course, pure style.

  They recorded it on the night of December 3—five days after Thanksgiving, eleven days after the assassination. All feelings, except the joy of performance, buried deep beneath the surface, where all three men felt that feelings mostly belonged.

  —

  Barry Keenan was the kind of talented screwup everyone has encountered, a guy who peaked too early and burned out young. As a student at University High School in West Los Angeles in the late 1950s—Nancy Sinatra was a friend and fellow student, as were Jan Berry and Dean Torrence, soon to become the successful singing duo Jan and Dean—Keenan had a seemingly contradictory reputation: he was a charming, hard-drinking partier and also an extremely clever and ambitious kid, fascinated with the stock market and determined to become a millionaire before he turned thirty.

  He almost made it. By age twenty-one, he was a successful real estate investor and the youngest member of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, earning in the neighborhood of $10,000 a month in early-1960s dollars. He married young and lived well. But then he was badly injured in a car wreck, and in short order he became addicted to painkillers and lost all his money. His marriage fell apart. There were some minor scrapes with the law.

  In 1962, he began to hit up his old friend Dean Torrence for money—not much at first, just a couple of hundred here and there. Torrence could easily afford it. By now, he and Jan Berry had forged a successful rock ’n’ roll career, and an atypical one: both were still living at home and completing their college studies, Berry in premed at UCLA, Torrence in architecture at USC. Dean Torrence had a substantial bank account, partly thanks to stock investments he’d made on Keenan’s recommendation.

  Keenan and Torrence had another bond: at Uni High, along with Jan Berry and another friend, a tough guy named Joe Amsler, they had been part of a social club called the Barons, many of whose members maintained a close fraternal tie in the years after high school. As a friend and a former Baron, Torrence felt obliged to help Keenan out; at the same time, he did his best to make himself scarce whenever Keenan came calling.

  In the spring of 1963, Barry Keenan contacted Dean Torrence again, saying he wanted to talk to him. “I knew what that meant,” Torrence recalled. He told Keenan he was on his way to class at USC. When Torrence came out of class, he found Keenan waiting for him. “I need to speak to you in kind of a quiet place,” he said.

  They sat on the quad. Keenan told Torrence that he was in desperate financial shape, that a job in door-to-door sales had led nowhere. He owed his family a lot of money. Now, he said, he had a venture in mind; he produced a three-ring notebook in which he had careful
ly outlined the business plan. He spelled it all out as Torrence sat in disbelief. Barry Keenan told Dean Torrence that he had carefully researched different sorts of crimes and had come up with the one that involved the least risk and would deliver the biggest payoff: kidnapping the son of a famous entertainer.

  —

  Snow was falling over Lake Tahoe on Sunday, December 8; cars with jingling snow chains on their tires crawled over icy Route 50, which skirted the southeast edge of the lake and ran by Harrah’s hotel-casino, on the state line. Unlike Cal-Neva to the north, Bill Harrah’s resort operated throughout the winter, drawing crowds for the gambling and the star attractions in the South Shore Room. The entertainment this weekend was Frank Sinatra Jr., singing with Sam Donahue and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

  Frankie, in boxer shorts and a white T-shirt, was relaxing in his suite before the first show, eating room-service chicken with a trumpeter in the band named John Foss. The phone rang, and Frankie picked it up. “Not here,” he said after a moment. “Wrong number.”

  At about 9:30 p.m., there was a knock on the door. “Room service,” the voice outside said loudly. “I’ve got a package for you.”

  Foss opened the door, and a man wearing a brown ski parka and carrying a wine carton entered. The man put the box on a table, then, fumbling, pulled a blue-steel .38 revolver—loaded—from his pocket and pointed it at John Foss and Frank Sinatra Jr. He told them to lie on the bed. Another man now entered the room. The two were Barry Keenan and Joe Amsler. Keenan had lured Amsler—who since high school had earned a marginal living as a prizefighter and a fisherman, as well as a minor criminal record—to Tahoe with the lie that a construction job awaited both of them; he’d put off telling him about the kidnap plot until the last minute. Both were almost incapacitatingly nervous. “Where’s the money?” Keenan demanded, as though robbery were what they’d come for. (In fact, he was broke again, lacking enough cash to buy gas for the getaway car, a 1963 Chevrolet Impala.) Frankie and Foss gave him all they had in their wallets, $20 and change.

  “We’d better take one of you guys with us,” Keenan said. He pointed at Frankie. “You,” he said.

  “But I’m in my underwear,” Frankie said.

  “Then get dressed, because you’re coming with us,” Keenan said.

  While Frankie put on a pair of gray slacks, brown loafers without socks, and a blue Windbreaker, Keenan bound Foss’s wrists with surgical tape. Amsler tied Frankie’s wrists behind his back and blindfolded him with a sleep mask, and then he and Barry Keenan hustled Junior out of the room, into the dark and snow. A moment later, Keenan returned to the room and tore the telephone wire from the wall. He left not realizing he had accidentally left his gun in the hotel room.

  —

  In a few minutes, John Foss managed to free himself and run to the lobby, where he told the receptionist that Frank Sinatra Jr. had been kidnapped; he then gave the news to Frankie’s manager, Tino Barzie. Within half an hour, the hotel was swarming with police. Faced with the unpleasant duty of phoning Frank senior with the terrible news (and perhaps remembering Lawford’s fate), Barzie punted, calling Big Nancy instead. Nancy, who was having dinner in her Bel Air house with the Hollywood gossip columnist Rona Barrett,* put her hand over the telephone. “Good Lord, Rona,” she said. “They’ve kidnapped Frank Junior!” She then phoned Frank in Palm Springs. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it,” Sinatra said. “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no.”

  Frank quickly chartered a plane (the Christina was in Los Angeles) and flew through the blizzard to Reno: no small matter for him; he was always more frightened of flying than he let on. William Raggio, the district attorney of Washoe County and an old friend, met him at the airport, as did a crowd of reporters and photographers. “I got no comment to make,” a shaken Frank told them brusquely. “Just get away from me, you bums.” Together, he and Raggio got in the DA’s car and headed toward Harrah’s, sixty miles to the south, but by now blizzard conditions had made the roads impassable, and the two had to return to Reno. There, in a sixth-floor suite of the Mapes Hotel, a grand old Art Deco high-rise downtown, Frank—along with Mickey Rudin, Jack Entratter, Jim Mahoney (who had now replaced Chuck Moses as Sinatra’s publicist), Jilly Rizzo, and five FBI agents—awaited a call from whoever it was that had taken his son.

  Back at Harrah’s, the FBI administered lie-detector tests to John Foss and Tino Barzie, asking them, among other things, if the kidnapping was a hoax. It was a strange question, but one that, in the present strange conditions, had to be asked. Both men said that they knew of no hoax, and both passed the test.

  —

  There was no word that night, though as Frank sat by the telephone, chain-smoking and beyond agitation, many other calls came in, some from unexpected quarters. Bobby Kennedy phoned, and within five minutes the man Sinatra had hated became his ally, as the attorney general promised the Justice Department would give the investigation top priority. Sam Giancana called, offering to conduct his own form of investigation, and Frank alienated his former friend even further by telling him to back off: “Please. Don’t do a damn thing. Let the FBI handle this.”

  Pierre Salinger also phoned, as did Pat Brown, the governor of California. And then J. Edgar Hoover himself, ordering Sinatra not to speak to the press. It was not a moment for the savoring of irony.

  On Monday morning, the newspapers were black with headlines, not just about the kidnapping, but about the horrific crash of a Pan Am 707, in a fireball, over Elkton, Maryland, killing all eighty-one people aboard. It was a bleak season. Snow blanketed much of the country. LIGHTNING TURNED PLANE TO FIREBALL?, read the eerie banner headline on the front page of Kansas’s Hutchinson News. The kidnap story ran next to the jet-crash story, a soulful photo of Frankie in a tux cheek by jowl with a picture of the wreckage in Elkton. Underneath was a text block promoting The Torch Is Passed, the Associated Press’s instant book about the Kennedy assassination. “The Hutchinson News has arranged to make it available to all its readers at the very reasonable rate of $2,” the text ran. “It will not be sold through bookstores.”

  The AP story about the jet crash described, in detail, a scene of hellish carnage and destruction. There were a lot of plane crashes in those days. The piece about Frank junior said that the police were seeking two escaped convicts, bank robbers Joseph James Sorce, twenty-three, and Thomas Patrick Keating, twenty-one, in connection with the case. The pair were presumed to be armed and dangerous.

  Frank continued to sit by the phone in the Mapes Hotel, leaving only to go to the bathroom and, for a few minutes, to get some fresh air on the roof. Jim Mahoney issued a statement to the press: “Sinatra is ready to make a deal with the kidnappers, and no questions asked.” The day wore on, but no word came.

  —

  It would have been easy for Frank and his family, in the midst of their unspeakable torment, to have imagined the worst: that violent and desperate career criminals with itchy trigger fingers and little to lose had taken Frank junior. (Many years later, Tina Sinatra recalled that her father had fretted the abduction might have been a message from the Mob to keep quiet about anything that might link organized crime to the Kennedy assassination.) Yet it is hard to imagine that the Sinatras would have derived much comfort from knowing the true story of the kidnapping and the ragtag trio who had pulled it off:

  That Barry Keenan, who was a devout Catholic in addition to being addicted to Percodan and alcohol, had, months before, begun to hear the voice of God. “God talked to me, particularly when I would go to church and light a candle and be still and I would hear God talking to me and telling me what I had to do,” Keenan recalled. “And He was very definite about nobody can be hurt, and I had to pay the money back.” He also planned to tithe 10 percent of the ransom to the church.

  That one section in Barry Keenan’s divided three-ring binder outlined in detail his five-year investment plan for the ransom money, which he intended to put into real estate projects in West Los Angeles and Chrysler Corpor
ation stock, then at an all-time low. Having made a list of the funds he needed for investments and to help his parents, he hit upon the precise amount he needed: $240,000. “Since I was going to have to pay it back,” he recalled, “I didn’t want to raise more money than I could easily pay back.” At the end of five years, he fully intended to return Frank Sinatra’s money to him, with interest. “And just imagining the reaction that he and the FBI would have when the ransom money starts coming back to him,” he said. As it turned out, Keenan’s investment plan, had he had the chance to carry it through, would have been highly successful: Chrysler stock soared, and the West Los Angeles tracts he intended to buy became Marina del Rey.

  That another section in the notebook outlined the potential benefits of the kidnapping to the Sinatra family. “It would bring father and son closer together,” Keenan said. Also, “At the time, Sinatra was being investigated for his connections with the mob and money laundering through the Cal-Neva Lodge and Sands casino in Las Vegas. And I thought, well, this might even help him there…I felt that, if the public would perceive him as a worried parent rather than a famous singer hanging out with the Mafia, that would cast him in a more favorable image.”

  That Keenan, having to press the dim and frightened Joe Amsler into participating in the abduction of Junior, quickly came to feel that he was kidnapping two people: Frankie and Amsler. To help his sidekick to feel calmer and more confident, Keenan gave him some of his Percodans.

  That Frank junior, initially believing that he was only a robbery victim who had been taken hostage, cooperated fully at first with Keenan and Amsler, promising to help them in every way possible and even agreeing to down a couple of sleeping pills with whiskey in order to appear plausibly passed out, rather than kidnapped, if police stopped the getaway car.