by James Kaplan
—
Inside the house at 700 Nimes, Frank was falling apart, railing at what he felt sure was a double cross, shouting orders at the FBI agents (“Call Bobby Kennedy! Call Hoover! Jesus Christ, call the president, I don’t care! Wake up the fucking president! Somebody do something!”), and remonstrating with the Almighty Himself, who, he was certain, was paying special attention. (“God, look, don’t take it out on Frankie, okay? I’m the one. I’m the jerk. Punish me. Not Frankie. That’s what you’re doing, anyway—punishing me, ain’t you? Taking it out on me?”)
And if God, Washington, or fate didn’t intervene in the next five minutes, he told the agents, he was going to call Sam Giancana.
—
George Jones knew about the hordes of reporters and photographers outside 700 Nimes Road, and so he told Frankie to get into the trunk of his car. It wasn’t the first car trunk Junior had been in in the last couple of days. As Jones passed the crowds of journalists outside Nancy Sinatra’s house, he leaned his head out the car window. “Any news yet, boys?” he asked. Then he headed up the driveway to the back door and rang the bell.
An FBI agent answered the door; Nancy Sinatra stood just behind him. “Mrs. Sinatra,” Jones said, “I have your boy in the trunk of my car. And he’s all right.”
Jones opened the trunk, and Frank junior climbed out—skinny, very hungry, but otherwise none the worse for wear. He embraced his hysterical mother. “Hi, Ma,” he said. “Don’t cry—it’s over.” Then he turned to Frank. “Dad, I’m sorry,” Frankie said.
“For what?” Frank asked. “Jesus Christ. For what?”
—
Smiling, Frank walked out to the waiting crowd of reporters—there were about 150 in all—and apologized for keeping them waiting in the cold. It was close to four in the morning of Wednesday, December 11. He turned to go back into Nancy’s house, then turned back to the newsmen once more. “Tomorrow is my birthday,” he said, “and it’s the best present I could get.”
—
“Frankie wolfed down an overdue meal and then was questioned by the FBI,” Tina Sinatra recalled. “After they were done it was family time. We were exhilarated just to be safe and together again. At some point Mom opened a magnum of Dom Pérignon. She drank the entire bottle by herself and never got a headache.
“We’d all caught a second wind, and it was close to dawn before Dad left with Mickey Rudin. Mom called out after him, ‘Frank, button your coat, it’s drizzling.’ ”
—
All day Wednesday, like some manic secret Santa, Barry Keenan drove around Los Angeles, stowing paper bags of cash in the houses of various friends and relatives without their knowledge. The unwitting beneficiaries, soon to stumble upon their good fortune, were people to whom he owed debts; they included his parents and his ex-wife. Keenan’s reasoning—if reasoning it was—seemed to be that if he didn’t personally hand them the money, they might be able to keep it with impunity. Another recipient was his old friend Dean Torrence. “I left you something nice in the shower,” Keenan told him.
“It was a big bag of cash,” Torrence recalled. “I have no idea how much it was. I don’t think Barry knew either; he was so delirious that he just threw a bunch of money in the bag. I didn’t call the cops,” he said—once a Baron, always a Baron. “I made arrangements to get it back to him the next day. Luckily for me, he got caught that night.”
“My brother broke open the case,” Nancy Sinatra writes. While Frankie was blindfolded, she says, his senses became sharper: he heard small planes over the hideout; he identified the make of a station wagon in which he’d been driven by the sound of the tailgate; he deduced John Irwin’s probable profession from the roughness of his hands. But in the end, it wasn’t Frank junior’s acute observations or brilliant detective work by the FBI that brought the perpetrators in; it was Joe Amsler’s brother, who phoned the FBI while Joe was sleeping in James Amsler’s house in Imperial Beach. Fifteen agents arrested Barry Keenan as he walked into his girlfriend’s parents’ house in La Cañada. Keenan claimed they beat him to force him to tell where the ransom money was.
December 11, 1963: Frank junior speaks to the press after returning physically unharmed from his kidnapping ordeal. “Tomorrow is my birthday,” Frank senior told reporters, “and it’s the best present I could get.” (Credit 20.2)
“The next day, the police interviewed everybody,” Dean Torrence said. “The FBI were a little curious that I was the only one that didn’t get any money.”
“Virtually everything I had outlined in my plan of operation in terms of how the Sinatras would be affected had worked,” Barry Keenan told Randy Taraborrelli in 1997. “Father and son were hugging. Divorced parents were reunited in the moment. And the public now viewed Sinatra in a sympathetic light rather than as a hoodlum. They had a big celebration party that night. It couldn’t have worked better if they had paid me to do it, which, by the way, they hadn’t.”
It is a remarkably detached and self-serving assessment. And the benefits to the Sinatras, such as they were, lasted no longer than the bags of cash Barry Keenan spread around Los Angeles. The repercussions, though, would last for decades.
—
“Thank God it’s over,” Frank had said when the ordeal was done. “I’m gonna sleep for a week.”
That, of course, was unlikely to happen at any point in Sinatra’s life, even this one. By the following weekend, he was onstage again.
The Sands had opened on Frank’s thirty-seventh birthday, December 12, 1952; on the Saturday after the kidnapping, he took the Christina to Las Vegas with Jill St. John, Dean Martin, and Yul Brynner, among others, to celebrate his forty-eighth birthday, the eleventh anniversary of the casino in which he no longer held a stake, and the successful resolution of the kidnapping. As Sinatra and Martin rose unannounced to join Sammy Davis Jr. and Danny Thomas onstage, the audience gave Frank a standing ovation. He traded repartee with Sammy, Danny, and Dean, then sang three numbers, including “Luck Be a Lady.”
In the wee hours, as Frank and his group took in Don Rickles’s late show at the Sahara, the comedian looked down at Sinatra and grinned ominously. “Do you know why the kidnappers let Junior go?” he asked. “Because they heard him humming in the trunk.”
* * *
* Nancy senior had sold the Carolwood house in 1961 and downsized—but not down-classed—to 700 Nimes Road, Bel Air, “a sleek, contemporary three-bedroom with a pool and a cantilevered deck, but no grounds,” according to My Father’s Daughter (p. 87).
21
Oh, I just got a little water on my bird—that’s all.
—FRANK SINATRA, ON HIS NEAR DROWNING IN THE SURF OFF KAUAI, MAY 1964
Sinatra, like most Americans, was in a somber mood at the beginning of the New Year. The triple blows of the fall—Cal-Neva, the assassination, and the kidnapping—had hammered a new sense of vulnerability into him, one that wouldn’t go away easily. “Our world felt turned inside out,” Tina Sinatra writes. “My father had been sick, off and on, since Kennedy was shot. Now his immune system was in shreds…Mom wouldn’t be herself for a long time. She’d go out on a simple errand and turn the wrong way; she was discombobulated.”
So was Frank. Over the holidays, he’d retreated to Palm Springs, where he laid low and tried to recuperate from whatever bug he’d caught. In a spirit of solemn generosity, he sent Jacqueline Kennedy a brooch for Christmas, and, forgetting how much she had detested him, she wrote him a heartfelt thank-you note:
Dear Frank
I do want to thank you for the enchanting pin you sent me for Christmas. You have always been so thoughtful.
The only happy thing that seems to have happened at the end of this year is the way your son was brought safely back to you.
Please know I am so deeply happy about that.
With my appreciation—the very deepest—for all you did for Jack—and for believing in him from the beginning.
Jackie
It was hardly the time fo
r ring-a-ding-ding. The day after New Year’s, Frank began a new album of patriotic songs dedicated to the slain president, a collaboration with Bing Crosby called America, I Hear You Singing. The bandleader Fred Waring and his ensemble, the Pennsylvanians—an orchestra and a glee-club-style chorus—would back them up. Each singer was to record three solo numbers, and Sinatra and Crosby would do two duets, a Cahn–Van Heusen rouser called “You Never Had It So Good” (“Miles of happy faces/Different styles and races”) and a spiritual, “Let Us Break Bread Together.” On the night of the second, Sinatra laid down his three tracks: “Early American,” a vague paean to basic values by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen; “The House I Live In,” a remake of the hymn to tolerance from his Oscar-winning 1945 short; and “You’re a Lucky Fellow, Mr. Smith,” a flag-waver originally sung by the Andrews Sisters in the 1941 Abbott and Costello movie Buck Privates. The chorus backed Frank, fulsomely, on all three tunes.
It was all very earnest and a little strange. On the one hand, it was a time when patriotic music still had wide currency, when American schoolchildren could sing, unself-consciously,
This is my country, land of my birth
This is my country, grandest on earth.
Sinatra really did love his country, in his fashion, even if its love for him was conditional. Bing, as warm in the public’s eyes as he was cold in real life, was widely adored, as were the publicly charming and inoffensive Italian-Americans Dean Martin, Perry Como, and Tony Bennett. Frank could be infinitely charming, but his Italianness was a chip on his shoulder, and inoffensiveness rarely concerned him: he mostly spoke his mind, frequently to his detriment. His popularity played on darker themes like seduction and envy. It was one thing for Bing Crosby to sing patriotic songs; for Frank, it felt off-kilter, as though he were protesting too much or wearing a suit that didn’t fit.
The album was more than a little deadly: the musical equivalent, in this dark season, of banging pots and pans to chase the demons away. The old saying that military justice is to justice as military music is to music should have a corollary about patriotic music, and patriotic music with chorus is yet another circle of hell. Everyone involved was very talented—a recuperated Sinatra sang as only he could; the musicians and chorus were top-notch; Nelson Riddle even wrote handsome arrangements for the first two songs of the January 2 session—but none of it could rescue the enterprise. Frank had felt strongly about it, as he felt strongly about all his ideas, good and bad alike. He would live it down.
—
The season of reflection passed quickly. Two weeks later, Frank and Dean headed north to Pebble Beach to take in Bing’s annual pro-am golf tournament, also known as the Crosby Clambake. The two arrived late on Friday the seventeenth and at about 1:00 a.m. walked into the dining room of the tony Del Monte Lodge, where Frank demanded something to eat. It would be unreasonable to assume he hadn’t been drinking. On an empty stomach. When a clerk told Sinatra the kitchen was closed, he made his unhappiness known as only he could. The clerk called his boss, Richard Osborne, the president of Del Monte Properties. While he was placing the call, Frank grabbed the telephone and told Osborne to get his ass over there right away.
The large, athletic, and socially prominent club president—the kind of man the newspapers used to call a sportsman—thought it might be amusing to try to placate Frank and Dean with a bottle of champagne. Frank, to whom Richard Osborne would have suddenly personified all the accumulated evils of American Waspocracy, was unamused. As Osborne re-explained to him that the kitchen was closed, Sinatra coldcocked him, sending the champagne bottle flying. Frank then continued to rain blows on the club president as Osborne warded off the punches as best he could, then fled the room. “I guess I overestimated Sinatra’s sense of humor,” he said afterward. He wasn’t the first to have done so, and he would be far from the last.
—
If Frank had brought his worst self to the dining room at the Del Monte Lodge, he brought his best to United Recording a week and a half later, laying down ten tracks (on two nights) for a new LP, the unmellifluously but descriptively titled Frank Sinatra Sings “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Moon River,” and Other Academy Award Winners. Riddle arranged and conducted, and it is an almost entirely beautiful album.
Almost, because with Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster’s beyond-bombastic “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” from the 1955 William Holden–Jennifer Jones weeper of the same name, there is nothing that can be done, even by Frank Sinatra. But on the ten other numbers, Frank does a great deal indeed, and from three of them—Fain and Webster’s “Secret Love” and Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses”—he and Nelson wrest redemptive surprises.
Doris Day had starred, charmingly, in Calamity Jane, Warner Bros.’ 1953 petty theft of Annie Get Your Gun (Jack Warner had tried to buy the movie rights but was outbid by MGM), and had a number 1 hit with its theme, “Secret Love.” But as wonderful a singer as Day was, everything that was sizzlingly tomboyish about her character in the movie evaporated in the number, which was—as the early 1950s demanded—wholehearted and, well, clean. The 1964 Sinatra, on the other hand, gave the tune a slight edge of world-weariness, his lived-in voice playing off gorgeously against Riddle’s sublime strings, somehow managing to make you believe that in a relentlessly publicized life he’d actually managed to have a secret love.
Nelson Riddle might have been gritting his teeth while arranging Henry Mancini’s megahits “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” but you wouldn’t know it to hear the results: he did his musical archrival proud. In the case of the latter song, the theme from the tormented 1962 Jack Lemmon–Lee Remick drama about alcoholism, Riddle had the brilliant idea to go upbeat, with George Roberts’s bouncing bass trombone anchoring a chugging horn section, and Frank—whose own prodigious intake of alcohol, and the behavior it unleashed, were steady problems—was somehow able to alchemize this lament into a compelling finger snapper.
By 1964, “Moon River,” the theme from 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, had become a mammoth hit, so ubiquitous both in the Muzak-ized instrumental version and in Andy Williams’s honeyed rendering (from his own best-selling movie-theme LP) that Johnny Mercer had come to detest it. “I hate that fucking song,” he told a friend. It took Sinatra and Riddle to give it new life, by—not so simply—being Sinatra and Riddle. Frank, who was of course a passionate student of lyrics, adored Mercer’s work and had done justice to many of his greatest creations: “Blues in the Night,” “One for My Baby,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Day In, Day Out,” “Laura,” “Autumn Leaves,” and on and on. “Moon River” was a late work by the great wordsmith, written after a long fallow period, and Sinatra managed to find its dignity and its melancholy, as did Riddle’s elegantly spare chart, which began with Frank backed solely by Al Viola’s lovely and plaintive Spanish-flavored guitar.
The album was, with the one exception, a treasure chest of pleasures, and no track was quite so pleasurable as Sinatra’s first and only recording of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields’s timeless “The Way You Look Tonight,” first sung by Fred Astaire in the 1936 musical Swing Time. Astaire, not a great vocalist but a great singer—which is to say a matchless interpreter of the American popular song—had all but closed the books on the number with his ardent rendition, but Frank and Nelson opened the books again with an upbeat version that was cool and warm in precisely the right proportions. Singing just behind the beat (and giving the tune a frisson of sexual tension), Sinatra managed to convey an intimacy that he could never find in real life: his loss, our gain.
But then it was his gain too, since his primary relationships were never quite with people but rather with the words, the music, the microphone, the audience. Frank’s “The Way You Look Tonight” may not be perfect, but it is majestic—a recording that could be beamed out into space to tell the universe endlessly what human love is about.
—
And so what, by co
mparison, could a seemingly simpleminded pop tune called “I Want to Hold Your Hand” be but—really—a kind of joke? A fad, a hula hoop or a Frisbee of a song, a trivial diversion for America’s youth, still so saddened by the slaying of their youthful president?
Capitol’s Dave Dexter had steadfastly rejected the Beatles throughout 1963, turning down their first three singles, “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” and “From Me to You.” But beginning in March of that year, with the release of their first LP, Please Please Me, the group had become a huge sensation in Great Britain—the singles “She Loves You” and then “I Want to Hold Your Hand” each sold a million copies, in a market one-tenth the size of the United States—and in December, through a strange concatenation of events, the Beatles skipped over the Atlantic and planted a toehold in America.
It had started on Halloween, when Frank’s old friend and enemy Ed Sullivan happened to be in London’s Heathrow Airport at the same time as the Beatles were returning from a five-day tour of Sweden. In a heavy rain, “several hundred screaming fans,” according to Mark Lewisohn, greeted the group, as did several dozen journalists, photographers, and representatives of the BBC. Sullivan was impressed. He had virtually broken out Elvis Presley by putting him on his show in September 1956, and he felt the Beatles might be the next Elvis. On November 12, Sullivan met with the group’s manager, Brian Epstein, and offered not one but two successive live appearances on his show—in terms of impact, the television equivalent of two feature stories in Time or Life—at $3,500 per appearance, considerably less than his top rate. Epstein, a shrewd bargainer, accepted the low fee but demanded top billing for the group. Though the Beatles were unknown in the United States, Sullivan agreed.
In the meantime, Beatlemania was overtaking the U.K., and America had begun to take a bemused and condescending interest. On NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report on November 18, the reliably crusty Edwin Newman did a four-minute report on the group, scowling at the camera and saying, “It’s anybody’s guess why the Beatles emerged from [Liverpool’s] cellar nightclubs to national prominence, but emerge they did.” And four days later—on the morning of November 22, the day of the assassination—on CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace, the London correspondent Alexander Kendrick did an equally sardonic five-minute piece on the group (“musicologists say it is no different from any other form of rock ’n’ roll, except maybe louder”) that began with footage of the Beatles performing “She Loves You” in concert.
