by James Kaplan
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Frank, who had stayed clear of the trial, anxiously waiting to see if he’d be subpoenaed, had Mickey Rudin fend off the motion while he flew to Tokyo to finalize arrangements for the first movie in his Warner Bros. deal (and his first without Dean or Sammy in over a year), an antiwar World War II drama called None but the Brave. The picture would also feature a couple of other firsts: it was to be an American-Japanese co-production, and for the first time in his career Sinatra would direct. In the meantime, Frankie returned from Europe once more in an understandably testy mood. He spent all of twenty minutes on the witness stand on Friday the twenty-eighth, once again fending off questions about why he had cooperated with the kidnappers. “I didn’t want to get killed,” he said simply.
After he was excused—this time for good—and the jury dismissed for the day, an exasperated Judge East rebuked the defense. “You have abused the processes of the court in bringing this witness here,” he said.
Frank junior was also exasperated. The trial and the attendant publicity, he claimed, had caused a singing engagement in Paris to be canceled. “Those people over there apparently didn’t believe the kidnapping story,” he said during an impromptu news conference outside the courtroom. “The seeds of doubt have been sown on my integrity and guts and will stay with me for the rest of my life.”
It was agonizingly well put and heartbreakingly prescient.
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The jury heard six hours of closing arguments on Friday, March 6, the twentieth day of the trial. “This is the strangest kidnapping case I ever heard of,” defense lawyer Lavine said.
The nine men and three women were then sequestered for the night, and on Saturday they returned their verdict, finding Barry Keenan and Joe Amsler guilty on all charges and John Irwin guilty of all charges save the actual kidnapping. Judge East handed both Keenan and Amsler the maximum sentence: life in prison plus seventy-five years. Irwin would eventually be sentenced to sixteen years and eight months for conspiracy.
All three were remanded to the federal medical facility in Springfield, Missouri, for psychiatric evaluation.
“The report that came back was that I was legally insane and that I had duped Joe into the kidnapping,” Keenan recalled. “They said we had not intended to harm Junior. For a probation report, they interviewed family and friends and determined that we were nice kids. They kept trying to make John the fall guy because he was older and should have known better. After all of that, our life sentences were reduced to twenty-five years, a fairly light sentence for that crime. All the rules were different in those days. John and Joe kept their appeals going, and that’s really how we got out.”
In fact, after Judge East discovered that the prosecution had tampered with a psychiatric report, he reduced Keenan’s sentence to twelve years. In the end, Amsler and Irwin spent three and a half years in prison; Barry Keenan got out in 1968, after four and a half years, and went on to become a millionaire real estate developer.
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It was Frank junior who really received the life sentence. According to a former servant of Bill and Edie Goetz, Frank’s Hollywood-royalty friends, even the Goetzes secretly believed Junior had staged his own kidnapping. As did much of the rest of the world. “Frankie was utterly blameless, but he couldn’t unring the bell,” Tina writes.
He’d get heckled at his shows, and it hurt him deeply; he’d be dogged by public stigma for years. Nancy will tell you that this incident soured his life and ultimately hurt his career. I’m not so sure, because my brother was also swimming upstream in the music world. By the mid-1960s, tuxedo singers with big bands were an endangered species. Frankie might have been a victim of bad timing and his own stubbornness as much as anything.
As for the two men in my family, and their choked and halting relationship…Our family crisis didn’t forge a breakthrough, as it might have in the Hollywood version. Dad and Frankie went on as they had in the past, not quite connecting. They loved each other and knew it, but it had taken a near-death experience to bring them close and together. When the trauma was over, the connection was broken.
They were two men who shared a name and a history and a pure passion for music, and all of that wasn’t quite enough.
In July, after legal maneuvering by Frank Sinatra and Mickey Rudin, a federal grand jury would indict Gladys Root and George Forde for conspiracy and subornation of perjury. “I feel sorry for anyone that vindictive,” Mrs. Root said of Sinatra. “I have always believed in the power of truth, and truth will be the winner in this case.”
All charges against the pair would be dropped the following year.
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At the end of April, Frank went to the island of Kauai, at the western end of the Hawaiian archipelago, to begin shooting None but the Brave. Jilly and Honey Rizzo accompanied him, as did a song-plugger pal named Murray Wolf (also an old friend of Van Heusen’s) and George Jacobs. The relationship with Jill St. John having run its course for the time being, Sinatra was traveling stag.
He was not only directing the movie but starring in it as the whiskey-swigging chief pharmacist’s mate Francis Maloney, leading a cast that included the hulking TV actor Clint Walker; Nancy’s husband, Tommy Sands; Frank’s second cousin Richard Sinatra (son of the bandleader Ray Sinatra, who’d been a modest success in the swing era before the other Sinatra came up); the tough guy Brad Dexter; and Frank’s Come Blow Your Horn co-star Tony Bill. In keeping with the spirit of the binational co-production, however, the film’s Japanese actors, all of them unknown in the United States, would be listed first in the credits.
Still trying to give voice to his liberal and idealistic sentiments, Frank was serious about the story he was making: a small group of American soldiers crash-land on a remote Pacific isle during World War II, only to find an abandoned Japanese platoon already occupying the island. Both sides have to decide whether to coexist and even help each other or to carry on the broader conflict, which in the context is meaningless.
And he was relatively serious about directing his first movie, although given his deep natural impatience with the process of filmmaking, he was wise to surround himself with solid support: his trusty producer Howard Koch was once again on hand (“He really knew the movies inside and out,” Tony Bill said; “he was a real stalwart as a filmmaker”), as were William Daniels, now producing instead of directing photography, and, in an uncredited co-directing role, the reliable Gordon Douglas.
For the duration of location shooting, Sinatra rented a $2,000-per-month beachfront house on Wailua Bay, redecorated in orange by the owner for Frank’s benefit. In front of the house, a little too symbolically, a Jack Daniel’s flag fluttered at the top of a tall pole.
On Sunday, May 10, a sparkling Hawaiian afternoon, Sinatra had a houseful of guests, including Howard Koch and his wife, Ruth, Brad Dexter, another tough-guy actor in the film named Dick Bakalyan, Murray Wolf, and Jilly and Honey Rizzo. George Jacobs stood by to mix drinks and prepare food.
The movie had been shooting for two weeks, and though it was going well, Howard Koch recalled, “Frank was getting itchy” to finish, though almost ten days of work remained. Koch sensed Sinatra’s restlessness as soon as he entered the house, and while everyone else headed out to the beach, the ever-accommodating producer sat down at a desk with the production schedule to see if he could find a way to tighten it.
In the meantime, despite warnings of a strong undertow, Ruth Koch decided to go swimming in the surf in front of the house. What happened next is the subject of a Rashomon-like array of recollections.
“The water was quite shallow very far out, so there wasn’t really much risk of drowning,” George Jacobs remembered.
However, the undertow tripped Ruth up and Sinatra, who swam over to help her, got tripped up as well. Immediately a young Hawaiian surfer paddled over to help them both out. As he was helping them back to the beach, [Brad] Dexter, who saw from the house that something was going on, dove in and assisted him.
/> They may have swallowed a lot of salt water, but neither Ruth nor Frank was in mortal danger. However, it seems as if everyone near the incident made it appear far worse than it was and took credit for helping save Mr. S’s life.
“They were two men who shared a name and a history and a pure passion for music, and all of that wasn’t quite enough,” Tina Sinatra wrote. (Credit 21.2)
Brad Dexter, who played the hard-assed Sergeant Bleeker in None but the Brave, was a big, cheerful-but-dangerous-looking tough guy of Serbian extraction (his birth name was either Veljko Soso or, according to other sources, Boris Milanovich)—“kind of a beer-drinkin’, world-weary, worldly-wise guy,” Tony Bill recalled—who’d made a solid but unremarkable career as a character actor in the movies and on television. Before that fateful afternoon, Dexter had been best known for two things: his tempestuous ten-month marriage to Peggy Lee in 1953, and the fact that he’d co-starred with Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, and Horst Buchholz in John Sturges’s 1960 cult classic The Magnificent Seven—the one man of the seven, he and others joked, whom no one could ever remember.
Speaking to Kitty Kelley some twenty years after the incident—in the course of which he became first central and then a nonperson in Frank Sinatra’s life—Dexter spun a richly detailed tale of that afternoon’s events, featuring himself as the heroic rescuer and Sinatra as the contemptibly weak and helpless victim. “It was a sun-drenched afternoon and we were all on the beach enjoying the ocean and that great tropical sun,” Dexter recalled.
The waves were billowing higher, though, and I noticed a treacherous riptide developing with a very strong undertow. I warned everyone to be careful in the water. Frank asked me to go to the house to bring him some wine and soda, so I went on up. While I was collecting everything in the kitchen, I heard Murray screaming hysterically from the living room that Frank was drowning.
According to Dexter, he dropped the wine and soda, tore out of the house, and ran down to the beach, where, between the big waves, he could just make out Sinatra and Ruth Koch’s heads bobbing in the water. As everyone else stood immobile with fear, Dexter dived into the surf and fought through the waves to Ruth Koch, who was gasping for air. “Save Frank,” she said. “I can’t go on.”
“Nobody’s going to die,” Dexter said he told her. “We’re all going to come out of this alive. C’mon, fight. C’mon. You’re going to be okay.”
Sinatra with Clint Walker, Tommy Sands (l.), and a cigar-chewing Brad Dexter on the set of None but the Brave. Tough guy Dexter saved Frank’s life in the Hawaiian surf, a good deed that did not go unpunished. (Credit 21.3)
Holding Ruth Koch under one arm, he then swam out to Frank, who was suffering from hypoxia: his face was bluish, and his vision was impaired. “I can hear you, but I can’t see you,” Dexter remembered Sinatra saying.
Did he think of Dolly, pushing him under the surf at the Jersey shore?
“Frank was pathetic, helpless like a baby,” the actor told Kelley.
He kept sputtering to me, “I’m going to die. I’m finished. It’s all over, over. Please take care of my kids. I’m going to die…” I tried desperately to instill in him the will to fight for his life. I kept slapping him repeatedly on the face and back with stinging blows. I pulled him up and out of the water, over and over again, but he was as limp and lifeless as a rag doll…I tried to get him angry enough to start fighting back by calling him a fucking lily-livered coward. A spineless, gutless shit. But he didn’t react. He seemed like he wanted to die, like he had no will to live. He just caved in.
Frank had lost consciousness, as had Ruth Koch. As the waves crashed over them, Dexter cradled one of them in each arm as he treaded water, knowing that time was running out. Finally, he said, he saw “four heads in the ocean coming toward us. I don’t remember how long it took for them to reach us, but the time seemed endless. Someone later said that it was forty-five minutes.”
In Dexter’s telling, the (anonymous) men on surfboards lashed Sinatra and Ruth Koch to their boards with ropes, then turned around and paddled back toward shore, leaving the exhausted actor to fend for himself. Dexter nearly slipped under the waves, but then, he said, he became inflamed by a single thought: if he gave up, “I’d be finished forever, and for what? For two people who wanted to die? Who had given up trying to save their own lives and could[n’t] have cared less about mine?…I swam like a crazy man with an extravagant passion to live, defying the waves to take me under. By some miracle that I don’t understand to this day, I reached the beach before the life-saving party.”
Miraculous indeed. Dexter said he then ran to the rescuers, who were just reaching the shore with Sinatra and Mrs. Koch, both still unconscious.
“I stretched Frank out on the sand and gave him artificial respiration,” Dexter recalled. “Once he started vomiting the water out of his lungs, I turned him over to the lifeguards. Jilly Rizzo ran up to me and shouted, ‘You’re a hero, Brad. You’re a hero. Without you, Frank would be dead.’ ”
Nancy Sinatra’s non-eyewitness version of the episode (she was on the island with Tommy Sands but arrived at her father’s house afterward) introduces a cast of characters involved in the rescue and omits Brad Dexter entirely. After a wave swept Ruth Koch out to sea, she writes, her father tried to swim to her; but then a second wave brought Mrs. Koch back to shore, and the undertow carried Frank even farther out. Though a strong swimmer, he struggled against the surf for long minutes, unable to get back to the beach.
As Jilly raced in vain to find a boat, Nancy claims, a neighbor named Alfred Giles jumped into the waves with his surfboard, and County Supervisor Louis Gonsalves and hotel manager Harold Jim swam out to Sinatra. Giles, Gonsalves, and Jim flailed in the heavy surf until a fire lieutenant named George Keawe managed to toss a rope to the rescuers and pull them and Frank to the beach. Sinatra’s face was turning blue—a sign, Keawe felt, that he wouldn’t have lasted much longer in the water.
Frank was then taken back to the house on a stretcher, Nancy writes. When she arrived, Frank was in bed, pale but hungry. They ate pepper-and-egg sandwiches and watched television together until he dozed off.
After the rescue, Dexter told Kelley, he went back to his hotel room and collapsed. A couple of hours later, he went over to Sinatra’s place to find the house filled with “newspaper reporters, photographers, island officials, friends, members of the cast and crew, and representatives of the Red Cross.” And Frank’s older daughter. Frank, in bathrobe and slippers, was sitting in an easy chair, trying to comfort her.
“He looked up at me when I entered the room and I observed that he was still in a state of shock,” Dexter recalled. “His eyes were bloodshot and he had the expression of a felled ox. When our eyes locked, it seemed that he didn’t know what to say. He was embarrassed. He hung up the telephone and said, ‘My family thanks you.’ ”
Tony Bill remembered that not much was made of the incident on the set the next day. “It was like, ‘Hey, Frank was having trouble getting back to shore; he went out for a swim, so Brad went out and brought him back in,’ ” he said.
But in the meantime, the press, spoon-fed the story by unit publicist Harry Friedman and hungry for fresh Sinatra sensation—it had been almost six months since the kidnapping—milked the thing for all it was worth. SINATRA NEARLY DROWNS, the headlines read; SINATRA HAS CLOSE BRUSH WITH DEATH. The reports were all similar but didn’t quite dovetail. The wave had been huge, UPI reported. (The agency’s first bulletin about the incident also contained the interesting statement Sinatra “was rescued in a matter of minutes.”) Two other people had also been swept out to sea, UPI said, but had managed to fight their way back through the surf and shout for help. “Brad Dexter, an actor, swam out to Sinatra but could not bring him in,” the Associated Press wrote.
This last actually jibes with Dexter’s own description: it was the anonymous surfboard paddlers who brought Frank and Ruth Koch in. Why, then, in Brad Dext
er’s telling, did Jilly greet him as a hero? And why, in Nancy’s telling, did Dexter disappear entirely?
My family thanks you. “It was such a strange remark, almost as if I had put him in the uncomfortable position of having to thank me for saving his life,” Dexter said. “He never thanked me then or later, and I realize now that my rescue efforts probably severed the friendship right then and there by depriving him of the big-benefactor role which is the one he liked to play with his friends.”
It was more complicated than that. The next night, Dexter recalled, Jilly phoned to invite him to dinner at Frank’s house. It was clearly a special occasion: George was making spaghetti pomodoro—Frank’s favorite—and Patsy D’Amore of the Villa Capri had had fresh Italian bread and prosciutto flown over.
Yet “Frank appeared uptight and depressed when I arrived,” Dexter said. “I didn’t realize how angry he was until we sat down to dinner and George started serving the spaghetti.” According to the actor, Sinatra began yelling that the pasta wasn’t prepared properly, then threw the platterful in Jacobs’s face, screaming, “You eat this crap! I won’t!”
The valet simply peeled the spaghetti from his face and went back to the kitchen. “That was unkind, Frank,” the stunned actor finally said. “A very unkind thing to do.”
“Goddamn it!” Sinatra yelled. “That bastard doesn’t know how to cook al dente and that’s the only way I’ll eat it!”
Dexter’s first thought was that “maybe Frank was suffering from the aftershock of almost drowning and just wasn’t quite himself.” But then, he said, he realized Sinatra “was unconsciously lashing out at me for putting him in the awful position of having to be grateful for his own life. He couldn’t deal with his feelings toward me, so he took it out on poor George, a black man who would never fight back and who Frank treated like chattel.”
