by James Kaplan
It went even better than expected. “They applauded and applauded,” the New York Times’s Alvin Shuster wrote.
They jumped from their chairs. They stayed up until the early hours of the morning. Frank Sinatra was in town giving his first of two charity concerts and about the only calm one in the Royal Festival Hall was the crooner himself.
It was Sinatra’s first London performance in more than seven years, and, as one exuberant critic said in the Evening News Friday, “dinner-jacketed socialites offered the loudest welcome since Winston Churchill took his V-Day tribute…”
Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were among the guests who waited until 1 a.m. for Sinatra to appear and begin with “I’ve Got the World on a String.” It was 22 songs later, many interrupted by applause at the opening phrases, before Sinatra and band leader Count Basie were finished.
The concert, geared to a tradition-minded audience, consisted almost entirely of chestnuts—besides “String,” numbers like “April in Paris,” “Pennies from Heaven,” and “Moonlight in Vermont.” Two exceptions were McCartney’s “Yesterday”—a surefire crowd-pleaser in London—and, oddly, a composition called “Lady Day,” originally written for Watertown but left off the album.
The background of “Lady Day” is that Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes, who had little knowledge of jazz and barely knew who Billie Holiday was, had written a tune not about the great singer but about Watertown’s fugitive wife, Elizabeth. It contained lines such as
Poor Lady Day could use some love, some sunshine,
Lady Day has too much rain.
But after recording the song the previous August, Frank had turned to Gaudio and Holmes and announced, to their bafflement, that it was a perfect tribute to Holiday. It should be rerecorded at another time, he said, and for a different album. It wasn’t much of a song (as a tribute to a lost jazz great, it was many levels beneath such sublime elegies as “I Remember Clifford” and “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”), and Frank’s affection for it reflected far more sentimentality than artistic acumen. But Sinatra was singing it, center stage in Royal Festival Hall, and the London audience listened reverently.
The two nights were, in the opinion of many—not least Frank himself—great concerts. “I have a funny feeling that those two nights could have been my finest hour, really,” he said shortly afterward, unconsciously echoing Winston Churchill. One of the British musicians on the dates, bassist Daryl Runswick, recalled, “There are few occasions when a bunch of world-weary London musicians are provoked into awe by a performance. It happened [then]. The thing that I remember is how hard Sinatra appeared to work. I was a few feet away from him and I recall how much he was concentrating. He was flawless…He quipped to one of the musicians earlier in the day that this could be his last performance in London. That certainly surprised us.”
—
At the end of April, President Nixon announced the expansion of the Vietnam War to Cambodia, a campaign that had been going on covertly for months. Massive protests erupted on college campuses across America: flags were burned; revolutionary rhetoric heated up. On May 4, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on protesters at Kent State University, killing four students.
Sinatra was no fan of Nixon’s, but the flag burnings and the speeches about bringing down the government—“the protestations”—stuck in his craw.
On July 8, he made his own startling announcement: he was joining the campaign to reelect Ronald Reagan as governor of California. More than that—he was accepting the co-chairmanship of Reagan’s campaign committee.
“It is my duty as a citizen to put aside partisan considerations when I think the other party’s candidate is clearly the outstanding man for the office,” Frank said.
Only eighteen months earlier, the columnist Vernon Scott had written, “Hollywood’s glitter people are Democrats. The Republicans among them are few and silent.” Sinatra, once the movie capital’s Democrat in chief, now appeared to be edging rightward.
“He made it clear he has no intention of abandoning his Democratic party affiliation, but said he joined Reagan at the governor’s personal invitation after they conversed about the state’s problems,” the Oakland Tribune reported.
“Those who do not know Governor Reagan and me as we have known each other for more than 20 years may be surprised by the announcement,” Sinatra said. “However our mutual friends always have been aware that we share the same desires for the welfare of the people of the state of California and the nation.”
He made no mention of Jess Unruh, the Democratic party nominee, but Reagan campaign officials said they regard it as a “smarting rejection” of the former Assembly majority leader.
At the very least. Unruh, a former disciple of Bobby Kennedy’s (bad enough, in Frank’s eyes), had thrown his support to Eugene McCarthy after Kennedy’s assassination, effectively torpedoing Hubert Humphrey’s presidential chances. The friend of my enemy…But for Frank to join the campaign of a man he had only recently regarded as a bozo and a bore spoke volumes about Sinatra’s fears for the country and his disaffection with the party that had slighted him during yet another presidential campaign.
The Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber interviewed Frank by telephone a few days after the announcement. She broke the ice by telling him she’d polled a couple of secretaries in her office about his political bombshell, finding them nonplussed. Sinatra was all sweetness and light. “The divine Francis Albert simply chuckled, that sexy-soft chuckle, when I told him he’d set our town’s prettiest heads on their ears,” she wrote.
Haber asked him if, in coming out against Unruh, he was indulging his time-tested fondness for Sicilian vendetta. “The personal aspect, that’s secondary,” Frank insisted. “But now that you mention it, it’s a damn good reason. Because [Unruh] hurt my man badly in Chicago. In fact, he hurt the whole Democratic party. Humphrey didn’t lose. His people lost for him.”
But Humphrey had also dumped Sinatra—a fact too humiliating to admit, but one that had influenced Frank’s turn to Reagan just as strongly as had Jess Unruh’s perfidy.
With admirable bluntness, Haber asked Frank how he could reconcile his own humanitarian, philanthropic philosophy with Governor Reagan’s withdrawal, announced that very day, of $10 million in aid for California’s aged, blind, and disabled.
Frank was silent for several seconds, apparently stunned. “Did he do that?” he finally asked. “Well, I suppose you don’t withdraw your support for a candidate over one issue, but—I’ll look into that. And you can bet I’ll speak to him about it.”
The record doesn’t show whether he did. In fact, he was more tired than he let on and in pain. Two weeks earlier, he had had surgery to alleviate the Dupuytren’s contracture in his right hand. “It looks like I held a cherry bomb in my hand,” he told Haber. At the end of July, there was an embarrassment when NBC’s publicity department impulsively announced that Sinatra would be the first guest on his pal (and sometime lover) Dinah Shore’s new daytime talk show in early August. He didn’t much feel like going on camera with a puffy and bandaged hand. He didn’t feel like doing much of anything.
“Dad’s convalescence was slow and painful,” Tina wrote. “It was the first time I would see my father suffer, a helpless feeling that I would come to know too well.”
In the past, Frank had always been a dynamo when it came to political campaigning, but he did little for Reagan at first besides lend his name to the cause. He did little over that summer in general besides giving a couple of charity concerts, clutching the microphone painfully as the one thing that continued to give him unalloyed pleasure kept him going.
He rose to a big occasion, though, on August 7, which marked both the fourth anniversary of Caesars Palace and Nancy junior’s premiere in the Circus Maximus. After Caesars celebrated with a ribbon cutting for its new fourteen-story, 220-suite addition, Frank did the hotel-casino one better, throwing two extravagant galas for his older daughter: a cocktail party for Hollywood’
s finest on Friday night and, as Variety noted, “the topper on Saturday, a black-tie cotillion for Nancy’s ‘coming out’ in Caesars’ society to be attended by carefully selected couples and singles.”
The paper was less starry-eyed about her lavish premiere, which was produced and choreographed by her fiancé, Hugh Lambert, and included five costume changes, plus the Osmonds (including seven-year-old Jimmy Osmond, who belted out a showstopping version of “My Way”), a black female vocal trio called the Blossoms, and a corps of ten male dancers. “Miss Sinatra is an uneven performer vocalistically,” the paper’s critic wrote, though he added, kindly, “To override the lack of warbling supremacy, a pleasant warmth issues, especially in regard to sharing the total show…Give a few performances and it will shake down to a good, tight 75 minutes.”
A terse paragraph at the end of the review noted the next act due in the big room: “Frank Sinatra follows Sept. 3–16, with David Frye and The Four Seasons.”
—
In early September, the multitalented talk-show host, entertainer, and liberal Steve Allen, a onetime ally of Sinatra’s in John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, wrote him an open letter. “Dear Frank: A great many uncomplimentary things are presently being said about you by Democrats around the country,” it began.
They can’t understand how a lifelong liberal could suddenly switch to the support of one of the leading exponents of conservatism, Ronald Reagan.
The more knowledgeable among your former political allies, Frank, are saying that the really surprising thing about your endorsement of Reagan is that you haven’t substantially modified your views at all. They say your hatred of Senator Bob Kennedy was so great—because he kept you away from the confidence of his brother, the president—that you have waited a long time to get revenge and would not even be denied by the Senator’s assassination. The word is, Frank, that all you can do now that Bobby is gone is “get even” with his man, Jess Unruh and the Kennedy-McCarthy types who work for him.
I’d like to hear you do a chorus of Irving Berlin’s “Say It Isn’t So,” Frank. Sincerely, I’d like to know that all the current rumors about “Sicilian vengeance” are untrue. No doubt you will tell us that they are. But if so, then consider a few of the social problems that make this moment of our history the most dangerous and perplexing the U.S. has ever known, because we know where Reagan stands on these issues. We thought we knew where you stood, too.
Allen went on to list Reagan’s conservative, if not reactionary, positions on race relations, welfare, health care for the elderly, prison reform, campus demonstrations, abortion rights, capital punishment, and other issues. “Only a few thousand people may read this letter, Frank. I offer you access to a few million if you’d like to visit my TV show and explain your position.”
Frank failed to take him up on his offer.
—
Wherever Frank is, there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It’s like Mack the Knife is in town, and the action is starting.
—Billy Wilder
“When he arrived in Vegas, that was what people talked about,” the producer George Schlatter recalled. “ ‘You see Frank? Frank’s in town.’ The cabdrivers, the bellhops, the hookers, everybody said, ‘Frank’s here.’ ”
“GUESS WHO,” the marquee at Caesars Palace had read when Frank first played the Circus Maximus. By the time he opened there for the sixth time, for a three-week stand beginning September 3, 1970, the legend had evolved to a simple “HE’S HERE.” Every paying guest was given a gold-toned medallion engraved with the legend:
HAIL
SINATRA
THE
NOBLEST ROMAN
IS AT
CAESARS PALACE
He was the show in Vegas, the main event, and the knowledge allowed him to assume certain privileges befitting emperors, including the small liberty of treating the cashier’s cage at the casino as his personal drawing account. At the Caesars casino, Sinatra continued the habit he had long maintained at the Sands: he pocketed his winnings and took his losses in the form of markers, sums that were, in his case and his alone, imaginary—until the moment came when they no longer were. The moment had come at the Sands, and it now came at Caesars.
Las Vegas was growing, and as the new towers soared along the Strip, so did hotel and entertainment prices. While the corporations pushed to make Sin City family-friendly, the Mob continued to profit mightily from the casinos. The Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service were paying careful attention.
In the summer of 1970, the FBI and the IRS were paying particular attention to Caesars Palace, which in late 1969 had been purchased for $60 million by the Miami fast-food chain Lum’s—whose executives had retained the previous casino manager (and former Caesars part owner), Jerome Zarowitz, a protégé of Meyer Lansky’s. But in the tighter regulatory climate of the new Las Vegas, Zarowitz soon had to be dismissed: because of his criminal record, Nevada refused to license him. The Feds also had their eye on a mysterious drop of $3 million in the casino gross under Zarowitz’s tenure. When Zarowitz left the job, he was replaced by a man he had recommended, Sanford Waterman. In case the name rings a bell, Waterman—a former New York film distributor and Florida gambler, according to news accounts—had once been one of Frank Sinatra’s partners in Cal-Neva.
According to Sands (and then Riviera) pit boss Ed Walters, Waterman was in fact a front man for “a major guy in New York.” He had worked at the Sands throughout the 1960s, nominally as a casino host but actually to look after his eastern boss’s interests. Nobody there, including Sinatra, liked him, Walters said: “He was a penny-pinching asshole.” According to the former pit boss, after Sinatra left the Sands, Waterman’s sponsor sent him to Caesars to keep an eye on Frank.
As part of a continuing investigation, the IRS was also watching Frank—and Waterman—through an undercover agent in the cashier’s cage at the Caesars casino. And in the wee small hours of Sunday, September 6, in an episode eerily similar to the incident of almost precisely three years earlier at the Sands, the shit once again hit the fan.
Sinatra was sitting at the baccarat table, a glass of Jack Daniel’s by his side, indulging in one of the few activities that took his mind off the pain in his hand. According to the undercover agent, a member of Frank’s entourage came to the cashier’s window during the graveyard shift and cashed in $7,500 in black chips. An hour later, the same man returned with another pile of black chips. “That’s when we knew that Sinatra was using us for petty cash,” the agent recalled. “Whatever he was winning off the marker, he was putting into his pocket, and whenever he ran out of money to bet, he just signed another marker for ten grand. It was a way for him to get some easy money.
“We were concerned about his paying his back markers. Sinatra told people that he didn’t have to pay his markers. He said that when he performed at Caesars and then sat down to gamble, he attracted enough big money around him so that the casino made out and profited enough so that they didn’t need to collect from him.”
At around 5:00 a.m., the casino pit boss phoned the IRS agent to say that Frank had just signed another marker, for another $10,000, at the baccarat table. Witnesses later said that he was playing for $8,000 a hand at a table where the usual limit was $2,000. They said Sinatra was losing and wanted to raise the limit to $16,000 a hand.
In 1970, the U.S. median household income was in the vicinity of $7,500. To Frank Sinatra, $10,000 was somewhere past pocket change: just enough to be interesting, but run-of-the-mill money for the baccarat table at Caesars. In this case, of course, the sum would be purely imaginary unless Frank won. The agent phoned Sanford Waterman.
Much like Carl Cohen three years earlier, Sandy Waterman was unhappy at being awakened. He was sixty-six, a sad-faced old Jewish man with a checkered background: not quite a shtarker—a tough guy—himself, but one who had been close to quite a few of them, including Jerry Zarowitz. He also had enemies within Caesars, including Frank Sinatr
a. And so, when he got dressed to come downstairs and talk to Frank, Waterman—remembering Carl Cohen and knowing well that he himself was not physically equipped to take a punch at Sinatra, or whoever was protecting him—put a .38-caliber pistol into the waistband of his trousers.
He then went to the baccarat table and told Frank he needed $10,000 cash from him immediately.
“What’s the matter? My money isn’t good here?” Frank asked.
“Yeah, your money is good as long as you’ve got money,” Waterman said. “You don’t get chips until I see your cash.”
In much the same way as in the Sands incident, things became heated immediately, and later accounts of exactly what happened varied widely. According to the IRS agent, “Frank called Waterman a kike and Sandy called him a son of a bitch guinea. They went back and forth like that in front of a big crowd of people, including three security guards, until Sandy whipped out his pistol and popped it between Sinatra’s eyeballs.”
The agent neglected to mention whether Frank had first put his fingers around Waterman’s throat, a detail that doesn’t quite square with the pain he was still suffering in his right hand but an accusation that would come up afterward.
According to Nancy Sinatra, her father reacted coolly to having a pistol pointed at his face, reaching for the weapon and telling Waterman that he hoped he liked his gun, because he might have to eat it. She also claimed that Jilly Rizzo, promptly redeeming himself for his failure to defend Frank in the Sands fracas, jumped over a desk and grabbed the pistol from Waterman’s hand.
Frank flew straight home to Palm Springs, abruptly breaking off his Circus Maximus engagement after three days. The showroom was dark that night. The next day, Sanford Waterman was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon and released without bail. He declined to comment on the incident, but Las Vegas’s sheriff, the redoubtable Ralph Lamb, had plenty to offer. “If Sinatra comes back to town,” Lamb said, “he’s coming downtown to get a work card. And if he gives me any trouble, he’s going to jail.” (Vegas entertainers were legally required to be fingerprinted and photographed and to be issued work cards before accepting jobs in Clark County. Like most headliners, though, Frank had benefited from a gentleman’s-agreement exemption.)
