The Devil May Dance

by Tapper, Jake

  “Yeah?” Sinatra said, confused.

  “Sending flowers to the Bechmanns?”

  “Who?” Sinatra asked.

  “Lola’s real name was Mary Bechmann,” Charlie said.

  “Ah,” said Sinatra.

  “Did you ask Beans to send her family flowers?” Fontaine asked.

  “I may have,” Sinatra said, irritated, looking up from the Oscar nominees. “Is there a problem?”

  “Do you think that’s wise?” Fontaine asked. “No one knows you knew her. Why let the parents know?”

  Sinatra frowned. “Just tryin’ to be nice.”

  “Of course, of course,” Fontaine said reassuringly. “But let the studio take care of that. Lola was working on Kid Galahad, she had a bit part, so UA is going to send flowers. Okay?”

  “She was a fun time, Lola,” Sinatra said. “But young, you know?”

  “Sixteen,” Charlie said.

  “What?” Sinatra said, genuinely shocked.

  “That’s what the cops said.”

  “That can’t be true!”

  “It is, Frank,” Fontaine said.

  “That’s horrible,” Sinatra said. “Looked a lot older.”

  “At least eighteen,” Fontaine said.

  Charlie couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “I met her at a party at Lawford’s,” Sinatra recalled. “She walked in wearing one of those short skirts.” His facial expression made it clear his memory was taking him down a tawdry path. “Oh, Charlie, don’t get so high and mighty,” Sinatra said, noting his look of disgust. “I saw you talking to her. You weren’t discussing the Bay of Pigs.”

  “I didn’t say anything!” Charlie protested.

  “Your face is a Sunday sermon,” Sinatra spat.

  “Who else was she with?” Charlie asked. “Who else did she date?”

  “Everyone,” Sinatra said. “Powell, obviously. Last time I saw her was at a party at Van Heusen’s.”

  “Whatever happened to that?” Charlie asked. “Powell.”

  Fontaine shrugged. “Last I heard, it was Mob debts,” he said.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Sinatra said.

  Though Charlie and Fontaine had been shielding Sinatra from the street and police barriers prevented fans from approaching them, Fontaine looked around nervously. “Let’s change the subject,” he said.

  Sinatra put a concerned hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “How’s your pa?” he asked.

  Not great but alive, was the answer. After landing at Idlewild Airport a few days before, Charlie and Margaret drove the fifty miles north to Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining. In its 137-year history, the prison had housed many celebrities, from Lucky Luciano to bank robber Willie Sutton to Tammany Hall political boss Jimmy Hines. And now Winston Marder.

  They were met at the gates by Wilfred Denno, the warden. Bald and ingratiating, Denno was so eager to show off the prison to a New York congressman and his wife that he seemed to have briefly forgotten they were there to visit his ailing inmate father. It was a straight line from the entrance to the grounds to the prison infirmary, and Denno’s travelogue was unceasing: “The train tracks that bisect the property are underneath us in a tunnel” and “The stained-glass windows in the chapel were made by convicts out of old pharmacy bottles” and “The prison shops make more than a mil a year from dog licenses and shoes, brooms and paintbrushes”—until Margaret politely reminded the warden that although there were eighteen hundred prisoners in the five-tiered maximum-security cell blocks, they were there for exactly one, an ailing man in the prison hospital.

  Hospital was being generous, Charlie thought. It was just a long room in an industrial building that also housed the prison gymnasium, which provided a constant background of banging and clanking, shoe-squeaking and occasional shouts. Patients were lined up in cots just feet from one another on both sides of the room, some of them shackled to the bed. Charlie was temporarily distracted from the dismal sight by its echoes of Lucy’s favorite bedtime book, Madeline; this was a darker version of that orphanage, with his own aged father occupying a cot at the far end. As they approached his bed, the old man seemed to sense their presence, and through the tangle of IV tubes suspended from the wall above him, Winston turned his head toward them. When his eyes met Charlie’s, he smiled weakly.

  His father looked older and frailer, gray and shriveled. Charlie and Margaret could hear his heavy, labored breathing.

  “Charlie,” he said, his voice reedy and raspy. He extended a trembling hand to his son and beckoned for him to come closer, so Charlie took a nearby wooden chair and pulled it up to the bed. Margaret stood at the foot, her face grave with concern. Denno nodded his approval to the guard.

  “I…know,” Winston said, his voice strained. He tried to push out a third word but couldn’t.

  Charlie looked at the warden, worried about his father’s health, secondarily worried about what his father might say.

  “You…need—” Winston began to cough; what started as a throat-clearing quickly turned into a deep hacking. Charlie softly patted his father on his shoulder, looking sadly to his wife. What a thing to witness, the rapid erosion of a mountain.

  “We think there’s a chance your father may be coming down with pneumonia,” Denno said. “Doctors are watching him around the clock, of course.”

  “What doctors?” Margaret asked. “I don’t see any here.”

  Denno scanned the room and shrugged. He wandered off, presumably to find one.

  Something distant in Winston’s eyes lit up; he leaned into his son. “Trust,” Winston whispered in Charlie’s ear. “Don’t.” He collapsed heavily onto his pillow.

  Charlie thought back to when he was a child lying beside his father in bed, listening to serials on the radio Charlie had built by hand in Cub Scouts. They’d started with comedies like Sam ’n’ Henry and The Goldbergs and moved on to dramas: Aunt Jymmie and Her Tots in Tottyville. Eventually they’d graduated to Westerns, do-gooder tales, mysteries, and true-crime: Empire Builders, The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, The Bishop and the Gargoyle. When a show ended, Charlie would turn off the radio and he and his dad would talk about the plot, the twists, the actors whose voices they’d come to recognize. They were a team, a pair of aficionados, critiquing the sound effects, raising their fingers when a common trope was leaned upon too heavily. Those were some of Charlie’s happiest memories.

  Occasionally, on the nights when he smelled as if he’d been pickled in gin, Winston could get a bit silly. The popularity of radio serials exploded in the 1930s, and demand apparently exceeded the supply of new ideas and good writing; Charlie had noted the frequency with which some freshly wounded victim would spit out his last utterance with the only fight left in him, economizing the words so that “The murderer’s name is” would exhaust all remaining oxygen, leaving the identity of the killer a mystery unless the victim was able to point to some object that at first glance made no sense. Charlie would pretend to take one in the gut and then gasp, muttering, evoking laughter from his father. When Winston was sufficiently in his cups, the two would act it out together, collapsing on each other’s chests with the ridiculous last words: “The…murderer’s…name…is…”

  Winston’s current state recalled that theatrical shortness of breath; Charlie couldn’t help but smile despite it all. Winston saw him smiling and reached out to touch his cheek.

  “Pa,” Winston exhaled.

  “Pa?” Charlie asked.

  “Calais,” he added, then started hacking again. He held up his right index finger, then used it to reach out and touch Charlie’s nose. The cough then seized him and pulled him back, his body convulsing. Charlie looked at Margaret, now in tears. Warden Denno returned alone, no doctor in sight, and stood by uselessly. As Winston coughed violently, two orderlies ran to his bed and sedated him. It reminded Charlie of a time in France when his men were choking on nerve gas left over from the previous war. He desper
ately needed a drink.

  Escorting Charlie and Margaret from the infirmary to the front gate, the warden asked if they had any idea what Winston was talking about. If it was something that would be helpful to the doctor, Denno said, he could pass it along.

  “No clue,” said Charlie. “Though it’s good to hear that somewhere in this complex, there’s an actual physician.”

  Embarrassed, Denno grimaced. “He’s usually here by now; he’s just late today.” He cleared his throat, filling the awkward silence with something, anything. “Did he say Pa? Did you call him Pa?”

  “Thanks for your time today,” Charlie said, ignoring his question. They reached the front gate, and he shook the warden’s hand with all the politeness he could muster, balancing his disgust with his father’s predicament against the fact that the warden could make it much worse. “Really appreciate your help, Warden.”

  Once they were on the highway, Margaret answered Denno’s question. “Pas-de-Calais,” she said.

  “That’s my guess too,” Charlie said. He had a flask hidden somewhere. He needed to get at it. Without Margaret seeing.

  “What does a northern French state have to do with anything?” she asked.

  Charlie frowned and looked in the rearview mirror for police. His foot pressed harder on the gas pedal. Margaret was familiar with this particular brand of silence. This was when he felt he had information he couldn’t share. To Margaret, it was an aggressive silence, almost showing off.

  “We are well past keeping secrets here, Charles,” she said.

  He sighed; she was right.

  “It was called Operation Fortitude,” he said. “Most people still don’t know about it. I didn’t even know about it at the time—I only learned about it on House Oversight.” He looked at her.

  “Go on,” she said. “Keep your eyes on the road and keep talking.”

  “So part of Fortitude took place in Pas-de-Calais, with the First Army Group,” he continued. He stole a look at her, then wondered if there was a rest stop where he could sneak a drink.

  “First Army Group?” she said. “Never heard of them. And I read everything when you were over there.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” Charlie said.

  “Which was?”

  “It didn’t exist,” Charlie said. “Deception campaign. Army even built these things they called Bigbobs. Fake landing craft. Inflatable. Dummy tanks.”

  “Holy smokes, I can’t believe I haven’t heard about this.”

  “It’s one of the most amazing stories of the war,” Charlie agreed.

  “So was your dad holding up one finger to signify the First Army Group?” she asked.

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought that,” he said. “Maybe. I thought it was something else. Huh. You may be right.”

  “How did your dad even know about it? You confided in him?”

  “Believe it or not, he told me,” Charlie said. He pointed to an exit. “I’m going to get some gas,” he said.

  “He did?” she asked.

  “Yeah, one night, maybe ten years ago? It was late, we were in his study drinking scotch. Turns out he knew about it because he helped with the pneumatic-rubber construction. Dad made a lot of money during the war, doing these…odd jobs. For the Allies.”

  “And then violated some promise and spilled the beans.”

  “We were drinking,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah, well,” said Margaret. “People do stupid things when they drink too much.”

  Charlie looked at his wife to see if she was speaking about his obvious general problem or alluding more specifically to the Lola incident. Although he still had not told her about it; had Charlotte? She didn’t return the glance. He pulled into a gas station and an attendant ran out.

  “Fill ’er up,” Charlie said. He turned back to Margaret, who was powdering her nose. “You want to use the facilities?” he asked her.

  “Sure,” she said.

  A few minutes later, she returned to the car and stood outside his window. “Find your flask? Feeling better?”

  “I’m fine,” he said sheepishly.

  “Why don’t I drive so you can keep drinking.”

  He slid over to the passenger side. Margaret got behind the wheel, handed the attendant a five-dollar bill from her purse, and started driving.

  “Anyway, it was a deception campaign,” Charlie said to his wife, who was staring at the road.

  “What did you think it was?” Margaret finally asked.

  “Huh?” Charlie asked.

  “You said you thought it was something else when your dad raised his index finger—what did you think it was?”

  “Oh,” Charlie said. “Dad loved this essay Orwell wrote after the war about how the Krauts and Japs lost because their rulers weren’t able to see the reality in front of them, facts plain to any dispassionate eye. The quote was ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’”

  “He touched your nose,” Margaret said.

  “Right,” Charlie said. “I thought he was referring to something obvious that we’re missing.”

  “So, a deception campaign,” Margaret said. “Something in front of our noses that we’re missing. What are we missing? Lola? Powell? Giancana?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said.

  “Lot of deception, I guess,” Margaret said pointedly.

  He was ashamed that Margaret knew enough about his drinking to be disappointed in him but decided to make the most of the moment. He told Margaret everything then, about the photograph of him and Lola in the hot tub and about how he couldn’t stop drinking. She listened, and when he finished, she kept driving in silence south toward their Manhattan home, the bare trees and milky light of the late-winter afternoon adding to his already pronounced sense of despair.

  Chapter Seventeen

  New York City

  February 1962

  Midway through another night of revelry, Sinatra surprised the crowd in the restaurant by standing up at his long table in the middle of the room, raising his highball, and toasting his fiancée. Their engagement had been announced in January but few had seen him with Juliet Prowse, a statuesque, full-lipped redhead who’d costarred with her beau in Can-Can two years before. She stood and beamed a smile toward her future husband while the guests clapped and hooted appreciatively, then sat back at her table with Frankenheimer, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury.

  Shooting of The Manchurian Candidate had wrapped earlier that day, and the cast and crew, along with invited guests, were gathered for a celebratory dinner Sinatra was hosting on the third floor of Toots Shor’s legendary restaurant. Charlie and Margaret, like other honored-but-less-important guests, occupied a small table on the outskirts. They’d arrived late after reading bedtime stories to Lucy and Dwight, then leaving them in the care of Margaret’s mother—again—and tiptoeing out of the house with renewed pangs of guilt.

  Margaret’s response to Charlie’s admission of having been photographed in a compromising position with Lola was mixed. Fortunately, she believed him and had no doubts of his fidelity. That was the good news. But after he told her the story on their drive back from Sing Sing, it was almost as if a barrier had been constructed between them, one built out of disappointment and embarrassment.

  “Well, there’s Meehan’s motive,” she had noted. “If he ever gets that photograph, he’ll come at you like a bull.” She didn’t mention that he’d imperiled their entire world. Scandal, blackmail, defeat—anything was possible. She remained civil to him, but distant. He figured he was getting off easy, so he didn’t fight it. He’d been overjoyed when she’d agreed to come with him to Toots Shor’s tonight.

  “I thought this place was on Fifty-First Street,” Margaret said.

  “It used to be,” Charlie said. “Then some real estate guy who was trying to build a skyscraper told Toots he would rebuild his place one block over and give him one and a half million dollars if he moved.”

&n
bsp; “Quite an offer.”

  “Isaiah says Hoffa put up a loan from the Teamsters’ pension fund to underwrite it,” Charlie said. “Four million!”

  New York City was full of swanky restaurants with award-winning chefs and gracious service; Toots’s place offered neither. It was a saloon with a pedestrian menu and a fabulous clientele, frequented by the likes of Sinatra, Babe Ruth, Jackie Gleason, Joe DiMaggio—all of whom were forced to wait in line and suffer occasional insults from Shor himself.

  The Fifty-Second Street version was almost the same as the Fifty-First Street version, with plank oak floors, pine-paneled walls, and spacious and brightly lit rooms dominated by murals of sporting triumphs. The first and second floors each had an immense circular bar, and each dining room had an enormous fireplace with a bronze hood. The third floor, where Sinatra hosted his party, was accessible by elevator and winding staircase and fit three hundred people, though fewer than a hundred were present tonight.

  “It feels like what I imagine a men’s club would be like,” Margaret observed. “Which is saying something, given how much of regular life in America is a men’s club.”

  “What do you mean?” Charlie asked.

  “You know,” Margaret said, sipping her martini. “We’re dames. Usually off camera. Like the First Lady. Or Juliet Prowse. Or sidekicks like Shirley.”

  “You’re no sidekick,” Charlie protested.

  “Not to you,” Margaret said. “But to them.” She tilted her head toward Sinatra and his crew. “And then there’s that other role women can fill…” Margaret nodded toward a corner table where Lawford and Giancana chatted with Judy and another young woman, this one in the process of slowly wrapping herself around the Kennedy in-law. Giancana’s face was lit by a wide, lascivious grin, clearly inspired as much by both women’s attention as by Lawford’s conversation. Charlie had long felt a pang of sympathy—or maybe pity was the better word—for Lawford, a showman who hung out with and had married into groups of more compelling performers. He existed alone in his Venn-diagram circle, a tenuous and less respected member of both the Kennedys and the Rat Pack, constantly overcompensating as he flitted among roles as a diplomat, actor, and bon vivant, failing miserably at all but the last.