The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  “I used to be Ricky Nelson,” Dean tells her. “I’m Perry Como now.”

  Lewis Milestone, who was already a seasoned professional when he made All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930, was hired to direct.

  “They say this is hard work, this acting. What bullshit,” Dean said. “Work? Work my ass.”

  Dean and Richard Conte—Nick Conte, as those close to him knew him—got along well. Conte’s background at the fringes of Jersey City’s malavita was not dissimilar to Dean’s; and both were the sons of old-fashioned Italian barbers. The production and the partying flowed together. From January 26 through February 16, the Rat Pack filmed by day and took the stage of the Sands by night. To Jack Entratter, the sign outside—it would appear at the closing credits—was like a dream come true:

  FRANK SINATRA

  DEAN MARTIN

  SAMMY DAVIS JR.

  PETER LAWFORD

  JOEY BISHOP

  The newspapers had been full of the upcoming Paris summit conference being planned by Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and De Gaulle. Well, Sinatra declared, they would have their own summit conference of cool. Newspapers across the country began publicizing it as the Rat Pack Summit. By the night they opened, every hotel room in Las Vegas was booked for the duration. Entratter was more than happy to go along with their setup: At least one of them would perform every night; sometimes two or three or four of them, sometimes all five.

  Even Kennedy himself showed up at ringside one night. Sinatra introduced him from the stage. Dean came out: “What did you say his name was?” Then Dean picked up little Sammy and held him out to Sinatra: “Here. This award just came for you from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” Later, Kennedy joined the Rat Pack upstairs for drinks. Lawford took Davis aside and whispered to him:

  “If you want to see what a million dollars in cash looks like, go into the next room; there’s a brown leather satchel in the closet. It’s a gift from the hotel owners for Jack’s campaign.”

  There were broads that night as well: blowjobs on the house, all around, for the New Frontiersman and his Democratic crew. One of the women Sinatra introduced to Kennedy was a twenty-five-year-old would-be starlet named Judith Campbell. Sinatra had been fucking her for a while. So had Johnny Rosselli, the West Coast’s lord of darkness. Now Campbell would begin a two-year affair with Jack Kennedy. Sinatra liked the idea: the two men bonding their friendship through a woman.

  Most mornings, they would come offstage at half past one or a quarter to two, drink till dawn, and begin filming.

  “It wasn’t that it wasn’t professional,” Angie Dickinson said of the movie making; “but you’d have to look hard to find a camera to prove to you that they weren’t playing. They really had fun together. The director was very easy. He knew exactly who was signing his check.”

  On their closing night, old-time movie-gangster Jack LaRue was introduced in the audience among a crowd of other celebrities. “Why don’t you come up here and kill somebody?” Dean called out to him. Later, when he stumbled on a sentence, he remarked, “I got my nose fixed, and now my mouth doesn’t work.” He urged the audience, “On your way out, please buy a copy of my latest book, The Power of Positive Drinking.”

  They took the train to Los Angeles that night, and resumed filming at Warner Brothers the next morning.

  Ocean’s Eleven was completed on March 23. Three weeks later, Who Was That Lady? opened at the Criterion in New York. In it, Variety had noted, “Martin strengthens the false impression that he isn’t acting at all. It should be so easy!” The Times did not much care for it— these were the days when the paper of record found Jack Kerouac’s Pull My Daisy “truly arresting”—but did declare that “Mr. Martin, especially, is fine.” On May 9, with André Previn conducting, Dean recorded the soundtrack album for Bells Are Ringing. A day later, with Nelson Riddle, he recorded “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” the song that James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn had written for Ocean’s Eleven. In mid-June—they could not draft him now—he underwent an operation on his hernia at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Bells Are Ringing opened at Radio City Music Hall on June 20, two days before he was released from the hospital.

  The Daily News called Bells Are Ringing “a knockout, even better entertainment than it was on the stage.” Dean, as Holliday’s “partner in singing, dancing and romancing,” was “a perfect choice.”

  HIGH HOPES. That summer, the Rat Pack sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” to open the Democratic national convention in Los Angeles. The delegates from Mississippi loudly protested Sammy Davis’s presence on the stage. But Mississippi had the lowest average income level and the fewest television sets per capita of any state. Jack was not playing to them. His bleeding heart went out to the downtrodden of that state, but only through the wonder of television could they truly experience the integrity of that heart and the probity of the sharecropper’s friend. As every black man in Hyannis Port knew, young John Kennedy was a man whose sense of justice was real. Television conveyed that reality, as it conveyed all realities.

  Dean, who earlier in the year had brought the realities of Fabian and André Previn together on his NBC show, found himself becoming more involved in the shadow play that surrounded Sinatra’s infatuation with the prince of the New Frontier. Jack Kennedy’s kid brother Bobby, a worse spoiled brat than he, was chief counsel to the McClellan Senate committee’s investigations into labor racketeering. Bobby’s holy war against Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters had stirred trouble far and wide. It seemed that the little rabbit-mouthed irlandese was out to crucify not only the new head of the Teamsters but every wop in America along with him. One of those who had been called before the committee in 1959 was Sam Giancana, boss of the Chicago mob, whom both Dean and Sinatra knew from his earliest days of power following the death of Charlie Fischetti. Wearing sunglasses and a cheap hairpiece, Sam had sat there holding a three-by-five-inch card bearing the words of the Fifth Amendment, whose protection he invoked in response to every question Kennedy put forth. The heat had not diminished, and it came to be believed that the only way to get Bobby Kennedy’s nose out of everybody’s business was through Jack. The Teamsters, of course, could not publicly endorse Jack, though Hoffa himself became one of the believers in the hope of his intercession. But, through Giancana, a large donation to Kennedy’s presidential campaign was drawn from the Teamsters pension fund and passed to Jack beneath the blind eyes of his brother Bobby, who took time out from his wop-hunting to serve as Jack’s campaign manager. There were also disbursements from the campaign fund made through Sinatra to Skinny D’Amato in Atlantic City. Under Giancana’s guidance, D’Amato was to purchase the influence of several West Virginia election officials known to him through the 500 Club.

  Giancana, cheap hairpiece and all, was far from a fool. He led Sinatra to think that the donation in support of Kennedy, as well as the influence-buying in West Virginia, was prompted to a great degree by the faith in Kennedy that Sinatra had expressed to him. By giving the impression that he was relying on Sinatra’s judgment and that he was doing Sinatra a favor—Sinatra would be able to further ingratiate himself to Jack by taking credit for the donation and newfound support—Giancana rendered Sinatra beholden to him. Not only, Giancana figured, would he now be able to use Sinatra as a money-maker toward his own ends, Sinatra would be able to deliver that other one, that aloof bastard, that unreachable menefreghista, toward those same ends as well.

  The McGuire Sisters, the three singing daughters of an Ohio minister, had risen to national prominence with a string of hits in 1954, the year that Sam Giancana had become a widower. Sam, who knew the act from the Chez Paree, had run into Phyllis McGuire in Las Vegas in early 1960, about the time that Kennedy announced his candidacy. She was twenty-nine, recently divorced, drinking, and gambling heavily; the days of the McGuire Sisters’ big hits were past. She became Giancana’s lover. Not long after they began their romance, Sinatra introduced Giancana to Judy Campbell, th
e woman who was now Kennedy’s mistress. Again, he liked the idea. Now the three of them, Frank, Jack, and Sam, were sharing the same braciole.

  High hopes: a casino of his own. Elmer “Bones” Remmer, the San Francisco gangster who owned the Cal-Neva Lodge, at Crystal Bay on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, had gotten in trouble with the Treasury Department, trouble that went deeper than the $800,000 he owed the Internal Revenue Service. Control of the Cal-Neva had passed to Bert “Wingy” Grober, who had his problems too. In June 1960, there was talk of Grober’s reducing his stake in the troubled casino. On July 13, 1960, the day Kennedy won the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles, it was announced in Carson City that a group of four men had applied for permission to take over a fifty-seven-percent, majority interest in the Cal-Neva Lodge. Those four men were Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sinatra’s longtime friend, piano player, and legbreaker, Hank Sanicola, and Skinny D’Amato. Under the plan, Wingy’s interest would be reduced to eighteen percent. Sanicola would hold sixteen percent; D’Amato, thirteen; Dean, three. Sinatra’s proposed twenty-five-percent interest, the largest piece, would be shared in secret with Sam Giancana, whose behind-the-scene machinations had enabled the four men to strike an above-board takeover price with Wingy of only $250,000.

  On that same night of July 13, as Kennedy’s nomination was being announced, Dean opened at the Sands.

  “I’d like to tell you some of the good things the Mafia is doing,” he said. There was a momentary hush, then a long, slow wave of rising laughter.

  His singing had begun to take on a new tone. He was no longer merely selling the lie of romance. Stabbing sharply and coldly here and there into the songs with lines of wry disdain, he was exposing his own racket as well, selling the further delusion of their sharing in the secret of that lie itself. It was an elaboration on his tried and true style of singing to the men rather than the women, of singing to them as if they alone could truly understand him. It was also a natural emanation of the way he felt. He simply no longer cared. He began more songs than he finished, dismissing most of them with a wisecrack partway through. Some, with the help of lyricist Sammy Cahn, were simply reduced to gross parody.

  “If you think I’m going to get serious, you’re crazy. If you want to hear a serious song, buy one of my records.”

  In the first week of August, Ocean’s Eleven was previewed at the Fremont Theatre in Las Vegas. The Los Angeles Examiner declared it “something you should keep your children away from.” The New Yorker dismissed it as “an admiring wide-screen color travelogue of the various effluvia—animate and inanimate—of Las Vegas.” But Variety’s prediction proved true: despite “serious weaknesses in both material and interpretation,” it would “rake in chips, thanks to cast.” Ocean’s Eleven became the ninth biggest money-maker of the year, behind such formidable pictures as Psycho, Spartacus, Exodus, La Dolce Vita, Butterfield 8, and The Apartment.

  On September 13, the Nevada Gaming Control Board issued a recommendation for approval of the Cal-Neva takeover. Dean by then had finished another film: All in a Night’s Work, produced by Hal Wallis and directed by Joseph Anthony, who had done Career. Shirley MacLaine once again had the female lead; Cliff Robertson played a romantic ringer in the background. As in Career, Wallis found MacLaine “difficult,” but Dean “was never a problem.” All in a Night’s Work, as Variety later put it, was an “essentially predictable, featherweight comedy,” excellently directed and with a strangely classical score by André Previn. “Never for one moment,” Variety said, “is Martin believable in the role of the youthful publishing tycoon, but his easy-going manner and knack for supplying the comedy reaction gets him by.”

  On November 1, Sinatra joined Dean on “The Dean Martin Show,” which was presented as “Honoring Frank Sinatra.” Seven days later, John F. Kennedy was elected president. It was close: a plurality of only 118,574 votes, the narrowest presidential victory of the century.

  “Listen, honey, if it wasn’t for me, your boyfriend wouldn’t even be in the White House,” Sam Giancana would tell Judy Campbell.

  “Frank won Kennedy the election,” Skinny D’Amato would say.

  But it was television that won it for him. It was Nixon’s poor appearance before the debate cameras that gave Kennedy the votes he needed to scrape by.

  The following night, November 9, Dean returned to the Sands: “I just talked to Jack this morning and he made me secretary of liquor.” He was, Variety reported, “hotter than ever” and “one of the most potent lures for gamblers.” He was also “more relaxed than ever—in fact he appears to be imitating his imitators.”

  Camelot opened in New York on December 3. The show was beloved of the new president, and his administration came to be known by its name: the Camelot years. Jack and Jackie became the fairyland royalty of the land of whiter whites.

  High hopes: a record company of his own. Capitol’s current contract with Sinatra’s Essex Productions company, binding him to release his recordings exclusively through Capitol, would lapse to a nonexclusive basis in February. In early December, it was announced that Sinatra would then begin releasing his records through a new company of his own. On December 19, he made his first recording for his new company, which now had a name: Reprise Records.

  Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, 1992

  Hunter S. Thompson

  (1937–2005)

  After spending years at the low end of the journalism food chain, as sportswriter, copyboy, newspaper stringer, and writer for underground newspapers, Hunter S. Thompson spent a year riding with the Hell’s Angels, which resulted in his first book, Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. The success of that book gave him entrée into respectable venues such as Esquire and Harper’s, then Rolling Stone. Few cultural publications have exhibited less tolerance for humor than Rolling Stone, but they almost made up for it by giving Hunter S. Thompson carte blanche—even if many times owner Jann Wenner jerked Thompson’s leash and ended up killing stories that might have been masterpieces, such as his take on the fall of Saigon. Thompson’s Rolling Stone debut chronicled his run for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, and marked the beginning of the gonzo journalism that gave us Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, excerpted here. Thompson’s style was the entheogenic apotheosis of the New Journalism.

  from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  A Night on the Town . . . Confrontation at the Desert Inn . . . Drug Frenzy at the Circus-Circus

  SATURDAY MIDNIGHT . . . Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide-pegs, is a pocketful of keno cards and cocktail napkins, all covered with scribbled notes. Here is one: “Get the Ford man, demand a Bronco for race-observation purposes . . . photos? . . . Lacerda/call . . . why not a helicopter? . . . Get on the phone, lean on the fuckers . . . heavy yelling.”

  Another says: “Sign on Paradise Boulevard—‘Stopless and Topless’ . . . bush-league sex compared to L.A.; pasties here—total naked public humping in L.A. . . . Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers . . . house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd.”

  A LONG time ago when I lived in Big Sur down the road from Lionel Olay I had a friend who liked to go to Reno for the crap-shooting. He owned a sporting-goods store in Carmel. And one month he drove his Mercedes highway-cruiser to Reno on three consecutive weekends—winning heavily each time. After three trips he was something like $15,000 ahead, so he decided to skip the fourth weekend and take some friends to dinner at Nepenthe. “Always quit winners,” he explained. “And besides, it’s a long drive.”

  On Monday morning he got a phone call from Reno—from the general manager of the casino he’d been working out on. “We missed you this weekend,” said the GM. “The pit-men were bored.”

  “Shucks,” said my friend.

  So the next weekend he flew up to Reno in a private plane, with a friend and two girls—all “special guests”
of the GM. Nothing too good for high rollers. . . .

  And on Monday morning the same plane—the casino’s plane—flew him back to the Monterey airport. The pilot lent him a dime to call a friend for a ride to Carmel. He was $30,000 in debt, and two months later he was looking down the barrel of one of the world’s heaviest collection agencies.

  So he sold his store, but that didn’t make the nut. They could wait for the rest, he said—but then he got stomped, which convinced him that maybe he’d be better off borrowing enough money to pay the whole wad.

  Mainline gambling is a very heavy business—and Las Vegas makes Reno seem like your friendly neighborhood grocery store. For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth. Until about a year ago, there was a giant billboard on the outskirts of Las Vegas, saying:

  DON’T GAMBLE WITH MARIJUANA! IN NEVADA: POSSESSION—20 YEARS

  SALE—LIFE!

  So I was not entirely at ease drifting around the casinos on this Saturday night with a car full of marijuana and head full of acid. We had several narrow escapes: at one point I tried to drive the Great Red Shark into the laundry room of the Landmark Hotel—but the door was too narrow, and the people inside seemed dangerously excited.

  WE DROVE over to the Desert Inn, to catch the Debbie Reynolds/ Harry James show. “I don’t know about you,” I told my attorney, “but in my line of business it’s important to be Hep.”

  “Mine too,” he said. “But as your attorney I advise you to drive over to the Tropicana and pick up on Guy Lombardo. He’s in the Blue Room with his Royal Canadians.”