“It’s funny about that statue. You walk up to the stage like you’re in a dream and they hand you that little man before twenty or thirty million people, and you have to fight to keep the tears back. It’s a moment. Like your first girl or your first kiss. Like the first time you hit a guy and he went down. . . . I don’t think any actor can experience something like that and not change.”
At his home a few miles away, the psychiatrist Frank had been seeing had been watching the Oscar ceremony on television. “That’s it, then,” Dr. Ralph Greenson told his wife with a chuckle. “I won’t be seeing him anymore!” He was right. Frank felt secure now, he told an interviewer, fired with new ambition. Things were also looking up on the musical front.
Before the separation from Ava, before the wrist-slashing, he had been taken on by Capitol Records. The songs he began to record came from his nightclub routine. Six months before the Oscar, at the Riviera in New Jersey, Frank had shown that his voice was back in shape. Audiences had been riveted. “Ever see a mammoth opening night crowd stay completely quiet for an hour?” Metronome’s George Simon wrote. “Or a huge and pretty corny bunch of dinner gobblers still its cutlery and usual chatter to such a degree that a guy at the very back of a spot as big as the Riviera could catch every soft sound that the performer was making? That’s what happened last month when I caught Frank Sinatra on two different occasions.” Simon thought the performance that of a singer who was developing into “one of the most knowing showmen of all time.”
SOON AFTER FRANK’S STAR began to shine again, two gangsters visited Mario Lanza at his home in Los Angeles. The singer was in financial trouble, and the mobsters offered him $150,000 in cash, tax-free, if he would make movies and record for mob-controlled companies. In their pitch to Lanza, a Bureau of Narcotics report noted, the mobsters pointed out that “Frank Sinatra a few years back had been in a similar financial condition. . . . ‘Look,’ they said, ‘what we have done for him.’ ”
It is clear enough now what the Mafia did for Frank. In the three years before his professional collapse, Frank had made no nightclub appearances. From early 1950 on, he made many. One of the first, in January 1950, was the Shamrock in Houston, where Allen Smiley wielded influence. Smiley, who had been Frank’s neighbor at the Sunset Towers in Los Angeles, worked closely with associates of Lucky Luciano. He had recently been looking after Willie Moretti, who was spending some time in California.
Three months later Frank opened at the Copacabana in New York, generally believed to be controlled by Frank Costello. Costello’s columnist friend John Miller—the mafioso’s wife was godmother to Miller’s son—remembered a Sinatra that few ever saw. Frank often came to sit at Costello’s table during this period, according to Miller, as a supplicant. “He was always asking favors of the old man.”
Moretti, back from the West Coast, was at the Copa for Frank’s opening. So, too, was Joe Fischetti, and Frank got work at the Chez Paree in Chicago soon after. In September, as his personal crisis deepened, Frank appeared at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. Months later, and then again as his career began to recover, he returned to Atlantic City to sing at Paul “Skinny” D’Amato’s 500 Club. D’Amato had a lifelong association with organized crime. Early on, when D’Amato was starting out in the gambling business, he had been entrusted with the care of Lucky Luciano when the mobster was hiding out from the law.
D’Amato always insisted he was sole owner of the 500 Club. A usually authoritative source, however, states that he fronted for Marco Reginelli of the Philadelphia mob. Reginelli was a frequent visitor, always treated royally, as was his successor, Angelo Bruno—after whom, by one account, D’Amato named his son.
Frank had known D’Amato since the 1930s, and would be a pall-bearer at his funeral. He liked to celebrate his birthday with him and, when his own star was in the ascendant, came to the rescue when business was slack at the 500. It was a friendship cemented at the time Frank had hit bottom.
“Sinatra was down and out,” said Roy Gerber, a veteran Atlantic City hotel executive. “He was out of show business. He had friends in Atlantic City, though. He could always get work here. . . . Before Sinatra got the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, that’s all there was for him. Places like the 500 Club.”
“Before he made the big time again,” said Vincent Teresa, the Mafia informer from New England, “he was begging for spots to sing at.” Frank did get work in Boston, and according to Teresa borrowed money from Joe “Beans” Palladino, a bookmaker with heavy mob connections. He was beholden to mobsters or mob-related businessmen all over the country.
In 1951, during the breakup of his first marriage, Frank was taken on at the Desert Inn. “At the time you could walk in,” Sonny King said, “you could sit in the back of the room for 25 cents and drink Coca-Cola and watch Frank Sinatra—and he was singing to half a house. It broke my heart, because his voice wasn’t there.”
In spite of the poor performances, Frank was hired again the following year. He got the work thanks to a call from Skinny D’Amato to Moe Dalitz, an alumnus of the old Detroit and Cleveland mobs. Dalitz was the dominant force in the mob’s shift to Las Vegas, and the Desert Inn was a key bridgehead. Far more shrewd an operator than Bugsy Siegel, he was to survive into the 1980s and end his days cloaked in respectability.
Dalitz had been present with Luciano and Moretti at the mob conclave that first discussed formation of a national crime syndicate. He had been one of the criminals who saw Luciano off when he went into exile in 1946. To defy Dalitz, according to an intelligence report, was tantamount to defying Luciano.
Frank’s relationship with mob figures was such that they readily involved themselves in his personal life. Once, when he was still married to Nancy, Frank had asked Mickey Cohen in Los Angeles to restrain a lesser mobster he suspected of pursuing Ava. Cohen advised Frank to “go on home to Nancy where you belong.” Willie Moretti gave Frank the same advice more than once. “When Sinatra was recently separated from his wife,” an informant told the FBI in 1948, “a cousin of Sinatra’s wife who is related to a key member of the Moretti mob contacted Willie Moretti regarding Sinatra’s marriage difficulties . . . as a result Moretti personally instructed Sinatra to go back and live with his wife. Sinatra immediately obeyed.”
Two years later, with the news that Frank was involved with Ava and that the Sinatras were separating, Moretti sent Frank a telegram:
I AM VERY MUCH SURPRISED WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING IN THE NEWSPAPERS BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR DARLING WIFE. REMEMBER YOU HAVE A DECENT WIFE AND CHILDREN. YOU SHOULD BE VERY HAPPY. REGARDS TO ALL. WILLIE
Moretti’s admonition was typical of his Italian-American generation, and especially of mafiosi. “The integrity of the family (small ‘f’) was high on the Mafia’s list,” wrote Claire Sterling in her study of the Sicilian mob. “A Man of Honor was expected to keep up appearances. . . . Maintaining a mistress was practically compulsory; but a member could be expelled for deserting or divorcing his wife.” Costello took the same view. To parade a mistress in public as Frank had Ava, he thought, “showed a lack of respect for the institution of marriage.”
In 1953, after Frank’s divorce from Nancy and when his marriage to Ava was collapsing, Luciano met with Frank in Naples. “Luciano was tempted to convince Sinatra to return to his wife Nancy,” a Bureau of Narcotics agent in Italy reported. “However, he didn’t because he thought it unwise to interfere.”
Moretti was dead by that time, executed by fellow gangsters in a New Jersey restaurant. As mob bosses parceled out his business interests, they had debated who should take over his role in the handling of Frank Sinatra. “Because of my dad’s Hollywood connections,” said the gangster Allen Smiley’s daughter, Luellen, “they suggested giving my father a part in managing Sinatra. As it turned out he didn’t want it, but that was what was on offer.”
Oversight of Frank was entrusted to others. The Mafia had a continuing interest in every aspect of his life and career.
M
ARIO PUZO’S NOVEL The Godfather, and the movie based on it, included a character who could hardly have been modeled on anyone but Frank Sinatra. In the opening chapter of the book, Johnny Fontane, singer protégé of the mob, goes to Mafia boss Don Corleone for help. Fontane had gotten out of his contract with a bandleader called Halley (read Dorsey) thanks to a mob threat to kill Halley. He had then become “the greatest singing sensation in the country” and made money-spinning Hollywood movies. Later, Fontane had “divorced his childhood-sweetheart wife” and left his children to “marry the most glamorous blond star in motion pictures.” Only the hair color is wrong. Fontane constantly suspects his new actress wife is unfaithful. He drinks heavily, loses weight, cannot sleep, and takes pills. His voice has gone and he has been dropped by his Hollywood studio, in part because he “used to sing those songs for the liberal organizations.” There is a part in a new movie, Fontane tells Corleone, that he is desperate to play.
“The main character is a guy just like me. I wouldn’t even have to act, just be myself. I wouldn’t even have to sing. I might even win the Academy Award. . . . I’d be big again.” The problem, Fontane tells the Don, is that the studio head has refused even to consider him for the part. “He sent the word that if I come and kiss his ass in the studio commissary, maybe he’ll think about it.”
The studio boss in the novel is Jack Woltz, a New Yorker of Russian extraction who had moved west, invested in the nickelodeon, and risen to become a tyrannical studio head. He is “rapaciously amorous” of women, but over all else loves his thoroughbred horses. Woltz’s pride and joy is Khartoum, a fabulously expensive stallion he has purchased. One morning soon after Fontane’s meeting with the Don, Godfather aficionados know, Woltz wakes to find Khartoum’s severed head at the foot of his bed. Message received. Fontane gets the part.
In real life, Harry Cohn was also a New Yorker of Russian parentage. From beginnings in the nickelodeon business, he had risen to become a renowned Hollywood despot. He had a voracious sexual appetite, and was addicted to horse racing. He did not own an Arabian stallion but, as an inveterate gambler, he favored one called Omar Kiam. And, of course, he had resolutely opposed casting Frank in Eternity.
“What phony stuff!” Frank was to say of The Godfather. “Somebody going to the mob to get a role in a movie!” In private, Frank had long since hinted at a different truth. “Hey,” George Jacobs recalled him saying with a Cheshire Cat grin, “I got that part through my own fucking talent.” “And then,” Jacobs said, “he gave me a wink.” Frank admitted to Brad Dexter, as did Ava, that the mob had leaned on Cohn. There is also a firsthand witness.
Martin Jurow, who produced the classic movies Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Terms of Endearment, was the William Morris Agency’s man in New York when Eternity was being cast. He was forty-one then, an up-and-coming agent who had switched to show business after graduating from Harvard Law School. In 2001, he told how a William Morris colleague, George Wood, brought Frank into his office. Wood explained that Frank was there to discuss his foundering career, and wondered if Jurow had any suggestions. Wood, Jurow knew, was close to the “ ‘quiet investors’ who were willing to pay entertainers large fees for performing in their Las Vegas clubs”—in other words, the mobsters. Wood had been “connected” since Prohibition days, and was close to Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky.
Jurow looked carefully at Frank as he came into the room. Some of the old cockiness remained but he seemed dispirited, almost desperate. When Jurow said finding him a prestigious film role would get him out of the doldrums, Frank said gloomily that there was small chance of that. Jurow, however, knew something Frank did not—that Fred Zinnemann was still looking for the right actor to play Maggio in Eternity. Frank looked the part, a loser trying to put on a brave face, and Jurow put his name forward. Zinnemann expressed interest. Cohn, however, reacted with characteristic coarseness. Yelling into the phone, he said he would not have “that bum” Sinatra in his studio.
Hours after being turned down, Jurow went to see Wood at his apartment on Central Park South. There, as he put it fifty years later, “something fantastic occurred.” He found Wood, not for the first time, ensconced with a mafioso, “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, a key member of the old Luciano syndicate. Alo had a low profile but a great deal of power. He knew Frank and his family so well, an associate said, that Frank regarded him as “his closest friend in that realm.” He was an intimate of Frank’s East Coast manager, Henri Giné, though that was something Giné went to great pains to keep quiet. Alo had a stake in the William Morris agency, had known Wood since the 1930s, and visited him almost every day.
That night in New York, Alo was told how Cohn had rebuffed Jurow. Alo knew Cohn, had done him favors in the past. “Harry Cohn, huh?” Jurow recalled Alo responding. “Where is he now? In California? . . . Does he have a private line?” Jurow gave him the number. “Jimmy Blue Eyes then walked over and patted me on the head,” Jurow recalled. “He spoke with a finality I have never forgotten: ‘He owes us. Expect a call.’ Three simple words, but spoken with such ominous certainty.” Jurow felt he was “right in the middle of an Edward G. Robinson movie.” Cohn did soon telephone—to concede defeat and assure Jurow that Frank would get the part.
Cohn’s widow, Joan, acknowledged the mob involvement. The writer Peter Evans, who knew her socially years later, often heard her describe how “two gentlemen from the mob turned up at Columbia Pictures and told Harry Cohn he was going to cast Sinatra in Eternity.” When he passed the word to Zinnemann, as Joan told it, the director said he thought Frank might be right for the part anyway. This gave Cohn a face-saver. He could give the Mafia what it demanded while plausibly maintaining that his decision was based on merit.
According to his biographer, Costello had also been in touch with George Wood at William Morris, and told friends “he was the one who got Sinatra the part.” Johnny Rosselli, a key mob emissary on the West Coast—Luciano had authorized his work there—said he delivered the mob threat. He had long been close to Cohn, having produced the cash that gave Cohn control of Columbia Pictures. He advised Cohn on gambling ventures and had been a frequent guest at his home. The two men wore matching rings, rubies set in gold, to attest to their friendship. As in all Mafia relationships, however, the bottom line was fear.
Rosselli “was the one who laid it out,” his associate Joe Seide said. “That was serious business. It was in the form of ‘Look, you do this for me and maybe we won’t do this to you.’ ” Meredith Harless, the former assistant to Cohn’s opposite number at MGM, Louis B. Mayer, said she learned Rosselli delivered a simple ultimatum: “Give Frank the role or I will have you killed.”
HAVING HELPED FRANK through a tough period, the Mafia stayed close. In November 1953, when he slashed his wrists in New York, he had been about to leave for a nightclub engagement in St. Louis. When he failed to turn up, it was St. Louis attorney Morris Shenker, the foremost mob lawyer of his day, who let Frank’s booking agents know what had happened. Shenker’s relations with top gangsters went “far beyond mere legal representation,” Life reported. The Sacramento Bee described him as a “money mover for the mob.”
After the wrist-slashing, George Wood was assigned to baby-sit Sinatra. “When Frank ate, I ate,” he recalled. “When he slept, I slept, when he felt like walking, I walked with him. When he took a haircut, I took a haircut.”
Emotionally unstable though Frank was, the mob had good reason to mollycoddle him. Now, more than ever, he represented an important investment. A fortune in Mafia money was being committed to make Las Vegas the nation’s gambling capital, and the way to lure suckers was to provide top-class entertainment. Frank was to be part of a specific new mob enterprise, the Sands Hotel and Casino.
The Sands had opened in late 1952, when Frank had so little money that Ava had had to pay his airfare to Africa. He had been in tax trouble for some time, and the IRS filed a lien for $109,997 ($750,000 today) against him in early 1953. What money Frank had during the do
wn period had come from his club appearances, and the part in Eternity had boosted his morale but paid only $10,000. He was still heavily in debt. Then, in August 1953, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Nevada Tax Commission had delayed its decision as to whether or not to grant Frank a gambling license “until he has cleared his income tax obligations.” The license was necessary, the Times explained, if Frank were to hold “a two per cent interest in the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas,” an investment of $54,000. Frank got his license a few months later, having told the commissioners he was gradually paying off the tax debt. All of a sudden, evidently, he had access to large sums of money.
One of the secret owners of the Sands was Frank Costello. The building of the complex had been supervised by Jimmy Alo, who was now monitoring progress. The Sands general manager Jack Entratter, a big fellow, had escorted Frank during his initial wild popularity and worked as a bouncer at the Copacabana in New York. Frank was among friends.
In early 1953, during the filming of From Here to Eternity, Frank had been seen in Las Vegas cavorting with a New York–based enforcer for a Luciano associate. In October, riding on the wave of his success in the movie, he was back in town for his opening at the Sands. The management installed him in style in the hotel’s Presidential Suite, with its three grand bedrooms and its very own pool. The “quiet investors” were making sure to pamper Frank. He was to sing at the Sands the following year, the year after that, and again and again until the late 1960s. It became, as his daughter Nancy put it, his Las Vegas home. He would reign as “King of Las Vegas,” the city’s star of stars.
TWO YEARS EARLIER, pressed by Kefauver Committee attorneys to discuss his alleged mob ties, Frank had been in a state of high anxiety. The nation’s growing audience of television viewers had been watching as gangster after gangster, compelled to testify in public, ducked and weaved under tough questioning. Desperate to avoid that sort of exposure, Frank agreed to meet investigators at 4:00 A.M. in an office at Rockefeller Center. The attorney who asked the questions, Joe Nellis, vividly remembered how Frank came in looking “like a lost kitten, drawn, frightened to death.” He visibly shook as Nellis showed him pictures of Frank in Cuba with Luciano. Frank said the mobsters were “people his mother knew, that his family knew.” The Fischettis, he admitted, were “great buddies,” “good people, who support the Church.” Costello, he said, was just someone with whom he had “once” had a drink.
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