Frank did see Kennedy the following day, at the Lawfords’ house, and Peter Lawford witnessed an interesting exchange. The guests he planned to bring to the week’s final reception, Frank said, might include “some friends from Chicago.” “Well, Frank,” Kennedy replied with mock solemnity, “just make sure they leave their shades in the car.”
On the eve of the convention, Murray Humphreys had labored to nail down support for Kennedy. Holed up in a Chicago hotel suite, he worked the phones and huddled with politicians and union officials.
Important mobsters were also in Los Angeles during the convention, according to Bill Bonanno. For some of them, he said, Kennedy remained a “hard, almost impossible sell. . . . More people in our world were behind Lyndon Johnson than Kennedy.” Tommy Lucchese, the old Luciano hand from New York, paid a quiet visit to Joe Kennedy and, according to Bonanno, made a deal. Those under Mafia control at the convention were now told to throw their weight behind his son John.
Giancana met with Humphreys the following month. They talked over dinner about “what politicians had to be ‘turned around,’ ” Jeanne Humphreys remembered, which “union heads had to be convinced. . . . Mooney [Giancana] was exuberant. . . . There was a lot of ‘Frank said this’ and ‘Frank said that’ and ‘It’ll all pay off.’ ” In jest, Jeanne said, she told Giancana that someone ought to put her on the campaign payroll. The Mafia boss responded, “We’ll all get our payoff in the end.”
IN CALIFORNIA and across the country, Frank had embarked on a marathon of campaign activity. Rosalind Wyman, a key Democratic campaign organizer on the West Coast, thought him “the one who really made a difference.” He was hugely effective as a fund-raiser. People paid $50 a head to hear him sing from the diving board by the pool at Tony Curtis’s house in Beverly Hills. “He’d get on the phone to somebody,” said Milt Ebbins, “and before you knew it he’d be saying, ‘Gotcha down for ten thousand.’ . . . Frank snapped his fingers and people fell into line.”
“If he asked people to go somewhere, they’d go,” said Wyman. “Sammy Davis, Jr., Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Milton Berle, Bobby Darin, Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows. Frank got them all to do events for us.” When transport was needed, Frank supplied the plane.
“We’d spread out,” Davis remembered. “I’d do rallies in L.A., San Diego, and up the coast to San Francisco, then we’d meet back at Frank’s. ‘How’d it go? What happened?’ . . . There were always groups huddling, planning activities, and it was exciting to be there, everybody knew you and you knew everybody and you were all giving yourselves to something in which you deeply believed.”
“Just a simple call,” said Joseph Cerrell, who was a political consultant during the campaign, “and [Frank] takes care of the whole thing. There aren’t any bills for the orchestra. . . . People don’t say no to him.”
Frank’s energy and enthusiasm were boundless. He lent his name to a book, Many Happy Returns, that featured recipes recommended by Democrats Eleanor Roosevelt, Dinah Shore, Bette Davis, and Lauren Bacall. He made time for politics even when working, barnstorming around the Hawaiian islands by private plane during location work for The Devil at 4 O’Clock, a forgettable adventure movie. “I wish I had Sinatra’s stamina,” said Robert Kennedy, who was himself known for his staying power.
In mid-October, when Frank appeared at a rally in New Jersey, the crowd’s welcome seemed more for him than for the politicians on the podium. Thousands surged forward shouting “We want Sinatra!” and he had to cut short his remarks. Two days later, he took part in a radio program with Eleanor Roosevelt.
The offices of two of Kennedy’s doctors were burgled during the campaign, probably Republican efforts to get information on his health problems. With similar intent, undercover operatives for Joe Kennedy had been trying to confirm rumors that Nixon had for some time consulted Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, a New York psychotherapist. They succeeded, Kennedy confided later, in getting hold of “a whole dossier.” Milt Ebbins confirmed this. “The one thing they stole,” he said, “was a report on Nixon, a detailed report about four to six typed pages. I remember the word ‘paranoid.’ . . . The doctor’s recommendation was that Nixon should go to some place and get treatment.”
On November 6, less than forty-eight hours before the election, Dr. Hutschnecker was startled to receive a call from an Associated Press reporter. Would the doctor care to comment, the reporter wanted to know, on his patient Richard Nixon? Hutschnecker would not comment, and the information stayed out of the news until well into the future. The man who had leaked the story to the press, according to a later Washington Post report, was Frank Sinatra.
Frank was at Tony Curtis’s house to watch the returns on election night. At midnight, eight miles away at the Ambassador Hotel, Nixon was saying privately that Kennedy was going to win. In front of the cameras, however, Kennedy’s opponent would not concede. “Frank was drunk,” Janet Leigh recalled, “and he yelled at the TV screen, ‘Concede, you son-of-a-bitch! Concede!’ Frank called the hotel where Nixon was and tried to get him and told someone to tell him to concede. It was a heavy night.”
The world learned the following morning that Kennedy had won the popular vote with a majority of just 113,057 votes out of nearly 69 million cast. He would have lost in the electoral college, the crucial part of the process, had 28,000 voters in Texas and 4,500 in Illinois cast their votes differently. Suspicions of fraud focused above all on Illinois.
Frank had kept a line open to Chicago throughout election day, checking tallies every half hour on the half hour with Democratic ward boss Jake Arvey, who was close to Giancana. During the cliff-hanger evening hours, before going to Janet Leigh’s house, Frank spoke time and again with Giancana himself, turning to friends repeatedly to forecast, “It’s gonna turn, it’s gonna turn.”
John Kennedy had made a call of his own, from Hyannis Port, to Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley. Daley had assured him, Kennedy told aides, that “we’re going to make it with the help of a few close friends.”
In his office at the Armory Lounge, Giancana had presided over his own bank of phones. With Johnny Rosselli, he monitored local returns as they came in. Orders had been issued, and field operatives bent the voting process as required.
“Votes weren’t bought,” said Murray Humphreys’s wife, so much as “commanded, demanded and in a few cases cajoled.” According to Giancana’s brother Chuck, “guys stood menacingly alongside the voting booths, where they made clear to prospective voters that all ballots were to be cast for Kennedy . . . more than a few arms and legs were broken.”
Big players in the know had placed big bets. “I know for a fact that Joe Kennedy put down $22,000, to win, on his boy,” said former bookmaker Harry Hall. “Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin made big bets also.”
The votes that put Kennedy over the top in Illinois had been “stolen—let me repeat that—stolen,” Notre Dame professor Robert Blakey, an organized crime specialist, has said. FBI wiretaps alone, he said, show that mob money and muscle made a difference. The Mafia does nothing for nothing, however, and Blakey was sure Giancana thought “the Kennedys would do something for them” in return.
According to Jeanne Humphreys, Joe Kennedy had assured Giancana that a Kennedy administration would “lay off the mob.” Former FBI agent William Roemer, who orchestrated FBI surveillance in Chicago, recalled the import of bugged Mafia conversations, some of them in Sicilian dialect, before and after the elections. “Eventually,” Roemer wrote, Giancana had a conversation in which he “indicated that Frank Sinatra had made a commitment to Giancana in 1960. . . . The agreement was that if Giancana used his influence in Chicago with the ‘West Side Bloc’ and other public officials on Kennedy’s behalf, Sinatra felt he could get Kennedy to back off from the FBI investigation of Giancana.”
Even Lucky Luciano was harboring hopes of a return from exile. In the late 1950s, he recalled, he had been visited by an American senator “with a yen to be in the White House”—not Kennedy—
who “talked about trying to fix up a way for me to come back.” Nothing came of it. During the 1960 campaign, however, for reasons Luciano did not reveal, his hopes rose.
“We were playing gin rummy on the veranda and talking,” said Sal Vizzini, a Bureau of Narcotics undercover man who got close to Luciano at that time, “and I got a feeling that Costello and Lansky were promising him an opportunity to come back if Kennedy won. He wasn’t supposed to do anything himself because they could do it for him. . . . He inferred that he would get a crack at going back to the States.”
Luciano’s associate Joe Adonis, who had been deported to Italy in 1956, was a multiple murderer, another of those gangsters whom Frank claimed to know only on a “hello and goodbye” basis, though FBI records suggest otherwise. He may have had special reason for optimism about returning to America. According to an intimate of Skinny D’Amato, Michael Hellerman, Joe Kennedy had promised to “do what he could,” should his son become president, to see that Adonis was allowed back.
“Joe Adonis expects to be allowed to return from Italian exile in the spring,” Walter Winchell wrote within weeks of the election. “Christmas cards from Lucky Luciano arriving in New York. . . . Frank Costello should be sprung before the snow melts.”
On the matter of the Mafia, though, the Kennedy family was at odds with itself.
FOUR YEARS EARLIER, as chief counsel of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, Bobby Kennedy had resolved to expose the penetration of the labor unions by organized crime. His father had thought the idea “dangerous . . . not the sort of thing or the sort of people to mess around with,” and they had argued bitterly. Bobby held firm, and by 1959 he was pursuing Sam Giancana. He personally interrogated Giancana in a public session, grilled him about the disposal of cadavers, taunted him for giggling like a girl in response to questions. Giancana had taken the Fifth Amendment thirty-three times.
Frank, who watched the hearing on television, had exploded with rage as Kennedy questioned his friend. “Can you believe this little weasel?” he exclaimed. “Can you believe how crazy this goddamn Mick is!” Giancana himself, said his daughter Antoinette, “really hated Bobby Kennedy . . . Bobby was ‘the rat of the family,’ while Jack was different.”
The month after the election, John Kennedy announced Bobby’s appointment as attorney general. Mobsters across the country were amazed and appalled that their nemesis had become the nation’s senior law enforcement officer. Speaking from the steps of the Department of Justice, Bobby made it clear that he intended to wage war on organized crime.
FBI files show that Giancana’s name was placed close to the top of the list of those selected for “concentrated intensified action.” He was already under electronic surveillance, and FBI agents were soon to plant a bug in his headquarters. He would eventually be subjected to “lock-step” physical surveillance, designed to keep him off balance. Where he drove, agents drove. When he played golf, golfing FBI agents followed one hole behind.
As the FBI wiretaps and other evidence show, Giancana simmered with rage. He had been double-crossed, as he saw it, and Frank was at least partly to blame.
ENTERTAINERS HAD NEVER BEEN immune to violent retribution, and least of all from Giancana. It had been a young Giancana, some have claimed, who knifed Joe E. Lewis in the late 1920s. He had been involved in the mob threat to Sammy Davis in 1957. It would be he, according to a fellow mobster, who in 1961 would issue an order to kill Desi Arnaz—later rescinded—because he was making The Untouchables, a TV series that depicted mobsters as ruthless killers.
Early that same year, just as it was becoming clear that the Kennedy administration was not going to be soft on organized crime, Frank experienced a moment of sheer terror. Melville Shavelson, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter later to become president of the Writers Guild, learned what had happened at the time. He and his partner, Jack Rose, had worked on the Kennedy inaugural gala, with the assurance that Frank would be helpful should they need a favor. Holding him to the promise, they asked Frank if he would star in a movie that was in the works at Paramount. Frank said he might be interested, and asked the writers to meet him at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. Shavelson and Rose flew there, arrived at the hotel, and took the elevator to Frank’s penthouse suite. “We went into the living room,” Shavelson said, “and there was a bunch of his henchmen sitting around. And one of them asked what we wanted. And I said, ‘Frank told us to come down to talk about a movie.’ He said, ‘You don’t tell it to him today.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ And he replied, ‘Because he ain’t going to come out of his room.’
“ ‘Why not?’ I asked again. And Frank’s guy told me, ‘He ordered room service last night, and they brought it up to him on a silver tray with a platter covered with a silver dome.’ I don’t know if Frank lifted it or one of them lifted the dome, but under it, they told us, was the skinned head of a lamb. . . . Frank got up, went into his room, and didn’t come out. He didn’t show at all the next day.”
Dead animals have indeed been used by the Mafia to deliver warnings and threats. Though a fiction, the horse’s head in The Godfather was in the authentic Mafia tradition. A “sheep with its throat cut” left outside a man’s door, wrote Herner Hess in his study of the Sicilian Mafia, is one of a range of threats used against nonmembers.
Far into the future, according to a member of Frank’s staff, he could not abide the smell of roast lamb. Whether as affectation or in caution, he preferred to sit in restaurants with his back to the wall. Frank had gone to Giancana on the Kennedys’ behalf, his daughter Tina has said, expecting nothing back. “What he did not expect was to be set up like a blindsided innocent, like a fool to take the fall.”
26
Friends Fall Out
IN JANUARY 1961, two nights before John Kennedy’s inauguration, Frank had spent the evening at Robert Kennedy’s grand house outside Washington. The Kennedy children behaved as if he were “a god who had dropped out of the sky,” fellow guest Joan Braden thought. After endless requests that he sing, he finally leaned back in his chair, removed his toupee—an astonishing departure—and sang for them. Then he rose and said, “That’s enough of Frank Sinatra. Bobby, get me a drink.”
The previous night, at another Kennedy party, Frank had sat beside the president-elect. A month after his forty-fifth birthday, it seemed, he not only had fame and fortune but entrée at the pinnacle of political power. The inauguration gala he produced, featuring a plethora of stars, was rated a huge success. Though only three thousand people made it to the show—there was a blizzard—all twelve thousand seats had been sold in advance at prices ranging from $100 to $1,500, with boxes costing as much as $10,000. The gala reduced the party’s debt by $1.5 million.
In return Frank was honored. Jacqueline Kennedy, who did not approve of the Rat Pack’s antics, walked to the presidential box on his arm. John Kennedy took the microphone to declare himself “indebted to a great friend, Frank Sinatra. . . . You cannot imagine the work that he has done. . . . I thank him on behalf of all of you.”
The next day, however, when Kennedy stood in the cold in front of the Capitol to take the oath of office, Frank was not among the six hundred men and women seated in the area set aside for the president’s friends. Instead he was in his suite at the Statler Hilton, watching on television. The composer Leonard Gershe, who watched with him, said “Frank didn’t want to go—it was something like twelve degrees below zero.” According to the New York Daily News, Frank had turned up drunk before the ceremony. “There was a stand that had assigned seats, and Frank was not on the list,” said Bob Neal. “He climbed up and said ‘I’m Frank Sinatra,’ and a guy said ‘We don’t care if you’re the Pope. You’re not on the list.’ And the cops threw him out. That’s what I heard.”
At the Hilton that night, when Frank gave a dinner for his fellow entertainers, there was caviar and champagne and, for each person present, the gift of an inscribed silver cigarette box. Frank had commissioned the boxes in bulk from Ruser�
�s of Beverly Hills at a cost of thousands of dollars. This was Frank’s sumptuous inauguration sideshow, and the president had promised to drop in.
Gloria Cahn remembered how Frank sat “very much on edge, waiting, watching, wondering when Kennedy was going to get there.” Then came a message that the president was in the hotel and wanted the stars to come downstairs to shake his hand. “Tell him,” Frank said, “that we’re eating.” He slipped away after a while, though, and persuaded Kennedy to come up to talk with the stars.
The following day, when it was time for a select group of celebrities to fly to Palm Beach to visit the president’s father, Frank was not among them. Janet Leigh was surprised to find him still in his suite with his current girlfriend, Juliet Prowse. “Tony [Curtis] and I went into the living room and he and Juliet were having breakfast. I said, ‘Oh! You’re not dressed yet.’ He said, ‘We’re not going. I have to go back to Hollywood.’ Everything had seemed friendly and cozy the previous night, and Poppa Kennedy had gotten houses for Frank and the rest of us. Then it was just, pftt, he didn’t come.
“At the time I didn’t know what happened. But later we were told— I think by Peter Lawford—that something had been said after the ball, or that morning. Frank was not in a happy mood. . . . Something had happened.” The relationship between Frank and the Kennedys had in fact had been coming apart for some time.
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