by Shawn Levy
Sammy, on the other hand, seemed willing to spend himself completely on the audience, yet he was just as informed by an aspect of Frank’s art as was Dean. If Dean, like Vic Damone, Tony Bennett, and Eddie Fisher, was born of Frank the Crooner, Sammy, like Bobby Darin and Buddy Greco, was a son of Frank the Swinger. For Sammy, the sheer dramatic actorliness of Frank’s singing was a jumping-off point for an act that transformed sincerity from something you conveyed with just your voice to something you communicated with the feet, the face, the hands, the knees, the hips. He provided a link between Al Jolson and Michael Jackson, a man gifted with a variety of awesome talents, none more impressive than the ability to marshal them all in the service of a single, overpowering emotion. What Frank could sell with a whisper or a roar, Sammy used his whole being to put across. Ballads, saloon songs, swing numbers, novelty tunes, he wrung them all, completely.
In the curious juxtaposition of his tiny frame and his deep, woody voice, in his struggles against racism, gossip, and slander, in his triumph over physical trauma and social obstacles, he became a curiously heroic figure, and this made each song he sang seem a challenge that he would conquer through sheer will. Like Frank, he believed deeply in the redemptive power of music, but where Frank thought it unseemly to do anything but sing a song, Sammy attacked it with his life. Audiences with whom he had nothing in common as people found themselves empathizing with his struggle and victory; to root against Sammy as he went up against a number was pure bad faith. He was a man naked against the elements with only his heart and voice to keep him alive.
This might’ve been why he was so restless, trying so many types of material—show tunes, blues, Latin numbers, standards, rock. He was always looking for a new fight, another piece of the world that hadn’t submitted yet to his assault. He became known, over time, more for the idiosyncrasy of his métier than for the depth of his expertise in any area, as an eclectic rather than, as Dean and Frank, a specialist. And his specialty was being himself more than anyone else could ever be: “I Gotta Be Me,” “A Lot of Living to Do,” “What Kind of Fool Am I?,” “Yes I Can.” What was this but propaganda of the soul, pure ambition exactly like that which Frank expressed in his own more precise fashion?
Sammy never forgot Frank telling him to find his own sound; it was given as career advice, the counsel of an older brother to a younger. Frank certainly felt no threat from Sammy, but he may have been uneasy at seeing the neediest part of his own act presented by Sammy in such a raw, bald form. Sammy was a fabulous mimic (as, by the by, was Dean), and Frank, who could barely do a decent Kingfish, didn’t care for the spectacle of his cerebral passion being alchemized into something so physical, earthly, and brash. Frank loved Sammy’s act as a counterweight to his own, but when it was too close to his own, it made him queasy. This, of course, was the risk Sammy took every time he took the stage—the risk that made his art so thrilling—but Frank was nevertheless right to resist it.
A true original, he was entitled to look askance at the mannerists in his wake.
Worthless bums and whores
The Pan Am clipper landed in Havana on February 11, 1947, filled with snowbirds out to enjoy the balmy climes and not-so-discreet temptations of one of the world’s most exciting cities—mambos, rum, jai alai, cigars, casinos, sex shows, cheap flesh.
Among the gay throng, three well-dressed men stood apart. Two bore a distinct air of menace, mitigated, maybe, by fine clothes and grooming. The third, the slightest of them, had a softer mien; like one of the larger men, he carried a briefcase. A few years later, a photograph would be published of the three of them disembarking from the plane.
A car took the three men to the Nacional, the grandest hotel in the Caribbean. There they signed a register book. The big men were Joe and Rocco Fischetti of Chicago and Miami, cousins of Al Capone and brothers of Charlie “Trigger-Happy” Fischetti, one of the chief inheritors of Capone’s crime empire. Rocco ran gambling rackets for his big brother, while Joe, weaker and a tad soft in the head, kept an eye on nightclubs, restaurants, and other quasi-legit operations.
The little man was Frank. He’d spent the previous few days with the Fischettis in Miami; the night before their trip to Cuba, he entertained the brothers and an audience of gamblers at the Colonial Inn, a Hallandale, Florida, carpet joint owned by Meyer Lansky and Joe Adonis. He had come to Havana for one of three reasons: to have a few days with “the boys” before joining his wife in Mexico, as he told reporters at the time; or “to find sunshine,” as he told Nevada gaming commissioners who questioned him about the visit in 1981; or to attend a gala four-day party being thrown in his honor by a large group of Italo-Americans who were filling three dozen suites at the Nacional, as one of the hosts later claimed.
This last was likeliest, even though it was itself a cover story. The real reason that such men as the Fischettis, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Joe Profaci, Meyer Lansky, Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Tony Accardo, and Tommy Lucchese had gathered in Havana was to pay fealty to and talk business with Lucky Luciano, the deported mob boss who’d snuck circuitously into Cuba after a year and a half of exile in Italy.
Joseph “Doc” Stacher, future owner of the Sands, was there, and he remembered years later that the assembled mobsters used Frank as a cover for their real purposes. “Luciano was very fond of Sinatra’s singing,” Stacher admitted, “but, of course, our meeting had nothing to do with listening to him croon.” In the days that followed Frank’s arrival in Havana, he was seen in the company of some of the men staying at the Nacional at a racetrack, a casino, and various festive functions in restaurants and saloons and at the hotel. Frank was photographed nightclubbing with Luciano and smiling with him on a hotel balcony. (Presumably, Frank wasn’t present at graver occasions during the week. Among the items on the agenda were the importation of narcotics into the United States, the takeover of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and the execution of Benny Siegel for embezzling construction funds and failing to turn the hotel quickly enough into a cash cow.)
The conclave was carefully watched by agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the only department of the federal government then convinced of the reality of an organized crime syndicate. Those agents suspected that the briefcase that Frank carried off the plane that day was filled with $2 million in cash earmarked for Luciano. In an effort not so much to discredit Frank as to draw national attention to the problem of syndicated crime, information about the events in Havana was leaked to the press. Within a few days, Frank was hit with a number of highly critical newspaper columns which fingered him for consorting with known criminals and charged him with being a bagman for the mob. The sweet, skinny crooner with the bow ties and the pretty wife was now being mentioned in the same breath as the nation’s most vicious killers.
Frank tried to fight back. To charges that he ran with a bad crowd, he responded, “I was brought up to shake a man’s hand when introduced to him without first investigating his past.” He admitted being on the same plane as the Fischettis, and he even admitted having met Luciano, although he once again ascribed it to his good manners: “As so often happens in big groups, the introductions were perfunctory. I was invited to have dinner with them and while dining, I realized that one of the men in the party was Lucky Luciano. It suddenly struck me that I was laying myself open to criticism by remaining at the table, but I could think of no way to leave in the middle of the dinner without creating a scene.”
Later, Frank said, after a gambling and nightclubbing excursion, he hit the Havana Casino: “We passed a table at which were Luciano and several other men. They insisted that we sit down for a drink. Again, rather than cause a disturbance, I had a quick drink and excused myself. These were the only times I’ve ever seen Luciano in my life.” (The statement went unchallenged, even a few years later when police ransacking the gangster’s Naples, Italy, home turned up a gold cigarette case engraved “To my dear pal Lucky from his friend Frank Sinatra.”)
> As for the bag with the $2 million stuffed inside it, Frank laughed: “Picture me, skinny Frankie, lifting $2 million in small bills. For the record, one thousand dollars in dollar bills weighs three pounds, which makes the load I am supposed to have carried six thousand pounds.… I stepped off the plane in Havana with a small bag in which I carried my oils, sketching material, and personal jewelry, which I never send with my regular luggage.” (Dollarbills? Oils?)
The ugly denouement to the trip came in April, when Frank came across Lee Mortimer, entertainment editor of the New York Daily Mirror, at Ciro’s nightclub in Hollywood. Writing for an organ of the right-wing Hearst newspaper chain, Mortimer had for several years taken issue with Frank’s public stands on racial harmony and had expressed a personal distaste for Frank’s singing and the reaction it provoked among the bobby-soxers. He’d also been among the loudest and most caustic voices in the rumpus about Frank and the mob; in a review of Frank’s recent film It Happened in Brooklyn, Mortimer even referred to the star as “Frank (Lucky) Sinatra.”
Frank had long been threatening to get Mortimer, and the sight of the columnist in his own California stomping grounds outraged him. Words were exchanged, or maybe not: Frank said Mortimer called him a “little dago bastard”; Mortimer denied it and said Frank called him a “fucking homosexual” and a “degenerate.” Whatever, Frank up and decked the guy, who went to the hospital to be treated for bruises and then filed criminal charges for assault and battery and a civil lawsuit for $25,000.
Frank got murdered in the papers. Mortimer was a little prick, everybody knew that, but the press wasn’t happy with having one of its own smacked by some cocky star, even if they were on his side; they let him have it. The pressure from national newspapers and his own bosses at MGM to put the matter behind him became untenable. When Frank’s claim that Mortimer had used ethnic slurs against him dissolved in an absence of witnesses to back it up, he paid the columnist $9,000 and admitted in open court that “no provocation really existed” for the fisticuffs.
For the rest of his life, Frank and his family would explain away the attack on Mortimer by claiming that the columnist initiated the decades-long assumption that Frank was chummy with mobsters; one friend even reported visiting a cemetery with Sinatra and watching him gleefully piss on Mortimer’s grave.
True, Mortimer had spread the Havana story, and Frank answered questions about that trip for years. But from his repeated, ferocious protest against having his name mentioned alongside those of Mafiosi, you’d’ve thought he was the only entertainer ever to brush up against Mafiosi—or that, the record to the contrary, he didn’t like the contact.
In fact, just about every American comic and singer who had a career before the rock ’n’ roll era worked for and met gangsters. From New Orleans, where a branch of the Mafia appeared at around the time Dixieland was born, to Chicago and Kansas City, where jazz and organized crime grew up together, to the nightclubs of New York and the showrooms of Las Vegas, the histories of the mob and showbiz were interlinked.
Dean knew gangsters: His hometown was filled with mob-run casinos, speakeasies, and brothels, and he himself worked as a dealer in sneak joints and as a singing waiter and entertainer in nightclubs with shadowy silent partners. He and Jerry Lewis had played the Copacabana in New York, the Riviera in northern Jersey, the Chez Paree in Chicago, the 500 Club in Atlantic City—mob joints all. They came to know the owners and their front men; even, a tad dangerously, their women.
The mobsters tolerated Jerry, but they loved Dean; they courted him, seeking his company in saloons and casinos and on golf courses. But he had no more desire for their favors or their company than he did to have Frank drag him around by the nose. Frank Sinatra, Frank Costello, Franklin Roosevelt: It was all the same to him. A drunken mob soldier once came up to him blubbering, “I have so much respect for you, so much respect,” and kissed him on the cheek; Dean wiped his face and gave the man a withering look: “Keep a little for yourself, huh, pallie?” Dean knew that the world for such men was a one-way arrangement; he was smart enough never to be disrespectful or insubordinate—asked to make an appearance, he usually complied—but he kept his distance and tried to maintain strictly professional relationships with any gangsters who wanted to get closer.
This wasn’t Sammy’s problem by a long shot. Aside from Frank himself, no one in the Sinatra orbit would’ve been happier to accommodate gangsters than Sammy—not because they were gangsters so much as that it was just his nature to be accommodating. But no matter his manner, the mobsters that he encountered in nightclubs and casinos treated him with contempt. Sammy was a “nigger weasel” to Sam Giancana, who threw cherry bombs under his chair and belted him in the belly for suggesting that he oughtn’t force Shirley MacLaine to try his spaghetti if she was dieting. Others followed suit: Jules Podell, one of Frank Costello’s front men at the Copacabana, once took the wind out of Sammy’s sails when he’d let his act go on too long by shouting at him, loud enough for the audience to hear, “Get off my stage, nigger!”; Joe Fischetti, Frank’s Florida buddy, once summoned Sammy to a Miami Beach Teamsters convention that he’d said he was too busy to perform at by hissing at him, “Nigger, you get your ass down here even if it means you have to sprout wings to fly.”
Tough crowd: They scared the shit out of Peter, who was sufficiently titillated by the spoor of gang muscle to dine in Los Angeles with Chicago mob attorney Sidney Korshak but cowered in the corner of a Copacabana dressing room when a couple of thick-necked guys in fedoras walked in on him and Jimmy Durante and wanted to know why Bobby Kennedy was being so hard on their friends. (“I was watching those guys,” he spoke out brazenly when the coast was clear, to which an observer responded, “You were watching them? They’d chew you up and spit you out!”)
Even Joey wasn’t immune to their pull, entertaining at the wedding of one of Sam Giancana’s daughters—presumably on the arm.
But none of these guys had Frank’s connections. He liked to think of himself as an almost-made guy—though a lot of his gangster pals thought he was too soft and had too big a mouth to fit the profile. He was chummy with New Jersey rackets king Willie Moretti back in Hasbrouck Heights, and had even been counseled by the older man to keep his first marriage together at a time when Moretti was dying from a dose of syphilis he’d contracted by straying from his own. Frank had helped set up Joe Fischetti as the entertainment manager of the Fontainebleau, assuring the Capone cousin a check every week whether he’d done any work to book the current act or not. When Frank’s career was in the toilet, he was booked almost exclusively into joints owned by gangsters and had a testimonial dinner thrown him by L.A. hood Mickey Cohen; when he went into the gaming business, it was through partial ownership of mobbed-up casinos and even a mobbed-up racetrack, Berkshire Downs (aka Hancock Raceway) in Massachusetts; he cut radio commercials gratis for a mobbed-up car dealer in Chicago; he played gigs at a couple of slash-and-run operations operated briefly by the mob as legitimate nightclubs in New York and Chicago; he was photographed with killers, underbosses, and dons.
It wasn’t always a mutual respect society. Frank was taken as a chump by mobsters on more than one occasion. In the forties, he was shaken down by a boxing writer and onetime member of his entourage named Jimmy Taratino, whose scandal rag, Hollywood Night Life, presaged Confidential and all subsequent supermarket tabloids. The paper was funded by Mickey Cohen and, in exchange for economic support totaling $15,000, it didn’t run any of the stories it had unearthed about Frank’s philandering (Taratino was eventually convicted of extortion for scams like this).
Decades later, Frank was suckered into paying a $10,000 initiation fee and performing a few concerts on the arm for a group of gangsters led by Jimmy Fratiano, who had set the bait of offering to make him a Knight of Malta; they got some Hungarian blowhard to front the ruse and gave Frank scrolls and flags and medals, which he accepted with solemnity. It was a sham: All the money from his initiation fee and his free shows
was divvied up by the hoods.
Frank knew ’em all—Santo Trafficante, Carlo Gambino, Benny Siegel, Johnny Rosselli, Johnny Formosa, Paul Castellano, Aniello DellaCroce—a pantheon of gangland stars that outshone those chummy with just about any other entertainer.
But no mobster had closer ties to him than Sam Giancana, the ferret-faced Chicago don whose life was to become so intimately linked with Frank’s and, eventually, Jack Kennedy’s.
It’s tempting, in retrospect, to tell the whole thing as if it was Frank’s idea: that Frank knew what he was doing when he mixed these men as his brothers; that he consciously tried to bring the mob into the White House and drag the president into the shadows; that he didn’t think of himself as merely a source of income and amusement for Giancana and of sex and laughs for Kennedy; that he thought he’d united these two earthly potentates out of the sheer force of his will and personality just as he had Sammy and Joey and Peter and Dean.
But you had to figure that even he wasn’t quite so brazen. Frank had pushed around producers and directors and columnists and the occasional studio boss or record company executive, but he’d never played in this kind of league before. Frank liked to sip Jack Daniel’s and bully busboys and hookers; maybe he’d punch out a photographer. Giancana was a torturer and murderer with seventy arrests on his record, including a murder indictment at age eighteen (the chief witness to the crime turned up dead himself the day after the charges were filed). He had a grade school education and millions of dollars; he was a little, unappealing man who slept with beautiful women and commanded the loyalty of men who could physically tear him apart; and he was so cunning and distrustful that he frequently flew from Chicago to L.A. and then drove to Las Vegas to collect his portion of the money the mob skimmed from casinos there. You had to figure that he was the one pulling Frank’s strings, that he was the guy who reckoned he’d use Frank as a bridge to the Kennedys.