Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  On the night of the eleventh, the night of Sammy’s shame, Jack tried to involve Campbell in a threesome with another woman; offended by the suggestion and shocked at his bizarre sense of priorities—“I would think you had enough on your mind without cooking up something like this,” she told him—she left, avoiding him for the rest of his stay in town. Quick to recover, Jack saw Marilyn the very next afternoon and then dined with her at Puccini’s, Frank and Peter’s Beverly Hills restaurant. At the table with Peter and Kennedy aide Kenny O’Donnell (who’d driven the flustered Campbell home the night before), Marilyn joked about how Jack had been “very democratic” and “very penetrating” with her during some private time they shared earlier in the evening.

  The following afternoon, Jack, Bobby, and Old Joe sat watching the convention on TV from the Beverly Hills mansion of Joe’s old showbiz friend Marion Davies, entertaining a steady flow of labor leaders and political bosses from around the country. Frank was there as well, serving as bartender and greeter. But when the actual balloting got under way, Frank returned to the convention hall, where he anxiously monitored the activity.

  As the Wyoming delegation cast its votes, putting Kennedy over the top, Frank went wild, jumping up and down and slapping Peter on the back. “We’re on our way to the White House, buddy boy,” he shouted. “We’re on our way to the White House!”

  The following night, one of Frank’s little touches fizzled. Comedian Mort Sahl, invited by Frank to address the convention before Jack’s acceptance speech with, presumably, an anti-Republican routine, threw in a few jibes at the Kennedys: “We’ve finally got a choice, the choice between the lesser of two evils,” he told a surprised audience. “Nixon wants to sell the country, Kennedy wants to buy it.” (After which, the comedian was forever blackballed by Sinatra, surprising no one.)

  Later in the evening, Peter threw a party for the nominee at his Santa Monica home. Jack’s voice was gone from all the talking he’d been doing—he ordered his daiquiris from the bar by writing down what he wanted—but he perked up when Sammy walked in, bearding for him with Marilyn on his arm. The candidate and the screen goddess soon cozied up, and Sammy, once again, drifted away.

  The Kennedys, frankly, would’ve preferred it if Sammy had just disappeared altogether. If Frank was apt to stumble on occasion and threaten the dignity of the campaign, Sammy was a bad-luck magnet who was in all likelihood doing more actual harm than good merely by showing up. In a general election against Nixon, Jack didn’t have to try terribly hard to win the black vote (or, what the hell, the Jewish vote), but he desperately needed the southern vote, and Sammy genuinely imperiled his ability to get it.

  It was more than just his being black: It was the romance with May Britt, which had blossomed beyond all probability into something serious. In March, after the interiors on Ocean’s Eleven were through, Sammy caught up with her in New York, where she was filming Murder, Inc., and they decided to get married. It was a risky venture, Sammy knew: Anytime his name had been linked with a white actress in the past it had proved an ugly scene. But this was the real thing, and he banked on May’s being Swedish and a movie star of sorts to buffer the inevitable public outcry at their union. Still they kept it under wraps among their Hollywood cronies, lest word leak out to Confidential or one of the gossip queens.

  In May, Sammy flew to London to appear in a royal command performance before Queen Elizabeth (he was in top form, flooring the crowd on a night that found Nat King Cole drowning in flop sweat) and sticking around for a nightclub engagement at the Pigalle. Sammy always loved to affect British airs, and he took to London readily, sporting Savile Row suits complete with bowler hats. He was also delighted to discover when May visited him there that few heads were turned by the sight of an interracial couple—in part, of course, because he wasn’t as well known in the U.K. as at home, but certainly because of different racial standards as well.

  That all changed when word of their increasingly public courtship made its way to the States. Headlines back home started asking when Sammy and May would marry, and, rather than live with speculation and innuendo, Sammy foolishly called a press conference to announce the engagement. Among the unusually passive Fleet Street reporters in the audience was an American wire service reporter who peppered Sammy with obnoxious, provocative questions: “Are you announcing it over here because you’re afraid to do it at home?” “What happens if you find you can’t go home?” “Isn’t this the first marriage between a Negro man and a blonde, white movie star?” “How would Miss Britt feel if her kid turns out to be black—you know what I mean?” The British writers couldn’t hoot the man down, and Sammy finally lost his cool: “Buddy, I’ve known what you’ve meant for forty-five minutes. Now as far as our children are concerned it would not matter to us, in terms of our love for the child, if it were white, brown, or polka-dot.”

  Oh boy.

  Aside from a small but ugly protest outside of the club during the remainder of Sammy’s gig—Oswald Mosley’s fascist thugs picketed the place with placards reading “Go home, nigger” and “Sammy, back to the trees”—the press conference meant nothing to most British observers: an American nightclub performer marrying a Swedish starlet.

  Back home, however, the press ran with Sammy’s “polka-dot” comment for days, and he returned to a shit storm. First there was the convention, where he could at least ascribe the catcalls that wounded him to traditional southern bigotry. But a few weeks later—after invitations went out to an October 16 wedding at which Frank had agreed to stand as best man—he was greeted outside of the Lotus Club in Washington, D.C., with a reception even uglier than the one in London. More pickets: “Go back to the Congo, you kosher coon,” “What’s the matter Sammy, can’t you find a colored girl?” and, insanely, a charcoal-colored dog wearing a swastika and emblazoned with a sign that read, “I’m black too, Sammy, but I’m not a Jew.”

  There were death threats, bomb threats, ugly phone calls. He got bags full of hate mail: “Dear Nigger Bastard, I see Frank Sinatra is going to be best man at your abortion. Well, it’s good to know the kind of people supporting Kennedy before it’s too late, [signed] An ex-Kennedy Vote.” Someone sent him a cartoon clipped from a right-wing newspaper. In the first panel, Sammy stood posed as a butler offering JFK a tray of fried chicken and watermelon; in the second, he sat next to Kennedy eating; the caption read, “Will it still be the White House?”

  These, of course, were extreme responses, and Sammy did what he could to shield May from them—turning her into a prisoner of hotel suites and room service meals when he even dared let her accompany him on the road.

  But his timing had truly been awful: Southerners opposed to Kennedy’s election were making great hay out of the inference that Jack countenanced interracial marriage, and Frank was getting hammered for acceding to so public a role in the wedding. (Oddsmakers in Vegas were laying three to one that Frank would bail and have Dean take his place.)

  “I combed the papers every day,” Sammy remembered. “The already stale news that Frank would be my best man continued making the front pages and too often by ‘coincidence’ right next to it were stories about Frank campaigning for Kennedy.”

  In early September, he found himself back at the Sands for the first time since the Summit and began to consider the corner in which he’d painted himself and his mentor.

  “I could imagine the pressure Frank must be under,” Sammy thought. “He must have eighty guys telling him, ‘Don’t be a fool, you’ve worked hard for Kennedy, now do you want to louse him up?’ He must be getting it from all sides. And the worst of it is it’s understandable.” Without conferring with May, he decided to relieve Frank of his duty and delay the wedding.

  Tremulously, he called Sinatra in Palm Springs and told him that there were problems with the banquet room, with the rabbi’s schedule, anything.

  “You’re lying, Charlie.”

  He fessed up: “Look, what the hell, it’s best that we postpone it
’til after the election.”

  Frank got quiet. Sammy could hear a party going on elsewhere in the house. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to. All the talk …”

  “Screw the talk!”

  “I know, but it’s better this way.”

  Awash in relief, gratitude, sorrow, shame, Frank spoke in a near-whisper: “I’ll be there whenever it is. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know that, Frank.”

  “You know that I’d never ask you to do a thing like this. Not your wedding. I’d never ask that!”

  “That’s why it’s up to me to be saying it.”

  “You’re a better man than I am, Charlie. I don’t know if I could do this for you, or for anyone …”

  “You’ve been doing it, haven’t you?”

  Frank put the phone down without another word. A minute passed, with Sammy dying inside.

  The next thing he heard was Peter, all business: “Frank can’t talk any more.”

  Sammy said nothing.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes, Peter?”

  “Charlie, I … it’s beautiful of you.”

  They said goodbye.

  And now he had to break the news to May—an even harder call. He reached her in an ebullient mood: She was all caught up in the excitement of the presents that were starting to arrive in the mail.

  He spoke reasonably: “Darling, it boils down to this. Over a period of almost twenty years, Frank has been aces high, aces up—everything a guy could be to me. There’s nothing in the world he wants from me, nothing in the world I can do for him except be his friend. Ninety-nine percent of the others come and go and you act nice and help them if it’s convenient, but Frank is a friend, and now he needs something from me, so there can be no evaluating, no hesitating, no limit.”

  She said she understood, but she gave him a subtle warning: “I know it’s not easy to suddenly start thinking differently than you always have, and I know you’re trying.”

  The next day, they sent telegrams to their guests announcing that the wedding would be delayed until November 13—the Sunday immediately following Election Day. Sammy’s publicists put out a statement blaming the postponement on complications with May’s Mexican divorce. Even though it was transparently a lie, it worked: The heat was off Frank and, consequently, Jack’s campaign. The only losers were Sammy and May. When they finally did marry that November, with Frank, Peter, and Dean in attendance, there was a slight note of deflation in the air—and a pregnant bride under the chuppah.

  Truth be told, Frank probably would’ve just as soon gotten Sammy’s wedding out of the way, he was so damn busy anyhow. After the convention, he campaigned more publicly for Jack than he had during the primaries, hitting the Hawaiian islands in a September barnstorming tour with Peter and serving as host for the Democratic Governor’s Ball in New Jersey at the end of October. Both of these were combined with work: the shooting of The Devil at 4 O’Clock, a Mervyn LeRoy thriller that gave him a chance to act opposite one of his screen heroes, Spencer Tracy, and a stint at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, during which he passed an evening talking shop with a couple of over-the-hill hookers at a seedy bar, finally dismissing the pair with “Oh, shit, get the fuck away from me, you pigs.”

  The end of August found him at the Capitol Records tower on Vine Street recording perhaps the best swing album of his life—Sinatra’s Swingin’ Session!—a collection of rollicking, spirited, loosey-goosey updates of several songs he’d recorded in the past (“I Concentrate on You,” “My Blue Heaven,” “It All Depends on You”) and another number that constituted the most stunning display of sheer audacity in his entire recording career: a finger-popping swing version of “Ol’ MacDonald” with special lyrics that transformed the “chick” of the children’s version into a curvy dame. It was a completely infectious performance—sexy, confident, and charming, the work of a master artist who could whip off stuff this good, it seemed, just as easy as lighting a cigarette; it reached number 25 on the charts.

  On top of all that, he was party to a big wedding in his own family. On September 11 at the Sands, he gave the hand of his twenty-year-old daughter, Nancy, to Tommy Sands, a pretty-boy pop singer who’d had a couple of Top 40 hits a few years earlier. Like Elvis Presley, Sands had enlisted in the military, and the wedding was originally meant to be held later that fall. But Frank’s commitment to the film in Hawaii forced his daughter, in an ironic reversal of Sammy’s fate, to move her wedding date up, and so Sands was forced to get hitched in his air force uniform, only the first of many occasions at which he would be made to feel an adjunct to his famous father-in-law.

  With all this going on that summer and fall, then, it was little wonder that Frank began to show signs of wear when the election finally came around. Election Day found him holed up in his offices watching the results and keeping a telephone line open to Chicago, where he and Joe Kennedy had once again prevailed upon Sam Giancana to pull strings and see to it that Illinois’s twenty-seven electoral votes—more than 10 percent of the total necessary to win—fell Jack’s way. Nixon won the vast majority of the state’s 103 counties, but he lost Cook County by an average of two votes per precinct—slightly more than Kennedy’s statewide margin of victory. As in the West Virginia primary, any chicaneries in Chicago by Kennedy partisans were probably matched by the work of Nixon forces working elsewhere in the state; moreover, Mayor Richard Daley was just as likely to have manipulated the vote in his city as Giancana. And it was reasonable to assume that the vote in Texas, which also fell into the Kennedy column, was just as crooked as the one in Illinois. But Giancana would forever take credit for Kennedy’s victory—“Listen, honey,” he told Judy Campbell, “if it wasn’t for me your boyfriend wouldn’t even be in the White House”—and he assumed that the new president would reciprocate in kind once he took the reins of power.

  That little matter still hadn’t quite been settled, however, by 3:00 a.m. West Coast time, and Frank, his nerves absolutely frayed from a day of waiting, hit the roof when he watched Nixon take to the podium and refuse to concede a race that was still, technically, up in the air. In a bootless reprise of his drunken 1944 assault on Westbrook Pegler’s Waldorf suite, Frank called Nixon’s hotel and lambasted an operator who refused to put him through to Nixon’s suite: “Do you know who this is?” It didn’t matter. He slammed down the phone, went grudgingly to bed, and woke up in a new world which he was convinced he had helped build.

  For Peter, who’d invested less of himself in Jack’s election than Frank, the campaign was a strange, giddy season. He had headlined a number of events, including that series of Hawaiian quick hits with Sinatra that climaxed with a performance in front of nine thousand people at the Waikiki Shell. And he had shown up somewhat more than usual on TV, guesting on variety shows hosted by Frank, Perry Como, and others. He even changed his nationality so as to be able to vote for his brother-in-law, standing in Los Angeles among six hundred other immigrants on April 23, 1960, and taking the oath of citizenship. He voted by absentee ballot, spending the last days of the election in Boston and Hyannis Port with the Kennedys.

  He had also contributed at least one crucial service, advising Jack on how he should comport himself on television, giving him tips on makeup, hair, wardrobe, and, most crucially, demeanor: “Don’t be afraid of the camera,” he told him. “Look directly into it, as though it were a friend across the dinner table. You’ll be making contact with millions of people at the same moment, but each one will feel as though you’re talking only to him.” This counsel proved especially useful, of course, in the debates between Kennedy and Nixon, in which, famously, Jack was reassuring, confident, and positive while his opponent looked like a nervous, unshaven shyster.

  But such cosmetic expertise aside, the Kennedy men never really reckoned Peter as their equal. They took him, correctly, for an intellectual flyweight, and his lack of passion for political or even financial matters made him less intere
sting to them than their other brothers-in-law, Sargent Shriver and Stephen Smith. Peter was an outsider as a Brit, he was an outsider as a movie actor, he was even an outsider as an only child: The very size and fraternalism of the Kennedy clan made him ill at ease. “He just didn’t like that atmosphere—that big family,” recalled Milt Ebbins. “At one time they rang a bell for dinner. And we’d sit down at this long boardinghouse table, the women would come out with pitchers of milk and big tubs of butter and hot bread and creamed fish and mashed potatoes, and they’d all jump on it. Peter couldn’t take that. It seemed almost barbaric to him. He just sat there.”

  The family sensed Peter’s alienation, but they sensed an undertone of condescension in it as well and decided, perhaps tacitly, to take him down a peg. In one of their famously rambunctious games of touch football (a game Peter had never played because of his nationality, weak arm, and preference for solo sports such as tennis and surfing), the Kennedy men, led by Smith, decided to “get Peter,” tackling him with relish and knocking the wind out of him. Peter tried to convince himself that it was just a case of the new boy’s being hazed, but he never allowed himself to feel part of the inner circle.

  Ironically, Peter’s sense of discomfort around the rest of the family made him close to another outsider—Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy—whose upbringing and tastes matched Peter’s nearly as much as did her sense of alienation from her husband’s boisterous clan. In time, Jackie’s solicitude became, curiously, Peter’s strongest connection to the Kennedys. Jack and Bobby, after all, came just to see him as a pimp, the rest of the family hadn’t even that much use for him, and his marriage to Pat foundered on the shoals of his adultery.