Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  Some nights were really special, with lots of the top dogs together. Some nights it was Frank and, oh, Sammy—plus, of course, a few big guys, maybe the latest dame.

  But it was something, somewhere, nearly every night. Frank needed to keep the end of the day at bay. He’d sleep until noon, or later, no problem. But until that moment of submission came, until he felt safe and calm enough to be alone, there’d be a party of some sort.

  Dean didn’t care for it. He’d like a few drinks, of course, a few laughs, some gambling, a girl, but the marathon of it, the effort—that he didn’t need. Frank would be urging him to join some spree; Dean would beg out—a broad waiting for him, he’d say: always a good excuse—and then go back to his room and a western on TV or a comic book. And every night—for real!—his prayers.

  Peter and Sammy, though, were cut just right for such nights, maybe even more than Frank. Nothing thrilled them enough, not the booze, which hit each of them harder than it ever did Frank, not the elegance or the glitter or the perfume. On the road, they might put all the lightweights to bed and then continue on with Frank in one of their suites, drinking after sunrise, when John Q. Putz was getting to work. Guys would joke that with this crowd, “a black tie evening” meant “bring sunglasses.”

  And yet even the most dedicated decadents couldn’t quite keep up with the Leader. No one ever remembered, save for when he was all broke up over Ava, putting Frank to bed. Oh, George Jacobs did it plenty, as did, eventually, Barbara Marx, but those were private moments, more harrowing than even the closest of the chums ever saw. Socially, no one ever stayed at the table after Frank to keep up the jollity or pick up a tab. Sammy, who emulated Frank’s endless late-night partying his whole life, watching movies and playing board games and even holding play readings in his homes and suites when he was too afraid to hit the town and venture the disdain of racist nightclub owners and doormen, could recall being worn to a frazzle by Frank, a man ten years his senior. He’d stifle yawns, he’d rub at his plastic eye (a sure sign of exhaustion): “At that hour, there was nothing happening anywhere that interested me as much as my bed. The thought of it made me giddy. Bed, oh bed. Bed, bed, bed, soft bed.” (Weariness turned him, apparently, into Gertrude Stein.)

  Not every night ended with a fade. Some exploded: Frank might get cross with somebody in a bar or restaurant and instigate a shouting match, or worse; he might brood or sulk over some perceived slight or other and then erupt hours later against food, furniture, clothing, friends, the help. Plates and telephones flew, windows broke, guns were fired, an original Norman Rockwell portrait was destroyed. And those same late-night friends who would sit patiently for Frank’s teasing on other occasions would scurry into action—cleaning up, quieting up, paying off, warding away.

  Some of these men would never dream of committing such acts themselves: Cahn and Van Heusen were songwriters, for God’s sake, not thumbbreakers. They didn’t travel with bodyguards at their backs and cherry bombs in their pockets. They didn’t have police records or FBI files. They weren’t prone to such outbursts, but they endured them, witnessed them, hell, condoned them with their silence and their willingness to return and, inevitably, see more of them. It was the price they paid for what they received: Frank’s approval, acceptance, aura. Somebody once called Van Heusen out on it, the toadying and pandering and looking the other way and buttoning up he did for Frank: He admitted with some shame, “I’m a whore for my music.”

  That was a mite strong, but there was a truth to it. Beyond Dean and Sammy, his brothers in performance and celebrity and mien, beyond Peter, whom he curried for ulterior reasons that the whole world tacitly understood, beyond the few guys like Joey and Rickles and Tony Curtis and Yul Brynner and R.J. Wagner, with whom he worked, there was that second layer of men who were around Frank because their livelihood depended on it. Friendship was possible, of course, and some of these men would come to mean a great deal to Frank and his family, but there was always this other dynamic to the relationship—not unlike that with Peter. It was understood that a certain deference would be paid Frank, that that “Leader” joke was no joke. Frank’s will was not to be crossed, his choices not to be questioned. “He has hurt me more than once, Frank Sinatra,” Sammy Cahn confessed, but his favor was apparently worth the price of the injuries.

  Of all these adjuncts, Cahn and Van Heusen may have been the oddest because they were the smartest, the most talented, the ones who should’ve known better. They were remarkably gifted in their fields, but they so tied themselves in with Frank and his world that they were smothered even while being rewarded.

  Over time, they became Frank’s house composers and, by extension, those of the Rat Pack as a whole. Cahn went back with Frank to the Dorsey days, and he’d written for Frank first in partnership with composer Jule Styne and then with Van Heusen; that latter tandem were the great songwriting team of Frank’s fifties and sixties—“All the Way,” “Love and Marriage,” “High Hopes,” “The Tender Trap,” “The Second Time Around,” “My Kind of Town.” Some of the material was commissioned with exacting specificity by the singer (“Ring-a-Ding-Ding,” “Come Fly with Me”) and some was never published—specialty material consisting mainly of Cahn’s topical, often salty rewrites of lyrics for Friars Roasts, benefits, and, of course, the Kennedy campaign: “Everyone wants to back Jack/Jack is on the right track.”

  Feisty, ferret-faced, prematurely balding, Cahn was a Jewish New York songsmith in the mold of Berlin, Arlen, the Gershwins, a street kid with a gift, in his case, for rhyme. Van Heusen had been born Edward Chester Babcock, a native of Syracuse, New York, descended, the family legend went, from Stephen Foster. He attended a seminary and Syracuse University, writing pop songs the whole while, then became a Tin Pan Alley stalwart. He was a ladies’ man and a crack test pilot, and, in the words of many witnesses, one of Frank’s ideals—a man’s man, strong, worldly, accomplished, discreet. He, too, had been around Frank since the forties—he’d written the music for “Nancy (with the Laughing Face)” and had been one of Frank’s constant companions in L.A., New York, and Palm Springs.

  As bachelors and fellow aficionados of female delights, the two songwriters reveled in the flesh that fell to them from Frank, and they happily abetted his adulteries and affairs to their constant profit. They disrespected his first marriage to the extent that they let him conduct trysts in their Sunset Strip apartments, and they witnessed his courtship of and estrangements from Ava Gardner with dispassion, always ready to commiserate with him or stop him from committing some stupid act over her. It was at Van Heusen’s New York apartment that Frank slashed his wrists over Ava’s absence in 1953—one of many little incidents that the composer overlooked in the pursuit of a friendship built around Frank’s singing his songs.

  A very few others in Frank’s orbit during the early sixties had careers as independent as Cahn and Van Heusen. Whirlwind agent Swifty Lazar and restaurateur Michael Romanoff, holdovers from the Bogart Rat Pack, were men whose lives, built on sheer moxie, must’ve struck Frank as parallels of his own. Lazar was a renegade in the agenting business who wasn’t bothered by taking cuts from both a buyer and a seller in a deal, or by peddling properties and people that weren’t his to represent. Romanoff was an honest-to-goodness con man: A Russian-born Jew raised largely in orphanages in Illinois, he spent his adult life boldly impersonating the royalty of Europe, passing himself off as the nephew of the last czar so audaciously that he parlayed the scam into a $6,000 grubstake to start his famed restaurants, at which he lorded over Hollywood’s elite to their exquisite pleasure. These were clearly A-list guys over whom Frank had no more control than he did over Jack Kennedy or Sam Giancana. They were happy to accept his friendship, his invitations, his custom, to engage in one-upmanship and practical jokes. But they weren’t flunkies, not even close.

  For the real thing—muscle, gofers, yes-men—Frank preferred big guys who could put on a suit and not get embarrassed, borderline thugs with just enough polis
h to pull off legitimate business. Hank Sanicola was number one through the fifties. He helped Frank manage his music interests and served as a casual accompanist, but he also had pieces of various Sinatra enterprises—until the day, that is, he literally asked Frank to let him out, luggage and all, when they were driving through the desert arguing about how to run the Cal-Neva Lodge, in which Sanicola owned points.

  By then, Frank had met Jilly Rizzo in Miami Beach and had helped promote and fund his Broadway saloon by slipping him a few dollars and making the joint his unofficial New York clubhouse (it even appears in The Manchurian Candidate). From the mid-sixties on, no one was around Frank more than Jilly, and no one could get to Frank unless they passed through the massive wall of protection he constituted. Of course, Jilly didn’t hurt anybody so’s you could prove it: There were other, meaner guys for that. But a nod from Jilly could be a blessing or a curse—could get you near Frank or banish you forever—and most everyone who crossed his path was happier with the former.

  Dean, too, had a wall: Mack Gray, a kind of companion, valet, procurer, bodyguard, and drug peddler who came into Dean’s service after George Raft, his original boss, could no longer afford to keep him on the payroll. Like Sanicola and Jilly, Gray intimated danger and pain to anyone considering violating the space of his boss. He’d been a fight promoter before putting in twenty years under Raft. He looked the part of a hood, he even had the nickname Killer, but he wasn’t quite the figure of menace he seemed. That nickname, for instance, came not because he was capable of homicide; it was a corruption of the Yiddish word for “hernia.”

  Gray’s real name? Max Greenburg.

  A Jewish thumbbreaker for an Italian singer: Even in picking his rough friends, Dean had a better sense of humor than Frank.

  The Frank situation

  Jack Kennedy loved sports: football, of course, and sailing and golf. He loved games like Diplomacy and Charades. And he loved trashy novels, especially espionage novels. He famously devoured Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, and he enjoyed The Manchurian Candidate, Richard Condon’s bestseller about an American soldier brainwashed by the North Koreans and programmed to assassinate a U.S. presidential candidate. It was a crackling good read, combining cold war paranoia with creepy psychological themes and a shock ending—part page-turning thriller, part satire of American mores and politics. Everyone who read it—Jack Kennedy included—thought it would make a swell film.

  Two Hollywood hotshots, screenwriter George Axelrod (The Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) and director John Frankenheimer (Birdman of Alcatraz, The Young Savages), got ahold of the rights to the book, and in September 1961, they approached Frank about starring in it and releasing it through his contract with United Artists, which was handling distribution of films made through Sinatra’s various production companies. Frank liked Condon’s story—he had already played a presidential assassin in 1954’s Suddenly—and he expressed his interest to U.A. president Arthur Krim, who was also, coincidentally, national finance chairman of the Democratic Party.

  Krim had good relationships with both Sinatra and Frankenheimer, and his company was admired for its independence and seriousness (its 1961 releases included Judgment at Nuremberg, The Misfits, and films by Billy Wilder, Martin Ritt, and Frank Capra); but he got queasy at the thought of Condon’s subject matter, and he balked at a movie version of it. Frank went over his head to Jack, whom he saw at Hyannis Port in September 1961. The president told Frank how much he liked the book (“Who’ll play the mother?” he asked) and agreed to call Krim and tell him that he had no objection to a film being made of it. Krim relented, and preproduction plans for The Manchurian Candidate went forth. “That was the only way that film ever got made,” Richard Condon remembered. “It took Frank going directly to Jack Kennedy.”

  The film began shooting in New York and L.A. the following January, at around the time that Jack’s office revealed that he would be staying at Frank’s Palm Springs estate during a West Coast trip at the end of March. The arrangement had been Peter’s doing—diplomatically, he had asked it as a favor of both Jack and Frank, acting as if he was calling upon each man’s sense of obligation to the other. He reminded Jack of all Frank’s work during the campaign; he asked Frank if he would mind the imposition of a presidential visit.

  Mind it? It would be the climax of Frank’s great moment. After he hung up with Peter, he felt himself a man who could literally do anything. He could provide the president with girls, broker negotiations between Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Kennedy, provide a conduit between the Mafia and the White House. Jack’s stay at his estate would be an opportunity for Frank to crown himself—his home would become a western White House, and the president of the United States would become part of his entourage.

  Frank had already been considering a renovation of the Palm Springs estate. Now he began a major reconstruction of the entire grounds. The main house was expanded with the additions of a banquet room able to seat forty and a Kennedy Room decorated with mementos of the president; two cottages were added to house Secret Service agents, and a communications center was installed, with five private telephone lines, teletype equipment, and enough cable to handle a full switchboard; a concrete heliport was poured, and a towering flagpole was erected, modeled after the one Frank had seen in Hyannis Port flying the presidential seal as a sign that Jack was there. Steep overtime charges were incurred so that work would be completed in time; lumber was even flown in by helicopter. “He redecorated every part of the house except his own bedroom,” Nancy Sinatra recalled. The prize piece: a bronze plaque attached to a bedroom door in the main house reading, “JOHN F. KENNEDY SLEPT HERE November 6th and 7th 1960.” (The dates were wrong: Kennedy’s only previous overnight visit to the estate had been in November 1959; Election Day in 1960 was November 8, and Jack had been back East in the days immediately prior.)

  Frank’s avidity amused the Kennedys, who remembered him arriving in Hyannis Port the previous September with two loaves of bread for Joe. “It had been kind of a running joke with all of us,” Peter recalled. “No one asked Frank to do this.”

  Which is why what followed was all the more awful for him. Without his knowing it, his entrée into Camelot, always tenuous, had eroded. All the shit that Frank had steered Jack’s way—the broads, the Mafia money, the shadowy friends—was about to be shoved back in his face by the Kennedys with heartless indifference.

  Jack was set to visit Palm Springs on March 24; on March 22, Peter Lawford was told by Jack and Bobby to call Frank and tell him the president wouldn’t be coming.

  Peter knew how awfully Frank would take the news, and he tried to get Jack to change his mind. “I said that Frank expected him to stay at the Sinatra compound, and anything less than his presence there was going to be tough for Charlie here to explain,” he recalled. But the Kennedys cared as little for Peter’s troubles as they did for Frank’s.

  “You can handle it, Peter,” Jack told him. “We’ll take care of the Frank situation when we get to it.” Then he ordered Lawford to find him another place to stay in Palm Springs. (That far Peter couldn’t go; somebody somehow arranged for accommodation at Bing Crosby’s estate at Shadow Mountain near Palm Desert.)

  Dialing Frank’s number, Peter was stupefied, terrified. He said his bit, telling Frank that the Secret Service had nixed his estate as a presidential retreat because of its open location out in the flats of Palm Springs; Crosby’s house, backed up against the mountains, was more secure. He apologized a million times, then waited for the storm.

  Frank’s first reaction was shock. He walked around muttering, like a man who’d come upon an atrocity, “What am I gonna tell my kids?” He called the Justice Department to appeal the decision with Bobby, and was rebuffed. Frank had nowhere else to turn: Joe, the Kennedy whose bedrock morality most matched his, the one with whom he’d most frequently and freely spoken, had been laid up two months earlier with a massive stroke. Bobby was now the one with Jack’s ear, and Frank w
as history.

  He blew up: “Frank was livid,” according to Peter. “He called Bobby every name in the book and then rang me up and reamed me out again. He was quite unreasonable, irrational, really.”

  After hanging up with Lawford, Frank fumed around the house, then found a sledgehammer and set to destroying the helipad he’d had built. “He was in a frenzy,” Lawford recalled.

  When he arrived in Palm Springs, Jack asked Peter how Frank had taken the news. “I said, ‘Not very well,’ which was a mild understatement,” Peter said. “The President said, ‘I’ll call him and smooth it over.’ So he did. After the conversation Jack said, ‘He’s pretty upset, but I told him not to blame you because you didn’t have anything to do with it.’”

  But that wasn’t how it went. Frank mourned the distance that Jack had placed between the two of them. “If he would only pick up the telephone and call me and say that it was politically difficult to have me around, I would understand,” he lamented to Angie Dickinson. “I don’t want to hurt him. But he has never called.”

  Among the Hollywood crowd over whom he had lorded his intimacy with the president, Frank suffered an awful loss of face—Eddie Fisher joked that Frank should have a plaque on the house reading, “JFK Almost Slept Here”—and everyone close to him who had anything to do with the fiasco incurred his wrath. Jimmy Van Heusen, who owned the house next door to Crosby’s and made it available to the Secret Service, was given the cold shoulder for weeks.

  But Peter—Peter was a dead man. “I was the one who took the brunt of it,” Lawford remembered. “He felt that I was responsible for setting Jack up to stay at Bing’s—Bing Crosby, of all people—the other singer and a Republican to boot. Well, Frank never forgave me. He cut me off just like that—just like that.”

  Peter tried to call Frank to make amends, but Frank refused to talk with him, telling people that he wanted nothing more than to punch Lawford in the face. He and Frank had already given up the restaurant, Puccini, that they jointly owned (after mobster Mickey Cohen had started a fistfight with Red Skelton’s manager in the joint, it went on to be filled more frequently with cops than customers), but now Peter wouldn’t even get considered for future Rat Pack films; worse, Peter claimed, Frank “turned Dean and Sammy and Joey against me as well.”