Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  “I guess I like the guy,” Giancana told his brother when the subject of Frank came up. “Shit, it’s not his fault that the Kennedys are assholes. But if I didn’t like him, you can be goddamned sure he’d be a dead man.”

  As long as he was letting him live, and since he couldn’t get him to deliver the Kennedys, Giancana schemed up a way for Frank and his bum friends to turn a profit for him.

  It involved setting up a mini-Las Vegas in an unincorporated part of Cook County, north of Chicago. Giancana had been a silent partner in the Villa Venice, a restaurant in the area, since 1956, and he was planning to spend $25,000 to upgrade it; in the spring of 1962, he sold it from one front man to another to give the operation the appearance of a genuine makeover. Two blocks away, in a nondescript Quonset hut hidden from the road by a parking lot filled with trucks and heavy machinery, he built a plush gambling joint—carpeted and air-conditioned, with craps, blackjack, and roulette tables, and a fully stocked bar and snack shop.

  The plan was going to call in favors from such heavy-duty stars as Frank, Dean, Sammy, and Eddie Fisher and inaugurate a new entertainment policy at the Villa Venice, using the attendant hoopla to attract high rollers to the nearby gambling facilities. The first one up would be Fisher, a guy for whom the widowed Giancana, curiously, had a soft spot: “There’s a guy with a broken heart,” he told a lieutenant, imagining the singer’s grief at having been dumped by Liz Taylor.

  Fisher opened the Villa Venice on October 31. The joint had been splendidly remodeled. Guests were greeted at the front entrance by gondoliers, who poled actual watercraft through an actual river that snaked into the main room. Able to seat eight hundred, the showroom was sumptuously decorated with a thick burgundy carpet and discreetly tasteful wall furnishings. The tables were dressed with fine linen, china, flatware, and stemware; flowers and maidenhair ferns served as centerpieces. Off to one side was the Venetian Lounge, a bar with a separate entrance, spiffed up with fountains and a fireplace. Upstairs, private quarters for the performers were provided—a complete suite of rooms where they could rest or play host between shows.

  Everyone who came to the Villa Venice for the family-style Italian food and the top-notch entertainment paid $10 at the door just to get in; reservations were taken in minimums of ten only—a hundred bucks before you opened the door or got a piece of bread. But the really big dough was taken in at the Quonset hut, which was overseen by Giancana associate Rocco Potenza. Tables took bets up to $100 a pop—and higher—with some fish taking baths for as much as $25,000 in a single night.

  All this activity naturally drew the attention of the FBI agents on Giancana’s case. They found their way to Fisher at his downtown Chicago hotel. The bureau knew he’d given up a lucrative engagement at the Dunes in Vegas to play the Villa Venice, purportedly for free. Asked why, he hemmed and hawed, talking about his good friend Frank Sinatra. The phone rang; it was another friend, comedian Louis Nye. “That was my attorney, Louie Nye,” Fisher told the agents, “and he advised me not to talk.”

  Following Fisher’s engagement, the celebrated trio of Sinatra, Martin, and Davis came to town (they were in fighting shape; only two months earlier, they’d played Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City). It was a much more elaborate affair all around. Representatives of Reprise Records came in from L.A. to set up the musical arrangements and tape the concerts for a possible live album; it was to be Frank’s only pay for the gig, and he hoped to net $500,000 through record sales. In addition, Frank was demanding that Giancana book a private train to transport him and Dean to Chicago. The gangster couldn’t believe it.

  “That Frank,” he complained. “He wants more money, he wants this, he wants that, he wants more girls.… I don’t need that or him. I broke my ass when I was talking to him in New York.”

  When the gig finally opened at the end of November, it was the biggest thing to hit town in decades. Lines snaked around the block from the unlikely nightclub’s doors. The Quonset hut casino was packed. The opening night crowd included a rogue’s gallery of Chicago criminals: Marshall Caifano, Jimmy “The Monk” Allegretti, Felix “Milwaukee Phil” Alderisio, Willie “Potatoes” Daddano, and, of course, Giancana, as well as Wisconsin gangster Jim DeGeorge and Joe Fischetti, Frank’s guy from the Fontainebleau.

  Frank, Dean, and Sammy played sixteen shows in seven days, breezing confidently through the same act they’d been doing in Vegas and Miami and elsewhere since the Summit. During nonworking hours, Frank and Dean palled around the city with Fischetti.

  Once again, FBI agents descended on the performers to find out how it was that they came to be available to play at the Villa Venice for free. Dean just plain ignored inquiries until he left town; the FBI had no more luck getting him to play ball than the mob did. Frank gave the agents a song and dance about how he had known Leo Olsen, Giancana’s front man, since their boyhood days in Jersey and he was delighted to lend him a hand in his new business.

  Only Sammy, perhaps a bit more intimidated by J. Edgar Hoover’s burly white investigators, gave the feds anything to work with. They interviewed him one morning in his suite at the Ambassador East hotel downtown; Sammy was dressed only in tight black slacks, and he offered to fix the agents drinks.

  They were strictly business: Why had he shown up here instead of at some paying gig somewhere else?

  “Baby, that’s a very good question. But I have to say it’s for my man Francis.”

  Or friends of his?

  “By all means.”

  Friends like Sam Giancana?

  “By all means.”

  And what did “by all means” mean?

  “Baby, let me say this. I got one eye, and that one eye sees a lot of things that my brain tells me I shouldn’t talk about. Because my brain says that, if I do, my one eye might not be seeing anything after a while.”

  Fair enough. The agents left.

  The trio completed their engagement at the Villa Venice on December 2; they would rev it all up again the following month at the Sands. By then, however, the Villa Venice was, curiously, no longer in the entertainment business. Though its debut month was a brilliant success, the restaurant had shut down regular operation and was available from that point on strictly for rental as a catering hall. It was sold; one day, it burned to the ground. Finis.

  And its shadow owner, Sam Giancana? Federal agents listened in on him as he tallied up the take from that spectacular month. Between the nightclub and the gambling hall, the crime boss was ahead $3 million in cash: tax free.

  Frank had definitely cleared his marker.

  All the creeps that Frank liked to run with, all the thugs whom Dean and Sammy worked for, all the awful shit Peter was in on—guess who was the only one ever to testify at a murder trial: Joey.

  It was right before Ocean’s Eleven. He was asked out to a San Fernando Valley restaurant by a theatrical agent who ran with Mickey Cohen on the very night that Jack “The Enforcer” Whalen was rubbed out in the joint. Joey wasn’t actually there at the time, but he became a witness for the guys accused of the murder, and the story that he stumbled into made for a better plot than the caper picture he made with Frank and the boys.

  Whalen was a big, bruising bookmaker and legbreaker, a convicted extortionist who bullied everyone smaller than him and kissed the ass of anyone more powerful. He had been in the air force during the war, and he still had a flyboy’s daring. Ordered by L.A. mob boss Jack Dragna to submit to authority, he told him off: “I’ll make up my own mind whether I stay in business or not.”

  He was the sort of thug who’d take money from somebody who wanted to buy a little justice, then split it with the intended victim—with whom he might even turn around and take a piece out of the guy who’d hired him in the first place. He earned his nickname through a habit that made him lots of enemies: If anyone in town had a beef with a bookie who refused to pay on a bet, Whalen would track the welsher down and get the aggrieved party his money. In the disorganized mess that
passed for the L.A. mob, Whalen was the kind of freelancing loose cannon that nobody wanted around but nobody knew how to stop.

  Mickey Cohen, for one, couldn’t stand the guy. Whalen had once literally ripped Cohen’s pants off him to get at his bankroll so as to settle somebody’s score. “This great big enforcing bullshit cocksucker,” Cohen fumed in his memoirs. “He had no respect for nobody. Everyone knew what a vicious, bullying, rotten bastard Jack-this-so-called-Enforcer-Whalen was.”

  “Was” being the operative word. Whalen, who’d been warned that Cohen had a contract out on him, nevertheless showed up at Rondelli’s, an Italian restaurant in Sherman Oaks, on the night of December 2, 1959, to collect a bet from one of Cohen’s crew. He’d only been inside for a few minutes when he got a .38 slug in the brain.

  Rondelli’s was a fashionable spot. Errol Flynn, Melvin Belli, and Liberace were regulars, and the home-style food was reckoned the area’s best. It was also secretly owned by Cohen. “It was trying to be run as a legitimate joint,” the gangster lamented. But after the hit, its heyday was over: “This was the final come-off.”

  The murder investigation was strictly Damon Runyan. Cohen and others on the scene insisted they didn’t see anything. “When I hear shots, I run,” said one, echoing Cohen, who said he’d ducked under a table as soon as Whalen had walked in and started a fracas. Searching the premises, police found three guns in a Dumpster, none of which was the murder weapon but two of which were Cohen’s.

  The actual murder weapon had been spirited away by Cohen flunky Sam LoCigno, and it was Sam who Cohen decided would take the dive for the hit. This was the deal: Sam would get $50,000 and all legal expenses if he would plead self-defense, claiming that well-known bully Whalen had been hitting and threatening him; Cohen and other witnesses would back his story, and he’d get an easy sentence.

  It didn’t work. LoCigno was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. And as for his money, “LoCigno was supposed to get $50,000,” said Cohen. “To be truthful, he didn’t get it.”

  Cohen, of course, knew that LoCigno wasn’t the real killer. “The person that hit Whalen was an expert shot,” he explained. “This expert shot never missed before with whatever it was.” LoCigno, Cohen sighed, “couldn’t hit the wall of an auditorium.” But he wasn’t about to reopen the case by pointing this out to the cops.

  LoCigno stewed in jail, slowly realizing he’d been screwed, and finally told a priest what really happened. The priest told the D.A., who decided to seek a new trial for LoCigno and widen the scope of the case into a conspiracy to kill Whalen by Cohen and three others. The state supreme court agreed that there hadn’t been sufficient evidence for LoCigno’s initial conviction (police had never, for example, turned up the murder weapon), and a new trial was held in 1962 with Cohen, LoCigno, and three others as defendants.

  Cohen’s defense was based on common sense: “It was the hottest place in town,” he said of his restaurant. “So when the move was made to knock Whalen in, would I blow up my own joint?…The killing was the end of Rondelli’s and the good food for a lot of people.”

  Another defendant, Joseph DeCarlo, a theatrical agent whom Cohen met while dallying with one of his clients, stripper Candy Barr, had a better alibi: The night of the killing, he said, he had invited Joey Bishop to dinner with him at Rondelli’s; would he have asked a guest along if he was planning on having somebody murdered?

  Joey was called to testify. He told the jury that DeCarlo had, indeed, asked him to an Italian restaurant that night, but that he’d told the agent to call him just before their scheduled appointment because, as he explained, “I have a reputation for not keeping dinner engagements.” When DeCarlo called, Bishop begged out, claiming he was exhausted from a long day golfing (he would play as much as forty-five holes in a row to allay loneliness); he invited DeCarlo to stop by the Cloister nightclub on Sunset Strip later on to catch his second show. Joey reserved a ringside table, but the guy never showed; when they ran into one another later in the evening, Joey asked what had happened. “Well,” replied DeCarlo, “read the papers and you’ll know why I didn’t show up.”

  Cohen and company were acquitted, and LoCigno got the light sentence he’d originally been promised—one to ten years. Cohen would’ve wished him a hell of a lot worse: He never forgave his former soldier for implicating him. “LoCigno lived like a rat bastard and he died like a rat bastard,” he groused. “Because he’s dead doesn’t make him any less of a son of a bitch.”

  He had nothing but kind memories, however, of Joey.

  You and I will always be friends

  Frank may not have been welcome at the White House, but Peter always was—and not only because he was the president’s brother-in-law. Perfectly polished, cultured, dapper, with that fetching English accent, he was still the nation’s idea of a sophisticate. Frank was the one who had the bad reputation in the papers; Peter, for all the salacious goings-on in his life, seemed almost as respectable as Jack.

  Over the years since the inauguration, Peter’s association with the Kennedys had become a point of interest for film producers. Earlier, his arena had gradually shrunk through the years from film to TV. But Jack’s rise in power and his association with Frank had rescued him.

  Throughout the early sixties, Peter was, moderately, in demand. Darryl Zanuck wanted him to play a war hero in The Longest Day; Otto Preminger wanted him to play an anti-Semitic English soldier in Exodus and a skirt-chasing senator in Advise and Consent. He knew that these roles were offered to him only nominally because of his talents—all three films would be helped by having some sort of unofficial liaison to the government—but he took the work, the first movie roles he had in almost a decade that hadn’t fallen to him off of Frank’s plate.

  He tried to resent the public’s awareness of his predicament as an appendage to powerful friends and in-laws: “People seem to forget,” he told a reporter, “that I have been in this business for 20 years. I had a career before I ever met Pat Kennedy.” But in the very next breath, he admitted that he was protesting too much: “If you could call it a career.…”

  Jack, always intrigued by the business and gossip of Hollywood, was keenly aware of the rises and falls in Peter’s career. The president had occasionally brushed off suggestions that he separate himself from Frank with the rejoinder that Frank was the only man in Hollywood giving Peter work; he agreed to allow his speechwriter, Arthur Schlesinger, write movie reviews “as long as you treat Peter Lawford with respect”; he once buttonholed Peter’s manager, Milt Ebbins, at a White House photo session with “When are you gonna get Peter a job?”

  Jack even tried to give Peter a job himself. Recalling the sound advice that Peter had offered before the debates with Richard Nixon, Jack asked Peter to critique his demeanor and appearance on TV regularly, proposing to use him as an unofficial adviser much as Dwight Eisenhower had Robert Montgomery. After one speech, Jack called Peter at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas and peppered him with questions about his makeup and delivery. Peter hadn’t watched the speech, but he bluffed his way through the conversation. Sometime later, Jack asked Peter to evaluate the script of PT 109, the projected film about his naval heroics. Peter got drunk and fell asleep with the script only partially read. When he told Jack what had happened, the president smiled as if it were John-John talking and never asked his brother-in-law’s help in politics or show business again.

  Still, if Peter’s only crime had been laziness or a failure to have been bitten by the political bug, the Kennedys might have found a way to live with him. What finally drove a wedge between the actor and his in-laws was the failure of his marriage. Pat had somehow managed, like her mother and sisters and sisters-in-law, to endure Peter’s serial womanizing, and she matched her husband drink for drink and digging insult for digging insult; she even carried on affairs of her own. But what she couldn’t stand was the increasing awareness of how weak-willed and spineless her husband was. She thought she had mar
ried a god; he turned out to be just another flawed mortal.

  Peter disappointed his wife in almost everything. He had no interest in their children, he barely made a show of sexual fidelity, he wasn’t as educated as he seemed or clever as he sounded, he didn’t make a lot of money—nothing.

  The last straw seemed to observers to be Peter’s clumsy complicity in the decline and death of Marilyn Monroe. The Kennedys were properly aghast at the tragedy they’d inadvertently helped orchestrate, but no one in the family ever blamed Jack or Bobby for their roles in it. So, though he was merely doing for his brothers-in-law what they’d asked, Peter became the scapegoat for the incident.

  “Everything he went out of his way to do for them, they held against him,” remembered Peter’s old MGM pal Jackie Cooper years later. “They didn’t want him around. They cut him off. If he had been at Chappaquiddick he probably would’ve gotten blamed for that, too.”

  Frank, so much more attuned to the subtle flows of power, had tried years earlier to alert Peter that his position in the family was unstable. Way back during the weekend that Jack was inaugurated, the singer sent for Milt Ebbins and told him, “If Peter doesn’t watch his ass, he’s gonna lose his old lady. You’d better tell him to wise up and get his act together.”

  Ebbins replied that the message would mean more coming from somebody with more clout: “Frank, can’t you help?”

  “Shit, I’m not his keeper. You just tell him to watch himself or he’s going to lose everything.”

  At the time, Pat and Peter were actually living in separate hotels in Washington and Peter was actively screwing around; he didn’t even attend the inauguration ceremonies—he watched them on TV from his hotel room in a bathrobe.