Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  By 1963, the couple’s frequent estrangements had come to seem the norm. They decided they’d divorce, but, being Kennedys, they went to the White House to solicit Jack’s counsel on the matter. It was an unprecedented request. Despite all the just cause over the years, no Kennedy had undergone so much as a legal separation; now Peter and Pat were asking for permission to do something that would surely be loud and controversial. Just having to seek Jack’s counsel caused Peter to break down in tears in the Cabinet Room.

  Jack reassured him. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If it’s going to happen it’s going to happen. Let me tell you something—it’s not all your fault. I know Pat better than you do. You and I will always be friends, Peter. You’re not going to lose me.” He gave the couple his consent, opining that “it won’t be such a big deal.”

  Milt Ebbins demurred: “If we announce this tomorrow, there will be three pictures on the front page of the New York Times the next morning: Peter’s, Pat’s—and yours.”

  Jack saw that he was right. He asked Pat and Peter to indulge him by keeping the facade of their marriage intact for two more years. If they could wait until after the 1964 election, he wouldn’t stand in their way.

  They agreed. Peter was now adrift from everyone that had ever tied him to respectability—his father, Louis Mayer, Frank, Pat.

  Ebbins tried to keep him busy with work. The acting jobs started to dry up again, but there was a production company, Chrislaw (named after Peter’s son, Christopher), that had a hit TV series on its hands (The Patty Duke Show) and went into feature film production in 1963 with Johnny Cool, a story about a mob hit man starring Ocean’s Eleven vet Henry Silva and featuring Sammy and Joey Bishop in small roles.

  On his own, Peter continued to perform as a straight man for Jimmy Durante in the nightclub act that took him to New York, Lake Tahoe, and Vegas, where they were regulars at the Desert Inn. There, Peter indulged himself excessively. One hotel official, according to the FBI, declared that Peter had “run wild, had signed numerous charges that were not authorized, such as gifts, railway tickets, food, etc.” They hadn’t wanted Peter on the bill in the first place, and now they were stuck with the tab for his caprices. But without Frank to shield him from the powers that ran the city, Peter was called to reckoning: Failing to achieve satisfaction any other way, the Desert Inn sued him in May 1964 for $20,000.

  They could get in line.

  It always ended up as a threat

  After the Palm Springs debacle, and with Sammy increasingly tied up in his million solo projects, Frank and Dean became more and more a two-act, the core of the Rat Pack and, often, all that was left of it.

  They decided to make another picture together, but this time it was Dean who came up with the project. Maverick director Robert Aldrich, who, on the strength of such hits as Vera Cruz, The Big Knife, Attack!, and Kiss Me Deadly, had formed his own production company in 1960, had been floating a script around town for a big, comic western with Gina Lollobrigida and Anita Ekberg. In late 1962, Dean agreed to go partners on the film with Aldrich, and they shopped the script to such bankable actors as Jimmy Stewart and Robert Mitchum, hoping to land a name to costar with him. In March 1963, Frank read the script, and two weeks later he was in.

  The picture, once known as Two for Texas but now called Four for Texas, would be a coproduction of Dean’s, Frank’s, and Aldrich’s companies, along with Warner Bros. Dean would make $250,000 against 10 percent of the gross; Frank would make three times that, with the same percentage guaranteed. Shooting would commence on location in Red Rock Canyon near Mojave, California, just before Memorial Day and run through mid-August in Burbank. Lollobrigida was replaced by Ursula Andress—talent Dean and Frank hadn’t grown bored with yet. Charles Bronson, Victor Buono, Arthur Godfrey, and the Three Stooges all had roles.

  As the stars and coproducers, Dean and Frank loaded the picture with flunkies. Dean had a personal entourage of four, including Mack Gray, which cost a combined $1,100 a week; Frank’s personal crew of eight, which included a hairpiece handler, raked in a total of $2,125 a week. (In the spirit of her bosses and costars, Ekberg racked up $479 in transportation overcharges when she insisted on a chauffeured Lincoln to take her shopping and visiting and to ferry her husband on errands.)

  But if coproducer Aldrich was upset with his stars, he kept it to himself—until production started and Frank began to raise hell. Aldrich had sent Frank a completed script on the first of May, but Frank waited nearly four weeks to complain that the opening sequence, a chase-and-shoot number in which he and Dean survived a stagecoach holdup, was too elaborate. Aldrich, who was already up at the desert location, conceived of the scene as the high point of the film, but he made a bunch of cuts anyway. Not enough: Frank called him up to complain that the sequence was still too long and that he would be leaving the location after five days—despite being scheduled for ten—“whether the sequences were completed or not.”

  On Tuesday the twenty-eighth, Dean and Frank flew into Mojave by helicopter, watched their doubles rehearse a scene, dressed, and came back to the set where Aldrich discovered that they knew neither their lines nor the physical actions they were supposed to perform. Frank stared the director down and told him to cut two pages out of the scene. As Aldrich wrote to his lawyer, “Faced with the dilemma of whether to make this ‘make or break declaration of difference between us’ (since we had yet to make Shot One), I decided to avoid that kind of showdown and we proceeded with the day’s work.”

  The rest of the day went productively—Aldrich had compressed the schedule to try and get Frank back to L.A. in five days, and he got twenty-four setups and four and a half pages shot. The next day, he had twenty-six setups in the can before lunch. Frank, satisfied that he could make this thing move as fast as he fancied, chose this moment to tell the director that he’d be leaving on Thursday, not Saturday. Aldrich was dumbfounded and said it couldn’t be done.

  “His reply,” the director remembered, “was wordless but significant.”

  That night, Sinatra sent Howard W. Koch, producer for Essex Productions, over to Aldrich to reiterate the star’s intention to leave the location the next day. “The manner in which Mr. Koch phrased these remarks was always most polite, proper and professional,” Aldrich recalled, “but regardless of the phrasing, it always ended up as a threat and an ultimatum.” Aldrich spent the night trying to rework his schedule to accommodate Frank, then told Koch in the morning that the changes would result in cost overruns and he wanted Essex to reimburse the production for the expenses. Koch agreed.

  But Koch had no control over Frank’s behavior. “During the day,” Aldrich wrote, “there were many unfortunate and unnecessarily negative and derogatory remarks by Sinatra (but never to me) about the uselessness of the shots being made and that the crew was unpardonably slow.… We only made eighty-two setups in two and two-thirds days.… SLOW???”

  Before the day was done, Aldrich told Frank that there’d be a brief break, then another ninety minutes of work, and then he’d be all finished at the location. “That’s fine,” Frank said, and he wandered off in his car. Five minutes later, Koch approached Aldrich. “Frank says he’s had it … he’s tired, he’s going home.”

  Once again, Aldrich protested. “Koch honorably and professionally replied that he completely understood this,” he recalled, “but the situation [the control of Sinatra] was more than he could cope with or handle.”

  Aldrich struck the set and dismissed the crew even though there were hours of light left. He then ordered his assistant director to give Dean and Frank calls to appear ready to shoot the next morning, making Koch swear in front of witnesses that he’d see that Frank showed up. Aldrich then sent telegrams reiterating the call to Frank’s homes in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, his office in L.A., his agent’s office, and his lawyer’s office.

  At 11:00 p.m., he got a telegram from Frank in response: “You’re kidding.” Frank never came back to Mojave.

&nbs
p; “In closing,” Aldrich wrote, “it should be noted that the impossible was almost accomplished. By concentrating on Sinatra we could have finished his originally scheduled 10 days work in three—a three that was telescoped at considerable sacrifice to both quality and performance from an already difficult five. And to what avail?”

  Filming proceeded in Burbank without any further eruptions, though crew members routinely asked one another with trepidation, “How’s Sinatra?” when they showed up for work.

  And Dean, who was the soul of cooperation out in the desert, finally showed his own form of truculence when it came time to shoot promotional materials for the film, flat out refusing to do it. (He’d always been awful about such stuff: It had been a sore point between him and Jerry.)

  Aldrich wrote in despair to Jack Warner’s assistant Steve Trilling: “Don’t you think it’s about time that you should make it your business to see that the stars of this picture perform in a professional business-like manner, or are you and /or Warners going to step back and sit back with your new deal and say ‘that’s Aldrich’s problem’?…I don’t see any constructive or intelligent (let alone responsible) behavior from you and/or Warners in disciplining anyone who can remotely shout back.… Since you appear to be so anxious to ‘hold the line,’ why not begin here?”

  Trilling showed the letter to his boss, who suggested that it be filed in a folder marked “No Purpose Answering.”

  He’s needed this for years

  The Cal-Neva Lodge was the jewel of the north shore of Lake Tahoe from the time it opened in 1927, when Las Vegas was just a desiccating old railroad town hardly worth a stop on the drive between Salt Lake and L.A. The hotel was built by William Graham, a Reno political fixer with a conviction on his record in New York for shifty dealings with stolen bank bonds.

  The architecture capitalized on the gorgeous setting between the icy lake and the forest-covered mountains—a real log exterior, stone vestibules and floors, a huge A-frame lobby studded with granite boulders, a massive stone fireplace, thick wooden ceiling beams. There were guest rooms in the main building, chalets for high rollers and celebrities out back. The big novelty was the way the hotel straddled the state line. The rooms and restaurant were in California, the casino was in Nevada; the border ran right through the massive fireplace and the big outdoor swimming pool. (“You could violate the Mann Act without even going outside,” the joke went.)

  The Cal-Neva thrived through Prohibition and the war, but the fifties weren’t so kind. Heavy winter snowfall in the Sierra Nevada meant the place was only accessible during the warm months, and the rise of Las Vegas cut heavily into the business of even the toniest casinos in the Tahoe-Reno region. Elmer “Bones” Remmer, the San Francisco gangster who owned the place through the decade, hit a wall of tax troubles and passed the hotel over to his friend Bert “Wingy” Grober (the name referred to his having only one arm), who couldn’t make any better a go of it.

  Grober’s knights in shining armor arrived at the dawn of the sixties: Frank and Dean, along with Frank’s piano-playing business buddy, Hank Sanicola, and Skinny D’Amato, the gambler and pimp who ran the 500 Club in Atlantic City and had greased the wheels for Jack Kennedy’s primary victory in West Virginia. The foursome offered to buy up most of Grober’s interest in the casino for a mere $250,000: Frank would get 25 percent, Sanicola 16, D’Amato 13, and Dean 3. They would invest more than $2 million in a complete renovation of the premises, add an acoustically superior showroom, even spring for improvements to local roads to make the joint more accessible through the winter.

  To pay for these upgrades, the new owners sought a $3-million loan from the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, which had made such a specialty of investing in hot new Vegas properties. They felt reasonably assured of being approved because their entrée to that fountain of money was provided by a silent partner in their enterprise, Sam Giancana, who thought it a routine enough matter to ask Jimmy Hoffa’s union to lend him $3 million. Giancana, though, was all kinds of hot on account of being investigated by the feds, and Hoffa turned him down. Giancana was livid: “Once I got $1,750,000 from him in two days,” he told friends. “Now all this heat comes on and I can’t even get a favor out of him now. I can’t do nothing for myself. Ten years ago I can get all the fucking money I want from the guy and now they won’t settle for anything!” The grubstake—$1.5 million—wound up coming instead from the Bank of Nevada.

  Sinatra performed at the hotel that summer, inviting the cast of The Misfits, which was then filming near Reno, to be his guests; Marilyn Monroe and her husband, Arthur Miller, were among those who took him up on the offer. Joe Kennedy showed up as well—he held court at the hotel before the 1960 Democratic convention, sporting with women, huddling with gangsters, and brokering the deal through which Frank would take ownership of the place. With all the commotion, he must’ve felt like he already had.

  “Dad liked Cal-Neva because it was unpretentious yet glamorous, homey yet exciting,” remembered Nancy Sinatra. But he had ample reason to abhor it as well: It was one of the places he’d tried to off himself a decade earlier in despair over Ava’s headstrong ways.

  But those bleak days were forgotten now, blasted away by sunny dreams of his own casino, more intimate than the Sands and more his. The deal finally went through in the summer of 1962, albeit with the ownership equation slightly changed: Dean, for one, wanted no part of splitting money with Giancana, and D’Amato, who was brought West to keep an eye on the mob’s cut, wasn’t likely to be welcomed at the airport by Nevada licensing authorities. Instead, they’d set up a dummy corporation, Park Lake Enterprises, that would take possession of Cal-Neva for Frank, Sanicola, and Sanford Waterman, a bookmaker and casino manager who’d worked in Meyer Lansky’s Havana joints. Under this new arrangement, Frank had a full 50 percent of the place.

  On paper. For as Sam Giancana made it clear to Johnny Rosselli, at least that much of the hotel was his. “Who gives a fuck about Cal-Neva?” he laughed. “I’m gonna get my money out of there and I’m gonna wind up with half of the joint with no money.” (It sounded like a sweet gig to Rosselli: “If you do that, please send me there, will you, to look out for you?”)

  The Cal-Neva reopened all gussied up on the last weekend of June 1962, a gala to which Frank flew planeloads of Hollywood friends. He, of course, was the main attraction, which didn’t stop him from getting into an ugly beef. On the second night of the grand reopening, Frank traded blows in the hotel kitchen with a sheriff’s deputy who’d recently married a waitress with whom Frank had a romantic history. The cop belted Frank so hard that he couldn’t finish out the weekend’s performances. He went into Reno and complained to the sheriff, who promptly suspended his man; two weeks later, the guy died in a mysterious automobile accident not far from the hotel.

  Not long after that, a prostitution ring that was operating right out of the front desk was busted, and then somebody got shot on the front steps as he showed up for work.

  And not long after that, Peter Lawford, who’d once been mentioned as a potential partner in the place before he was banished from Frank’s society, showed up at the hotel with Marilyn Monroe.

  Bad, bad idea: Pat and Peter had been desperately trying to disengage Marilyn from the accumulating stresses of her life and had hit upon a swank getaway as a solution. It only got worse: Marilyn spent the weekend drinking and popping pills; there were suggestions that she was forced into sex acts; and Joe DiMaggio, her still-jealous ex-husband, was seen roving the perimeter of the hotel, unwilling to actually come in and talk with her because he was feuding with Sinatra.

  Eventually, Marilyn succumbed to everything going on around her and everything she’d poured inside herself; she passed out in her chalet, and only the fact that she’d kept her bedside telephone connected to the hotel switchboard so that she wouldn’t feel alone saved her life. An alarmed operator, hearing the actress’s labored breathing, alerted Peter and Pat, who burst into Marilyn’s room, revive
d her with coffee and forced walking, then snuck her out of the place to the Reno airport, where Frank’s private plane was waiting to get them the hell out of town. Camera buff Frank had shot a roll of pictures of Marilyn around the hotel that weekend; two weeks later, when she died, he burned them.

  Dead cops, hookers, shootings, overdoses: Frank had bought the Cal-Neva because he thought the place exuded quietude and class; instead, in the first two months it had operated under his ownership, it had become Dodge Fucking City.

  And the wildest was yet to come.

  In July 1963, the feature act in the main showroom at the Cal-Neva was the McGuire Sisters, starring Sam Giancana’s girlfriend Phyllis (not their actual billing). Ten days before they were to open at the Cal-Neva’s Celebrity Room, Giancana and McGuire showed up at the hotel for some R&R. FBI agents watched him play golf with Sinatra, lounge by the famous interstate pool, drive one of the hotel’s house cars, and dine in the restaurant.

  On opening night of the engagement, Sam, the McGuires, and Victor LaCroix Collins, the trio’s road manager, retired to Sam and Phyllis’s chalet for a nightcap. Something unpleasant was in the air: Phyllis kept punching Collins in the arm every time she passed him, and he started dishing her singing voice. It got a little too physical, and he wound up dumping her on her ass, a playful gesture—spiced, perhaps, with too much booze and a little ill will—that got out of hand.

  The sight of his woman being manhandled drove Giancana into a fury. He went after Collins with fists flying, slicing open his eyebrow with the large diamond ring he wore on his right hand. It became a melee, and Collins got the upper hand. The loud commotion drew headwaiter Eddie King into the room, then Frank and his valet, George Jacobs. They pried Collins off of Giancana, then held him like a punching bag while the mobster revenged himself with a salvo of uncontested blows.