Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  Giancana left the hotel the next day, but word quickly leaked out that he had been there and had gotten into some kind of bang-up, and that was a damn bad break. Giancana, despite being the shadow owner of the Cal-Neva, was barred from so much as stepping a foot inside a Nevada casino. He was one of the original eleven men listed in the Black Book, the slender pamphlet issued by the state Gaming Commission which carried photos, descriptions, and aliases of men who were banned for life from all licensed premises in the state. By allowing Giancana in the Cal-Neva at all—much less for ten days and with prime privileges—Frank had severely compromised the hotel. And the ensuing fallout was the worst public relations fiasco he had ever suffered.

  Within a few days, reports of the gangster’s visit to the hotel started popping up in the Chicago papers, along with allegations that the state Gaming Commission was investigating a possible Black Book violation. The commissioners spoke with Victor LaCroix Collins to get an account of the fight, then tried to get in touch with Eddie King, only to discover that he’d unexpectedly disappeared to Palm Springs.

  On August 3, Ed Olsen, a former Associated Press Reno bureau chief working as chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, reached Frank by phone at the Sands. Frank admitted having seen Giancana leave Phyllis McGuire’s chalet one evening, but claimed that that was the extent of their interaction. He knew nothing about a fight: “If there was a rumble there while I was there, they must be keeping it awfully quiet.” And while he agreed to avoid Giancana and other Black Book figures while in Nevada, he reserved the right to consort with whomever he wanted anywhere else: “This is a way of life,” he said, “and a man has to lead his own life.”

  The Gaming Commission continued its investigation throughout the month in relative quiet, but the Las Vegas Sun got wind of it just before Labor Day, and the matter exploded. Frank’s lawyers and spokespeople immediately denied that Giancana had ever been to the Cal-Neva or been in touch with Frank, but Olsen, interviewed in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, suggested that “certain discrepancies” had arisen in various accounts of just such a visit.

  Frank didn’t care for this last implication, and he asked his accountant, Newell Hancock, a former member of the Gaming Control Board, to invite Olsen to the Cal-Neva for dinner, a show, and a private meeting to clear the air. Olsen said that he didn’t feel it would be appropriate for him to meet Sinatra at the hotel, and he suggested to Hancock that Frank come up to his office, which was deserted during the holiday weekend. Hancock explained that Frank wouldn’t care for that, so they chose a neutral site—Hancock’s Lake Tahoe home—and set an appointment.

  A half hour later, Olsen’s phone rang again, and a secretary asked him to hold for Mr. Sinatra.

  Frank wanted to know why Olsen wouldn’t come to the Cal-Neva, and the commissioner reiterated his belief that he shouldn’t enter a hotel that was being investigated; he repeated the suggestion that Frank visit him in his office.

  “You’re acting like a fucking cop,” Frank responded. “I just want to talk to you off the record.”

  Olsen tried to assure him that no reporters would know of his visit, and Frank interrupted him: “Listen, Ed, I haven’t had to take this kind of shit from anybody in the country, and I’m not going to take it from you people.” He repeated his invitation once again, this time including the commission’s chief investigator, Charles La France: “I want you to come up here and have dinner with me … and bring that shit-heel friend, La France.”

  Olsen couldn’t believe his ears, and he motioned to a couple of colleagues who were in the room with him to pick up phone extensions. They listened in as Frank continued: “It’s you and your goddamn subpoenas which have caused all this trouble,” he said.

  Olsen said that the subpoenas were completely confidential and had not generated the press reports. “You’re a goddamn liar,” Frank retorted. “It’s all over the papers.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  “I’ll bet you fifty thousand dollars.”

  “I haven’t got fifty thousand dollars to bet.”

  “You’re not in the same class with me.”

  “I certainly hope not.”

  That did it. “All right,” Frank hollered, “I’m never coming to see you again. I came to see you in Las Vegas and if you had conducted this investigation like a gentleman and come up here to see my people instead of sending those goddamn subpoenas you would have gotten all the information you wanted.”

  Olsen reminded Frank that Eddie King had skipped out on one of the subpoenas and that Skinny D’Amato had outright refused to talk to investigators, adding that he wasn’t satisfied that Frank had been entirely forthright, either.

  “I’m never coming to see you again,” Frank said.

  “If I want to see you, I will send a subpoena,” Olsen replied.

  “You just try and find me. And if you do, you can look for a big, fat surprise—a big, fat, fucking surprise. You remember that. Now listen to me, Ed.… Don’t fuck with me. Don’t fuck with me. Just don’t fuck with me.”

  Olsen couldn’t believe his ears: “Are you threatening me?”

  “No, just don’t fuck with me, and you can tell that to your fucking board and that fucking commission too.”

  Finally, Olsen suggested that if Frank didn’t want to submit to the gaming authorities he simply get out of the gambling business in Nevada altogether.

  “I might do just that,” he replied, “and when I do, I’m going to tell the world what a bunch of fucking idiots run things in this state.”

  He then, in a knee-jerk resort to diplomacy, repeated his dinner invitation and got off the phone.

  A few hours later, Newell Hancock reached Olsen at home and asked, in genuine innocence, if Frank had called the commissioner earlier. When Olsen rehearsed the conversation for him, Hancock groaned, “Well, I may have just blown a client.”

  Hancock was actually calling about something else that had happened that afternoon, a terrible coincidence that was guaranteed to exacerbate an already ugly situation. Following a schedule that had been set up months in advance, two Gaming Board agents had shown up at the Cal-Neva to monitor the evening count of the take from the casino’s drop boxes: strictly standard stuff. They arrived, however, just after Sinatra’s outburst to Olsen, making it look to Frank as if the commissioner was avenging himself with a pop investigation. When Skinny D’Amato told Frank that two inspectors were in the casino, he exploded, “Throw the dirty sons of bitches out of the house!”

  It turned out that the agents were already leaving; they’d come late—the count had already begun—and they’d already arranged with casino manager Irving Pearleman to come back at 6:00 the next morning to observe the next count. Which is just what they did, and as they were getting ready to leave, satisfied that everything was kosher, they were startled by Skinny D’Amato, who stood between them and slipped hundred-dollar bills into the crooks of their arms—for the previous evening’s inconvenience, he explained. Unbelievable: In the middle of this shitstorm, Skinny was openly greasing gaming officials.

  Olsen was now determined. On September 11, he charged that Sinatra “associated and spoke with” Sam Giancana at the hotel and “did not request Sam Giancana to leave and made no effort to persuade him to depart.” He threw in charges of threatening a state official, attempted bribery of gaming agents, and instructing hotel employees to resist subpoenas. Frank had two weeks to present a defense.

  The case made headlines everywhere. Frank was the most popular entertainer in the country, with eight hit albums and three big movies in the last year and a half. The news that he was tied in with a mobster and had been abusive to a government official was irresistible. Even Jack Kennedy was intrigued: Passing through Nevada briefly to make a speech, he asked Governor Grant Sawyer, “What are you guys doing to my friend, Frank Sinatra?”

  Frank managed to joke about the situation at, of all places, the United Nations, where he emceed a show for the General Assembly. As
king Secretary General U Thant if it would be okay if he smoked as he sang, he indulged in a bit of self-mocking stage patter. “It’s essential to relax,” he explained, “with the hot spots in the world.… Vietnam…Congo … Lake Tahoe.” He waited for the laugh to die, then asked, “Anybody wanna buy a used casino?”

  When Frank’s lawyers deposed Ed Olsen, learning just how much of Frank’s testimony would be impeached by sworn statements from the likes of Victor LaCroix Collins and getting a look at the transcript of Frank’s August 31 conversation with the gaming commissioner, they decided not to contest the charges at all. The deadline passed without Frank’s offering any defense, and Frank’s gaming license was revoked; he was given until the following January to divest himself of his interests in the Cal-Neva and the Sands.

  Frank’s office issued a statement, declaring that the singer had spent the previous six months preparing to separate himself from the gaming industry since “my investments and interests were too diversified.” Describing himself as “surprised, hurt and angered” at the news of the Gaming Commission’s desire to revoke his license, he said, “My immediate reaction was to contest such recommendation, although it was consistent with my future plans.” The commissioners, in other words, were doing him a favor by showing him the door: He just wanted to do it in his own time.

  In fact, Frank had been working to sell off some of his entertainment interests. During the summer, he’d begun talks with Warner Bros, about forging an alliance between his own film and record businesses and the larger company’s. The deal called for Frank to sell Reprise to Warner Records for $3 million, then for one-third of the new Warner Reprise Records to be sold to Frank for $2 million, netting Sinatra a cool $1 million. (He carried a check for that sum around with him for a couple of days, showing it off to friends and crowing, “Now that’s what I call pocket money!”) At the same time, Frank’s Artanis Productions film company would partner up with Warner Bros. Pictures on movie and TV projects, with Frank serving as a special consultant to Jack Warner. Finally, Frank managed to convince Warner to lease his interest in the Cal-Neva from him, separating himself from the property for good.

  Frank was also pretty much separated for good from Sam Giancana, who watched helplessly from Chicago as Sinatra turned a bad situation awful and a gusher into a dry well. “Sam never could figure out why Frank would deliberately pick fights,” recalled Phyllis McGuire. “He would always say to him, ‘Piano, piano, piano.’ ‘Take it easy, take it easy.’ Sam never could get over the hotheaded way Frank acted.”

  Especially, apparently, when Sinatra was endangering not only his own investment but Giancana’s. The gangster told associates that Frank’s fuckup in Nevada cost him $465,000. “That bastard and his big mouth,” Giancana snarled. “All he had to do was keep quiet, let the attorneys handle it, apologize, and get a thirty-to-sixty-day suspension. But no, Frank has to get on the phone with that damn big mouth of his and now we’ve lost the whole damn place.”

  You couldn’t find anyone anywhere who thought Frank was in the right. The following November, Ed Olsen was at the Sands when Sammy spotted him and sauntered over.

  “Oh, God,” Olsen remembered thinking, “here comes a brawl for sure.” Instead, Sammy took him quietly aside, “to tell me in many of the same four-letter words that Sinatra used what a great thing I had done.”

  Olsen thought Sammy must have been drunk, then, realizing that the singer had just finished his show and was stone-sober, he relaxed and let him continue: “That little son of a bitch,” Sammy told the commissioner, who was now beaming. “He’s needed this for years. I’ve been working with him for sixteen years and nobody’s ever had the guts to stand up to him!”

  Say goodbye

  Marilyn.

  Picky Peter wouldn’t have her, but Frank did, and so did Jack, and maybe Bobby and maybe Mo, and Sammy and Dean didn’t but wouldn’t’ve said no.

  Her body was a mecca, and they—mere mortals—drew toward it like wild-eyed hajis.

  She instigated one of Frank’s more sensational brushes with the law—the so-called Wrong Door Raid of 1954; she was linked in the gossip sheets with Sammy; she showed up ringside at the Sands; she visited the Cal-Neva at a time when Giancana was skulking around the joint; she was making a picture with Dean when she slipped into her final fatal spiral; she made her last phone call to Peter.

  Flaubert would’ve based his entire career on her. Of all the women they ever used up and spat out, she was the only one powerful enough to defy them. It cost her, flying in their altitude: the anxiety, the doubt, the fear. But she was the credibly real thing: one of them. It frankly scared them. And whether they did her in out of indifference and neglect or out of cunning and deliberation, they made sure, in a way that their world condoned, that she’d be the last one that would get so close.

  She was never truly of the Rat Pack, of course, but she blew through their world like an ill omen. Other women passed through as many of their hands, but none had her iconic power—a strapping American blonde dipped in sex—and none, of course, was to die so mysteriously, not even Judy Campbell, who ratted them all out and had reason to worry.

  Alive, Marilyn was a walking embodiment of license and pleasure and surfeit and fun—as desirable and modish and swank as tail fins and sharkskin. Decades later, though, that body that had been the focus of so much lustful attention decomposed, and awful stories leaked out of it. She evolved into something sullied, a cesspool of rue and guilt and terrible secrets, a martyr to a culture that didn’t have the courage to admit what it wanted from her.

  The world would learn that she was a game piece, that powerful men conquered and colonized and twisted her, that she was an object to possess, a weapon to be deployed. America’s greatest baseball player, its greatest playwright, its biggest stars, its most powerful men, the president himself: She had been a rite of passage, an initiation into a select pantheon.

  But in accumulating lovers, in becoming a nexus of so much secrecy and power and license, she became a threat as much as a pleasure. By the summer of 1962, she was wet dynamite, capable of inflicting all kinds of damage if her chemistry wasn’t just right: a recent bedmate of the president, the attorney general, and the nation’s most popular singer; under surveillance by the FBI, the mob, and the Teamsters; strung out on drugs and rotten luck; with only Peter Lawford and a showbiz shrink to keep her steady.

  That, clearly, wasn’t enough. She could rip the world apart if she felt like it, and she was big enough to make it stick. She’d started to play dirty with her playmates just like they always had with her. She bugged her own house so that she could catch a Kennedy making promises or simply sporting himself. And she began talking about using the tapes.

  Frank had gotten close to her not much earlier, and he had found it scary. She’d get boozed or doped up, she’d wander through the house naked and stumble into rooms where there was company, she’d neglect herself or shoot her mouth off about something he felt she knew nothing about. Yes, there was the sex, but Frank could have that anytime. He liked dames with class, and he was disappointed to the point of anger to find out that Marilyn didn’t, in his book, have it.

  But Peter, who’d known her forever, stayed beside her. For one thing, he was guilty at having nudged her into the whirlpool that was swallowing her up. For another, he empathized with her as a kind of dopey sex object caught in the machinations of the gods. He himself felt so wee and inadequate around Frank and Jack and their ilk that he could immediately identify with anyone else similarly bedazzled by the circumstance. In the whole world, she was the only person, it seemed, who needed him to be strong; he couldn’t live up to it, but he tried, which is why he deserved her kind final words: “Say goodbye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.”

  Nice: not exactly a quality prized in these circles. With Marilyn gone, Peter became the last living vestige of the danger she presented. Frank was already through with him, and now Jack and Bobby, who’d always indulged in him l
ike a harmless little vice, grew remote. The only one among them who tried to help her, he wound up taking the rap for the mess the rest had left behind.

  They swept her under the rug: a freak accident. They lied even to themselves. Decades would pass before anyone could call them on it, and by then most everybody who might’ve known the truth was dead or determinedly silent.

  Still, there had to have been a general shudder when the news of her death came. Whether they were complicit or not, whether they’d been with her or not, whether there was a conspiracy before or after, a murder or a cover-up, they were all implicitly to blame.

  Marilyn had been the best of what they took such pains to make everyone believe mattered to them, and they’d trampled and discarded her and left her to the vultures.

  She was the one true sign before Dallas that something was extremely rotten in their world.

  “He taught me everything I know. He’s one of the reasons I became a star. He’s always been one of my great friends.”

  That was Frank, describing his pal Gene Kelly, the guy who taught him how to dance, how to endure the longueurs of moviemaking, how to play to the motion picture camera, everything. They met in 1944 on Anchors Away. Kelly was a hot new star; Frank was just some crooner who’d arrived at the MGM lot after making a couple of low-budget films at RKO. They made three films together all told—Take Me Out to the Ball Game and On the Town followed in 1949—and Frank never tired of telling folks how Gene had taken him under his wing when he arrived at the world’s premier movie studio.

  “Because I didn’t think I was as talented as some of the people who worked there, I went through terrible periods of depression and I’d get terribly embarrassed,” he admitted years later. “It was Gene who saw me through.”

  In the summer of 1963, when he was looking for somebody to oversee production on a new Rat Pack movie, a musical gangster picture (in which they would play Chicago mobsters, yet!), Frank turned to Kelly, who’d been producing and directing for nearly a decade, with such films as Singin in the Rain and Invitation to the Dance to his credit. This new film, with a period setting and several full-scale song-and-dance numbers, struck Frank as something for which Kelly was a perfect fit.