by Shawn Levy
The movie was scheduled to go before the cameras on Halloween, but it started hitting snags before the cameras ever rolled. In September, Joey found himself thrown off the film. He’d been signed in June to a $75,000 contract, but after some sort of breach of etiquette, Frank showed him the door. Some said that Joey had been carping about the accommodations he was given when he played the Cal-Neva, which would’ve been especially ironic considering that Frank had given up ownership in the hotel by the time the film went before the cameras. Whatever happened, they weren’t on speaking terms for about a year, and, with a few little exceptions—a mini-Summit at the Sands in 1966, a few TV spots, some benefit one-shots—they never really worked together again. His role wasn’t even recast; it was simply written out of the picture.
Then, three weeks before the first day of filming, Kelly quit. At first, his exit from the film was explained to the press in gentle terms: “We didn’t see eye-to-eye on some areas,” he told Variety. “I thought it best to withdraw before I got too deep into production. We were wide enough apart I felt I should leave. There was no blowup.”
But another story soon got around: Frank had called Kelly to complain that the picture had too much dancing in it and ordered him to cut three numbers out. Kelly didn’t care for his former protégé’s tone: “Why don’t you stick to your acting and let me stick to my producing,” he answered, and Frank cut his throat for him.
A week later, Kelly was back in New York after visiting the White House and was plainer about why he left the picture. “If you’re the producer you’re supposed to make the decisions,” he told a reporter. “I wasn’t making any decisions. I was taking orders.” He didn’t harbor any grudges against Frank or his cohorts: “Quietly, I like the boys, but friendship isn’t always everything in this business.”
He kept insisting that there were no hard feelings, but he sounded more defeated than that: “I’m going to take a few weeks off to think about this whole business of moviemaking,” he mused. “There are times in this business when you have to sit by a quiet lake and think about life. Sometimes the business gets too deep under your skin.” He was thinking, in fact, about returning to the theater: “The most appealing thing about Broadway is that it’s a couple of thousand miles from Hollywood.”
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, with Frank taking over the production reins himself, the new Rat Pack picture, Robin and the Seven Hoods, went into production as scheduled. It was an updating of the Robin Hood folktale, with Frank as a Chicago gangster in the Roaring Twenties named Robbo, Dean as gambling sidekick Little John, Sammy as his aide-de-camp, Will Scarlet, and Bing Crosby as a cheerfully corrupt orphanage administrator named Allen A. Dale (Richard Condon of Manchurian Candidate fame had worked on a script draft).
The title of the film had little to do with the actual number of men in Robbo’s gang. Like the three other buddy films that Frank had made—Ocean’s Eleven, Sergeants Three, Four for Texas—its real meaning lay in the number itself. And you didn’t have to be a numerologist to figure it out, either: 11, 3, 4, 7: Frank was shooting craps with house money.
Schlockmeister Gordon Douglas, whose chief talent was the ability to schedule other work until noon, when Frank preferred to show up on the set, was the director. Character actors like Peter Falk and Victor Buono filled out the cast, which was also liberally sprinkled with old movie gangsters like Edward G. Robinson and Jack LaRue, a Frankenstein-faced B-movie bad guy whose name graced a Studio City pasta joint Frank favored.
After the tumultuous preproduction, work on the $3-million film went well. By the third week of November, the picture was a day ahead of schedule and clipping along nicely. On Friday the twenty-second, Frank was the only star on the call sheet; the crew was filming on the Warner Bros. lot.
The horrible news arrived from Dallas just before 11:00: Jack Kennedy’d had his brains splashed all over his wife’s pink suit. Work stopped for a half hour—the famous “where were you when?” moment—and then they carried on. As soon as they were back on the soundstage, sixty-one-year-old Jack LaRue passed out. They revived him and shot nine more setups—a total of nineteen takes—before Frank went home at 2:50.
A full day’s work: What the hell were they thinking?*
Frank was devastated: Frank who’d been a puppet and a bagman and a pimp, Frank who’d been part of the web connecting Jack with the people who might finally have ordered him dead. He took off for the Springs and spent the weekend in seclusion. He called the White House and spoke to Pat Lawford, but he wasn’t asked to the funeral. “It just wasn’t possible to invite him,” Peter remembered. “He’d already been too much of an embarrassment to the family.” He did what he could: He withdrew The Manchurian Candidate from circulation; a few months later, when he learned that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a fan of Suddenly, the 1954 picture in which he played an assassin, he withdrew that as well.
Dean left no record of his reaction—he’d always managed to keep a distance between himself and the whole Camelot charade—but Peter was, once again, destroyed: Frank had rebuffed him, Marilyn had practically died in his hands, and now Jack.
Peter was in Tahoe performing with Jimmy Durante at Harrah’s and carrying on, once again, in a manner that concerned his employers—drinking all day, partying all night, broads. When the news came just before noon, he’d only been asleep about three hours; he threw up all over the kitchen and fell in his own puke, wailing. He took Bill Harrah’s private plane to Santa Monica airport and helicoptered to his beach house, where Pat sat in a state of catatonia.
Reporters were swarming all over the place; priests, nuns, and a psychiatrist were on hand; the living room was filled with stunned friends, including Judy Garland, who was drinking and weeping that she’d “never sing ‘Over the Rainbow’ to him again.” Pat, sedated, fielded some of the blizzard of calls that came—including one from a family friend back East suggesting that Peter didn’t belong at the funeral. She put her foot down: “I’m going back with my husband.”
Throughout the following days, a stunned Peter watched uncomprehendingly as the Kennedys waked the slain president. He was in shock, couldn’t eat, sleep, talk; they ate and drank and made jokes about their mourning attire, a boisterous Irish brood to the bitter end. Peter was appalled at such a display, but, really, he was no better: The night before the funeral, he snuck off to make hey-hey with a stewardess he’d met on the Air Force One press plane. The next day, he stood in black amid his weeping in-laws.
Afterward, the Kennedys repaired to Hyannis Port to spend a gloomy Thanksgiving. Peter knew better than to tag along. He returned to L.A., and then to Tahoe, where, to the sickened amazement of the world, he took the stage to joke and sing with Jimmy Durante. Offstage, he wept and wailed and drank himself to sleep; but every night he performed—a trouper, all of a sudden.
He had once been blessed with looks and mien and charm and, perhaps above all else, godlike timing.
Now he looked to the whole world like he was dancing on his brother-in-law’s grave.
And just two weeks later, also in Tahoe, somebody kidnapped Frankie Jr.
He was out on the road with the Dorsey band wearing bow ties and singing his pop’s old tunes: For some reason, he had chosen a suicidal career as his Old Man Manque.
Who could live up to it? Who would try? It was nuts.
Poor kid. He never really felt like he belonged anyhow: Frank favored the girls, everyone said. Somehow Junior had hit on music as the answer; Nelson Riddle, his dad’s greatest arranger and a guy with a full house of kids of his own, noticed him moping in the corner: “Frankie’s not an athlete like Dean Martin’s kid; he’s not a great student, he’s not a comedian or a back-slapper. He’s an introspective guy: Broods a lot.”
Fun.
But this: Jack Kennedy just dead, Frank reeling in the desert trying to make sense of things, the whole nation sick to its stomach: this…
A few horrible days followed: Frank flying from the Springs to Reno then back to L.
A., where the kidnappers jerked his chain in a hundred directions before picking up the money and letting the kid go.
The FBI had been all over the case from the start, thanks in part to Peter: As soon as Frank had gotten off the phone with the kidnappers the first time, he called Peter for help in reaching Bobby Kennedy.
It was a strange moment. They hadn’t spoken in more than eighteen months, ever since Palm Springs, not even after Jack’s murder.
“There was no hello, no apology, nothing like that,” Peter remembered. “He just said for me to call Bobby and get the FBI on the case and get back to him in Reno. I called the attorney general right away and he told me to tell Frank that they were doing everything they possibly could.… Bobby said, ‘I know how Frank feels about me, but please tell him that everything is being done and we’ll get his boy back as soon as possible.’ Bobby called Frank the next day, but I gave him Bobby’s message that night and he listened. I think he said thank you before hanging up, but that was the last time we ever spoke to each other.”
Peter kept abreast of the case on his own over the next few days, placing several calls to FBI offices in New York (“He appeared to have been drinking,” read one agent’s account of a conversation with him); he made such a nuisance of himself that he had to be scolded into quiet. A ranking official told the New York supervisor to “tell Lawford very firmly that while we are investigating, there was no information that could be furnished to him, so as to discourage any further inquiries from him.”
The feds monitored the money drop and quickly got their hands on three guys. One had gone to school with Nancy Jr. They were put on trial in the spring, and they came up with a despicable defense, claiming that they hadn’t really kidnapped Frankie at all but were merely part of an elaborate publicity scheme the youngster had cooked up to give his singing career a boost.
The judge, disgusted at this line of argument, instructed the jury to ignore it; within a few hours, they returned three convictions. Two were given life terms; the other seventy-five years. A few years later, from prison, they made headlines trying to peddle a screenplay about the case, still floating the utterly baseless canard that Frankie had masterminded the whole affair.
The innuendo stuck for years: Comics joked about it; it became confused in the public mind with the real facts of the case. The trauma that should have cemented the bond between the two Frank Sinatras wound up weakening it instead.
Two years later, when the whole world celebrated Frank’s fiftieth birthday, Frankie skipped the party, leaving his dad sobbing. The following spring, when Frank got married for the third time, not only was Frankie not invited, but he first heard the news from a reporter. “I think you got the wrong party, pal,” he declared. “I don’t believe it, I just don’t believe it.”
He took the stage that night and, before launching into the tribute-to-Frank portion of the show, announced, “I’m going to devote exactly five minutes to my father because, as he once confided in a moment of weakness, that is exactly how much time he devoted to me.”
* * *
* There’s an alternate version of the story. Sammy remembered showing up that morning to shoot at a cemetery, getting grief from Frank for being late, having lunch and drinks in a trailer with Dean, Frank, Bing, and Joey, then hearing about the assassination from his valet. But the production documents from the set that day didn’t mention him or Dean or Bing (Joey, of course, wasn’t even in the picture), and the call was for the lot, not a location, and it’s unlikely that anybody had had lunch and drinks before 10:30 a.m. West Coast time, which was when the hit in Dallas took place. Years later, on the far side of drug and alcohol addictions, Sammy seemed to be the only person in America who couldn’t remember where he was and what he was doing when the world blew apart that day.
Part 4
I’ve got five good years left
This was what it had come to: insanity, violence, kids disgusted with their parents, and nobody wanting to see them: Four for Texas opened around Christmas and died.
What the hell had happened?
In November, Jack was president and they were making their little Robin Hood movie, another crass, brassy lark.
In August, the movie came out: Jack was dead, and this bunch of kids from England with funny suits and haircuts had grabbed up five number one singles—more than Frank, Dean, and Sammy had ever had in their lives combined. Dean knocked ’em off the charts that month with “Everybody Loves Somebody,” but that was just one last punch from a heavyweight champ who was most definitely going down: They were over.
All those years spent climbing a mountain, who’s gonna tell you that you’re gonna hit a sheer cliff and fall?
There’d been chinks and fractures and staggers and stumbles before, of course, but the scale of this: They would never, ever, ever get back on their feet.
Oh, it was still possible in the spring of ‘64 to pretend things hadn’t changed. Frank and Dean showed up on a Bing Crosby TV special, then the three of them went into the studio to record the sound track to Robin and the Seven Hoods. Effortless stuff: three gods with more than a century in the game between them.
Yet there were intimations in the air, and Frank, being as he liked to be on top of the flagpole, felt them more profoundly than anyone. This wasn’t like back when he fell, the time with Ava and Mitch Miller and his voice going south on him. This time, he stayed right where he was—right on the summit—and the world receded from him. He stayed big; the pictures got small.
For another three or four years, Sammy could still galvanize an audience and lead a people, Dean could still sell records and movie tickets and TV advertising (he’d even get a golf tournament named for him), Joey could still be considered marketable enough to hang a talk show from, even Peter could still get jobs. Frank was king, there was no question; he would always be king. But how strangely grew the realm.
In May 1964, he was in Kauai to direct a movie. One day off, he was wading in the ocean with the producer’s wife when a riptide pulled them a couple hundred yards out. Gulping water instead of oxygen, he was too blinded to see when fullback-sized actor Brad Dexter fought the heaving surf to reach them.
Frank was sobbing: “I’m finished. It’s all over, over.”
Far off on the beach, rescuers were assembling with surfboards and tow ropes. Dexter grabbed ahold of the woman and dragged her over to Frank, who was still blubbering.
“Please take care of my kids. I’m going to die.”
Dexter struggled to get Frank to help himself.
“I tried to get him angry enough to start fighting back by calling him a fucking lily-livered coward,” he remembered. “A spineless, gutless shit. But he didn’t react.”
The woman was no better. Dexter slapped their faces, heaved them up into the air to breathe, held them under his arms while he fought to tread water.
The surfboards finally arrived, and Frank and the woman were ferried back to shore strapped to them; Dexter floated in on his own—in more ways than one.
“My family thanks you,” he quixotically told Dexter—the only thanks the actor ever got directly from him.
“I just got a little water on my bird,” Frank joked afterward.
For a while, Dexter was immediate family, another Hank Sanicola or Jilly Rizzo big enough to toss some muscle at anyone asking for it, but more pal than bodyguard. He was given a job in Frank’s production company; he got parts in a few films; he was lavished upon when Frank was in lavishing moods.
But there was always a faraway part to it, too, a coolness that Dexter always blamed on that day in Kauai. “My rescue efforts probably severed the friendship right then and there by depriving him of the big-benefactor role,” he reflected. “Frank would have much preferred performing the grand dramatic gesture himself and saved my life so that I would be the one who owed him.”
It could’ve been that. But it could also’ve been that Frank was just feeling the weight of his days. He was staring down fifty, and
even though he was one of the great middleweights of his era, he was feeling sated. He wasn’t accumulating people the way he did five, ten years before; there would be no more clans. He would work with Dean and Sammy, he would still make movies and records and tour and do TV shows, but he was starting to look inward, thinking about that half-century he’d owned. His tank was full—overflowing—and he was willing to let some of it dribble away, to let his spirit slow down to a pace like the rest of the world’s.
Little by little, anyhow. He still swung, he still tore up joints and banged broads and filled Vegas with high rollers and made a mint. It wasn’t like it was a few years earlier, what with Jack and Marilyn now dead and him not owning the same pieces of the action, but he could still wail.
He played dates with Count Basie, the rockingest big band of them all, and made marvelous, sexy, modern-sounding records with Quincy Jones and Antonio Carlos Jobim (this latter collaboration produced, in 1967, Francis Albert Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim, an absolute landmark record, as cool and sexy and dreamy and beautiful as anything he’d ever cut—and as important an LP of its type as anything the Beatles or Bob Dylan was doing at the time). He sang starkly and feelingly about his age—“It Was a Very Good Year,” “My Way”—but he could still make you stand up on your chair and shout along with him: “The Summer Wind,” “That’s Life.” So what if he gave up trying in his movies and never could figure out TV? When he had a good song and a good band, nothing compared. In his third decade as a pop star he was still the all-time Best of Breed.