The tricks Mama Dolly taught me about making authentically inauthentic Italian food would soon come in handy. Mr. S was putting on a huge spread in Palm Springs for a special guest. He even hired a mariachi band to entertain. I had never seen him try so hard to have everything perfect, not even for Ava. He was extremely nervous about each little thing being just so, the linens, the soap, the caviar, which had to be the finest Beluga, from Iran and not Russia. “The guy hates Communists,” Mr. S explained. Who was he, I asked, Joe McCarthy? No, Mr. S laughed. He was as far from Senator Joe McCarthy as a guy could be. So who, I pressed my boss, was I going to all these pains for? “He owns Chicago,” Mr. S said. Sam Giancana was one Italian Mr. S did not call Dag.
The thing that made the first big impression of this Mr. Big of American Gangland were his hands. He had the most perfectly manicured hands and nails I had ever seen. Yet these were the same hands that, according to the man’s legend, in his youth had crushed tracheas and squeezed triggers. Mr. S never mentioned that side of Giancana. What impressed Sinatra about the capo was that he was a genius of a businessman. No matter that the legend labeled Giancana as a near idiot, with a double-digit IQ. To Frank Sinatra he was a genius when it came to money, and money was the only test that mattered in America, where anything was possible, even for an idiot to own Chicago. Where success was concerned, brawn could be better than brains, though “Mafia” was a word I never heard Mr. S use.
Sometimes they called Giancana Sam, sometimes Salvatore, sometimes Mooney, which was some kind of Italian usage for “crazy.” He didn’t seem crazy to me. He seemed very conservative. Sam Giancana, a small man, almost Sinatra’s and my size, but a little heavier, was around sixty, balding, mousey. He was the kind of man you might have seen in Marty Sinatra’s Italian social club, except his clothes were way too good. He had the fanciest clothes I ever saw, as fancy as his hands. He had silk suits, and silk shirts, and silk pocket squares, and alligator shoes even after alligator shoes became illegal. Everything was custom made. He wore a star sapphire ring that looked like the Hope Diamond, serious Breakfast at Tiffany’s stuff. And he smoked Havana cigars that would have made Harry Cohn jealous. Yet at the same time, he had a high, almost girlish voice that mispronounced half of the few things he would say. He got everybody’s name wrong, from President Eisenheimer to Clark Grable.
Sam Giancana looked dazed, lost, a scared rabbit. He carried huge rolls of dimes and quarters, to use in the pay phones he was constantly stopping at. He said all the regular phones he could use were being tapped. He seemed totally paranoid. Yet Mr. S insisted the man was a wizard, a business mastermind who understood big money better than anyone else in the world. Like Skinny D’Amato, Sam Giancana had kept Mr. S afloat when he was drowning, probably more so, because Skinny took orders from Sam. Sam had ordered Skinny and other gang-related club owners around the country to book Sinatra and to keep booking him, despite his voice problems, despite his dwindling allure. Sam Giancana’s confidence that Sinatra would come back became a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Talk about the heat being on in the kitchen. I must have cut myself five times and burned myself ten, but that was nothing compared to what this mob kingpin would do to me if I fucked the meal up. And it wasn’t just Sam Giancana. Throughout the day one mob boss after another showed up at the Alejo house. There was Johnny Rosselli, the original Dapper Don, with clothes and hands like Giancana but tall and handsome. Rosselli, who had done more time than a clock, was supposedly the Mafia’s man in Hollywood. I used to see him at the best tables at Romanoff’s and Perino’s, with the prettiest starlets as well as with Harry Cohn, who had a huge gambling problem that Rosselli enabled. They were also frequently at Santa Anita racetrack together, and they wore identical “blood brother” ruby rings that Rosselli had given the mogul. After seeing Rosselli at his house, I asked Mr. S if Giancana had leaned on Rosselli to lean on Cohn to give him the part in From Here to Eternity, and he gave me a Cheshire-cat grin. “Hey, I got that part through my own fucking talent,” he said. And then he gave me a wink.
And there were more. There was a guy named Joe F. and another called Johnny F., and some others with Italian names no one could pronounce. Each guy came with at least one or two thick-necked bodyguards. Mr. S couldn’t have been more thrilled. He’d say, “George, feed ’em all.” Now I know how Wolfgang Puck must feel on a night at Spago when all the stars show up at once and want special dishes. One mobster wanted eggplant, another spinach, another wanted clams. There were no fresh clams in Palm Springs in those days, so I got canned ones and prayed to God the boys were drunk enough not to care about the difference. Luckily they were. I don’t know what was going on out there that attracted so many heavy hitters. It was like the famous Apalachin Conference they had the next year, I think, 1957, when the capos from all over the country met in a little town in upstate New York. But there were no closed-door meetings, at least at Sinatra’s house, and no whispers of dividing up Las Vegas, or Havana, or whacking some rival. No, the only talk I heard was about broads, boxing, and golf. Don’t forget, Palm Springs was a place to relax, even for criminals.
That weekend I would drive Sam Giancana around Palm Springs to meet his visiting fellow mobsters, each of whom was staying in some gated mansion, not of celebrities but rather of the faceless fat cats from all over who owned manufacturing companies and heavy industry and came to the desert to golf. Those mobsters were certainly connected, although I’m not sure to whom. Giancana was a total gentleman, and I’m not saying this out of relief that he didn’t strangle me to death. Once he got comfortable with me, he said a strange thing to me: “You know, I like niggers.” Mob guys were not known for their racial tolerance, so this was a big confession. “Niggers made me what I am,” whatever that was, he continued.
I wasn’t sure how to pronounce his last name, so I called him Mr. Sam. “Tell me about it, Mr. Sam,” I asked him, and between one golf course and another, he did. When he was in prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, in the forties, for what I didn’t press him on, his fellow inmate was a black guy who went on to become the king of the numbers racket in Chicago and a multimillionaire. It was one of the few ways a black man could get rich in America at the time. Giancana knew a good thing when he saw it, and, in a rare display of brotherhood, he became the black guy’s partner. He eventually had to force the black king out, because his own bosses “didn’t want to be in business with no niggers,” Mr. Sam said. When he said force, he meant force. Sam didn’t tell me the gory part, but I later heard that Giancana and his henchmen had kidnapped the numbers king and brutalized him until he turned over to Giancana his business and the details of how to run it. Mr. Sam put a much nicer spin on this for me, boasting of how magnanimous he was in setting the black guy up for life in a villa down in Mexico. “A lifetime of the shits is still a lifetime,” he said. The Big Boys wanted the black king whacked, and Sam saved his life. He sounded as if he expected an award from the NAACP.
Mr. Sam also complimented me on my driving, which, I learned, was a big deal from him. Giancana had begun his mob career as a driver, or “wheel man,” for the successors of Al Capone. “You oughta come to Chicago,” he said at the end of his stay. “I’ll give you a real job.” “Hey, he’s mine,” Mr. S spoke up when he overheard him. It was the only time all weekend that he had asserted himself to Sam in any way. Otherwise, he had been as much of a valet as I was. He would follow Mr. Sam around the golf course, hitting a few balls at first, then giving up and just riding in the cart watching Giancana play. That man loved golf as though he were Arnold Palmer. In between holes, Mr. S would hang on every word Sam said. Sinatra wanted to learn from Giancana in the same way Sammy Davis wanted to learn from everybody else. Mr. S never acted that way, though, around anyone else. What he and Giancana talked about was business, the business of running casinos. The numbers I heard them throw around made my head reel. They were never less than in the hundreds of thousands. The word “skim” came up a lot, and I don’t think
they were referring to milk, as did the phrases “IRS,” “balance sheets,” “gross,” “pension funds,” and “Teamsters.” I wasn’t a Wall Street Journal kind of guy, and all of it went over my head, but I didn’t think Mr. S was, either. I was surprised how slick he was at numbers talk, but I guess when you’ve got it, you like to talk about it. Sinatra owned a piece of the Sands, in return for his making it his exclusive venue in Vegas, and he loved the notion of being a capitalist, a proprietor. He wanted to own even more. Sam Giancana was his mentor in these ambitions that extended far beyond stage and screen.
There are endless conspiracy theories about Frank Sinatra being in the pocket of the Mafia, involving trying to kill Castro, killing Marilyn, killing the Kennedys. What about a theory that Sinatra and the Rat Pack were pawns of the Mafia, which controlled America’s bar and liquor business? Wasn’t the whole Rat Pack phenomenon nothing more than a three-year liquor advertising campaign? If it was about anything, it was about the joys of drinking. That might be farfetched, but Mr. S was indeed strongarmed by Mr. Sam and friends to do car ads, not national campaigns for Ford or GM, but local radio spots for a small Pontiac dealership in Chicago that the “Chicago Boys” were involved with. The place was Peter Epsteen Pontiac in Skokie. Mr. S did his pitch to “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” singing “Old McDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O. And on this farm he had a car, the swingin’est car I know. It was a new Pontiac with a dual wide track. What a kick to drive it, like ballin’ the jack. Peter Epsteen Pontiac, he sold the car to Mac.” Not only did Mr. S do an ad; Dean and Sammy also performed for Peter Epsteen, to “Come Fly with Me,” and “High Hopes.” If Mr. Sam could get these superstars to stoop to this, then anything was possible. That was “respect.” Major respect. The Rat Pack song “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is)” was a declaration of loyalty to Mr. Sam.
The “mob circuit” of venues where I began traveling with Mr. S in the mid-1950s went from the Sands in Vegas, to the Villa Venice in Chicago, to the Copacabana in New York, to the 500 in Atlantic City, to the Fontainebleau in Miami. The drill was the same, endless nights, oceans of booze, gorgeous girls, and, of course, the greatest music on earth. Gangsters were everywhere. The faces were different; the muscle was the same. The only reason I was able to keep my bearings in this cavalcade of excess was because I had gotten married again. That gave me ballast, though I have to admit that the temptations were hard to resist. I had met my new wife Sally in music school while I was still working for Swifty Lazar. We had three boys, Gregory, born in 1955, Guy, in 1956, and Sean, in 1957.
Sally was Finnish, and very blond. Her family had emigrated to Oregon, where she had grown up on a farm. I had dated white girls before, and both my parents were part white, so Sally’s whiteness wasn’t exotic to me, but I was pretty exotic to Sally. However, blacks were considered totally cool and then some in Finland, where anything different was welcome. But then Sally’s mother left her logger father for a local machinist, who was as much of a racist redneck as an Alabama Klansman. So we didn’t go home to Oregon for Christmas. Sally hated her new stepfather, who went to jail a few times for robbery. Funny how I married into two criminal families. (The third time was to a preacher’s daughter, just to even things out.)
In any event, we had a short, intense courtship. Sally had insisted on remaining a virgin until our wedding night, so I figured she was mine forever. Shows how much I knew! Sally’s singing dreams got about as far as mine. She took a job at the telephone company, and later as a secretary at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. For my first three years with Mr. S, he never met my family. He barely saw his own, so it wasn’t discussed. Home and work were separate but not necessarily equal. Mr. S was a jealous mistress. The kids were too young to take on the road, so Sally had to stay home and play mom while I gallivanted all over the world. It wasn’t real gallivanting, but it seemed so glamorous no one would believe how hard the work and the round-the-clock pressure were. Even when I was in L.A., I’d never get home until two or three in the morning, if at all. Then I had to get up at six when the kids did. I drank a lot of coffee.
Sally wasn’t crazy about my hours and my travels, but I was crazy about her and my kids, and love conquered all. At least for a while. At the beginning of our marriage, we didn’t have a religious household at all. That was before I rediscovered my Judaism and before Sally discovered the faith of Jehovah’s Witnesses, which I blame for destroying our marriage, even more than my dreadful hours. But later about that. In these early years with Sinatra, this new wife and family kept me grounded. If I hadn’t embraced family values I would have embraced a lot of women who would have spelled a lot of trouble.
Even though I was true blue, sometimes my wife would get terribly jealous, just because my proximity to the goddesses of the world had such potential for incrimination. Take the time Mr. S sent me down to Acapulco to “take care of” three of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. In the “Come Fly with Me” days when Acapulco was the most glamorous of resorts, Mr. S had taken a villa on La Concha Beach. A big house party he had planned had somehow fallen apart. None of the men he invited could make it, including Mr. S, who had to stay at the studio for reshoots. So I was sent to take his place. The first of the women was Ava Gardner, who was in town and in a nonmatador availability phase. The second was the lovely Jeannie Martin, Dean’s wife, a former Orange Bowl Queen from Miami Beach. And the third was the equally lovely Bea Korshak, a former model and Ice Capades skater who was the wife of Sidney Korshak, the Chicago mob lawyer who had become the most feared Mr. Fixit-or-Be-Fixed in all show business.
I knew Ava liked to drink and listen to jazz, and Jeannie liked to drink and browse and laugh at soft-core pornography, when porn was much harder to come by than it is today. I used to drive around to these obscure bookstores in Hollywood and buy Jeannie under-the-counter sex comic books, with funny photos and silly stories. Whenever I’d go to Tijuana on fireworks runs for Mr. S, I’d bring Jeannie some really hard-core magazines. Remember that in those days Tijuana was one of the raunchiest places on earth, famous for the donkey show at the club the Blue Fox. Acapulco being Mexico, I was sure I could find some “literature” that would amuse Mrs. Martin.
I had no idea what Bea liked and was frankly afraid to find out. I didn’t want to get too chummy with the wife of Mr. Big, who may have seemed like a typical I’ll-sue-you-but-won’t-kill-you Jewish lawyer but was someone for whom I didn’t want to take the slightest risk of creating any impression of impropriety. Bea herself appeared to be the nicest lady, with no apparent kinks at all. Most of the time she and Jeannie sat on the beach making up guest lists for their charity SHARE, which was the ultimate do-good activity for A-list Hollywood wives. While they were out planning their good deeds, Ava would stay in the villa, napping, drinking, and listening to jazz. There was a great collection in the house, and, naturally, all of Mr. S’s records, which got lots of play, in his absentee honor. All three women liked to swim, particularly on the balmy moonlit nights and, luckily for me, who liked keeping things simple, none was in a Dietrich-Garbo phase. Nor did any of them get a yen for one of the handsome cliff divers, or any of the local gigolos who were always lying in wait. I mostly hung with Ava, who gave me the nickname “El Matador de Moscas,” or, the killer of flies, for swatting away the endless swarm of bugs. My wife was on my case about having a wild foursome, and the only action I was getting was playing exterminator. It wasn’t always glamorous.
People remain confounded as to why Mr. S, now on top of the world, would continue to consort with, actually court, people like Sam Giancana, Johnny Rosselli, Sidney Korshak. Were these the folk heroes of his Jersey childhood? Did Mr. S have an outlaw streak? Were criminals simply more fun to be around than boring straight people? Was this the fantasy of the ninety-seven-pound weakling dreaming of becoming a strongman? Or was it gratitude, plain and simple? I have my own idea. It was all about business. Why did Harry Cohn hang with these same people? Why did Lew Wasserman? Why did Joe Kennedy? Thes
e guys had the capital, they had the labor, and they would take chances when conservative Wall Street wouldn’t, chances in the entertainment business, which Wall Street viewed as unpredictable, unquantifiable, and “Jewish” to boot. Wall Street in the fifties preferred U.S. Steel. Look at U.S. Steel now, and look at entertainment. Sam Giancana wasn’t a gangster; he was a visionary. He was the genius Mr. S said he was. If Wall Street disdained showbiz, as a crapshoot, Mr. Sam and his outfit were willing to roll the dice. Literally. That’s how Las Vegas was born.
In truth, Mr. S had a little bit of Wall Street in him. Look how risk averse his father Marty was. Mr. S had rolled the dice and won, but he had rolled and almost lost as well. He had nearly crapped out. He saw how tenuous the whole game was, how it could vanish in a flash. Mr. S wanted to be part of the capital, not just the labor, fancy labor, that he was. He wanted to be an owner. Just as Marty treasured his tenure at the firehouse, Mr. S too wanted some major security of his own. His firehouse happened to be a Vegas casino. To achieve that end, he jumped into bed with Sam Giancana, who helped him acquire his own “piece of the rock.” The first rock was the new Sands, which opened in Vegas in 1952, with its own Copa Girls, considered the cream of the Vegas crop, and its own Copa man, Jack Entratter, considered the host with the most. With his 9 percent share, the Sands was more than Mr. S’s showcase. It was his office, the house that Sinatra built. He loved being an owner so much, he would go for a second round with Mr. Sam at the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe, this one with tragic results. Nevertheless, Mr. S had discovered the joys of capitalism. He preferred the odds on the croupier’s side of the table. He liked talking business, going to his new offices in a bank building in Beverly Hills, reviewing balance sheets, nearly as much as he did getting on stage. It says something that his new “best friend” was Al Hart, the Jewish president of City National Bank in L.A. Maybe Mr. S’s father did know best. Having a firehouse wasn’t so bad after all.
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