Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  The correct scene was considerably more nuanced. Was Sinatra the kingpin of the quintet? Without a doubt. “It’s Frank’s world, we just live in it,” Dean Martin is famously supposed to have said; he might even have actually said it. All four of Sinatra’s partners in the Summit were proud to call him a friend; they readily acknowledged him as the Leader. But the reality was thornier. Dean Martin had huge admiration for Frank as a singer and loved him as a friend. But Sinatra’s version of friendship demanded fealty, and Martin kowtowed to no one. He went his own way, and if things ever became confrontational, his way was to vanish.

  Though Sammy Davis Jr. had some talents that Frank Sinatra could only dream of, and was nearly his equal in stardom, his relationship with Sinatra was uneasily sycophantic. The sight of him onstage during the Summit performances, bent over and grimacing with seemingly uncontrollable laughter as Sinatra clumsily mocked him, is painful. But like Peter Lawford, Davis knew all too well what could happen when you got on Frank’s bad side.

  As for Lawford, he held a certain amount of reflected power in 1960 (Sinatra’s nickname for him during that period: Brother-in-Lawford) but was widely seen as a toady and errand boy. “He was hanging around Frank all the time,” Walters remembers. “It was Sinatra being the boss and Lawford being the employee. One of [Don] Rickles’s great jokes was ‘Peter, you can laugh. Frank says it’s okay.’ Because we all knew Lawford didn’t do anything without Frank’s okay. Frank didn’t treat him like a friend.”

  And Joey Bishop was never going to be one of Sinatra’s drinking buddies—the only kind of buddy Sinatra had—for one important reason: he didn’t drink. “We’ve worked together many times, and I enjoy it, but we don’t socialize afterwards,” Bishop admitted.

  The socializing afterward was one of the most important things in Frank Sinatra’s life: he was a thoroughly nocturnal man who lived in desperate fear of being alone. Drinking buddies and hangers-on (they were usually one and the same) were required, at the pain of Frank’s displeasure, to stay up with him until the sky over Vegas lightened to the shade of morning twilight that he loved so much—“Five O’Clock Vegas Blue,” he called it. And woe betide the man who tried to sneak off to bed: Sinatra was known to roust the recalcitrant from their hotel rooms personally, sometimes with the aid of cherry bombs.

  The single pass Frank issued to any of his drinking friends—and he issued it because there was no other choice—went to Martin. “All the guys would take a steam bath, they’d go out and gamble—[and] Dean Martin would say, ‘I’m sorry, guys, I’m going to bed,’ ” recalled Sid Avery. “He’d get up early in the morning, go out and golf.”

  Sometimes Martin would soften the blow by telling Sinatra, “I’ve got a girl in my room,” and sometimes there really was a girl in his room. But then, and throughout his life, Dean Martin preferred his solitude. “He was not like the rest of the Clan,” Judith Campbell recalled. “He was the kind of person who wandered around by himself. He didn’t need a retinue walking with him when he walked from one room to another…I don’t think he could stand having a lot of people around him all the time the way Frank did.” Despite his drunk act onstage, Martin wasn’t really a convivial drinker. He liked to watch a Western on TV, get his beauty sleep, and hit the links well rested. Golf was his one great passion in life.

  So the image of the Rat Pack as a kind of floating social club, merrily cavorting together when the cameras weren’t rolling, doesn’t quite jibe with reality. Sometimes they gambled together, but the five of them didn’t even all go to the legendary Sands steam bath (in which Frank had had the management install a craps table) together: incredibly, Sammy was barred from entering.

  Not that Sinatra was lacking for nighttime companionship. His usual entourage was always with him: Jimmy Van Heusen; bodyguard/drinking buddies like Jilly Rizzo, Hank Sanicola, and Al Silvani; and Ocean’s 11 cast members like Angie Dickinson, Richard Conte, Henry Silva, Buddy Lester, George Raft, and Shirley MacLaine (who played a bit part as a Tipsy Girl) orbited around him, as did such visiting luminaries as Kirk Douglas, Yul Brynner, and Steve Lawrence.

  Frank’s days, too, were populous. And bibulous. “There is no way anyone can ever spend a day alone with Frank Sinatra,” Exner writes, recalling a weekend afternoon and evening, late that January, spent in his bungalow at the Sands.

  His quarters are a crossroads, with traffic moving in all directions, day and night. I think he would dry up and blow away if he were left totally alone.

  Everything considered, it was a peaceful, pleasant day. I brought a book and sat out in the sun on his patio and read while Frank talked on the phone, glanced through a pile of scripts, dictated a few letters, acknowledged the comings and goings of an endless string of visitors, growled at flunkies, drank martinis, ate lunch, drank Jack Daniels, ate hors d’oeuvres, drank Jack Daniels, ate dinner, and drank more Jack Daniels. Frank was not feeling well that day.

  —

  On January 28, 1960, in the midst of the shooting of Ocean’s 11, Frank flew to Los Angeles to record a campaign song for the Democratic front-runner, who had formally announced his candidacy on the day after New Year’s. The tune, Sammy Cahn’s special-lyrics version of Cahn and Van Heusen’s “High Hopes,” was called “High Hopes with Jack Kennedy.” It began,

  Everyone is voting for Jack.

  ’Cause he’s got what all the rest lack.

  Everyone wants to back Jack,

  Jack is on the right track.

  ’Cause he’s got High Hopes!

  He’s got High Hopes!

  1960’s the year for his High Hopes!

  The original “High Hopes,” charmingly sung by Sinatra and Eddie Hodges in A Hole in the Head and a big hit as a single, deserved its popularity: though nothing like a great song, it was madly catchy, and its message, a clarion note of optimism in a nation that was materially comfortable but mired in a fog of conformity and nuclear fear, was irresistible.

  The campaign version, released in advance of the all-important Wisconsin primary in March, raised the original song’s gauzily abstract confidence to a specific, even an aggressive, level. With its explosive k end rhymes (“Jack,” “lack,” “back,” “track”), it was the sonic equivalent of the pointing, sawing hand gestures Jack Kennedy deployed on the podium, challenging America to rise from its stupor and seize the future from the Soviet Union.

  —

  Frank Sinatra introduced Sen. Kennedy at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel a couple of nights ago—and there was wild cheering from the audience. Then Dean Martin stepped from the wings and said to Sinatra, “What was his name?”

  —Earl Wilson’s syndicated column of February 4, 1960

  John F. Kennedy, the cultural historian Jonathan Gould writes, “was the first American president to be born in the twentieth century, the first to grow up in thrall to the movies, radio, and the glossy idealizations of magazine advertising—the first American president to have his sensibility molded in the crucible of modern mass culture.” Kennedy recognized the power of show business, saw how it could help him in his campaign. He also recognized which show-business figure attracted more women than any other.

  “Sinatra thought Kennedy was going to be a great president,” says Ed Walters, who met the president-to-be on several occasions at the Sands. “Kennedy just wanted to get laid.”

  If the formulation is coarse, so was this side of John F. Kennedy. We are all divided souls; because Jack Kennedy was rich and brilliant, with movie-star looks and charisma, and because he became a world-historical figure, his contradictions stand out in especially stark contrast. “He was not a grown-up and he was a grown-up. He was both,” Nancy Olson Livingston recalled. He could be deeply thoughtful or callous, sparklingly witty or boorish, empathetic or coldly calculating. Some found him warm and present; others didn’t. “He was a little distant,” Livingston added. “He was not that interested in what you thought and what you had to say.” And where his personal life was concerned, he was a man w
ho felt completely entitled to do precisely as he pleased, and pleasure was one of his highest values. All of which makes him a key part of the Rat Pack saga.

  Crisscrossing the country on his campaign plane, the Caroline, in late January and early February 1960, Kennedy stumped in Illinois, Indiana, West Virginia, North Dakota, and New Mexico; strikingly, he also made it his business to visit Nevada twice within a one-week period: on January 31 and February 1, to powwow with the state’s progressive Democratic governor, Grant Sawyer; and then on February 7 and 8, apparently for purely personal purposes. He took in the Summit’s show at the Sands on both visits. On the second, he and his entourage (including his twenty-seven-year-old brother, Ted) stayed for two nights at the hotel-casino, as Sinatra’s guests. “There was no goddamn reason for stopping there except fun and games,” Blair Clark, a CBS reporter traveling with the candidate, recalled. On the other hand, “We all figured, ‘How bad can it be to catch Sinatra at the Sands?’ ”

  Frank and the presidential candidate at the Sands, circa 1960. “There was no goddamn reason for stopping there except fun and games,” a CBS reporter traveling with Kennedy recalled. (Credit 13.3)

  That was the whole thing in a nutshell. In an era when the (almost exclusively male) press corps covering politicians and candidates winked at sexual peccadilloes, Jack Kennedy had carte blanche. Sinatra would introduce him fulsomely at the Summit shows: “Ladies and gentlemen, Senator John F. Kennedy, from the great state of Massachusetts…The next president of the United States!” A blurry home movie taken on one of those nights shows the slim young senator grinning and standing to take a bow.

  Judith Campbell Exner claimed in her book that she first met Jack Kennedy “at ten o’clock Sunday evening (February 7, 1960). He and Teddy were at Frank’s table in the Sands lounge. He looked so handsome in his pin-striped suit. Those strong white teeth and smiling Irish eyes.”

  After a drink in the lounge, Exner maintained, someone mentioned dinner, and she found herself dining with Peter Lawford, Gloria Cahn, and Jack and Teddy Kennedy in the Garden Room.

  Lawford’s agent, Milt Ebbins—an apparently agenda-free witness—claimed that he had been at the table at the Sands when Campbell made her first appearance. “The lights were low,” he told Anthony Summers, “but I sensed a lady come and sit down beside me—maybe it was her perfume. And she said, ‘I’m Judith Campbell, I’m a guest of Mr. Sinatra’s. He asked me to sit at this table.’ ”

  Ebbins said that after the Summit show, Campbell left with Jack Kennedy. The agent told Summers that when he later asked Lawford who she was, Lawford said, “She’s a hooker. Frank gave her two hundred dollars to stop at our table…to go to bed with Jack.”

  That is what Lawford said. On the other hand, as the singer Betsy Hammes recalled, guys were throwing money around a lot in those days. Campbell “was always kind of like a girl about town,” Hammes said. “She was everywhere. In Beverly Hills nightclubs, you would run into her every night. She was always kind of out of it all the time—I don’t know if she was a drinker or [it was] pills, or what.”

  Was she a pro?

  “I don’t think so—she just slept around.”

  —

  After one of the Summit shows, on the night of February 7 or 8, there was a private party in Sinatra’s suite; the candidate and some of his entourage were present, as were at least two young women. Two reporters who were there, Blair Clark and the Washington Star columnist Mary McGrory, excused themselves, Clark later recalled, “because we sensed that Jack and Frank and a couple of the girls were about to have a party.” One of the women, Clark said, was Judy Campbell.

  Campbell, who was “tremendously impressed by [Kennedy’s] poise and wit and charm,” formed a very different impression of him from Nancy Olson Livingston’s. “When he listened, it was as if every nerve and muscle in his whole body was poised at attention,” she recalled. “He had a habit when he listened of tilting his head slightly toward you, as if to facilitate the process, guarding against the possibility that a word might mischievously try to slip by him.”

  Of course the level of his interest might have varied directly with the degree to which he was on the make. Livingston claims that Kennedy tried to force himself on her in 1948, when she was a twenty-year-old junior at UCLA, and that she fended him off. He might have given her up as a lost cause afterward. Campbell, on the other hand, was to become his mistress.

  And Frank had made the introduction.

  —

  He liked nicknaming people who meant a lot to him, and the handles were breezy but sharp edged: he was Dolly’s son, after all. Dean was Dag, the a long, for “dago”; Sammy was Smokey, for his heavy smoking habit and the color of his skin. Brother-in-Lawford has been mentioned. But now there was a new pally, the brother-in-law’s amorous brother-in-law, and so the candidate was dubbed: Chickie Baby.

  —

  Intent on establishing a decorous timeline for her relationship with John Kennedy, Judith Campbell Exner maintained that it was Teddy Kennedy who came after her—unsuccessfully—on the first night of the Sands layover and that her bond with the president-to-be was initially an intellectual and spiritual one, forged over a long, intense discussion about Catholicism and politics during a tête-à-tête lunch on the patio of Sinatra’s bungalow. By her account, familiarity accelerated into heavy flirtation that afternoon at a reception for JFK (“I felt like a schoolgirl infatuated with the new boy from out of state that no one knows anything about…I thought that every time he came over and touched my hand, all eyes were focused on us”). That evening, she said, the two of them sat by themselves in Jack Entratter’s booth in the back of the Copa Room and held hands in the dark while they took in the Summit show. And then Kennedy was off to Oregon to continue campaigning but not before telling her, “Don’t worry, I plan to see a lot of you, campaign or no campaign, we can arrange it somehow if you’re willing.”

  Exner writes that JFK telephoned her regularly, and even sent her roses, from the campaign trail. In the meantime, she followed his progress avidly in the newspapers and read Why England Slept and Profiles in Courage. The question of the time and the place of their next rendezvous, the meeting that would accelerate their relationship from the intellectual to the physical, hung in the air. Then Frank muddied the issue.

  On the afternoon of February 24, Exner recalled (the Ocean’s 11 shoot had moved back to Los Angeles), she had lunch with her sister, the actress, at Warner Bros., then the two of them paid a visit to Sinatra on the set. “He was extremely solicitous and gallant, making sure that chairs were provided for us so that we could watch the shooting of a scene,” she writes.

  Later, over drinks in his dressing room, I asked what he was going to do next. He said he had an engagement at the Fontainebleau in Miami and that the Clan was planning on joining him for some of the shows. Their show had been a huge success at the Sands and Frank thought it would be “a gas” to repeat it in Miami. “Hey, why don’t you come down for the opening. Always great to have a pretty girl up front.”

  I didn’t accept, nor did I refuse. I said I would think about it. I wasn’t about to make any plans that might later conflict with my seeing Jack. As luck would have it, we decided on the place and time for our next meeting that very evening when Jack called from Wisconsin.

  The place was New York City, the Plaza hotel to be exact, on March 7—the night, according to Exner, that she and Kennedy first became lovers. Frank opened at the Fontainebleau the next night, and Judy Campbell found time in her schedule to fly down to Miami for a couple of weeks and catch his act, not once, but several times. It was at one of those shows, she maintains, that Sinatra introduced her for the first time to the charming and well-dressed middle-aged man whom he called Sam Flood.

  —

  On the night of February 15, the third Frank Sinatra Timex Show aired on ABC. “Here’s to the Ladies” was the theme, and the guests were two of the grandest dames around, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lena Horne,
along with Frank’s new squeeze Juliet Prowse, the opera singer Mary Costa, and the impressionist Barbara Heller. The former First Lady came out in the slot of honor, second to last on the show, and the host introduced her with maximum deference: “a lady whose friendship I treasure very much…the most admired woman of our time, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  She was seated on a banquette, a vision in white silk, with room by her side for Frank. He sat, and she smiled with genuine pleasure. “Good evening, Mr. Sinatra,” she said in her patented fluty, plummy tones.

  “Mr. Sinatra? Why don’t you call me Frank?” he replied.

  She was a little old-fashioned, she told him; “Mr. Sinatra” seemed more natural to her. Her warm smile said otherwise. The two engaged in some scripted banter for a few moments. Mrs. R., charmingly obvious about reading the cue cards, wondered what she might be able to do after the other women had performed so beautifully. Mr. S. replied that just sitting and talking with him was enough.

  “Now come, Frank,” she said, thrillingly lapsing into informality, “there must be something I can contribute to the evening.”

  Frank with Eleanor Roosevelt. Sinatra admired the former First Lady and great humanitarian extravagantly; she returned his regard a little more coolly. (Credit 13.4)

  As it turned out, there was. As Nelson Riddle’s strings struck up in the background and a choir began to hum, Mrs. Roosevelt proceeded to recite the lyrics to “High Hopes”—with humor, dignity, and a certain steel behind those long, slitted eyes (she was and would continue to be resistant to her host’s chosen candidate, John F. Kennedy), not to mention a patrician lilt that Sammy Cahn hadn’t quite had in mind: