by James Kaplan
On Tuesday night the seventeenth, Frank, dressed in Don Loper’s finest, accompanied Nat King Cole and his wife to a party for the gala’s entertainers thrown by Steve and Jean Kennedy Smith at their house in Georgetown. The evening was cold, and the 130 guests mingled in a heated tent in the backyard. The starry contingent included Vice President elect and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson and “most of the Kennedy clan,” the Associated Press reported. “These included Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife, the president-elect’s parents.” These did not include Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. The president-elect himself showed up solo and an hour late, tuxedoed, smiling, and tanned, having flown up earlier in the day from Palm Beach, where his wife remained with three-year-old Caroline and seven-and-a-half-week-old John junior, who had been delivered by cesarean section the day after Thanksgiving.
Jackie Kennedy, the biographer Barbara Leaming writes, was putting off her departure from Florida as long as possible. Her partly true cover story was that she was still exhausted from the birth and that her doctors had ordered rest. But there was more, much more. Though the inauguration “was an event the Kennedy family had been awaiting for much of their lives,” the president-elect’s wife dreaded it, and dreaded the public exposure that moving into the White House would bring. “It was a situation each new president and his family faced,” Leaming writes, “but for someone like Jackie, fanatically obsessed with her privacy, the idea that she was under constant observation was particularly difficult…Jackie’s husband of seven years cheated on her compulsively, a fact that was painful and humiliating to her. Now that he was president, she would have to live that nightmare in full view of a group of strangers.”
Both the gala and the postinaugural festivities would also bring her into contact with Frank Sinatra, a man she “loathed,” according to Leaming. “Aside from Jackie’s personal dislike of someone she regarded as a crude, boorish thug who brought out the worst in her husband,” the biographer writes, “there was a more serious aspect to her objections. During the campaign, she had tried…to make Jack understand that his association with Sinatra and the Rat Pack was utterly wrong for his image.” Her stance was complicated by her fondness for Lawford, a man whose bad habits more than rivaled Frank’s but who at least knew which forks to use.
Early in the afternoon of the nineteenth, snow began to fall on Washington, a city that was ill prepared for it. “The winds blew in icy, stinging gusts and whipped the snow down the frigid streets,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger.
By six o’clock traffic had stopped all over town. People abandoned their cars in snowdrifts and marched grimly into the gale, heads down, newspapers wrapped around necks and stuffed under coats. And still the snow fell and the winds blew.
The show that Frank and Lawford had planned as carefully as a military operation (or the heist in Ocean’s 11) was looking as if it might tank. “The stars who’d come to the armory to rehearse were unable to return to the hotel to change into their performance attire,” writes Shawn Levy.
The gala was to begin at 9:00 p.m., but the auditorium was only half-full at that hour.
Frank would’ve been agitated even without the storm…But pacing backstage in his fancy duds, wondering if the president-elect would be able to make it through the snow-choked streets, he died a thousand deaths. As Bill Asher, who directed a taping of the gala, remembered, “Frank was really into the juice that night, and he got mad at Peter. We had a lineup of people in the show on a big bulletin board, and Frank kept coming into the room screaming, ‘Fuck Lawford! I’m not gonna do this show. I’m out!’ and then he’d pull his name down off the board.”
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Jackie had flown up from Palm Beach on Wednesday, nanny and babies in tow, and proceeded to her Georgetown town house, where her husband had been holding meetings amid boxes packed for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Early on Thursday evening, “the young President-elect and his wife went to the Inaugural Concert at Constitution Hall,” Schlesinger writes.
An hour later they left at the intermission to go on to the Inaugural Gala at the Armory. The limousine made its careful way through the blinding snow down the Mall. Bonfires had been lit along the path in a vain effort to keep the avenue clear. Great floodlights around the Washington Monument glittered through the white storm. It was a scene of eerie beauty. As stranded motorists cheered the presidential car, the President-elect told his friend William Walton, “Turn on the lights so they can see Jackie.” With the light on inside the car, he settled back to read Jefferson’s First Inaugural, which had been printed in the concert program. When he finished, he shook his head and said wryly, “Better than mine.”
At 10:30 p.m., the radiant First Couple—he in a tuxedo, she in a white organza Oleg Cassini gown—arrived at the armory. Inside the cavernous building, where dozens of the nation’s top entertainers had been wondering for an agonizing hour and a half whether or not the show would go on, just three thousand of twelve thousand seats were filled. But at the entrance, in the blowing snow, Frank Sinatra was smiling—suddenly all was right with the world—as he greeted his friend Jack, then took the arm of the woman who detested him and escorted her up the stairs.
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After the big scare, the three-hour spectacular went as smoothly as its producers could have wished. All seats had been sold in advance, netting close to $1.5 million for the Democratic Party, and so the no-shows were of no practical consequence. The gala began grandly, with Bernstein’s “Fanfare,” Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and Mahalia Jackson’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sir Laurence Olivier spoke stirringly but with an ominous prescience about the challenges facing the new president: “We see him entering these Olympian lists at a moment which must be as thickly crowded with hazards as any yet known to the history of civilization.” Then Joey Bishop walked onstage, looked up at the presidential box, and said, “I told you I’d get you a good seat. And you were so worried.”
The rest of the gala was a similar sandwich of high- and middlebrow. Frank, in the prime second-to-last spot before intermission, told the New Frontier what it wanted to hear with a rendition of “You Make Me Feel So Young,” then, shifting gears, sang a hushed “The House I Live In” that had a surprised Jackie Kennedy dabbing tears from her cheeks. After the interval and Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” Ethel Merman—who’d been a fervent Nixon supporter—looked straight up at the president-elect and belted out, “You’ll be swell! You’ll be great!/Gonna have the whole world on a plate!” from Gypsy.
Jack Kennedy was sitting at the front of the presidential box, next to his father, smoking a cigar and loving every minute. Nat Cole smiled through “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top”; Jimmy Durante plucked the crowd’s heartstrings with “September Song,” Harry Belafonte and the Belafonte Singers did a stirring “John Henry”—and then, after a comedy bit by Milton Berle and Bill Dana, in character as the clueless José Jiménez, came the medley of popular songs Sammy Cahn had re-lyricized to make them apt to the moment. Frank, naturally, got to do the closer. To the tune of “That Old Black Magic,” he sang,
That ol’ Jack magic had them in his spell
That old Jack magic that he weaved so well
The women swooned, and seems a lot of men did, too
He worked a little like I used to do.
That pretty much hit it on the head. Or, as the cultural historian Mark White writes, “That deferential praise for Kennedy’s sexual charisma from a man whose own star persona defined a brand of heightened machismo and sexual confidence served to authenticate JFK’s allure.”
JFK’s effortless eloquence, of course, was a significant part of his spell. After the finale, he walked onstage to thank the cast. “I’m proud to be a Democrat, because since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic party has been identified with the pursuit of excellence, and we saw excellence tonight,” he said.
The happy relationship between the arts and politics which has characterized our long history I think reached culmination to
night.
I know we’re all indebted to a great friend—Frank Sinatra. Long before he could sing, he used to poll a Democratic precinct back in New Jersey. That precinct has grown to cover a country. But long after he has ceased to sing, he is going to be standing up and speaking for the Democratic party, and I thank him on behalf of all of you tonight.
Frank glowed as he listened to Kennedy’s remarks and at the thought that he would get to listen to them again whenever he wanted. He had had the entire gala recorded, with an eye toward selling a commemorative double album on the Reprise label and donating the proceeds to the Democratic Party. It was a record that would have an interesting history.
Jackie Kennedy, emotionally and physically exhausted, had slipped out of the box during the intermission and gone back to Georgetown to try to get some sleep. Jack, on the other hand, was running on pure adrenaline (along with the cortisone injection he received daily for back pain). For Frank, of course, the night was still young. At 2:00 a.m., the president-elect and the stars got into limousines and buses and caravanned downtown to Paul Young’s, an upscale steakhouse that the Ambassador had rented for a private party. Kennedy biographer Carl Sferrazza Anthony writes that when Jack Kennedy’s close friend Paul “Red” Fay came in, escorting Angie Dickinson, “Joe Kennedy barked at him, ‘Wait until I tell your wife how you are conducting yourself!’ Joe then turned to Angie and snapped, ‘Why are you wasting your time with a bum like this fellow?’ They all laughed, and Joe waved them in as he greeted more of his arriving guests.”
Sinatra escorting Jacqueline Kennedy to the inaugural gala, January 19, 1961. The First Lady deeply disapproved of Frank and his bad influence on her husband, yet here she seems caught up in the moment. (Credit 15.1)
As the scent of brimstone hovered in the air.
Red Fay, who’d met JFK when they both served on PT boats in the South Pacific, had been drafted for the inaugural week to escort Dickinson to various functions—in short, to act as a beard for the president-elect, who had commenced a dalliance with the actress months before. A little later, Kennedy took him aside in the restaurant pantry and asked, excitedly, “Have you ever seen so many attractive people in one room? I’ll tell you, Dad knows how to give a party.”
Frank felt the same. When he told the Ambassador as much, the elder Kennedy said, “Wait until you see the party we throw four years from now!”
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Hatless and coatless despite the bitter cold (his secret: thermal underwear), John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, stood on the platform before the Capitol and began reading his inaugural address at 12:52 p.m. on Friday, January 20. The oration was a brilliant patchwork assembled by speechwriter Ted Sorensen and Kennedy himself: a lean, forceful, soul-stirring speech (“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans”), delivered by the greatest performer ever to occupy the White House, and the entire occasion had a suitably august air. In a special section before the platform sat some 60 of the more than 150 prominent figures from the arts and sciences invited to the ceremony as a sign of the new administration’s dedication to culture, among them W. H. Auden, Arthur Miller, Samuel Barber, Mark Rothko, Tennessee Williams, and John Steinbeck. Frank Sinatra sat in his suite at the Statler Hilton, watching the ceremony on TV.
Accounts differ as to the reason for his absence. The writer Leonard Gershe, who watched along with him, later said that Sinatra had stayed away because of the cold. But the New York Daily News reported that Frank—in his inverness cape with the red satin lining—had shown up drunk at the Capitol. Frank’s friend Bob Neal recalled that—through an oversight or on purpose, if Jackie Kennedy had had anything to do with it—he had simply not been invited. “There was a stand that had assigned seats, and Frank was not on the list,” Neal said. “He climbed up and said, ‘I’m Frank Sinatra,’ and a guy said, ‘We don’t care if you’re the Pope. You’re not on the list.’ And the cops threw him out.”
He had invested a huge amount in the gala; a postshow letdown was inevitable. That night, as President Kennedy circulated among five inaugural balls (without Mrs. Kennedy, who had returned to the White House, exhausted by being in public without letup for over twelve hours), Sinatra held his own party, at the Statler Hilton, for all the gala participants. The guests dined on caviar and champagne and received their silver cigarette cases. Frank had assured the partygoers “that Kennedy would stop by to deliver his personal thanks,” Ronald Brownstein writes.
As the evening wore on and Kennedy made his way through the round of inaugural balls, Sinatra sat anxiously in the glittering company “very much on edge, waiting, watching, wondering when [Kennedy] was going to get here—because he had given his word that he would make this dinner…,” said Gloria Cahn Franks, who was there with her then-husband Sammy Cahn…Finally there was a rustle of activity at the door…Secret Service agents glided into the room, and then “in he came,” Franks recalled…Kennedy graciously moved from table to table, greeting the stars, chatting, laughing, while Sinatra sat there “beaming, beaming…like the Cheshire cat.”
But sometime between then and the next day, something happened to change Sinatra’s spirits from ebullient to depressed and angry. Could it have been because the president had left Frank’s party to head to a small gathering at the columnist Joseph Alsop’s house? Frank had a keen antenna for slights, and being late-dated by the most powerful man in the world could have set him off. Whatever the reason, he abruptly changed his plan to join a group of stars whom Joe Kennedy had invited to come to Palm Beach. Expecting Sinatra to be ready to fly, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis instead found him having breakfast in his hotel suite with Juliet Prowse.
“At the time I didn’t know what happened,” Leigh recalled. “But later we were told—I think by Peter Lawford—that something had been said after the ball, or that morning. Frank was not in a happy mood.”
Something was eating at him. He and Prowse headed to New York, where he was scheduled to do a Carnegie Hall benefit for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Reverend Martin Luther King on the twenty-seventh. Dean and Sammy were to join Frank. Early in the week, Sinatra told Earl Wilson that he’d skipped Palm Beach “because I had so much work to do, I’d have had a bad conscience.” He claimed to Wilson that he needed to rehearse for his upcoming shows at the Sands and the Fontainebleau, but there is no record of his rehearsing or performing that week before Carnegie Hall. Gossip items had him out on the town in Manhattan, squiring Juliet Prowse to the Colony and an Upper East Side Italian joint called Tony and Tony’s Wife, taking the Toots Shors to hear his old flame Peggy Lee at Basin Street East.
But another old flame—Ava Gardner—had popped into the city the week before to take in Peggy Lee’s show at Basin Street, “with a guy nobody knew.” That was nothing new for Ava: she was often with a guy nobody knew. Frank, who was in regular touch by telephone with her, would have been well aware of her proximity. Finding themselves on the same skinny island at the same time (whether coincidentally or not), could they possibly have avoided getting together? When the columnist Wilson asked Prowse about a rumor that she and Sinatra were going to marry, “she laughed for two minutes.”
Sammy Davis Jr. emceed the King benefit; the bill also included Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Count Basie and orchestra, and Tony Bennett. The great Sy Oliver was there to conduct for Frank. Early in the evening, Sammy announced from the stage that “the leader has arrived,” accompanied by “his drunken Italian friend.” Dean wasn’t the only one imbibing. The writer Peter Levinson, then angling for a junior publicist’s job with Sinatra, found himself in Frank’s dressing room at Carnegie Hall, watching in amazement as he downed over a dozen bourbon and waters over the course of the evening, then went out and sang as though nothing had happened.
Frank didn’t appear until after midnight, “rushing down the aisle to interrupt Davis doing an imper
sonation of Sinatra,” the Associated Press reported.
From then on it was the Rat Pack’s show. They interrupted each other’s songs with insults—sometimes slightly smutty—from mikes off stage; rolled in a cart loaded with liquor bottles and poured each other drinks; paraded on and off while one of the pack was trying to perform, and generally living up to Davis’ introduction: “Now comes the tumult.”
Nobody was even pretending the act was spontaneous anymore. It was what the people expected, and it was all more than a little predictable by now—putting aside the question of whether it was appropriate in this venue and for this cause.
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On February 1, Frank opened a two-week stand at the Sands, his first in a year. The show had just one flaw, according to Variety’s adulatory review: “He did only 12 songs and the greedy audience seemed to want at least twice that many. Sinatra, the hottest star in Las Vegas, again displays his skill as a powerhouse performer, and it’s certainly good to have him back.”
Reprise employee number one, the newly hired Mo Ostin, was Frank’s guest at the opening, ringside and starry-eyed with his young wife. “We were seated at a table with Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, and two Kennedy sisters, Eunice Shriver and Jean Smith,” Ostin recalled. “I hadn’t been exposed to this kind of world, and here I am suddenly sitting with some of the biggest stars ever, at a show where Frank Sinatra was performing—I mean, we would have ordinarily probably asked for autographs.”
Ostin smiled at the recollection. He would attend many Sinatra performances over the years but would never forget the first. “He very rarely gave a bad show,” he said. “When he had friends in the audience, I think he really performed at his best. He exuded confidence. He knew he had power. And yet he could be charming, and he could endear himself to almost anybody.”