Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  And despite Nikita Khrushchev’s back-channel assurances that missiles were not being shipped to Cuba, Kennedy continued that summer to receive intelligence reports of a Soviet military buildup there. What’s more, though any flare-up with Cuba would revive the subject of the Bay of Pigs and damage the Democrats in the midterm elections, not to say hurt JFK’s chances for reelection in 1964, Operation Mongoose, the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, was—whether with or without the direct approval of the president and the attorney general—still very much under way.

  —

  In the meantime, Frank had another dustup with a photographer.

  He was on his way back to Los Angeles from Cal-Neva on the night of August 12, a week to the day after Marilyn’s death. Stopping in San Francisco, he took a party of eight to a nightclub called New Facks. According to witnesses, the photographer began snapping pictures as “two unidentified girls” leaned over Sinatra’s shoulders. Frank said something to the photographer, and a fracas ensued. At first, all concerned denied that Sinatra had grabbed the photographer, Jimmy Jaye Perrine, by the necktie and wrestled him to the ground. In Los Angeles, Chuck Moses said, “There was no bodily contact, no smashing of cameras.” The club owner, George Andros, said that Sinatra merely demanded the photographer hand over his film. “He handed me the camera and I had the film taken out,” Andros said. “Frank was the calmest I’ve ever seen him.” Even the photographer—who said he’d been taking pictures of someone next to Sinatra, not Sinatra—denied that Frank had touched him. It had been a “guy” who had grabbed him, Perrine said; Frank even told him afterward that he was sorry it had happened.

  Three days later, Perrine filed a suit against Sinatra for $275,390, alleging that Frank had choked him and smashed his camera.

  What had really happened? Had Frank, all too predictably, simply lost his temper? Or was the photographer—who later settled out of court for $2,500—merely seizing an opportunity to make a few bucks off the fattest target in the business?

  In a way, it didn’t matter. No matter how many children’s hospitals Frank visited, no matter how many anonymous good works he did, he would always stir things up. Numerous people have spoken of the electricity that could be felt across the floor of the Sands, even throughout Las Vegas itself, whenever Sinatra was there, even before anyone knew for a fact that he was there. Confined to a single room, a restaurant, or a small nightclub, that electricity could almost instantly escalate from the slightest spark to an explosion.

  —

  And then, a far bigger confrontation. According to Nancy Sinatra, her father and Hank Sanicola were driving from Palm Springs to Las Vegas when Sanicola worried aloud about Sam Giancana’s visits to Phyllis McGuire at Cal-Neva in violation of Black Book rules. Frank tried to reassure him that Mooney kept to his cabin and the showroom, staying away from the casino, but Hank wasn’t buying. Sinatra’s old friend was in a fretful mood; Cal-Neva’s losses were eating up the profits from Park Lake Enterprises, the corporation that also produced Frank’s films and in which Hank held a large share.

  Then and there, Nancy says, her father insisted on buying Sanicola out of the lodge and all other partnerships. The only problem was that Sinatra didn’t have much cash to throw around. Accordingly, he gave Hank outright ownership of all five of his music-publishing companies: Sands, Saga, Marivale, Tamarisk, and Barton. Nancy claims that the firms’ collective inventory was worth “well over $1 million.” Sanicola told the driver to stop, she writes, then he took his bags out of the trunk and stood by the side of the road, watching Frank Sinatra drive out of his life for good.

  In Sanicola’s version, it was Frank who ordered him out of the car.

  Just recently, Sinatra had reminisced to the British writer Robin Douglas-Home about his early, hungry years in the depths of the Depression: “I was seventeen then, and I went around New York singing with little groups in road-houses. The word would get around that there was a kid in the neighborhood who could sing. Many’s the time I worked all night for nothing. Or maybe I’d sing for a sandwich or cigarettes—all night for three packets [sic]. But I worked on one basic theory—stay active, get as much practice as you can. I got to know a song-plugger called Hank Sanicola…and he used to give me fifty cents or a dollar some weeks to buy some food. For some reason he always had terrific faith in me.”

  Sanicola had been Sinatra’s right hand since the beginning: rehearsal pianist, musical adviser, music publisher, bodyguard, confidant, and friend. It was a relationship that had lasted longer than almost any other in Frank’s life; he might have known Hank before meeting Nancy Barbato. But Hank had made demands. Suddenly stray gossip-column items took on new meaning: the antiques Frank had brought back for Jilly and Honey from the world tour; the Miami nightclub he was considering buying with Jilly. Jilly, who demanded nothing, now took over the latter three of Hank’s old roles.

  With Sinatra, only his children and his parents were forever, yet even they made uncomfortable demands on him.

  —

  And that he was strapped for cash, and that Cal-Neva was bleeding him—these were not good signs. Reprise was bleeding him too. Much was coming in in 1962 (and Frank continued to spend like a man with infinite resources), but more was going out.

  —

  A couple of weeks later, Frank flew east to do three nights at the 500 Club. He was joining Dean (who’d begun the week as a single) in an act of outright charity for their old pal Skinny D’Amato. Sammy would join them on the final night. The Five—and indeed the entire nightclub business—had been in steep decline for years, the victim of television, inflated salaries for headliners, and Las Vegas, where gambling was the dog and entertainment the tail. Without casinos attached, niteries (as Variety called them) were nothing but money pits. Atlantic City itself was also on its uppers. Skinny had expanded the 500 Club to a thousand seats in 1958, then watched many of those seats go empty for season after season. He’d been wise, it seemed, to branch out to Cal-Neva, where even if he couldn’t share in profits on the books, there were still profits to share.

  —

  There was a kind of final-days-of-Rome decadence to those August days in Atlantic City. Not only was it the last time Frank, Dean, and Sammy would play the 500 Club together, but a number of top organized-crime figures were also in town, as a report from the Newark FBI office to J. Edgar Hoover noted:

  for two-fold purposes, that is to attend the wedding of [the Philadelphia Mob boss] ANGELO BRUNO’s daughter on August 26, 1962, and a performance of FRANK SINATRA–DEAN MARTIN–SAMMY DAVIS, JR., at the 500 Club.

  FRANK SINATRA arrived in Atlantic City…for the above scheduled appearance with DEAN MARTIN and took over the first sleeping floor of the Claridge Hotel…which consists of approximately 40 rooms. SINATRA’s representatives allowed no one on the hotel floor, including the hotel management, except by invitation…

  SINATRA and MARTIN were appearing at the 500 Club as a personal favor to PAUL D’AMATO, also known as “SKINNY,” for which they would receive no money but would have all of their expenses taken care of by D’AMATO…

  SINATRA’s personal airplane landed at the Atlantic City Airport…and he departed from the Airport in an unmarked Atlantic City Police car.

  The report went on to note that Sam Giancana was “observed…in a private dining room on Sinatra’s floor of the Claridge Hotel.”

  A couple of days later, Hoover took the trouble to send a memo marked “PERSONAL” to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. It read,

  While conducting inquiry at the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in connection with an investigation under our Criminal Intelligence Program, Agents of our Newark Office were confidentially advised by an official of this hotel that Frank Sinatra had received a personal telephone call from President John F. Kennedy on August 23, 1962.

  It would have been months since they’d last talked. Was JFK trying to mend fences? Apparently, the hotel switchboard put the president through, but no one
listened in. “The nature of [the call],” a later FBI summary noted, succinctly, tantalizingly, “was not described.”

  On the final evening, August 25, Atlantic City police captain Mario Floriani personally drove the three entertainers to the 500 Club, where a screaming mob awaited them. Frank, Dean, and Sammy did five shows that night, the last one beginning as the sky was starting to lighten over the ocean. On a recording of one of the shows, a wildly appreciative audience eats up every line of Rat Pack repartee, some of it, by now, sounding merely stale:

  FRANK [singing “The Lady Is a Tramp”]: She loves the free, fresh clyde in her bird, without a word…

  And some of it both stale and offensive:

  DEAN [to Sammy]: Don’t touch me! You can sing with me and talk to me, but don’t touch me!

  And some, freshly offensive:

  SAMMY [complaining that he alone hasn’t been given a stool to sit on]: I don’t think Martin Luther King is gonna like this.

  FRANK: Listen, you want to buy a wrecked Freedom Bus? It’s cheap.

  To his everlasting credit, Sammy came back instantly: “I thought Italians were supposed to be liberals.”

  After the last show, “Frank and his entourage hit the town with Skinny and Sammy,” Jonathan Van Meter writes. It was 8:15 a.m.

  They stopped at Grace’s Little Belmont across the street from Club Harlem on Kentucky Avenue to visit Sammy Davis Jr.’s mother, Baby Sanchez, who was now a barmaid at the famed jazz club, and then on to Timbuktu at Kentucky and Arctic Avenues, Frank handing out folded $100 bills to every bartender, porter, doorman, cook, waitress, and washroom attendant who crossed his path.

  Strapped for cash, he was still the padrone, and the biggest thing in show business, bar none.

  And the week—between Dean’s five nights, Frank and Dean’s three, and Frank, Dean, and Sammy’s one—put $175,000 in the pocket of Skinny D’Amato, a friend with good friends.

  —

  “It is the belief of the Attorney General—and it is not exclusive with him—that the crime of gambling pays for other crime,” read a late-August editorial in the Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Morning Herald. “Kennedy told the House subcommittee last year: ‘Organized crime is nourished by a number of activities, but the primary source of its growth is illicit gambling.’

  “This is the principal reason for a federal grand jury investigation of gambling at Las Vegas, Nev., where the pastime of course is legal. The Attorney General is checking on the possibility that bigtime racketeers have moved into secret ownership of some of the Las Vegas pleasure traps.”

  —

  Frank got back on the Christina and flew west, continuing to follow Newton’s first law of motion. The very night he returned, the twenty-sixth, he sang at a celebration of Sam Goldwyn’s fifty years in the movie business; the next night it was back to United Recording to make an ill-advised single, “The Look of Love”—the perky and instantly forgettable Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen number by that name, not Hal David and Burt Bacharach’s classic—and a tune by two otherwise-unknown songwriters named George Cory and Douglass Cross, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

  Yes, that “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Tony Bennett had recorded it in January, as the B-side to a single whose A-side, his rendition of Lee Adams and Charles Strouse’s Broadway classic “Once upon a Time,” failed to grab anybody once radio stations started to play it in February. When DJs flipped the 45, though, Bennett’s tribute to the City by the Bay quickly took off and went gold, soon becoming Tony’s signature song. Why Frank chose to record it after it had been out for half a year and become a big hit is something of a mystery—except that Sinatra was Sinatra, and, though their relationship was fraught by Frank’s domineering, he had been something of a mentor, and certainly an inspiration, to the younger singer (born in 1926). He might simply have felt it was his right to take a whack at it: again, the padrone.

  He was wrong. Bennett’s version has stardust sprinkled on it, and Sinatra’s, though he is singing well, simply doesn’t. Tony Bennett had (and continues to have as of this writing) the rare ability to bring joy to a song, and joy was an arrow Frank didn’t quite have in his quiver. (Schadenfreude—literally, gloating joy—he possessed in full measure: witness “Goody Goody,” the bouncy screw-you number with which he led off nearly every show on the world tour, seeming to dedicate it, more and more, to Ava.)

  For whatever reason, very likely embarrassment, Sinatra withdrew the single after it had been out for just two weeks.

  The August 27 session was also something of a waste of the talents of Nelson Riddle, who did the pleasant enough arrangements under the table (though his contract with Capitol was nearing its end, he was still bound by it), and the Reprise in-house jack-of-all-trades Neal Hefti, who conducted. Sinatra’s failures were rarely less than interesting, but this one came close.

  From L.A., it was a quick hop back up to Lake Tahoe, where he shuttered the Celebrity Room for the season after playing Labor Day weekend and three additional nights. It ran contrary to his grand plan to stay on until October, but he had many other fish to fry.

  The casino stayed open, milking the suckers for all they were worth.

  —

  On September 18, Variety formalized the split between Frank and Hank, though in a slightly hedged fashion. “The 28-year-old association of Frank Sinatra and Hank Sanicola has struck a sour note,” the show-business daily reported.

  In the wake of New York rumors of a rupture, Sanicola yesterday admitted, “We had one of our little beefs—about the operation of the Cal-Neva. We’ll discuss it further…” He added, “It could be okay again by tomorrow. It’s happened before. I guess I’m the only guy who will disagree with Frank once in a while.”

  Sinatra, contacted on the set of his current film, “Come Blow Your Horn,” gave more than his usual “no comment.” He replied, “That’s nobody’s business!”

  But Hank had disagreed once too often. It was over.

  —

  Early that fall, a box postmarked “London W1” landed on the desk of Capitol Records’ head of international A&R, Dave Dexter Jr. The carton contained eighteen records sent by Capitol’s British parent company, EMI, to be considered for U.S. distribution by the American label. Though Capitol didn’t have an anti-rock policy—the Beach Boys were racking up big sales—Dexter didn’t think twice about turning down one of the discs, a song called “Love Me Do,” by the new British group the Beatles. The fact that the record was climbing the charts in the U.K. meant nothing to him. “I didn’t care for it at all because of the harmonica sound,” he recalled. “I didn’t care for the harmonica because I had grown up listening to the old blues records and blues harmonica players, and I simply didn’t…I nixed the record instantly.”

  —

  Come Blow Your Horn was a big hit on Broadway when Frank signed on to do the movie version early in the year, and it was still playing at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre when production on the film began in mid-September. It was Neil Simon’s first play, a semiautobiographical, bittersweet comedy about a playboy who teaches his worldly skills to his innocent and impressionable younger brother. Sinatra, of course, was a natural to portray the playboy—the part was an echo of his role in The Tender Trap—even though his character, Alan Baker, was meant to be somewhere in his thirties. The great Lee J. Cobb signed on to play Alan’s father. Cobb, a serious Method actor (which Frank was most decidedly not), was four years older than Sinatra. A twenty-two-year-old newcomer named Tony Bill, who had never acted professionally, was cast as Alan’s brother, Buddy. (Nancy Sinatra, wanting to give her husband’s acting career a much-needed boost, had lobbied Frank hard to cast Tommy Sands in the role; Frank agreed, but after the screenwriter, Norman Lear, and the director, Bud Yorkin, argued strenuously against Sands, the unlucky son-in-law withdrew.)

  In more than one way, the project was off-kilter before it began.

  Paramount was to distribute the picture; Frank’s company, Esse
x, co-produced along with Tandem, a new outfit run by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, both veterans of television comedy but relative newcomers to the movies. Lear and Yorkin (directing his first feature) had had to do some heavy persuasion to get Sinatra to play the role: there was the age issue for one thing, and the fact that in the play, Buddy, the younger brother (and Neil Simon surrogate), had the meatier role. Lear had to rewrite the play considerably, and Simon was not pleased.

  Sinatra, never at his best in comedy, was entering new comic territory with Come Blow Your Horn. Neil Simon had made his bones as a writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, and Norman Lear had written for Martin and Lewis, among others (his writing partner Ed Simmons had created Dean’s drunk persona). Bud Yorkin had also worked with Dean and Jerry, as a producer and director, on The Colgate Comedy Hour. The thirty-six-year-old Yorkin was intimidated by the new assignment and especially cowed by the prospect of telling Frank Sinatra what to do. “I certainly didn’t approach it with any great bravado,” he recalled. But Frank would surprise him, beginning on the first day of shooting.

  Sinatra had instructed the novice director how he wanted to proceed: Yorkin would stage beforehand each scene that had Frank in it; Frank would then come in and watch Yorkin act out the scene, playing the Sinatra role. Then Frank would do it for the cameras. Once.

  On the first day of shooting, the first scene was a conversation between Sinatra and Lee J. Cobb. Yorkin staged it with Cobb before Frank came to work, blocking it out in the standard way: a medium two-shot of Sinatra and Cobb, then two close-ups, one over Cobb’s shoulder, one over Frank’s. “Frank came and sat down and watched it,” Yorkin remembered, “and said, ‘Yeah, I think it worked okay.’ Then he said, ‘I’ve got a couple of suggestions.’ ”