Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  It was all so neat it could have been tied up with a bow. If you’d shaken the package, though, you would have heard a dry rattling sound.

  —

  That same Friday night, Frank had his own Vegas opening, with Dean and Sammy at the Sands. By night, they did their familiar thing in the Copa Room; by day, Frank seethed at the newspapers, where the scoop that had broken in Chicago had begun to go nationwide. DID SINATRA HOST GANGSTER?, a typical headline read on the thirtieth, above the story that UPI was now running with: not only had Giancana been present at Cal-Neva, in direct contravention of Nevada law; he had been given “red-carpet treatment.” In Los Angeles, the man Ed Olsen referred to as “Sinatra’s attorney, a very charming gentleman by the name of Mickey Rudin of Hollywood,” tried to stanch the flow with a stone wall. “There’s no truth to the fact any underworld figure was at the lodge or got in a fight there,” he told the Herald Examiner, in a curious turn of phrase. “Your information was wrong.”

  Frank and Frank junior, near the beginning of Junior’s long and arduous career as a tuxedo singer. “I think the kid has a future,” Frank senior said, “but he needs experience.” (Credit 20.1)

  Olsen hit back, informing the papers that his investigation—he had issued subpoenas to the entire Cal-Neva staff, including Skinny D’Amato—was being “conducted very unhurriedly.” It would not be concluded, he said, until “certain discrepancies in the information provided by various people at Cal-Neva could be resolved.”

  And Frank boiled over. He was like King Canute when it came to bad publicity, smiting the waves to no effect. In this case, the Las Vegas Sun had found out about the Cal-Neva subpoenas and started to run the story, which the wire services then picked up. But Sinatra suspected Olsen of grandstanding. From Cal-Neva, where he, Dean, and Sammy were appearing in the Celebrity Room for Labor Day weekend, Frank had his accountant, Newell Hancock, phone Ed Olsen. “Hancock opened the conversation with: ‘Ed, what in the hell are you doing to us with all this publicity?’ ” Olsen wrote in a memo of September 4. “I explained to Hancock that the publicity did not originate with the Board…Hancock went on to say that ‘Frank is irritated’ and would like to meet with me.”

  In Frank’s book, that meant that Ed Olsen was to come to him, at Cal-Neva. Grandly, Sinatra suggested, through Hancock, that he and the control board chairman meet informally over dinner; Olsen could then take in the show afterward.

  Olsen declined. Such a meeting was inappropriate, he told the accountant, because he was in the process of investigating Cal-Neva. Half an hour later, his phone rang. It was Frank himself. “To describe him as ‘irritated,’ ” Olsen wrote, “was a masterful understatement. He was infuriated.”

  Sinatra was enraged that the chairman wouldn’t accept his dinner invitation. Patiently, Olsen explained why he couldn’t come to Cal-Neva. To which Frank replied, “You’re acting like a fucking cop…I just want to talk to you off the record.”

  Olsen explained that this was impossible. He could only meet with Sinatra in the Gaming Control Board’s offices, he said, with others present and with his secretary making a record of the conversation.

  “Listen, Ed, I haven’t had to take this kind of shit from anybody in the country and I’m not going to take it from you people,” Frank said. “I want you to come up here and have dinner with me…and bring that shit-heel friend, La France.” Charles LaFrance, the board’s chief investigator, was present in the office. At this point, Olsen motioned to him to pick up the extension.

  “It’s you and your goddamn subpoenas which have caused all this trouble,” Sinatra continued.

  Olsen said that only those who had been served knew about the subpoenas; the press knew nothing of them.

  “You are a goddamn liar,” Frank said. “It’s all over the papers.”

  Olsen repeated his contention.

  “I’ll bet you fifty thousand dollars,” Frank said.

  “I haven’t got fifty thousand dollars to bet,” Olsen said.

  “You’re not in the same class with me,” Sinatra said.

  “I certainly hope not,” Olsen said.

  “All right, I’m never coming to see you again,” Frank said. “I came to see you in Las Vegas and if you had conducted this investigation like a gentleman and come up here to see my people instead of sending those goddamn subpoenas, you would have gotten all the information you wanted.”

  Here Olsen pointed out that he had indeed sent three agents and a stenographer to Cal-Neva to interview witnesses on the same night as Frank’s interview in the NGCB offices. He told Frank that both Skinny and Eddie King had declined to be interviewed and that King had lied about his involvement in the Chalet 50 brawl. Olsen added that he wasn’t satisfied that Frank was telling the truth about his own role in the incident.

  “I’m never coming to see you again,” Sinatra repeated.

  Olsen told him that if he wanted to see him, he would send a subpoena.

  Already over the edge, Frank now lost it. “You just try and find me, and if you do, you can look for a big, fat surprise…a big, fat, fucking surprise,” Frank said. “You remember that. Now, listen to me, Ed…don’t fuck with me. Don’t fuck with me. Just don’t fuck with me.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Olsen asked.

  “No,” Frank said. “Just don’t fuck with me. And you can tell that to your fucking board and that fucking commission, too.”

  Minutes after Sinatra slammed down the receiver, two agents from the gaming board’s audit division walked into the Cal-Neva casino. Their visit was purely coincidental, having nothing to do with the investigation or the phone conversation: it had been the board’s practice for several years to monitor the count of the gambling table drop boxes over Labor Day weekend. But their appearance threw Skinny D’Amato, already in a heightened state of alert, into a panic. He ran to confer with Frank, who yelled, “Throw the dirty sons of bitches out of the house!”

  The situation was resolved without incident when Irving Pearlman, the casino manager, told the agents that the count had already begun. Concluding that there was no reason to enter the counting room at that point, the agents told Pearlman they would be back.

  They returned at 6:30 a.m. on Labor Day and observed the count from start to finish in a completely routine fashion. Then things turned strange. As the casino employees concluded the count, Skinny walked in and touched one of the auditors on the arm. “Here’s one for each of you,” D’Amato said. When he left the room, the auditor found two $100 bills stuck in the crook of his arm. The auditors were horrified. D’Amato returned after a few minutes and explained that the money was for the inconvenience they’d suffered by having to come to the counting room twice.

  As Skinny’s biographer points out, the amiable D’Amato had no sinister purpose; he was just doing what came naturally. “Skinny tried to grease the wheels with money, as he had done hundreds of times before,” Jonathan Van Meter writes. “He spent so much of his life in Atlantic City using cash as a salve that it must have been impossible for him to realize just how foolish a move this was.”

  The moment the two agents left the casino, they phoned Ed Olsen, waking him: it was 8:30 a.m., Labor Day. When they told their boss what had happened, “Well, that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, as far as I was concerned,” Olsen recalled.

  I was just fed up with the whole organization. I couldn’t get any straight answers to anything, and they were just nothing but headaches, the whole business up there. I felt that…continuation would be detrimental to the entire gambling industry in Nevada.

  So as quickly as I was able to get the lawyer to work and legal papers drawn up, we prepared a complaint, seeking the revocation of Mr. Sinatra’s license at both Lake Tahoe and at the Sands in Las Vegas on the grounds of his having…conducted an unsuitable operation and having associated with people who were deleterious to the gaming industry.

  —

  Before filing the complaint, Ed Olsen took it to
Governor Grant Sawyer for review. Sawyer, a progressive Democrat who’d entered office promising to clean up Nevada’s gambling industry (and who’d appointed Olsen chairman of the Gaming Control Board), was not pleased. “This was the last thing in the world that he felt he needed at the moment!” Olsen said. Revoking the gaming licenses of the state’s most prominent casino owner, the man who was Las Vegas personified, would be a black eye not just for Frank Sinatra but for gambling in Nevada, for the state itself, and, by extension, for Grant Sawyer.

  The governor asked why Olsen intended to revoke Sinatra’s licenses; Olsen showed Sawyer his voluminous files on the high jinks at Cal-Neva and Frank’s obscene and threatening language during their phone conversation. Sawyer asked when Olsen intended to file. Just as soon as the legal details could be worked out, Olsen said.

  “Well, you’d better be right,” the governor told him.

  —

  On Thursday night, September 5, Frank performed for the last time at Cal-Neva, singing and clowning with Dean and Sammy and pulling Judy Garland onto the stage for a final quartet of “Birth of the Blues.” The next day, Sinatra, Martin, and Davis decamped for the Sands, where they sang and did their Summit act through the weekend as Reprise tape machines recorded the engagement for posterity. Twelve reels of tape comprising six shows were recorded; most of the material was never released.

  On Sunday, September 8, Cal-Neva closed for the season. The next day, Frank flew to New York, ahead of gathering winds.

  —

  On Monday night, Junior had had his biggest opening to date, fronting Sam Donahue’s Tommy Dorsey Orchestra at the Americana Hotel in New York City. Jackie Gleason was there, as were Joe E. Lewis, Toots Shor, Jack E. Leonard, and Alan King. Frank wasn’t. In honor of the occasion, Variety’s editor, Abel Green (he’d been writing for the show-business weekly since 1919), sent himself to review the show, and he was impressed with what he heard.

  Most impressive to Green was how well Frankie performed despite formidable obstacles: not just a snobby and slightly skeptical, $6-cover-charge crowd, but an under-amplifying microphone, turned down so as not to interfere with WNEW radio’s live pickup. (No less a personage than William B. Williams, the coiner of the epithet Chairman of the Board, conducted the broadcast.)

  And then there was the biggest obstacle of all, the man who stayed away that night, presumably to avoid stealing his son’s thunder. “He is handicapped as much as helped by his heritage,” the perceptive Green wrote of Frankie.

  None the less, despite all the travail of facing up to a $6 cover-charge trade, a meek mike, and a show-me turnout, he clicked. The show-me turnout, incidentally, were not-from-Missouri—they were Manhattanites who were rootin’ for a tradition. Junior sustained it.

  But to what extent was he sustaining a tradition, and to what extent was he an oldies act? (Not to mention a novelty act.) Abel Green called the show—which, besides the neo-Dorsey band, included the forty-six-year-old former girl singer Helen Forrest and the reconstituted Pied Pipers—“a nostalgic harkback for the adult set who were musically reliving the days of their younger years with a musical pot-pourri that sounded, played, and thrushed like the ‘Variety Music Cavalcade’ of a quarter century ago.”

  After the show, reporters quizzed Junior about Senior’s absence. Frankie handled them with aplomb. “I spoke to Dad on the phone, and he was coughing,” he said. “He was very tired. He’d been working all afternoon on his record business. He thought he’d stay home until he felt better.”

  Then, just to show Junior what the game was really about, one newspaperman winged a curveball at him: “Did your father stay away because of the Nevada situation?” At this point, the situation was still so contained that not everyone knew what he was talking about.

  Frankie did, and he didn’t bat an eye. “I’ve discussed it with my father,” he replied, “and he said when he’s ready, he’ll make a statement.”

  —

  That Wednesday, the Nevada Gaming Control Board filed its formal complaint against Frank’s corporation, Park Lake Enterprises Inc. In the first count, the board charged that at various times between July 17 and July 28, Sam Giancana “sojourned to Chalet No. 50 at Cal Neva Lodge with the knowledge and consent of the licensee” and that “Giancana was served food and beverage by employees of the licensee with the right of transportation by said employees and representatives of the licensee in automobiles owned and/or controlled by the licensee…and was extended other courtesies and services by the employees and representatives of Park Lake Enterprises.”

  Count two alleged that Frank “had openly stated that he would continue his association with Mr. Giancana, and had thus defied the law of the state.”

  The third count alleged that Sinatra had engaged in a phone conversation “designed and intended to intimidate and coerce the chairman and members of the State Gaming Control Board to discontinue performance of their official duties, and to drop the investigation then pending regarding the visits of Sam Giancana at Cal Neva Lodge…

  “In said telephone conversation, Frank Sinatra maligned and vilified the State Gaming Control Board, the Nevada Gaming Commission, and members of both said Board and Commission by the use of foul and repulsive language which was venomous in the extreme.”

  Count four alleged that Paul D’Amato, “the managing agent and representative of Park Lake Enterprises, Inc., listed on the payroll records as advisor of said corporate licensee in the operation of Cal Neva Lodge, attempted to force money upon” the two NGCB agents, which “was tantamount to an attempt to bribe them.”

  The next morning, the news hit front pages everywhere, and, as Edward Olsen put it, “all hell broke loose in the press and all over the country.”

  —

  Throughout the 1950s, unfriendly columnists—in particular Hearst’s Westbrook Pegler and Lee Mortimer—had now and then dredged up Frank’s old underworld associations: his early sponsorship in New Jersey by Willie Moretti; his attendance at the 1947 Mafia conference in Havana, where he’d hobnobbed with Lucky Luciano. But until now, no publicity had directly connected him with the Mafia, an organization whose existence the FBI had acknowledged for only half a dozen years and one whose reach and scope most Americans were just beginning to understand and become fascinated with.

  As the Mob’s public profile rose, Italian-Americans and other right-minded citizens quite properly pushed back. In a 1959 editorial titled “Italian-Americans Make Good Citizens,” Hearst columnist George Sokolsky wrote, “To assume…that all Italians in the United States and their descendants are criminally organized in a body called ‘The Mafia’ is to accept not only guilt by association but damnation by birth and nationality…Do we have to balance Enrico Fermi against Vito Genovese? Do we have to balance Frank Sinatra against Lucky Luciano?” The uncoupling of Sinatra and Luciano by a columnist for the press syndicate that had been Frank’s worst enemy just ten years earlier was striking. Even in the heat of the 1960 presidential campaign (and even as the unholy triangle of Jack Kennedy, Judy Campbell, and Sam Giancana was taking shape), the worst accusation the papers could come up with was that Frank was engaging in ring-a-ding-ding activities with his Rat Pack cronies: conduct unbecoming a friend of the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, to be sure, but in itself kind of charming.

  There was nothing charming about the fix he was in now. This wasn’t another punch-up with a photographer; this was, as the caption under a photo of a grinning Sinatra on the front page of the September 12 Arizona Republic read, “Trouble, trouble.” SINATRA MAY LOSE NEVADA GAMBLING PERMIT, blared the banner headline. The Republic, and many other papers, carried UPI’s full account of the Nevada Gaming Control Board’s complaint, Sam Giancana in the spotlight alongside Frank, the four counts laid out in gory detail. In its equally thorough account, the Associated Press called Giancana “one of the 12 overlords of American crime.”

  “Sinatra has 15 days to file a notice of defense before the [Neva
da Gaming Commission] will act,” the AP story continued. “He is entitled to a hearing by the five-man commission before his license could be revoked. If it is revoked, he can appeal to the Nevada courts.”

  Meanwhile, the court of public opinion set to work. “Sinatra being the national public figure that he was, I guess I should have realized that [the complaint] would attract a tremendous amount of attention, not only [in] the press but from individuals all over the country,” Ed Olsen recalled.

  There were literally hundreds of letters that came from every part of the nation. And the unfortunate thing that I found out was that so many people had a—apparently an ingrained resentment of Sinatra because he had been successful, or he came from a poor background and made money, or something like that. And so many of these things were racial overtones. People were just bitter about the man. So they were very complimentary to the state for trying to do something with him…

  On the other hand, there were some delightful letters from people who were either Sinatra fans, or had known him—friends, something like that—which were in his support.

  Hank Greenspun, the publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, a friend and big fan of Frank’s, climbed onto a soapbox, writing a series of daily front-page columns that lauded Sinatra’s philanthropy and generosity and raked the Gaming Control Board over the coals. “If I’m ever roasted again in my life I’ll never be roasted like I was by Greenspun,” said Olsen, who also noted that while the columns weren’t completely accurate, “they’re so well written that they’re well worth reading.”

  This was generous of him; Greenspun’s prose seems more emotional than finely wrought. “I cannot think of any individual who has possibly been more instrumental in spreading the name and fame of Nevada to the outside world than Frank Sinatra,” one column read. “I think [revoking his license] is a rotten, horrible, mean, and cheap way to repay this man for all the good he has brought this state.”