Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  In Maryland, a fourteen-year-old named Marsha Albert—twenty years earlier, she would have been a bobby-soxer—was watching, enthralled.

  Much like the first-person narrator of Chuck Berry’s “Roll over Beethoven” (a tune the Beatles had been covering from the beginning), Albert wrote a letter to her local DJ—Carroll James, of Washington’s WWDC—telling him that he really ought to try to get one of the Beatles’ records and play it on the air.

  Meanwhile, on December 14, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” knocked “She Loves You” off the top spot in the British charts—the first time in British history that an artist or group had replaced themselves at number 1. Taking notice, Carroll James ordered a copy of the new hit single, which the Beatles’ label, EMI, shipped over posthaste aboard a BOAC jet. On December 21, James had Marsha Albert introduce “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on his WWDC show, the first time the single was played on American radio. Over the next weeks, the song turned into a huge hit as WWDC played it nearly incessantly, and as a result EMI and Brian Epstein were finally able to convince Capitol to release a Beatles record. It was “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” with “I Saw Her Standing There” on the B-side, and—to take advantage of the sensation building on WWDC and, soon, on other radio stations—Capitol put it out the day after Christmas, December 26, 1963.

  All this during Frank’s sad sojourn in Palm Springs.

  —

  The movie 4 for Texas premiered during the same week as “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and did considerably less well. The critics flayed it. “4 for Texas…is one of those pictures that are known in Hollywood as Clanbakes,” Time wrote.

  They are made by Frankie and his friends…and if showbiz-buzz can be believed really are a lot of fun to film. Unfortunately, they are not much fun to see…It isn’t really funny to see two overage destroyers (Martin and Sinatra) wallowing in floods of booze. It isn’t really funny to see two top-heavy tootsies (Anita Ekberg and Ursula Andress) involved in a tasteless chest contest. And it isn’t really funny to hear line after line that develops a double meaning from a single idea.

  What’s mainly wrong with Texas, though, is what’s wrong with all Clan pictures: the attitude of the people on the screen. They constitute an ingroup, and they seem bored with the outside world. Sometimes, perish the thought, they even seem bored with each other.

  The press had been laying for the Clan for years, even if the Clan, insofar as it still existed, had essentially become an oldies act. But Frank had opened himself to fresh opprobrium by failing the most basic test of all: he wasn’t selling tickets. You could displease the critics as long as the people showed up, yet after the success of Ocean’s 11 the Rat Pack pictures—which were essentially Frank’s baby—interested ticket buyers less and less. In 4 for Texas, the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther wrote, Sinatra’s character Zack Thomas “behaves like a pasha, flanked by adoring handmaidens and servile flunkeys.” It was a little too close to real life, a little too unironic, and moviegoers picked up on it. Frank had violated his own rule, as expressed by Mike Shore: an audience is like a broad; if you’re indifferent, endsville. Sinatra had taken Jack Warner’s money and lost much of it (to gild the lily, the kidnapping had cost $1 million in production costs on Robin and the 7 Hoods), and by Hollywood logic Warner was determined to keep throwing money at him.

  —

  Jack Kennedy and Hank Sanicola weren’t the only friends Frank had lost by the end of 1963. Sam Giancana had phoned soon after the kidnapping with a mixed message: he was pleased and relieved that Frankie had come home safely but disappointed that Frank hadn’t accepted the help he’d offered. “Disappointed” was a grave word in Mooney’s lexicon. But he had a further proposal: there were ways of dealing with these three mopes who had done the job, even if they were in police custody. Frank politely declined. “He knew that if anything ever happened to those kidnappers, the finger of guilt would be pointed straight at him, and he was already in enough trouble because of Cal-Neva,” Giancana’s friend Tommy DiBella said. “Plus, I know that Frank Sinatra would never have wanted to be so indebted to Sam Giancana.”

  There might have been other reasons, at that moment, to distance himself from the Mob.

  In any case, Frank and Mooney were officially over. Sinatra, who once had been able to engender fear by association, had lost the association, just like that. “He missed Sam Giancana and all the tough guys, all the unspoken, never-bragged-about danger and swagger and confidence that having the mob in his corner gave him,” George Jacobs writes. Now Frank bought a pistol, a .38 Smith & Wesson, and never left home without the gun in its holster.

  And there was still Jilly.

  With Sanicola and Giancana out of the picture, the Broadway barkeep loomed ever larger in Sinatra’s life. The previous June, Earl Wilson had run a tiny item in his column: “Café owner Jilly Rizzo will open a H’wood branch of his Jilly’s, with Frank Sinatra as a partner.” (It never happened, though Rizzo would open a Palm Springs Jilly’s in 1968.) Three days later, Walter Winchell’s column featured a little dithyramb about the friendship under the heading “Novelet”:

  You may have seen the name Jilly’s over a night spot in a Frank Sinatra film [The Manchurian Candidate]…Or in a syndicated column…Sinatra often takes Jilly along on those distant tours—mainly for laughs—he’s a Fun Guy…In one remote place several years ago Frank decided to stroll alone near his hotel for the fresh air…In the shadows, two hoodlums sized up the scene, and seeing that Frank was solo, decided to mug him…But Jilly sixth-sensed it…He waited until the punks were directly under the 2nd floor mezz of the hotel and he leaped right on top of them—just like in the movies…That’s why Frank Sinatra and Jilly of West 52nd Street are buddies…Forever.

  Just like the movies—or a boy’s adventure story. Like Hank and Mooney, Jilly conveyed the kind of power Frank lacked himself. Unlike them, Rizzo asked nothing in return. And he wore his toughness lightly, which Sinatra found both amusing and admirable. “His speech was right out of Guys and Dolls, but much dirtier, all ‘dese fuckers’ and ‘dose cocksuckers,’ and Mr. S liked to imitate him,” Jacobs writes. “ ‘I smashed the rat bastard in the mouth and the cocksucking motherfucker went down.’ That was how Jilly talked.” Frank also laughed at all of Rizzo’s (invariably bad) jokes, just like a teenager with a crush.

  “Frank was a lonely guy,” said the jazz pianist Monty Alexander, the house pianist at Jilly’s in the 1960s. “Jilly filled that empty space, and they became like brothers. Frank confided in him; he gave Frank advice, feedback—not telling him what to do, just good advice. He also had a way to play the role that he was capable of playing—tough guy—and sending out that signal if he needed to, because he knew certain people. I knew that if anybody ever messed with me, the feeling I had with Jilly was like he was my uncle or godfather looking out for me. He’d say, ‘Kid, stay out of trouble.’ I always thought I could, as they say, make a phone call. Just get that dime if anything ever happened—‘I’ve got a problem, Jilly.’

  “One time I had a girlfriend, and we had a lovers’ tiff, and she scratched my face. Jilly said, ‘What happened to you?’ I said, ‘This broad scratched my face because of—’ He said, ‘I’m going to break her neck!’ I said, ‘No, no, really, boss…’ I called him boss. I said, ‘Boss, everything’s cool, don’t worry about it.’ ‘I’ll break her neck!’ That was his vibe.”

  It was a decidedly prefeminist vibe: Betsy Hammes remembered Jilly, for a laugh, throwing her and another young woman, who couldn’t swim, into the Sands swimming pool. But it was the perfect vibe for Frank, now that Momo was gone. “I liked Jilly; I had nothing against him,” Hammes said. “He could be very sweet, but he wasn’t the brightest on the boardwalk. Frank would have these characters around him—troublemakers. He loved to be around the bad boys. And whenever he was around them, he’d change into a totally different person. Trouble—Jilly would drum it up.”

  Frank with Jilly Rizzo and Sands president Jack Entratt
er. Sinatra considered the rough-hewn Rizzo—friend, bodyguard, factotum—the brother he’d never had. (Credit 21.1)

  —

  On Sunday night, January 12, Frank junior—now traveling with “unusual protection” (namely his father’s bodyguards Al Silvani and Ed Pucci, man stoppers both of them)—made his first television appearance since the kidnapping, on The Ed Sullivan Show, along with Sam Donahue and the Dorsey ghost band, Helen Forrest, and the Pied Pipers. Fellow guests included Connie Francis, the comedy team of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, and ragtime pianist Big Tiny Little. It was good early-1960s fun, but the tsunami was on the horizon.

  —

  Even before “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was officially released, radio stations all around the country were playing it: at first Capitol tried to enjoin them legally from doing so, then simply gave up, realizing the publicity could only help. In the first three days after its December 26 release, the record sold a quarter-million units: ten thousand copies an hour in New York City alone. By January 18, the single had begun its fifteen-week run on the American charts; on February 1, it hit number 1. It would stay there for seven weeks, finally relinquishing the top spot to “She Loves You.”

  And this is how a television-viewing audience of seventy-three million people—twenty-three million households; 34 percent of the American population; the largest TV-watching audience of all time, including that for the Kennedy assassination and aftermath—happens. Was Frank one of the seventy-three million watching the Sullivan show on the night of February 9? History doesn’t tell us, though it’s more likely he’d caught Frankie on the broadcast in January, singing Sinatra songs with Helen Forrest and the Pied Pipers, than tuned in to watch some British rock ’n’ roll band with a funny name. He was in Palm Springs that night—he could fly there on his Morane-Saulnier jet in seventeen minutes—trying to relax while he waited to see if he’d be subpoenaed to testify in the kidnapping trial of Barry Keenan, Joe Amsler, and John Irwin, which was to start the next day, February 10. And relaxing didn’t mean sitting around watching meaningless junk on television.

  —

  “In the opening day of the trial Monday a jury of nine men and three women was selected with unexpected speed under the guidance of federal district Judge William G. East,” UPI reported on February 11. The story also noted that the kidnappers’ defense attorneys were about to make their opening statements and were expected to offer the theory that Frank junior had been abducted “with his own consent.”

  It was not a good sign.

  The perverse idea that the kidnapping might have been some sort of hoax, perhaps even a publicity stunt to aid Frankie’s budding singing career, had been in the air since the kidnapping itself, when the FBI had taken the trouble to give lie-detector tests to John Foss and Tino Barzie. Whatever had been behind the crime, some felt that young Sinatra had benefited from it, professionally if not psychologically. “The attendant publicity has unquestionably added to the marquee value of the singer’s name,” Variety’s Art Stone had written on January 15. “In the case of Harrahs at Tahoe, Sinatra Jr. was listed on the bottom of the marquee when the TD band first opened. But after the kidnapping his name was moved to the top, just under the Tommy Dorsey Orch listing.”

  True enough—Harrah’s had even posted an outsize welcoming message, “FRANKIE JR. IS BACK”—but that wasn’t the whole story. After Frank senior had heard about the marquee, he’d phoned Harrah’s and complained, heatedly. The message was removed, and Frankie’s name moved back to the bottom in small letters.

  —

  The idea of a hoax was in the air, and a clever lawyer plucked it out of the air. “I was in jail, lonely and desperate,” Barry Keenan recalled.

  And one of the attorneys—not my own—came in one night and said to me, “Look, if this was a publicity stunt and you are able to tell us that it was a publicity stunt, then that would be a very strong defense.” Since I was the ringleader, I was the one who had to make the statement.

  By that time I had sobered up, and I realized we were all in a heap of trouble. I slept on it. The next morning, I came out with this lie about the kidnapping being a publicity stunt, and that’s all my attorneys needed to hear. It became our defense. I’m not proud of it. It was a lousy thing to do to the Sinatras. But I did it, I’m sorry to say.

  Keenan was represented by Charles L. Crouch; Joe Amsler by George A. Forde and Morris Lavine; and John Irwin by Gladys Towles Root. Root, fifty-eight, was a flamboyant character, a woman in what was then a man’s business, given to wearing large and dramatic hats to court and conducting withering cross-examinations, and it was she who had suggested the publicity-stunt angle to Barry Keenan and then asserted it to the jury on February 11. “This was a planned contractual agreement between Frank Sinatra Junior and others connected with him,” she said.

  “An apple doesn’t fall far from its tree, and Frankie Junior just wanted to make the girls swoon as his papa once did,” she continued, adding that Junior had told John Irwin, “The ladies used to swoon over my father. Then some wise publicity agent took that on and made my father into an international star. The press hasn’t found me as exciting as my father.”

  And then Amsler’s lawyer, George Forde, after pointing out that Junior’s career had been on an upswing since the kidnapping, introduced a mysterious, anonymous “fourth defendant.”

  “There is a vacant seat here for that fourth defendant,” Forde said. “A financier who financed this whole thing…He paid for the liquor that two of the defendants and Sinatra Junior shared together. He financed the rise of young Sinatra from a hundred-dollar-a-week band singer to an international star.” The mystery financier, he continued, was an unnamed singer who had “cut two million records.”

  Despite the sensational implication that Forde was talking about Frank Sinatra, it would soon turn out that he was referring to Dean Torrence.

  The international stardom of Frank junior consisted of a tour he was currently making with the Dorsey band in England and on American military bases in Europe. “There are a lot of kids who sing better than I do but don’t have the opportunity to be singing with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. I am very grateful for my position,” he’d told Variety with poignant truthfulness. “If I left the band now—I’m not strong enough to be on my own. I’d be dead without the people I’m working with. I’m a novice in this business. I’m just another guy in the band, not the star of the show.”

  He left the tour and returned to Los Angeles. On February 13, news of his first court appearance (“It’s Showtime for Sinatra, Jr.”) shared front pages with reports about the Beatles’ performance at Carnegie Hall the previous night. “The Beatles looked like an amusing parody of the worst elements of American rock ’n’ roll music,” the Associated Press reported. “The word ‘looked’ is used advisedly, for no one, especially the screaming little girls, actually heard the Beatles.” Frank senior’s shows at the Paramount two decades earlier had been similarly inaudible and similarly amusing to the press. And like Sinatra in 1943, the Beatles were in the process of taking the country like wildfire. By early April, they would hold all five top spots on Billboard’s Hot 100 and fourteen positions in all on the chart.

  On Friday the fourteenth, Frankie underwent a cross-examination by Mrs. Root, who had earlier posed for a news photographer in her courtroom outfit, a champagne-beige wool sheath dress with scoop neckline outlined in beige fox fur, a cape of purple wolf fur, and a champagne-beige wool trooper hat. As Frank junior sat on the witness stand, she demanded to know why he had said nothing when Nevada police stopped the kidnappers’ car at a roadblock.

  “Because, Mrs. Root, the number one man stated before we came to the roadblock that there was going to be some shooting,” he told her. “I did not want a sudden and idiotic move to cause this man who was stupid enough to kidnap me to voluntarily blow the brains out of this officer.”

  “Indeed,” Mrs. Root said. She turned to the jury. “The truth is you would have
wrecked your little kidnap plot, which you arranged, and it would not have been successful,” she said.

  “That is not true,” Frankie said emphatically.

  But on Monday, the defense began to unravel with the publication of a Sunday Los Angeles Times story headlined SINATRA JR. DESPERATELY FIGHTS CHARGE OF HOAX. The subhead read “Looks Grim and Pale as He Tries to Refute Claim He Sought Publicity for Career.” “I was outraged,” Judge East told the court, “when I read that headline and doubly outraged when I read the contents of the story.” In the piece, Amsler’s attorney, George Forde, said Barry Keenan had admitted to him that the kidnapping had been a planned publicity stunt, financed by a mysterious man named Wes. Keenan’s lawyer, Crouch, asked for a mistrial. When the judge wouldn’t grant it, Crouch said, “From now on, I’m working alone.”

  Judge East allowed Frank junior to return to his European tour, with the proviso that he be on call to come back and testify again. Frankie flew to London. The proceedings were thrown into further disarray when Dean Torrence took the stand, testified he’d known nothing ahead of time about the kidnap plot, then, later the same day, asked to return to the stand. “I’m afraid I made up some stories,” he said. Now Judge East had to decide whether to indict Torrence for perjury. “I’m desperately disturbed about it,” he said. Later that week, the defense won a motion to recall Frank junior to the stand and to call Frank senior to testify for the first time.