His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  Both Giancana and Sinatra possessed mercurial temperaments characterized by wild mood swings and frightening unpredictability. Both wore toupees, gambled, owned points in Las Vegas casinos, drove shiny cars, traveled with an entourage, and relished beautiful women. Both were lavishly generous, bestowing new cars like bread crumbs. More important, each had something the other wanted. For Frank, it was the power derived from associating with an underworld capo; for Giancana, it was the opportunity to enrich Mafia coffers by using the biggest entertainer in Hollywood as a draw.

  “Frank wanted to be a hood,” said Eddie Fisher. “He once said, ‘I’d rather be a don of the Mafia than president of the United States.’ I don’t think he was fooling.”

  Frank knew that Giancana was in the Las Vegas Black Book, which listed—with their pictures, aliases, and FBI numbers—the eleven men not allowed on the premises of any casino in the state. So he took care to hide Giancana in his dressing room when Sam visited the Sands. The gangster don rarely visited the casino because of the federal agents on the premises. FBI records state that Frank telephoned Giancana in Chicago, asking for him by the code name of James Perno (Sam’s relative), not knowing that their conversations were being recorded. In conversations with his girlfriend Phyllis McGuire of the three singing McGuire Sisters, Sam referred to Sinatra as “the bird” or “the canary.” And the FBI reports show that when the two men traveled together in Hawaii, Frank made hotel reservations for Sam, and that Sam used the code name of J. J. Bracket.

  Frank did not try to hide his association with Giancana from anyone except the federal agents who followed Sam everywhere. He was proud of his friendship with the Capone capo, and introduced him to his friends, among them Yul Brynner, Greg Bautzer, and Dana Wynter. Frank fixed him up with women in Las Vegas, Miami, and Hollywood, and included him in the dinner parties he gave at Las Brisas, an exclusive resort in Acapulco. Once, he sat Sam next to a New York socialite, and introduced him as “Sam Flood.”

  Frank played golf with Giancana in Nevada, and opened his house to him in Palm Springs, occasions that were witnessed by FBI agents. One Easter, his former wife, Nancy, helped him entertain Giancana and Phyllis McGuire in the desert. Later, when he was with Ava Gardner, Frank took Sam and Phyllis to meet his parents in New Jersey, where Dolly cooked them one of her big Italian dinners. As a favor to Sam, Frank gave Phyllis a role in his movie Come Blow Your Horn. Giancana visited her on the set regularly and became a source of fascination to the cast and crew.

  “He was there every day on the film, sort of hovering around,” said William Reed Woodfield, the unit photographer. “He was rather dour. He didn’t sit around and say, ‘We bumped off so-and-so today,’ or any of that stuff. I asked Frank once what the Mafia was and he said, ‘Oh, it’s, you know, just a bunch of guys.’ ”

  Frank treated the crime overlord with deference. “If Sam said something, Sinatra was on his feet, saying, ‘I’ll get it for you, I’ll get it for you,’ ” recalled Victor LaCroix Collins, road manager for the McGuire Sisters. “He was like a bum boy. He just kissed Sam’s butt left and right. He didn’t dare do anything else.”

  Phyllis McGuire saw the same thing. “Frank was in awe of Sam,” she said. “He adored him. They were the best of friends.”

  The star sapphire ring that Frank had given to Giancana was part of an Italian friendship ritual that symbolized lifelong bonding.

  “Those love rings are some kind of Mafia deal, something among the Italians,” said Joseph Shimon, a former Washington, D.C., police inspector who later became a close friend of Sam Giancana and a partner in Operation Mongoose, the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro. “I was with Sam at the Fontainebleau when Sinatra was appearing, and Frank must have called our suite twenty times trying to get together with Sam. He wouldn’t leave Sam alone. Finally, Sam said, ‘We’re going to have to see him sometime. Might as well get it over with now, but watch what you say because the guy’s got a big mouth.’ Sam was referring to the way that Frank bragged about his Mafia friends all over the place. Sam maintained that Frank’s mouth was the reason Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano got in so much trouble in 1947, because Frank was in a bar running his mouth about going to Cuba to see him and some guy tipped off the feds. Anyway, we went down and met Frank at the bar. I was sitting next to Sam when Sinatra walked over.

  “ ‘I can’t even keep up with you,’ Sinatra said. ‘Where you been keeping yourself.’

  “Sam said, ‘Look, I’m busy. You know I got to keep moving around.’

  “Frank looked down at Sam’s hand. ‘I see you’re wearing the ring.’ Sam said that he always wore it.

  “ ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ said Sinatra. ‘I heard you hadn’t been wearing the ring. I heard you never wore it.’

  “God, it seemed so ridiculous to me. He was talking like some frustrated little girl with a broken heart. Finally, I couldn’t help it. I said, ‘What is this? Are you two bastards queer for each other or what?’ Sam fell off his chair laughing, but Sinatra was very embarrassed and turned his back on me. He didn’t know who I was. He knew I was with Sam and Johnny Roselli and Bob Maheu but he didn’t know why.”

  From the beginning, Giancana knew of Frank’s commitment to the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, beginning with a series of meetings held at the Lawfords’ during 1959 to try to build a broad base of support for Kennedy throughout California.

  “I was at some of those meetings,” said former congressman Tom Rees. “Frank was there and quite a few other show business people. There was internecine warfare going on in the state in terms of what were we going to do: Would we come up with a favorite son? What about people such as Adlai Stevenson and the others? Should we file a separate Kennedy slate?”

  Always a strong Democrat, Frank had idolized Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944 and contributed five thousand dollars to his campaign. He had supported Harry Truman in 1948 and had sung for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, but this time he was personally committed to the candidate in a way he had never been before. Jack Kennedy—young, brilliant, rich, and handsome—was an extraordinary man from an Irish-American dynasty, and his impact on Frank was remarkable. In turn, Jack Kennedy enjoyed his glamorous Hollywood romps with Sinatra, who personified the sleek, swinging, emancipated male who can do anything he wants and never pay the consequences.

  “Let’s just say that the Kennedys are interested in the lively arts and that Sinatra is the liveliest art of all,” said Peter Lawford at the time.

  “His [Kennedy’s] fondness for Frank was simply based on the fact that Sinatra told him a lot of inside gossip about celebrities and their romances in Hollywood,” said Dave Powers, Kennedy’s closest aide. “We stayed with Frank in Palm Springs one night in November 1959 after a big fundraiser in Los Angeles. You could tell when Sinatra got up in the morning because suddenly music filled the house, even the bathrooms. Frank was a terrific host, and we had a great time. When we left, he gave me, not Jack, a box of jewelry to give my wife to make amends for keeping us the two extra days.”

  George Jacobs, Frank’s valet, a black man, served Kennedy what he called the house special. “With Frank, it’s spaghetti for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he said. “I was serving him by the pool, and Frank told JFK to ask me about my stand on civil rights. I didn’t like niggers and I told him so. They make too much noise, I said. The Mexicans smell, and I can’t stand them either. Kennedy fell in the pool, he laughed so hard.”

  On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Kennedy flew to Las Vegas to watch the summit meeting staged at the Sands by the Rat Pack during the filming of Ocean’s Eleven, which was a lighthearted tale of the mob and their casinos. Frank introduced Jack to the audience as Dean lurched from the wings. “What did you say his name was?” asked Martin. Kennedy laughed along with everyone else as Martin and Sinatra, whom Joey Bishop introduced as “the Italian book-ends,” wheeled their bottle-bedecked “breakfast” bar onstage to choose a suitable juice while Joey whispered to the aud
ience, “Well, here they are folks—Haig and Vague. … In a few minutes they’ll start telling you about some of the good work the Mafia is doing.”

  Minutes later Sammy Davis, Jr., flew out to smash a cake in Bishop’s face, and then Dean staggered out, picked up Sammy, and handed him to Frank, saying, “This is an award that just arrived for you from the NAACP.” Later, while Dean was singing, Lawford and Bishop strolled across the stage in their shorts and tuxedo jackets. Jack Kennedy enjoyed the impromptu japes and boys-only bonhomie.

  Fascinated by the spellbinding power of great screen personalities, Kennedy gravitated to the Rat Pack, which Frank renamed the “Jack Pack” in his honor. His interest in Hollywood came in part from his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who predicted in the 1920s that film would equal the telephone as a new industry. Recognizing the power of movies to create illusion and fantasy, the elder Kennedy had bought a production company called Film-Booking Office, and for two years he made movies. Then, through a series of complicated transactions and mergers, he had become part of RKO, one of the biggest Hollywood studios. During this time, he began an affair with Gloria Swanson, the glamorous actress. He took her on family vacations with his wife, and introduced her to his children.

  Beginning as far back as 1945, Jack Kennedy spent as much free time as possible in Hollywood, romancing movie stars like Gene Tierney. Once his sister, Patricia, married Peter Lawford in 1954 and bought Louis B. Mayer’s house in Santa Monica, Jack had a real base of operations in southern California. He used it frequently and in time began to socialize with the Rat Pack at Puccini’s, the Beverly Hills restaurant that Frank and Peter owned with Hank Sanicola and Mickey Rudin.

  Through Peter, whom Frank now called “brother-in-Lawford,” Kennedy became a close friend of Sinatra, who introduced the young senator to many women. FBI files contain information regarding some of the women that the two men enjoyed in Palm Springs, Las Vegas, and New York City. The files also mention that Kennedy and Sinatra were “said” to be the subjects of “affidavits from two mulatto prostitutes in New York” in possession of Confidential magazine, which ceased publication in 1958. The Justice Department files also state: “It is a known fact that the Sands Hotel is owned by hoodlums, and that while the Senator, Sinatra and Lawford were there, show girls from all over the town were running in and out of the Senator’s suite.”

  “I’m not going to talk about Jack and his broads … because I just can’t,” said Peter Lawford in 1983, “and … well … I’m not proud of this … but … all I will say is that I was Frank’s pimp and Frank was Jack’s. It sounds terrible now, but then it was really a lot of fun.”

  Among the women Frank introduced to Jack Kennedy was a striking twenty-five-year-old brunette named Judith Campbell (later Judith Campbell Exner), with whom Sinatra had had a brief affair, which ended when she refused to participate in his sexual parties, telling him that his tastes were “too kinky” for her. “You’re so square,” Frank had said after he brought a black girl to bed with him and Judith. “Get with it. Swing a little.”

  Frank introduced her to Jack Kennedy in Las Vegas and provided his own suite for the room service lunch the two shared on February 8, 1960, a lunch that launched a two-year affair that would include twice-a-day phone calls, a four-day stay at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, and romantic interludes in Palm Beach, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jack Kennedy’s home in Georgetown while Jackie was away. They met twenty times for intimate lunches in the White House in 1961, and telephone records show that Judith called him seventy times.

  Knowing that Judith Campbell had started an intimate relationship with Kennedy, Frank introduced her to his other good friend, Sam Giancana. He told her: “Wake up and realize what you’ve got in the palm of your hand.” Both men enjoyed a simultaneous intimacy with the young woman, who unintentionally but inexorably brought the underworld into a relationship with the White House.

  “Jack knew all about Sam and me, and we used to discuss him,” said Judith Campbell Exner in 1983. “He was angry about my seeing him. He had all the normal reactions that would take place between two people that cared for each other. Yes, he was jealous.”

  Extolling “that old Jack magic,” Frank worked closely with Ambassador Kennedy throughout Jack Kennedy’s presidential campaign, especially in New Jersey, which was a key state, and where Sinatra’s mother’s connection with Mayor John V. Kenny of Jersey City proved beneficial.

  Not everyone in the Kennedy camp was pleased with Frank’s involvement. “We wouldn’t let him campaign openly in the primaries,” said Paul Corbin, a Kennedy aide. “We couldn’t even let Peter Lawford in because of the Rat Pack image. Frank made his contribution to the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries over the jukeboxes—that’s it.”

  Throughout both primaries, voters heard the smooth, insouciant Sinatra voice singing “High Hopes” with the lyric reworked by Sammy Cahn:

  K-E-double-N-E-D-Y,

  Jack’s the nation’s favorite guy.

  Everyone wants to back Jack,

  Jack is on the right track.

  And he’s got HIGH HOPES,

  High apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes.

  “I went into every tavernkeeper in the state and paid them twenty dollars to press that button and play Frank’s song for Jack, but that’s all he did in West Virginia,” said Corbin.

  But unbeknownst to Corbin and the rest of Kennedy’s political operatives, Frank made a much more substantial contribution to the West Virginia primary. FBI wiretaps showed large Mafia donations to the state campaign that were apparently disbursed by Sinatra. This under-the-table money was used to make payoffs to key election officials. And Sinatra’s friend Sam Giancana dispatched Paul “Skinny” D’Amato to the state to use his influence with the sheriffs, who gambled in the illegal gaming rooms of Greenbriar County. These men controlled the state’s political machine, and many of them were gamblers who had been customers at Skinny’s 500 Club in Atlantic City; some still owed Skinny money, and others were more than happy to do him a favor, which was rewarded from a cash supply of more than fifty thousand dollars. Their job was to get the vote out for Kennedy—any way they could.

  Owning a few politicians in Illinois, Giancana knew the advantages of being close to political power, and decided to help Frank help the Kennedy campaign, figuring that if JFK won, Frank would be able to put an end to the federal surveillance Giancana was now experiencing every time he turned around. It wasn’t that John F. Kennedy was his favorite candidate; he was simply the least undesirable at the time.

  Kennedy had not wanted to enter the West Virginia primary, but after an indecisive win over Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin, where his victory was discounted because it came from strongly Catholic districts, it was felt he had to go into West Virginia to prove that he could draw Protestant votes. Frank was concerned about West Virginia because he knew that it was virulent anti-Catholic territory. Furthermore, the United Mine Workers there had already endorsed Hubert Humphrey in retaliation for Bobby Kennedy’s role as chief counsel of the McClellan rackets committee. This made Giancana’s money and men all the more important.

  With Skinny D’Amato quietly working the hollows of West Virginia, Ambassador Kennedy recruited Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., to stump the state with his son, knowing that the Roosevelt name was revered throughout West Virginia. The ambassador also had FDR, Jr., send letters postmarked Hyde Park, New York—President Roosevelt’s home—to every voter, praising Senator Kennedy. The ambassador knew it would be almost impossible for any miner to vote against a man endorsed by the son of the president who gave coal miners the right to organize and to make a living wage for the first time in their lives. Throughout the state, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., held up two fingers pressed tightly together, saying, “My daddy and Jack Kennedy’s daddy were just like this.”

  “Frank Sinatra would’ve done anything to get Jack elected, so it’s kind of ironic that he almost capsized the campaign early on when he tried to break the blacklist b
y hiring Albert Maitz,” said Peter Lawford. “God, was that a mess. The ambassador took care of it in the end, but it was almost the end of old Frankie-boy as far as the family was concerned.”

  On March 21, 1960, Murray Schumach wrote a story in The New York Times disclosing that Frank had hired Maitz, one of the Hollywood Ten, to write a screenplay of The Execution of Private Slovik, a book by William Bradford Huie about the only American soldier executed by the U.S. Army for desertion since the Civil War. Frank planned to direct and produce the story himself.

  Frank’s friendship with Albert Maitz had started in 1945 when Maitz wrote the Academy Award-winning short against racism, The House I Live In. But then Maitz had been imprisoned, fined, and blacklisted for refusing to answer the questions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he had moved to Mexico in 1951. It was there that Frank called him with the screenplay offer that would break the blacklist.

  Sinatra’s decision to hire Maitz unleashed the most rabid partisans from both sides of the “Red or dead” issue. Only months earlier, Otto Preminger had announced that Dalton Trumbo, another blacklisted screenwriter, had written the script for Exodus, which would soon be released. Preminger’s bold act was the first chink in the seemingly impregnable blacklist. The director’s stand encouraged Kirk Douglas to use Trumbo for the script of Spartacus, the story of a Roman gladiator based on a book by Howard Fast, then an avowed Communist.

  By announcing the signing of Maitz before the movie was shot, Sinatra joined a select group of men determined to bring an end to the invidious blacklist.

  “I had not worked on a film in Hollywood since 1948,” said Maitz, “and I, like others who were blacklisted, kept hoping that the blacklist would be broken, so to receive Frank’s call in 1960 was enormously exciting to me. I went up to see him, and we discussed the story, which we both agreed would say that the enemy in the war was not the United States Army, but the war itself. I point this out because of the irony of being blacklisted as a subversive who was trying to overthrow the government of the United States, and here I was setting out to say that the enemy in the war was not the United States, but war itself. Frank said that he had been thinking of hiring me for a long time and that it was very important to him to do so and to make this film. He said that if anyone tried to interfere with his hiring me, they were going to run into a buzz saw. He anticipated all the problems and the outcry from the American Legion types, but he said he didn’t care. He wanted to break the blacklist. So he decided to make the announcement in advance of my doing the screenplay.… Frank said he would announce my being hired, but we set no date, so I left for New York. While there, I got-a call from Frank’s lawyer, Martin Gang, who asked if I would mind if the announcement was put off until after the New Hampshire primary, in which Kennedy was running.”