His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  Her mother watched with mixed emotions as Nancy, Jr., rushed into marriage with the young singer who, as a teenage idol, had. sold a million copies of “Teen-age Crush” for Capitol Records. “It’s my own life happening twenty years later,” said Big Nancy.

  The twenty-three-year-old groom wore his airman third class Air Force uniform and the bride wore a white street-length dress designed by her father’s designer, Don Loper. Frank refused to pose for photographers. “This is Nancy’s day, and I don’t want to horn in,” he said.

  Frank cried when he saw his twenty-year-old daughter ready to walk down the aisle. “He looked at me in my white gown and veil,” she said. “He saw the bouquet and the little diamond star earrings he’d given me for a wedding gift. He just stood there with tears streaming down his face.

  “ ‘I love you, chicken,’ he said.

  “I said, ‘I love you, too, Daddy.’ And off we went down the aisle, both in tears.”

  Later Nancy said, “You know what most mothers give their daughters for a wedding present? Silver or china or money for a romantic trip. My mother gave me a sewing machine.”

  The marriage was to be tough for Tommy because Nancy was constantly calling her father for advice, and begging him to put Tommy in his movies. Tommy insisted that they move to New York to be away from the Sinatra influence. “Frank let me know that he felt it was a foolish idea, that I’d be hurting myself professionally by pulling up stakes and moving away from Hollywood,” said Sands. “I didn’t care though. I had to do what I thought was best … Nancy was unhappy about leaving her family, all her childhood ties, and it was only natural for her father to give me his advice because she was involved.”

  “I remember when we went to the Sinatras one Christmas when Nancy was married to Tommy,” said Mickey Rudin’s former wife, Elizabeth Greenschpoon. “Nancy opened her present from her father, which was a ten-thousand-dollar leopard coat. That was something Tommy could never have afforded to give her, and when she opened the present she started screaming. Everyone oohed and aahed over Frank, and poor Tommy left the room.”

  Five years later, Tommy Sands would walk out on Nancy, saying he no longer wanted to be married to her. Once again, she would see her father cry as she collapsed in her mother’s Bel-Air home, where she stayed in bed for weeks.

  On Election Day, November 8, 1960, Frank stayed in his office at Essex Productions in Los Angeles. His secretary, Gloria Lovell, kept an open telephone line to Jake Arvey in Chicago, where Giancana controlled the first ward and several river wards. Arvey, Democratic National Committeeman from Illinois and a close friend of Giancana’s, reported the state’s returns to Frank every half hour. By midnight, NBC’s John Chancellor was predicting a Republican sweep, with Richard Nixon the winner. At three o’clock in the morning, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley called Dave Powers in Hyannisport. “We’re trying to hold back our returns,” he said. “Every time we announce two hundred more votes for Kennedy in Chicago, they come up out of nowhere downstate with another three hundred votes for Nixon.”

  At 3:10 A.M., Nixon made a television appearance in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with his wife, Pat, who was on the verge of tears, but he refused to concede the election. This so angered Frank that he picked up the phone and called the hotel, demanding to be put through to Nixon’s suite. The operator refused to connect him. “Do you know who this is?” he screamed. “This is Frank Sinatra, and I want to talk to Richard Nixon.” He was determined to tell the Republican candidate to give up and get it over with, but he couldn’t reach him.

  A few hours later, Jake Arvey called Frank to say that the black wards in Chicago were coming in strong for Kennedy, but in the end he carried the state by only 8,858 votes. The national election was so close that Kennedy won by only 118,550 votes out of 68,832,818 cast.

  Although Chicago’s Mayor Daley later took the credit for Kennedy’s election, gangsters around the country pointed with pride to the syndicate control of the West Side Bloc, which produced that victory.

  “The presidency was really stolen in Chicago,” said Mickey Cohen, the Los Angeles mobster.

  Sam Giancana later bragged about his contribution to John F. Kennedy’s victory. As he frequently told Judith Campbell: “Listen, honey, if it wasn’t for me, your boyfriend wouldn’t even be in the White House.”

  Skinny D’Amato credited Sinatra’s mobilization of mob support for the victory. “Frank won Kennedy the election,” he said many years later. “All the guys knew it.”

  A month after the election, a contractor and construction crew began breaking ground around Sinatra’s Palm Springs compound to add a heliport and a large new guest house with a dining room capable of seating forty for the future president and his Secret Service agents. Frank spared no expense on this project and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime to get the job done in a hurry. Frank worked with the carpenters day and night and even flew in lumber by helicopter, for he was convinced that his house on Wonder Palms Road would become the Western White House, a vacation retreat for the president of the United States.

  21

  The Caroline, the Kennedys’ private plane, landed in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 1961. Frank jumped out with Peter Lawford and a little dog wearing a black sweater. A maroon Lincoln Continental limousine whisked them off to the National Guard Armory, where they would be spending the next thirteen days planning an inaugural gala to honor the president-elect the night before his swearing-in. This invitation-only show for ten thousand people paying one hundred dollars apiece for seats and ten thousand dollars for boxes would raise over one million dollars to cover the Democrats’ campaign deficit.

  “It will be the biggest one-night gross in the history of show business,” said Frank.

  He had thought of little else since the election, when he began making calls all over the world to assemble an impressive array of stars to pay a show business tribute to the president who so loved Hollywood. He persuaded Ella Fitzgerald to fly in from Australia to sing for five minutes, Shirley MacLaine was coming from Japan, Gene Kelly from Switzerland, Sidney Poitier from France, and Keely Smith and Louis Prima from Las Vegas. Frank negotiated with Leland Hay-ward to release Ethel Merman from Gypsy for one night and managed to close another Broadway show, Becket, for the evening to free Anthony Quinn and Sir Laurence Olivier. Sinatra wanted Fredric March to do a dramatic reading of Abraham Lincoln’s farewell speech, the one he delivered from the back of the train that took him from Springfield to Washington. Frank called Eleanor Roosevelt, who, despite her support for Adlai Stevenson, was thrilled to participate. He engaged Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen to write special songs, and Goodman Ace, Norman Corwin, Jack Rose, Leonard Gersche, and Mel Shavelson to write dialogue. Joey Bishop was to be master of ceremonies, and Leonard Bernstein promised to conduct “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The rest of the cast consisted of Harry Belafonte, Milton Berle, Nat King Cole, Helen Träubel, Juliet Prowse, Mahalia Jackson, Alan King, Jimmy Durante, Pat Suzuki, Kay Thompson, Bette Davis, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis, plus Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. Only Dean Martin, locked into a movie, and Sammy Davis, Jr., who had recently married Swedish actress Mai Britt, would be conspicuously absent.

  Sammy Davis did not want his interracial marriage to mar the gala in any way. He had postponed his wedding until after the election, because Frank was to be best man and Sammy didn’t want that fact to hurt Kennedy’s chances for election. “Right or wrong, fair or not, my wedding was giving the Nixon people the opportunity to ridicule Kennedy and possibly hurt him at the polls,” he said. “And every survey showed that [Kennedy] couldn’t afford to lose a single vote. I could imagine the pressure Frank must be under. He must have eighty guys telling him, ‘Don’t be a fool. You’ve worked hard for Kennedy, now do you want to louse him up?’ ”

  “This is the most exciting assignment of my life,” said Frank, who had planned every gala detail accordingly. Before leaving California, he spent ninety thousand dollars
at Rusar’s jewelry store in Beverly Hills creating silver cigarette boxes with the inaugural invitation inlaid on top to be given to the participating stars. He had spent thousands more ordering a custom-designed wardrobe, including an Inverness cape with a red satin lining, black patent leather pumps, a silk top hat, swallowtail coat, striped trousers, a double-breasted gray suede weskit, black calfskin oxfords, and white kid gloves. And, in case he spilled anything, he ordered everything in duplicate.

  The day of the gala, snow started falling softly on Washington and continued until the city was blanketed under huge white drifts that covered cars and buried shrubs and fences. By evening all traffic was stalled on snow-choked streets, and the National Guard had to be called in to plow the city’s main arteries. By nine P.M. the armory was only half full, and Frank and Peter Lawford were pacing back and forth, waiting for those performers still stuck in the storm. By ten P.M. the president-elect and Mrs. Kennedy had yet to arrive, and the show was an hour and a half late. Finally, their police car pulled up to the entrance, and Frank went into the swirling snow to escort Jacqueline Kennedy up the stairs, trying to stay clear of her white organza skirt.

  At eleven P.M., with many seats empty, the lights went down and Frank walked onstage.

  “We know it’s a great party,” he said, “because who else could run up a debt of two million dollars in three months without a credit card?”

  For the next three hours, a priceless collection of show business talent led by the son of Italian immigrants saluted the first Irish-American ever elected to the presidency.

  Seconds after the finale, John F. Kennedy went up onstage to thank the stars. “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 tonight.

  “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. You cannot imagine the work he has done to make this show a success. Tonight there are two shows on Broadway that are closed down because the members of the cast are here. And I want him and my sister Pat’s husband, Peter Lawford, to know that we’re all indebted to them, and we’re proud to have them with us.”

  After the gala all the stars were bused downtown to Paul Young’s restaurant, where Ambassador Kennedy held a glittering dinner for everyone. When Frank complimented him on the splendor of the evening, the seventy-two-year-old host said, “Wait until you see the party we throw four years from now!”

  Hours later, Frank was wearing his Inverness cape with the red satin lining and waiting to be driven to the Capitol in time for the noon swearing-in. And that evening, January 20, 1961, while the President and First Lady made their rounds of the five inaugural balls, Frank gave a party at the Statler Hilton for the stars who had participated in the previous evening’s gala.

  By the time the President made it to the second ball at the Statler, he was so curious about Frank’s party that he excused himself, leaving his wife and Vice-President and Mrs. Johnson sitting in the presidential box while he bounded upstairs to see the stars. He apologized for interrupting. “I’m sorry,” he said, walking over to Frank’s table, “I didn’t know you were eating.”

  “That’s class,” said Frank later. “That’s real class.”

  Everything about Jack Kennedy impressed Frank, who was still reeling from the thanks he had received from him the night before. He paid to have the President’s remarks reprinted in Variety and played the recording of that evening over and over for his friends, saying, “I only wish my kids could have seen it. I can’t find the words. I’ll never be able to find the words.”

  “After the inauguration we all had to sit around Frank’s hotel suite at the Sands in Las Vegas and listen to that record of Kennedy thanking him,” said the woman who was living with Jimmy Van Heusen. “Frank would stand by the mantel and play it over and over, and we had to sit there for hours on end listening to every word.”

  Frank framed the President’s note of thanks and put a gold plaque on the door of the bedroom where Kennedy had slept when he visited Sinatra in 1959, although he confused the date, saying “John F. Kennedy slept here November 6 and 7, 1960.”

  Visitors were always shown the “Kennedy Room,” where Frank exhibited his presidential mementos, including photographs of himself with Jack Kennedy and the half-dozen notes that JFK had dashed off to him during the campaign, each framed as beautifully as a precious painting. Aware that Nevada was one of the two western states that went for Kennedy in the election, Frank was pleased to point out the note that said: “Frank—How much can I count on the boys from Vegas for? JFK.”

  Upon returning to the West Coast, Frank sent the President every one of his albums, plus tapes of Rat Pack hijinks in Las Vegas. In return, President Kennedy sent him a thank you note on White House stationery; that, too, was framed and hung in the Kennedy Room.

  Returning home was a letdown for Frank, and he seemed out of sorts. He performed at the Sands in Las Vegas and flew to Miami for his opening at the Fontainebleau. There he spent time with Sam Giancana, who was working on a CIA plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. Back in California, Sinatra was still in a foul mood. He stayed at his Palm Springs house and entertained a regular crowd of friends, including Marilyn Monroe, Pat and Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Mai Britt, and Jimmy Van Heusen. Long days were spent at the pool lying in the sun, and in the evening everyone ate one of Frank’s Italian dinners served by George Jacobs.

  “Frank was awful during this time,” said one of the guests. “He yelled at Marilyn, saying ‘Shut up, Norma Jean. You’re so stupid you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She was drinking out of a flask by that point and rather pathetic. He barked at George constantly: ‘George, get this; George, fill the drinks; George, clean my ashtrays; George, clear the table.’ He never said ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ and was always yelling at that poor guy, but George never said a word. He just took it all with silent dignity.”

  Frank’s agitation was due, in part, to Desi Arnaz, who rented space to Frank’s production company at Desilu Studios. As president of Desilu, Arnaz was responsible for developing The Untouchables, a popular weekly television show about Eliot Ness battling the Chicago mob in the days of Al Capone, when Sam Giancana was Capone’s driver. The Chicago names being mentioned on the series were making Giancana and Tony Accardo extremely uncomfortable. They didn’t want to see their notorious predecessors depicted as murderers, so they secretly backed the Federation of Italian-American Democratic Organizations in starting a boycott against the show’s sponsor, Chesterfield cigarettes. In March 1961, Chesterfield bowed to the pressure and withdrew its sponsorship. But that wasn’t enough for Sam Giancana. He wanted Desi Arnaz killed.

  In April, after an evening of drinking in Palm Springs, Frank announced that he was going to take care of Desi.

  “I’m going to kill that Cuban prick,” he said.

  With actress Dorothy Provine beside him, Frank drove to the Indian Wells Country Club, followed by Jimmy Van Heusen and his date, to wait for Desi’s usual arrival at the restaurant there.

  The two women sat in silent terror as Frank said he was going to stop the show and put Desi out of business. Van Heusen tried to cajole Frank into leaving. Every five minutes he said, “Well, looks like Desi isn’t going to show. Let’s shove off,” but Frank refused to move. Minutes later, Desi walked in flanked by two huge Italian bodyguards, each one standing well over six feet and weighing at least three hundred pounds.

  Seeing Frank sitting at one of the tables, Desi yelled across the restaurant at the top of his drunken voice, “Hi ya
, dago.” Thinking Frank was there to have a good time, Desi walked over with the two bodyguards. With a tight jaw, Frank introduced him to his group, which was holding its breath in anticipation of mayhem. Frank turned to Desi and told him what he and some of his influential Italian friends thought about the show making the Italians gangsters. “What do you want me to do—make them all Jews?” said Desi. He said that he wasn’t afraid of Frank’s friends, and the argument went on from there. Frank admitted he’d never seen The Untouchables but said he knew what he was talking about because “I always know what I’m talking about. That’s how I got where I am.”

  Desi laughed. “Oh, yeah,” he said in his thick Cuban accent. “Well, I remember when you couldn’t get a yob. Couldn’t get a yob. So why don’t you forget all this bullshit and just have your drinks and enjoy yourself. Stop getting your nose in where it doesn’t belong, you and your so-called friends.”

  Unruffled, Desi meandered back to the bar with the two bodyguards, leaving Frank full of unspent bluster. Obviously embarrassed, he looked around the table and said, “I just couldn’t hit him. We’ve been pals for too long.”

  “Yeah, what’s the point,” said Van Heusen soothingly.

  As they were leaving, Frank spotted two women sitting at a nearby table and invited them to join the group at Van Heusen’s house for a party.

  At four A.M., the group headed for Van Heusen’s house in Palm Desert, relieved that the crisis over Desi Arnaz had been averted. They didn’t know that Frank was so upset that he would soon move his production company out of the Desilu Studios. But they saw how humiliated Frank felt to have backed down on his threats when he walked into Jimmy’s den, where a large Norman Rockwell portrait hung on the wall. One of the composer’s most treasured possessions, it portrayed Van Heusen sitting at the piano in his pajama top, and it was a special gift from the artist. Grabbing a carving knife from the kitchen, Frank lunged at the painting and slashed the canvas to shreds.