His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  ENGLISH: They owe that guy $14,000 and wouldn’t pay.

  GIANCANA: Why?

  ENGLISH: I don’t know. What do we do?

  GIANCANA: Tell him to sue the [obscenity deleted]. Do it fast, too.

  FBI wiretaps picked up another of Giancana’s conversations blaspheming Frank as a liar. “If he [Kennedy] had lost this state here he would have lost the election but I figured with this guy [Sinatra] maybe we will be all right. I might have known this guy [obscenity deleted]…. Well, when a [obscenity deleted] lies to you.”

  Later, when Sam and Johnny Formosa, another gangster, discussed their feelings of betrayal over Frank’s failure to “deliver” his friend, President Kennedy, and get rid of the federal agents who had marked Giancana as a target for early prosecution, they mentioned the Rat Pack.

  FORMOSA: Let’s show ’em. Let’s show those asshole Hollywood fruitcakes that they can’t get away with it as if nothing’s happened. Let’s hit Sinatra. Or I could whack out a couple of those other guys. [Peter] Lawford and that [Dean] Martin, and I could take the nigger [Sammy Davis, Jr.] and put his other eye out.

  GIANCANA: No … I’ve got other plans for them.

  Those “other plans” became clear the following year as Sam spent thousands of dollars renovating the Villa Venice in a Chicago suburb, and transformed the syndicate-owned restaurant into a red-tasseled nightclub with seating capacity for more than eight hundred people. Sam kept the Venetian gondolas outside on the river near the entrance and added Italian music as well as shuttle-bus service to a Mafia casino known as the Quonset Hut two blocks away. There he installed two dice tables, roulette wheels, and blackjack tables, all rigged to favor the house. His scheme called for bringing into the Villa Venice top entertainers who would attract high-rolling patrons, who in turn would be charged one hundred dollars and later steered to the illegal gambling down the road.

  Through wiretaps installed in the Armory Lounge in another Chicago suburb, the FBI learned that Giancana had spoken with Sinatra in New York and met with him in Los Angeles to arrange for the entertainment. Sam planned to open on October 31, 1962, with Eddie Fisher, who would be followed by Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, and Frank himself.

  Everyone agreed to perform without fee, although Frank was permitted to cut an album of his performances with Dean and Sammy for his new company, Reprise Records. He hoped to sell one million copies of the album for $4.95 each, which would net him fifty cents an album, a total of $500,000. Frank sent Mo Ostin from Reprise to Chicago a week ahead of time to work out the musical arrangements, and then he insisted on a private train to transport himself and Dean Martin from Hollywood. His demands irritated Giancana, who complained bitterly to a friend in a conversation recorded by FBI wiretaps.

  “That Frank, he wants more money, he wants this, he wants that, he wants more girls, he wants … I don’t need that or him. I broke my ass when I was talking to him in New York.”

  FBI agents interviewed each one of the headliners at the Villa Venice, and each one admitted he was performing there as a favor. Eddie Fisher referred to his good friend, Frank Sinatra, saying, “I’m here because a friend asked me to do him a favor.” Frank, who was making $100,000 a week in Las Vegas, said he was performing free as a favor to Leo Olsen, who was the nightclub’s owner of record, a front for Sam Giancana. Sammy Davis, Jr., was a little more forthright when agents questioned him about cutting short his lucrative Las Vegas engagement to work at the Villa Venice for nothing.

  “Baby, that’s a very good question,” he said. “But I have to say it’s for my man Francis.”

  “Or friends of his?”

  “By all means.”

  “Like Sam Giancana?”

  “By all means.”

  When asked to elaborate, Davis gulped his drink and exhaled. “Baby, let me say this. I got one eye, and that one eye sees a lot of things that my brain tells me I shouldn’t talk about. Because my brain says that, if I do, my one eye might not be seeing anything after a while.”

  Jammed for three shows a night, the Villa Venice did record business during the Rat Pack’s run, attracting mobsters from across the country. Dean Martin joked openly about suspicion of Frank’s hidden ownership. When Sinatra yelled for someone to hand him a stool to sit on, a stagehand tossed one out of the wings onto the floor.

  “I thought you owned some of this,” said Dean to Frank. “And that’s how they treat you.”

  A few minutes later, Martin brought down the house when he pointed in the direction of the club’s penthouse apartment and cautioned Sinatra and Davis: “Hold the noise down. There’s a gangster sleeping up there.”

  For Frank’s opening night, Joe Fischetti flew in from Florida with a contingent of gangsters, as did Jim DeGeorge from Wisconsin. Sitting ringside with Sam were several of Chicago’s Mafia lieutenants: Marshall Califano, Jimmy “The Monk” Allegretti, Felix “Milwaukee Phil” Alderisio, and Willie “Potatoes” Daddano, one of Sam’s personal assassins. Sam showed up every night with a phalanx of gangsters dressed in sharkskin suits and black fedoras, escorting wives in mink coats with teased bouffants.

  Sam, a widower, took Judith Campbell to Eddie Fisher’s opening, and during the run of the Rat Pack he entertained lavishly in his upstairs suite in the restaurant while down the road in the Quonset Hut the fixed wheels hummed and the loaded dice rolled. By the end of the month, his “other plans” for Frank and the Rat Pack had enriched him by over three million dollars in unreported, tax-free cash. The next day, the Quonset Hut closed, and the Villa Venice suspended its entertainment policy.

  “It was a sucker trap set by Sam, plain and simple,” said Peter Lawford, who had not been invited to participate, “and Frank lent himself and Dean and Sammy and Eddie Fisher as bait to bring in the high rollers while Sam and the Boys fleeced them.” Lawford added, “I guess it was either that or die.”

  Sam was so grateful to the entertainers who performed at the Villa Venice that he sent each an expensive present. Sinatra’s gift was seven thousand dollars’ worth of Steuben crystal.

  “It was gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous,” said Phyllis McGuire, who selected the teardrop pattern. “I got Frank full service for thirty—the martini glasses, white wine glasses, red wine glasses, champagne goblets, and water tumblers. I even called his secretary, Gloria, to see if he’d like it monogrammed. She said Frank had trouble with monogrammed things because people liked to keep them.”

  Phyllis had suggested crystal after seeing the one piece of plain stemware Sinatra had in Palm Springs. “It was a gift from Ruth Berle, and Frank tried to tell me it was Steuben, but I knew better,” she said. “I told him it’s not Steuben unless it says Steuben on the bottom. I turned his silly glass over and showed him that it was not Steuben. He still didn’t believe me. So Sam told me to get him the real thing and then maybe he’d know the difference. I guess that’s why he never said thank you for the crystal. He was too embarrassed. You see, Frank will never admit a mistake.”

  22

  “I know that certain people in the Chicago organization knew that they had to get John Kennedy in [the White House],” said mobster Mickey Cohen. “There was no thought that they were going to get the best of it with John Kennedy. See, there may be different guys running for an office, and none of them may be … what’s best for a combination. The choice becomes the best of what you’ve got going. John Kennedy was the best of the selection. But nobody in my line of work had an idea that he was going to name Bobby Kennedy attorney general. That was the last thing anyone thought.”

  By appointing his thirty-five-year-old brother to the nation’s top law enforcement position, Kennedy sounded a clarion call to attack organized crime on a national scale. As chief counsel to the McClellan committee, Bobby had exposed corruption in fifteen unions and fifty corporations, helping convict labor leaders like Dave Beck, Jr., president of the Teamsters Union. Now, as attorney general, he rallied Justice Department lawyers to “the conspiracy of evil” that he sa
id was organized crime, and he declared that it would be his major concern. He quadrupled the staff and funding of the organized crime section and appointed Edwyn Silberling to compile a list of top racketeers to be targets of prosecution. Included were some of Frank Sinatra’s closest Mafia friends: Sam Giancana, Mickey Cohen, Johnny Roselli, Anthony “Big Tuna” Accardo, Santo Trafficante, Jr., and Carlos Marcello. So driven was Bobby Kennedy in his pursuit of gangsters that he prosecuted Joey Aiuppa of the Chicago mob for violating provisions of the Migratory Bird Act. “Bobby’s instructions were: ‘Don’t let anything get in your way,’ said Henry Petersen, a senior aide in Kennedy’s Justice Department. “ ‘If you have problems, come see me. Get the job done, and if you can’t get the job done, get out.’ ”

  During one of many meetings the attorney general held with his bright young staff, one lawyer stepped forward to complain about the President’s friendship with Frank.

  “We are out front fighting organized crime on every level and here the President is associating with Sinatra, who is in bed with all those guys,” he said.

  The attorney general said, “Give me a memorandum and give me the facts.”

  A series of three reports were prepared on Frank in 1962. They showed that he had repeated and personal associations with ten of the leading figures of organized crime, detailing the times and dates these gangsters telephoned Frank at home, using his unlisted number. The report also enumerated special favors that Frank had performed for these men over the years.

  “Sinatra has had a long and wide association with hoodlums and racketeers which seems to be continuing,” stated the Justice Department report. “The nature of Sinatra’s work may, on occasion, bring him into contact with underworld figures, but this cannot account for his friendship and/or financial involvement with people such as Joe and Rocco Fischetti, cousins of Al Capone; Paul Emilio D’Amato, John Formosa, and Sam Giancana, all of whom are on our list of racketeers. No other entertainer appears to be mentioned nearly so frequently with racketeers.

  “Available information indicates not only that Sinatra is associated with each of the above-named racketeers, but that they apparently maintain contact with one another. This indicates a possible community of interest involving Sinatra and racketeers in Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, Florida, and Nevada.”

  The part that disturbed Bobby Kennedy the most detailed Sam Giancana’s repeated visits to Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs.

  Bobby had become even more alarmed on February 27, 1962, when he received a memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: While investigating Johnny Roselli, agents had found many calls to Judith Campbell. A check of her telephone records disclosed several phone calls to Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s personal secretary in the White House, as well as to Sam Giancana. Bobby did not know then that Frank Sinatra was the link between Judy Campbell and the President, and Judy Campbell and Sam Giancana, but he did have enough information about Sinatra’s connections to organized crime to dissuade his brother from accepting Frank’s hospitality as planned in March 1962. Bobby immediately stepped up surveillance on Giancana as well as on Judith Campbell, and dispatched J. Edgar Hoover to give the FBI reports to the President while he called Peter Lawford to cancel the President’s weekend stay at Sinatra’s house.

  Peter pleaded with Bobby to reconsider, but the attorney general was adamant, saying that under no circumstances could the President of the United States stay at the home of a man who also played host to Sam Giancana and other hoodlums. Peter then appealed directly to the President, who agreed with his brother.

  “I can’t stay there … while Bobby’s handling [the Giancana] investigation,” said the President. “See if you can’t Find me someplace else.”

  “It fell to me to break the news to Frank, and I was frankly scared,” said Lawford, who winced when he recalled the situation twenty years later. “When I rang the President, I said that Frank expected him to stay at the Sinatra compound, and anything less than his presence there was going to be tough for Charley here to explain. It had been kind of a running joke with all of us in the family that Frank was building up his Palm Springs house for just such a trip by the President, adding cottages for Jack and the Secret Service, putting in twenty-five extra phone lines, installing enough cable to accommodate teletype facilities, plus a switchboard, and building a heliport. He even erected a flagpole for the Presidential flag after he saw the one flying over the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport. Now, no one asked Frank to do any of this, but he really expected his place to be the President’s Western White House. When Jack called me, he said that as President he just couldn’t stay at Frank’s and sleep in the same bed that Giancana or any other hood slept in. ‘You can handle it, Petah,’ he said to me. We’ll take care of the Frank situation when we get to it.’ I made a few calls, but in the end it was Chris Dumphy, a big Republican from Florida, who arranged everything at Bing Crosby’s house for him. The Secret Service stayed next door at Jimmy Van Heusen’s, and Frank didn’t speak to him for weeks over that one, but I was the one who really took the brunt of it. He felt that I was responsible for setting Jack up to stay at Bing’s—Bing Crosby, of all people—the other singer and a Republican to boot. Well, Frank never forgave me. He cut me off like that—just like that!”

  Frank could not believe what Lawford told him: that the President was coming to Palm Springs and would stay at Bing Crosby’s because Bobby didn’t want him to stay with Frank. Unable to appeal to Ambassador Kennedy, who had been struck mute with a stroke a few months before, Frank called the attorney general in Washington. Bobby explained that it was impossible for the President to stay at his house because of the disreputable people who had been his houseguests.

  “Frank was livid,” said Peter. “He called Bobby every name in the book, and then rang me up and reamed me out again. He was quite unreasonable, irrational, really. George Jacobs told me later that when he got off the phone, he went outside with a sledgehammer and started chopping up the concrete landing pad of his heliport. He was in a frenzy.

  “When Jack got out here for that weekend [March 24–26, 1962], he asked me how Frank had taken it. I said, ‘Not very well,’ which was a mild understatement. The President said, ‘I’ll call him and smooth it over.’ So he did. After the conversation, Jack said, ‘He’s pretty upset, but I told him not to blame you because you didn’t have anything to do with it. It was simply a matter of security. The Secret Service thought Crosby’s place afforded better security.’ That’s the excuse we used—security—and we blamed it all on the Secret Service. We’d worked it out beforehand, but Frank didn’t buy that for a minute, and, with a couple of exceptions, he never spoke to me again. He cut me out of all the movies we were set to make together—Robin and the 7 Hoods; 4 for Texas—and turned Dean and Sammy and Joey against me as well.”

  Lawford was so distraught about Frank’s reaction that he sent his personal manager, Milt Ebbins, to talk to him.

  “Frank was terribly hurt, and Peter was the culprit. Frank blamed him for getting Crosby’s house,” said Ebbins. “I made a special trip to his office, I’ll never forget it, on Sunset Boulevard. I spent three hours with him. I said, ‘Frank, this is the real reason why he didn’t.…’ I told him everything, everything. You know what he said? ‘Well, maybe we’ll have dinner next week,’ but they never did.… Afterwards, Frank did not help Peter at all. None of Frank’s friends would ever hire him.”

  Close identification with the dynamic young President had given Frank a special aura in Hollywood, where people asked him, “What do you hear from Washington?” “How’s Jack?” “Have you been to Hyannisport lately?” To be cut off from this power was to have the gates of heaven slammed in his face. He was so deeply humiliated by Kennedy’s decision to stay at Bing Crosby’s estate instead of his own that he left town for the weekend. To close friends, he damned Peter Lawford and denigrated Bobby Kennedy, talking about the hypocrisy of accepting hoodlum money to get elected and then refusing to acc
ept hoodlum friendship, but Frank never said a negative word about the President.

  No one understood the importance of a good public image better than the Kennedys, who lived by the creed of their father: “You must remember—it’s not what you are that counts, but what people think you are.”

  As President, Jack Kennedy cared intensely about the image he projected. So much so that when Warner Bros, started to cast the movie, PT 109, based on his World War II exploits, he insisted on seeing the tests of the stars being considered to portray him.

  “When he learned that they were making the movie, we asked that the President be allowed to approve the man chosen to portray him,” said Pierre Salinger. “Especially since the picture would be shown overseas and could disseminate an image that might be very bad for the U.S. if not handled with dignity.”

  This attention to image was not lost on Frank, who admitted that his own was lacking. He called a meeting with his lawyer, Mickey Rudin, and his two publicists, Henry Rogers and Warren Cowan of Rogers and Cowan, to deal with the problem.

  “What the hell is wrong?” he asked them. “I have the worst image in the world. The press keeps rapping me. My reputation is going downhill more and more every day. I have the best public relations men in show business working for me, and my image stinks. What the hell is wrong?”

  “The only thing wrong with your image is you,” said Henry Rogers. “You have been doing outrageous things, you have been making outrageous statements, you have been offending the press outrageously.”

  Rogers and Cowan had been handling Frank’s public relations for seven years, trying to mollify the reporters and photographers he periodically abused, but Frank had frequently disregarded their advice and called his own shots.

  When Samuel Goldwyn arranged for some of the stars of Guys and Dolls to be on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1955, Frank discovered that he was to appear without pay while Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons were receiving fees. He took the matter to the Screen Actors Guild, and Sullivan bought a full-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter to protest. He commented on Sinatra’s low TV rating and added: “P.S. Aside to Frankie boy: Never mind that tremulous 1947 offer: ‘Ed, you can have my last drop of blood.’ ”