by Kitty Kelley
Cal-Neva also ended Frank’s friendship with Sam Giancana because the gangster never forgave him for losing his temper with Ed Olsen.
“I talked to Sam the next day, and he told me that Frank cost him over $465,000 on Cal-Neva,” said Joe Shimon, a former D.C. police inspector who was a good friend of Giancana. “He said, ‘That bastard and his big mouth. All he had to do was keep quiet, let the attorneys handle it, apologize, and get a thirty- to sixty-day suspension … but, no, Frank has to get on the phone with that damn big mouth of his, and now we’ve lost the whole damn place.’ He read him off for using all that filthy language with Ed Olsen and said he was a stupid fool. He never forgave him. He washed Frank right out of his books.”
Even one of Frank’s closest friends took Olsen’s side. Seeing Olsen at the Sands a few months after Sinatra’s license had been revoked, Sammy Davis, Jr., approached the Gaming Board chairman and said he’d like to speak with him privately.
“Oh, God, I thought, here comes a brawl for sure,” recalled Olsen. “Davis gets me off in a corner, and I don’t know whether he had a few drinks or what. He had just come off the stage not ten minutes before, so I’m sure he couldn’t have had. And he undertakes to tell me in many of the same four-letter words that Sinatra used what a great thing I had done. He says, ‘That little son of a bitch, he’s needed this for years. I’ve been working with him for sixteen years, and nobody’s ever had the guts to stand up to him!’ Coming from Sammy Davis, Jr., that just threw me. And he went on for, oh, five or ten minutes of… the same thing.”
24
Frank was on Stage 22 of the Warner Bros. lot making Robin and the 7 Hoods when he got the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. For the first time in a long time, he went to church to pray. Years later, when he learned that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched Suddenly a few days before shooting the President, he withdrew the 1954 movie in which he played a deranged assassin paid to kill the president. He also forbade the re-release of The Manchurian Candidate, his 1962 movie dealing with a killer who is brainwashed to gun down a politician.
That November evening, Frank called the White House. He expressed his sympathy to Patricia Lawford, but did not talk with her husband, Peter.
“Frank was pretty broken up when he talked to Pat and would have given anything to come back to Washington for Jack’s funeral, but it just wasn’t possible to invite him,” said Lawford. “He’d already been too’ much of an embarrassment to the family.”
When Frank returned to work a few days later, he was dismayed by the comments he heard among the cast and crew. Over the loudspeaker system he said, “I have heard some unfortunate remarks on this set about Texas. This indicates that we are still not unified, despite the terrible happenings of the past week. I beg of you not to generalize about people, or make jokes about anyone from Texas. Or say anything that will keep us divided by malice or hatred. Now is the time for all of us to work together with understanding and temperance—and not do or say anything that will prevent that.…”
A few weeks later, Frank turned to Peter Lawford for help when Frank’s nineteen-year-old son was kidnapped at gunpoint on December 8, 1963.
“Frank woke me up with his phone call a few hours after they grabbed young Frankie,” said Lawford. “There was no hello, no apology, nothing like that. He just said for me to call Bobby and get the FBI in on the case and get Back to him in Reno. I called the attorney general right away and he told me to tell Frank that they were doing everything they possibly could. Bobby had put men on the detail, and FBI agents in Nevada and California were working around the clock. He’d also ordered roadblocks set up at all state borders and police were checking all the cars. Bobby said, ‘I know how Frank feels about me, but please tell him that everything is being done, and we’ll get his boy back as soon as possible.’
“Bobby called Frank himself the next day, but I gave him Bobby’s message that night, and he listened. I think he said thank you before hanging up, but that was the last time we ever spoke to each other. We hadn’t been in much communication since the President had stayed at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs—and to make things just terrific for me with Sinatra, Jack had stayed at Bing’s on two different trips. I did see Frank briefly when we took Marilyn [Monroe] up to Cal-Neva, but he got so mad at her after she overdosed and had to have her stomach pumped that he just snarled at everyone. Young Frankie’s kidnapping was the only time I’d ever really heard him kind of scared. He sounded quite frightened.”
Frank, Jr., had quit school to start a singing career of his own. He had worked a while with the Dorsey orchestra and now was playing a lounge act in Tahoe. He tried to imitate his father’s style, singing in a tuxedo like his dad, telling some of his father’s stale saloon jokes, and performing some of his father’s most famous songs, but he was a pale imitation.
The kidnapping began on Sunday night at nine-thirty P.M., when Barry Worthington Keenan, twenty-three, and Joseph Clyde Amsler, his best friend from high school, also twenty-three, knocked on Frank, Jr.’s, door at Harrah’s Lodge in Lake Tahoe. Frank, Jr., was eating dinner with Joe Foss, a musician in the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, before their first show in the lounge. Pretending to be from room service, the two amateur kidnappers barged into the room, bound and gagged Foss, and carried Frank off at gunpoint to their car, a 1963 white Chevrolet Impala with a broken muffler, which carried them through a mountain blizzard to a rented house in Los Angeles, where they held young Frank for ransom.
In a few minutes Foss freed himself and called the hotel’s press agent, who called the police. Frank’s manager, Tino Barzie, called Frank, Sr., who was at his home in Palm Springs. He chartered a plane and flew to Reno, where he was met by Bill Raggio, the district attorney of Washoe County. The two men were joined by four FBI agents from Nevada; Frank’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin; and Jim Mahoney, the new Sinatra publicist who had replaced Chuck Moses by promising Frank a golf tournament in his honor.
Blocked by the blizzard and unable to drive or fly to Lake Tahoe, Frank set up headquarters at the Mapes Hotel in Reno. He was soon joined by Jack Entratter and Jilly Rizzo. After calling his former wife, Nancy, who was in Bel-Air, and his mother and father in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he waited for sixteen sleepless hours for the kidnappers to contact him.
On Monday, December 9, at 4:45 P.M., he finally received the first of seven calls. Following the script that kidnapper Keenan had written, a confederate, John Irwin, forty-two, called Sinatra to say that his son was safe. He said the kidnappers would call him later.
“They haven’t asked for money yet,” Frank told reporters that evening. “They know I would give the world for my son. And it’s true.”
When the ransom call finally came, Frank said, “You can have anything—a million dollars—anything.” But inexplicably, the kidnappers’ script asked for much less, $240,000, in used currency.
“Fine, fine, anything, okay,” said Sinatra.
“We’ll make another phone contact about the exchange,” said Irwin. “Discretion will be the demeanor.”
Frank called a friend, Al Hart, president of the City National Bank of Beverly Hills, to make arrangements for the ransom money, and flew to Los Angeles to await further instructions. He went to his former wife’s home in Bel-Air. Reporters were waiting outside to cover the biggest name kidnapping in America since the Lindbergh baby was abducted in 1932.
Hart assembled the money at the bank, and Frank, accompanied by an FBI agent, delivered it in a brown paper bag according to the kidnappers’ complex instructions. After fifty-four hours, young Frank was released two miles from his mother’s home in Bel-Air and taken to the home by a Bel-Air patrolman who recognized the young man. He hid in the car’s trunk to avoid newsmen, and his father was so grateful to the driver for bringing Frankie home that he gave him one thousand dollars.
“Father, I’m sorry,” said Frankie as he crawled out of the car trunk.
“Sorry? Sorry for what?” said Frank as he threw his arms
around his son. “You’re alive, and that’s all that matters.”
“Don’t cry, Mother,” said Frankie. “I’m well. I’m in good shape.”
Frank went to the phone to take a call from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He then called Frankie’s grandmother in Fort Lee. “Mom, we have him back. He is alive. He is well and will call you this afternoon. He is with the doctor right now.”
Dolly Sinatra burst into tears. “I was saying the Rosary when the call came,” she told reporters keeping vigil outside her home in New Jersey. “I dropped my rosary beads and dropped down in a near faint. This is the happiest moment of my life. We are leaving for California on the twentieth. We will spend Christmas together—the whole family.”
The three kidnappers were captured the next day, and most of the ransom money was recovered. Frank hired a Pinkerton guard for Nancy’s Bel-Air home and dispatched one of his personal bodyguards, Ed Pucci, to travel with Frankie to make sure nothing happened to him. He then called Chasen’s to deliver enough food and liquor for a three-day party to celebrate his son’s return as well as his own forty-eighth birthday. He invited all the FBI agents who had worked on the case as well as Dean Martin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Jack Entratter, Gloria and Mike Romanoff, and a Palm Springs neighbor, Abe Lipsey. “Getting Frankie back is the best birthday present I could ever have,” Frank told his friends.
The next night, he flew to Las Vegas with Jill St. John to celebrate the Sands’s eleventh anniversary party. Red Skelton joked about the kidnapping. “Frank called me and asked me to come over and I told him, ‘How can I? You marked all the money.’ ”
Don Rickles cracked, “Do you know why the kidnappers let Junior go? Because they heard him humming in the trunk.”
“It’s a week I never want to live through again,” said Frank. “I’m so happy that it turned out the way it did. I am happy that the FBI did such a magnificent job in capturing the three men, because I know it will act as a deterrent to other punks who want to try something like this.”
To show his gratitude to the federal agents who worked on the case, Frank sent each one a gold watch from France worth two thousand dollars. They were made out of twenty-dollar gold pieces and had black velvet bands. But the FBI returned the watches to Sinatra with a letter from Dean Elson, special agent in charge of the Las Vegas office, telling him that they were not allowed to accept gifts. A few weeks later, Frank bought another two-thousand-dollar watch and sent it off to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in Washington with thanks for all that the FBI had done to end his son’s kidnapping. Frank also enclosed the other watches for the agents who worked on the case. This time, they were not returned. Amused, Sinatra assumed then that he’d made a mistake the first time around by not sending a gift to the director.
During the kidnappers’ trial a few months later, Barry Keenan tried a bizarre defense. He said that the kidnapping was a hoax in which Frank Sinatra, Jr., participated to get publicity for himself and his budding new singing career. The jury did not believe the story and sentenced all three men to life in prison, but the idea of a hoax took root and dogged young Frank for many years.
“When the Independent Television News in London broadcast that it was just a publicity stunt on my part, Dad sued them for libel and collected a lot of money,” said Frank, Jr. “I forget how much we won, but I know that we donated the judgment to charity. Dad just wanted to keep the record clean and prove to the world that there was no hoax involved.”
Years later, Barry Keenan admitted that he had indeed made up the hoax story that had caused young Sinatra so much embarrassment.
“That kidnapping scarred young Frank for life,” said Nelson Riddle. “It brought him the wrong kind of publicity and alienated him even further from his father … but I think he’s turned out remarkably well given all that. He’s had the best mother in the world.”
Big Nancy devoted her life to her children, but made no secret of her desire to reconcile with their father, preferring to retain the status of a divorced woman and be Mrs. Barbato Sinatra for life than to remarry and lose the Sinatra name. She told friends, “Once you’ve had the best. …” Crushed by Frank’s engagement to Juliet Prowse in 1962, she said sadly, “Frank and I are a closed chapter. He wants a new life.” When the engagement was called off forty-three days later, she knew better than to hope for too much, for Frank had already told the press, “I love Nancy, but I’m not in love with her.”
Still, she raised her children to lionize their father, and she encouraged their dependence on him.
“I saw how close the family was when I did a play—Remains to Be Seen—with Tommy Sands in Chicago,” said Patricia Bosworth. “The whole Sinatra clan was there. I think even Frank, Jr., came down at one point. Every night they would go back to the hotel and call Daddy whether he was in Vegas or Beverly Hills, or wherever he was, and they would all talk to him except for Nancy, Sr., who sat on the couch watching television movies and eating big bags of hard candy. She kept saying, ‘Oh, what a life we had … I can’t help loving him still.… He’s a wonderful father, a wonderful father.’ One night she was watching Barbara Stanwyck on television and she said, ‘Barbara Stanwyck is just like me,’ meaning, I guess, that they both had lost their husbands to other women.”
Frank left the child rearing to Nancy, a strong, pragmatic woman who allowed him to be the soft, indulgent father. When Nancy, Jr., was nineteen years old, she became pregnant. Her mother took her to have an abortion.
“In those days, you didn’t sleep with anyone before marriage and you never had an abortion,” said Nancy, Jr. “I explained my reasons, and my mother understood. She never once made me feel guilty. Neither did my father. They simply didn’t want me hurt.”
“Little Nancy was a real daddy’s girl and she probably wouldn’t have married Tommy [Sands] if Frank hadn’t approved,” said Corinne Entratter. When Nancy pressured her father to give her husband movie work. Frank agreed to cast him in Come Blow Your Horn, but knowing that the director and producer did not want him, Tommy said he wasn’t right for the role and refused the part.
“Nancy put terrible pressure on her father to get Tommy in the movies,” said Chuck Moses. “Frank finally cast him in None but the Brave, which was the movie he directed in Hawaii, the first one he did under his new agreement with Warner Bros.”
That movie, a co-production of Japanese and American companies, nearly cost Frank his life on location in Hawaii. On Sunday, May 10, 1964, he invited several people to spend the day with him on the beach in front of the house he was renting in Kauai. His executive producer, Howard Koch, and his wife, Ruth, were there with Brad Dexter, a rugged, strapping actor who played the rough sergeant in the film. Dick Bakalyan, another actor, and Jilly Rizzo and his blue-haired wife, Honey, whom Frank had nicknamed the “Blue Jew’,” were also there. Murray Wolf, a song plugger, was up in the house, fifty yards away. Sensing Sinatra’s restlessness, Koch had excused himself to go back to work.
“Frank was getting itchy,” he said. “I was going back to the desk to do some rescheduling to see if we couldn’t finish [shooting] sooner.”
“It was a sun-drenched afternoon and we were all on the beach enjoying the ocean and that great tropical sun,” recalled Brad Dexter. “The waves were billowing higher and higher, though, and I noticed a treacherous riptide developing with a very strong undertow. I warned everyone to be careful in the water. Frank asked me to go to the house to bring him some wine and soda, so I went on up. While I was collecting everything in the kitchen, I heard Murray screaming hysterically from the living room that Frank was drowning. Í ran in and found Murray framed in front of the huge bay window in an emotional frenzy, pleading with me to save Frank’s life.”
Dropping the wine and soda, Dexter tore out of the house, running at full tilt down the long, winding path that led to the water’s edge. When he got there, he could barely see the bobbing heads of Frank and Ruth Koch in between the crashing waves. Everyone on the beach was paralyzed by
fear and drawing away from the shoreline as Brad raced past and, in a running dive, plunged into the ocean.
Fighting his way through the waves, he reached Ruth Koch first. “Save Frank,” she said, gasping for air. “I can’t go on.” Holding her head out of the water, Dexter tried to shake the submissiveness out of her.
“Nobody’s going to die,” he said. “We’re all going to come out of this alive. C’mon, fight. C’mon. You’re going to be okay.”
He held Ruth under one arm while he swam to Frank, who was even farther out. He was already suffering from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen, and his oxygen-starved brain was impairing his vision.
“I can hear you, but I can’t see you,” he cried, his face a pare shade of blue.
“Frank was pathetic, helpless like a baby, and he kept sputtering to me, ‘I’m going to die. I’m finished. It’s all over, over. Please take care of my kids. I’m going to die. My kids. I’m going to die,’ ” said Dexter. “I tried desperately to instill in him the will to fight for his life. I kept slapping him repeatedly on the face and back with stinging blows. I pulled him up and out of the water, over and over again, but he was as limp and lifeless as a rag doll. It was like grabbing a handful of jelly. He was so soft—there was no muscle tone, no firmness to hold on to, only squishy flesh. I yelled at him to help save himself, but he kept saying, ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die.’ I tried to get him angry enough to start fighting back by calling him a fucking lily-livered coward. A spineless, gutless shit. But he didn’t react. He seemed like he wanted to die, like he had no will to live. He just caved in.
“With one hand, I grabbed him by his ass and pulled him up and out of the water, but his body was a dead weight. Then I realized that he was unconscious, and so was Ruth. I had to fight continuously to hold them up and out of the crashing waves, praying that someone on the beach would summon help soon. I kept slapping them, pulling them out of the water, hoisting them up for air, but they were two dead weights. I cradled one in each of my arms and treaded water, trying to keep us all afloat, knowing that time was running out.