His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  Casting the sole dissenting vote, Senator Proxmire voted against confirming the Los Angeles lawyer as attorney general.

  Despite the controversy swirling around Frank, President Reagan remained loyal. This wasn’t the first time that Sinatra’s ties to organized crime had been brought to his attention. During the campaign, he had received a note from an outraged citizen about those gangland associations and had responded with a personal letter, saying: “I have known Frank Sinatra and Barbara Marx for a number of years; I’m aware of the incidents, highly publicized, quarrels with photographers, nightclub scrapes, etcetera and admit it is a life style I neither emulate nor approve. However, there is a less publicized side to Mr. Sinatra, which in simple justice must be recognized. It is a side he has worked very hard to keep hidden and unpublicized. I know of no one who has done more in the field of charity than Frank Sinatra. A few years ago a small town in the Midwest had suffered a terrible calamity; he went there on his own and staged a benefit to raise funds. All expenses were paid out of his pocket. He’d be very upset if he knew I’d told you these things. …”

  The letter later sold at auction for $12,500, the highest price ever paid for a letter from a living person. The secret buyer? Frank Sinatra.

  Days before the inauguration, the president-elect again was asked about Sinatra’s involvement with gangsters. “We’ve heard those things about Frank for years,” he said. “We just hope none of them are true.”

  Jubilant Republicans descended on Washington to stage the biggest and most expensive inaugural in history while the incumbent President from Plains, Georgia, tried frantically to negotiate for the release of the fifty-two Americans who had been held hostage in Iran by the followers of the Ayatollah Khomeni for 444 days after the seizure of the American embassy.

  Columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote that if the hostages were not released before Ronald Reagan took office on January 20, 1981, the new president should simply declare war on Iran. Frank Sinatra agreed, and immediately wired the editor of the National Review: DEAR BILL-BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO. IT IS THE MOST SENSIBLE SOLUTION I HAVE HEARD OR READ SINCE THE INCEPTION OF THE PROBLEM.

  Wearing a Philadelphia Eagles warm-up jacket, a gift from owner Leonard Tose, Frank worked in an opulent gold-carpeted office in inaugural headquarters. Here he made his calls, persuading Johnny Carson to be master of ceremonies, and recruiting Bob Hope, Ethel Merman, Jimmy Stewart, Donnie and Marie Osmond, Charlton Heston, Robert Merrill, Mel Tillis, Debbie Boone, Charlie Pride, Ben Vereen, and the U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club. He called the line-up of performers “the greatest talents America could offer to any audience.”

  Intent on raising $5.5 million for the Reagan Inaugural Committee, Frank directed and produced a three-hour show for 20,000 people in the Capital Centre, which was edited for television. Before the show started, he took the spotlight in a $2,500 tuxedo to escort the Vice-President and his wife to their seats, and again to greet the Reagans, whom he had placed in thronelike chairs a few feet away from the stage.

  He sang a lyrical revision of “Nancy with the Laughing Face,” retitled “Nancy with the Reagan Face.” Turning to the President’s wife, he said, “This is something special for our new first lady … I hope you like it, Nancy.” Craning to read the lyrics from a card in his hand, he made love to the music: “I’m so proud that you’re First Lady, Nancy, and so pleased that I’m sort of a chum/The next eight years will be fancy/as fancy as they come.”

  Nancy cried.

  So did the critics. With the exception of Clive Barnes in the New York Post, who pronounced the Sinatra gala gay and grand, most were repelled by what they saw.

  “It looked like a cross between Dial-A-Joke and Hee Haw” said Rex Reed in the New York Daily News. “I feel America is the greatest country in the world and the greatest talents in our country should have been up there proving it. Instead, we got a parade of jerks, clowns, and no-talent mediocrities that made you look forward to the brassiere and toilet-cleaner commercials. Except for the Metropolitan Opera’s Grace Bumbry, the show had nothing to offer anyone with intelligence or a respect for quality.”

  “For a celebration and cross-section of American bad taste, it was not all-inclusive, but not for lack of trying,” said Tom Shales in The Washington Post, dismissing the gala as “a tacky combination of a Hollywood awards show, a Kiwanis club talent contest, and a telethon stocked with fewer greats than near-greats and even more pure mediocrities.”

  Mike Royko of the Chicago Sun-Times was stunned by the performance of Ben Vereen, whose painted-on blackface and big white lips jolted 1981 sensibilities.

  “For sophistication, it would be hard to top having a shuffling, grimacing, bulging-eyed black man in bum’s clothing come out and do a minstrel routine in which he appeared to be brain-damaged,” Royko wrote. “You just don’t see that kind of sophisticated entertainment anymore—not since Stepin Fetchit died, and no other black actor came along who could so hilariously portray the dim-witted, gape-mouthed, obsequious black stereotype. It’s possible that this performance offended some black viewers, but it probably made many of the rich Republicans in the audience yearn for the days when you could get good domestic help.”

  At the cocktail party before the show, Barbara Sinatra, wearing a black sequined flamenco dress, talked with her husband’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, producer of the James Bond movies, saying that she thought politicians and actors were alike. “They’re both in a business under a lot of pressure,” she said. “Politicians need actors to help raise money. And it’s nice to be friends with somebody in office if there’s a problem in your hometown, in case you need a stoplight.”

  The next day, wrapped in a new mink coat, Barbara, clutching her lawn ticket, took her designated place in front of the U.S. Capitol to watch the swearing-in ceremonies. Frank, enraged at being excluded from the chosen one hundred people given special passes by the Reagans, barged up the steps to take his place on the platform with members of the first family and select friends.

  “Frank had not been invited to stand on the steps with the President and First Lady, but he bulldozed his way in anyway and took someone else’s place,” said a White House photographer. “He didn’t have an authorized ticket, but he ballsed his way through, ramming past the Secret Service and the Capitol police. No one had the nerve to stop him. No one!”

  33

  From the beginning, Frank’s gambling license seemed to be a sure thing, with the hearings in Las Vegas a mere formality. As early as December 8, 1980, Ned Day had written in the Las Vegas Valley Times that the license was “a lead-pipe cinch. You can tell by the pre-decision puffery which is starting to show up. …”

  Variety had concurred on December 31, 1980: “Frank Sinatra’s importance as adrenaline to the entire gambling industry here will probably offset disquieting allegations about ties to organized crime in his bid to become a key employee at Caesars Palace.”

  A week before the hearings, the Los Angeles Times headlined its Story: SINATRA’S GAMING LICENSE SEEMS ASSURED. The Las Vegas Sun agreed: “It’s absurd to think that [Frank Sinatra] wouldn’t be licensed. It’s naive to think that he shouldn’t have special treatment.”

  “Approval is an eighty percent certainty,” predicted George C. Swarts, former vice-chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. He pointed out that Las Vegas was losing too many gamblers to the new casinos in Atlantic City and needed Frank to bolster business. “When Sinatra’s in town, the money’s in town,” he said.

  Still, Mickey Rudin was not taking any chances. He wanted pictures of Frank and the Reagans in newspapers before the hearings and called the White House to ask why no photographs had been released of Sinatra with the President and First Lady. He was told that nothing could be released without the Reagans’ approval.

  “We had a lot of pictures with Frank, but Nancy had been so excited to see him that the veins on her neck stood out and she didn’t want those photos released,” said a Wh
ite House photographer. “Rudin was quite upset about it.”

  The lawyer need not have worried. He had the assurance of Nevada’s governor, Robert List, that things would be handled smoothly. In a secret meeting a few days before the hearings, the governor assured Frank that he would not be “kicked around or mutilated.” When asked if it was not improper to meet secretly with a licensing applicant to give him that kind of assurance, the governor said he simply had wanted to reassure Frank that the hearings would not become “a three-ring circus.”

  Former Gaming Commissioner Clair Haycock criticized the governor for the secret meeting, saying that Frank did not deserve a Nevada gaming license. “From what’s publicly known [about his ties to organized crime], I absolutely do not think he should be licensed,” he said. The former district attorney, George Franklin, agreed. “The very most we have going for us in the state is the image of gambling control,” he said. “If Sinatra, with his acknowledged background, can be approved for a license in Nevada, then even the image of control is destroyed. … It would sound the death knell for the gaming industry.”

  The governor took an active interest in the Sinatra case. Frank had raised more than five million dollars for athletic scholarships at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and had been awarded an honorary doctorate in 1976 for “charitable endeavors.”

  When asked about Frank’s friendship with the Chicago Mafia chief, Sam Giancana, chairman Richard Bunker had said, “I think it covers only one element of Mr. Sinatra’s story. It has to be considered, along with all the things that have transpired since then.”

  But Bunker was apprehensive about the forthcoming publication of Aladena “Jimmy The Weasel” Fratianno’s story, The Last Mafioso, by Ovid Demaris. He telephoned the author several times, asking to see the manuscript before publication, fearful that the Mafia informer would disclose damning material about Frank.

  “If we gave Mr. Sinatra a license, would we be embarrassed when your book comes out?” he asked Demaris. “Are we going to be hurt by that book?”

  Considering the licenses regularly granted unsavory characters, Demaris laughed. “How can one more hurt?” he asked.

  Fratianno refused to cooperate with the board after Richard Bunker insulted the organized crime informer. So did Judith Campbell Exner, former girlfriend of President Kennedy and Sam Giancana. Having been introduced to both men by Frank Sinatra, she could have told investigators about their triangular relationship, but she refused because she felt that the hearings were a sham.

  “What difference would it make?” she said later. “It was a foregone conclusion that Frank was going to get that license no matter what anybody said. They didn’t want to believe how close he was to Sam.”

  The governor and Chairman Bunker had been apprised of the information turned up by five full-time investigators and three part-time assistants, who spent nine months looking into the allegations of Frank’s links to organized crime. Not a law enforcement agency, the board was denied FBI cooperation, and so it lacked access to the surveillance reports, photographs and wiretaps that documented many of Frank’s intimate associations with mobsters.

  The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department also held back its investigative files from the board.

  Without subpoena power, the Nevada Gaming investigators were unable to compel the interviews they needed to explore Frank’s relationships to organized crime. They ended up getting a great deal of direction from Mickey Rudin, who arranged some of their interviews (Ava Gardner, Phyllis McGuire, Nancy Sinatra, Sr.) and discouraged others (Joe Fischetti and Mia Farrow). Because of these restrictions, the investigation was necessarily limited and could not possibly have been as far-reaching as promised. Relying primarily on newspaper stories, the agents traveled to Acapulco, to Miami, to Chicago, to Australia. They interviewed Miss Gardner in London, where she served them champagne and said how wonderful Frank was, without mentioning his close friendship with Sam Giancana, and the many times she had been with Frank and the Mafia chieftain in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, New York, and New Jersey. In New Jersey, they discovered that Frank had lied on his license application by saying that he had never been arrested, but Mickey Rudin quickly took the blame, saying that Frank’s 1938 arrest on a morals charge seemed so inconsequential that he didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

  While some of the agents worked on the personal investigation, others checked Frank’s finances after he submitted a statement claiming a net worth of $14,107,137.29. In addition to $865,242.40 invested in publicly held companies, he listed $1,195,132.26 in his music companies* and the Budweiser (Anheuser-Busch, Inc.) distributorship he owned in Long Beach, California. His lawyer later testified under oath that the distributorship, a large company with thirty employees, grossed close to $30 million a year. Frank also listed $650,683.01 for other investments, including his trucking company, FAS Trucking, the aircraft hangar he owned in Palm Springs, a building in New York City, a wine distributorship, and a water well in Palm Springs.

  His fixed assets totaled $4,591,431.33 for his houses in Rancho Mirage, Los Angeles, and Pinyon Crest. His New York property was in Mickey Rudin’s name. Sinatra’s other assets totalled $5,376,288.05 for cars, art, silver, china, office equipment, pension and profit sharing, and life insurance.†

  A net worth of fourteen million dollars seemed extremely modest for a man who received about sixty thousand dollars a month in royalties from Columbia Records, although he hadn’t recorded for them in decades. Between 1953 and 1962, he had recorded at least twenty-five million dollars’ worth for Capitol, and from 1961 to 1965, he recorded $14.4 million in albums and $1.5 million in singles for Reprise Records. He had earned one million dollars for each of his movies since 1963 as well as his television specials. He had sold his twenty-percent interest in Warner Bros.-Seven Arts to Kinney in 1969 for $22,500,000 in cash and convertible debentures. Mickey Rudin received $1.5 million for his services in negotiating the sale.

  In 1970, Sinatra and Rudin had formed a company with Danny Schwartz (SSR Investment Co.) to buy 200,000 shares of National General Corporation (a giant conglomerate which included motion picture and book publishing subsidiaries), plus $2,200,000 principal value of NGC’s four-percent debentures, which they sold in 1973 for about nineteen million dollars. In 1976, Sinatra had bought 420,000 shares of stock in Del Webb Corp., which owned four casinos in Nevada, for $2,139,294, and Mickey Rudin had bought 113,500 shares for $293,698. Together with Las Vegas publisher Hank Greenspun, the three men controlled eight percent of the company’s common stock. They wanted the company to pay for the investigation necessary to license Frank—a matter of some $500,000—but when they saw Frank faced considerable political opposition to receiving a license, they sold their stock to Ramada Inns for ten million dollars.

  Three years later, Frank still wanted to be licensed, so Caesars Palace agreed to submit his name for a “key employee” license, but the casino refused to pay the cost of the investigation. Frank assumed the burden himself and paid about $500,000 to have his background checked.

  By 9:18 A.M. on February 11, 1981, the board was ready to take Sinatra’s testimony in public hearing. He walked into city council chambers on East Stewart Avenue accompanied by his wife, his attorneys, his publicist, July Rizzo, and his various character witnesses. The first to testify was Peter Pitchess, the sheriff of Los Angeles County, who had given Frank a special deputy badge of the L.A. Police Department years before. Introducing himself as a “very good friend” of the applicant, the sheriff ended his testimony by stating: “If Mr. Sinatra is a member of the Mafia, then I am the godfather.”

  At the time Sheriff Pitchess made this remark, Ralph Salerno, one of the county’s leading experts on organized crime, was conducting a seminar in California for law enforcement officers. The next day Salerno addressed his class, many of whom worked for the sheriff: “When you see Pete Pitchess, tell him I say, ‘Hello, Godfather!’ ” Six months later, Sinatra took Sheriff Pitchess and Mrs. Pitch
ess with him to South Africa.

  The next character witness was an Episcopal priest, Father Herbert Ward, executive director of St. Jude’s Ranch for Children in Las Vegas, who raved about Frank’s generosity and the fact that he “gives glory to God.” The priest was followed by the chancellor of the University of Nevada, for which Sinatra’s benefits had raised more than five million dollars since 1974. He praised Frank’s “many unheralded philanthropic endeavors.”

  Then came Hank Greenspun, who reminisced about the Cal-Neva incident in 1963, when Frank turned on Ed Olsen, chairman of the Nevada Gaming Board, for challenging him about having Sam Giancana on the premises. Mr. Greenspun revised history.

  “It was nothing more than a shouting match [which] developed into a total character besmirchment, a hellish experience that this man has lived with for sixteen years,” he said.

  One of the star witnesses was Gregory Peck, who told the commission that Frank was a good citizen “who does more than anyone I know to serve his fellow man.”

  Kirk Douglas followed with an effusive recital of Frank’s goodness and offered into testimony an article he had written for The New York Times which the paper had rejected. The article entitled “Virtue Is Not Photogenic” was filled with awe and admiration for Sinatra’s generosity.

  Sinatra’s lawyer then addressed the commissioners, saying that under the Freedom of Information Act Frank had petitioned the government for all his files and had received “fourteen pounds” of FBI files and “another thirteen or so pounds” of IRS files, which he said he made available to the staff investigators. Dismissing most of the information as unsubstantiated and insignificant, the lawyer testified that the FBI was “out to get Mr. Sinatra” with “the net result [being] nothing.” He read from an IRS report that said while “the taxpayer has openly consorted and traveled with Giancana, the evidence supporting a joint financial—financial or nominee interest between the taxpayer and Giancana is lacking.”