Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Frank Sr. at first wanted his son to go to college. “Get your degree and then go into show business,” he told him. But, frustrated with his studies, Frankie soon dropped out of the University of Southern California. At eighteen, after a stint as a bank teller, he started working part-time at Dad’s Reprise Records and Essex Productions. However, he yearned to get up onstage and make a name for himself. At this same time, members of the original Tommy Dorsey band decided to tour together and found themselves in need of a lead vocalist. They asked Frank Jr. if he was interested in the job.

  With the passing of the years, Frank Jr. had become even more bookish and quiet. He was intellectual and not at all “hip.” His peers had long hair, wore bell-bottoms and Nehru jackets. Not Frank Jr. He came onto the scene around 1962, when Elvis was waning and before the Beatles hit. There was a small window of opportunity and he snuck in. He was a novelty. “As soon as I come out onstage for about the first three minutes of my act, there’s a rather low murmur throughout the audience,” he said when he was nineteen. “They compare us, and either they are very, very happy that I look like him or that I sound like my father, or they’re disappointed or they feel that perhaps I’m mimicking him. Some people get up and leave. Other people are delighted and smile. Some of the ladies begin to cry. Some nights, I don’t feel like being compared, but there’s no getting around it. I can’t fight city hall. If anyone thinks I’m trying to mimic the singing style of my father, I’m not. That’s just the way I came out of the factory; it’s my standard equipment.”

  Frank Jr. never quite understood the fascination with him just because he was a Sinatra. He often recalls the story of being in a restaurant and being approached by a fan who exclaimed, “You’re Frank Sinatra’s son!” She then asked, “Can I have one of your French fries?” Frank asked why. She said she wanted it as a souvenir. “I was disgusted,” Frank would recall. “Is this what life is? Is this what being Frank Sinatra’s son means? Giving a potato to a stranger as a keepsake. ‘Look,’ I told her, ‘you think I’m someone special, but I’m just like you.’ I shook the ketchup bottle over the French fries. ‘See. The ketchup won’t come out. I have trouble with ketchup bottles too.’ ”

  On September 12, 1963, the nineteen-year-old Sinatra made his professional singing debut at the Royal Box of the Americana Hotel in New York. The audience was filled with celebrities, friends of his father’s, and curious media types. It was a terrific opening, and during it Frank Jr. exuded a great deal of self-confidence and vocal proficiency. When attempts to coax him back onstage for an encore were unsuccessful, a comedian in the audience quipped, “He’s just like his old man. He’s already left with a broad.”

  Frank skipped his son’s opening night because he didn’t want to steal the focus during his big moment. Instead, he would attend another performance later in the week. Backstage, it was clear to any observers that the two men had great respect for one another. Privately they may have had their problems, but one thing they had in common was a love for performing. Frank couldn’t have been more proud of his son. “What do you think of your kid?” a reporter from the New York Times asked him as he stood backstage with his arm around Frank Jr. “Well, I think he’s marvelous,” Frank said, his blue eyes full of sudden warmth. “I actually think he sings better than I did at his age.”

  “Aw, Pop, come on,” Frank Jr. said with a bashful smile. “That’ll be the day.”

  “No, I really mean it,” Frank said. Frank noted that he had just seen Frank Jr. performing at the Flamingo Lounge in Las Vegas about a month earlier, “and the kid’s even better now than he was then!”

  “And what do you think of your old man?” the reporter asked.

  “He’s my hero,” Frank Jr. said, without giving it a second thought. “Everything I am is because of this man,” he said, beaming at his father. “I just want to be like my pop. That’s pretty much all I want, you know?”

  “Has he given you advice?”

  “He told me not to go into the business unless you know what you’re up against,” Frank Jr. said as his father watched him with pride. “ ‘Don’t go into it ignorant like I had to go into it,’ he told me. He had me study electronics and the use of magnetic tape, the use of speakers. He had me study instruments . . . to learn how to keep the horns warm . . . to know how to keep the reeds wet . . .”

  “Think you guys will ever work together?” the reporter asked.

  “We actually had a gig planned,” Frank said. He added that it was going to be a fund-raiser for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Santa Monica. It would have been the first time father and son would have shared a bill. “But it was canceled because of . . .” Frank shook his head; a sigh escaped his lips.

  Frank Jr. picked up his dad’s thought. “It was four days after President Kennedy was assassinated,” he explained. “My pop couldn’t sing. Me neither. It was impossible.”

  Frank pulled his son in closer. “He’s a good kid,” he concluded with a smile. “I got a good kid here.”

  About a month later, in early December 1963, Frank Sinatra Jr. would open at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Casino in Nevada, and it would be there that his fate and that of Barry Keenan would intersect.

  Delusional Thinking

  In the spring of 1997, thirty-four years after Keenan, Amsler, and Irwin planned to abduct the son of the most popular singer in the country, fifty-seven-year-old Keenan gave his first interview regarding the kidnapping and the events leading up to it. The scene of the interview was the same Polo Lounge in which the plot was concocted. At the time, Keenan was a real estate developer. He’d once been the youngest member of the Pacific Stock Exchange in Los Angeles, having received his securities license on his twenty-first birthday. His father was a prominent stockbroker with his own firm, Keenan and Company, operating from downtown Los Angeles.

  Keenan’s middle-class existence in West Los Angeles was rocked by a 1960 automobile accident in which he suffered debilitating back injuries. Three years later, he was depressed, in chronic pain, addicted to drugs and desperate for Percodan. Indeed, narcotics addiction and alcohol abuse were his biggest challenges. His parents were disappointed in him; he owed money to them and to close friends. At the age of twenty-three, he recalled, he was “a washed-up stockbroker.” His thinking clouded by drugs, he was anxious to find a solution to his financial predicament and also to get enough money to feed his addiction. He considered robbing a bank, but decided it was too risky. Selling drugs? He didn’t have the street savvy for such an undertaking. “But I knew you could get a lot of money for kidnapping somebody who was rich,” he recalled.

  In a mad, hazy state of mind, he compiled a list of potential victims, the wealthy youngsters with whom he had gone to school in Los Angeles. He finally settled on Tony Hope, Bob Hope’s twenty-three-year-old son.

  “But after thinking about Tony for a few days I discounted him because Bob Hope had done so much for our country, with the USO tours and so forth,” said Keenan. “I felt it would be un-American to kidnap his son. I might have been planning a kidnapping,” he recalled, a grim smile settling on his face, “but I still thought of myself as a solid citizen. I also thought of one of Bing Crosby’s sons. We had palled around together for a while. But it didn’t seem right to do that to Bing. Somehow, he seemed too fragile to me. I didn’t think he could handle it.

  “But Frank Sinatra, I thought, now there’s a tough guy,” Keenan remembered. “He could definitely take the stress of having his son kidnapped. Plus, I had seen him walk all over the parents of some of the kids at my school who were TV and film producers, so I rationalized that I didn’t care too much about him because he clearly didn’t care about anybody else. However, I wanted to make sure that Nancy Sr. and the girls didn’t have a traumatic experience, so I planned a short kidnapping, just twenty-four hours.”

  A devout Catholic, Barry Keenan went to church weekly to pray for guidance in his endeavor. His agreement with his maker was that the caper he was planning had to b
e for the Sinatras’ “highest good” as well as for his own; otherwise, “it would be wrong to do it. I knew that the father and son were estranged,” he remembered, “that father didn’t approve of Junior, they weren’t close, he was away at boarding school.

  “I knew all of this from having been over at Nancy’s house,” he explained. “She was my friend from grade school all the way to University High in West L.A. We had gone to the same schools for twelve years together, and for six of them we were in the same classroom together. We graduated together. My best friend, Dave Stephens, dated her in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. My mom would take Nancy and Dave places, and Nancy confided in my mom about little problems they were having.”

  As a friend of Nancy Jr.’s, Keenan had also met Frank Jr., but the four-year difference in age kept them from becoming friends. He also saw Frank Sr. at the home occasionally, and recognized that “he was a pretty hard-boiled guy.” Sinatra took a group of youngsters, including Barry Keenan, on a school junket, all of them crammed into an Eldorado sedan, with Frank driving.

  Keenan, who admitted he was “obviously delusional,” recalled, “I somehow thought that a kidnapping would serve the Sinatras by bringing father and son together. Also, Senior was in a little trouble for entertaining the Mafia at Cal-Neva Lodge, and I thought, ‘Well, this would take the heat off of him. Plus, it may bring him and his ex-wife, Nancy, closer together.’ ”

  Over the course of two months, the kidnappers finalized plans for the abduction. It was decided that Frank Jr. would be abducted during an engagement at the Cocoanut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel on November 22, 1963. Keenan had a strong alibi for that day—except for the actual abduction period—because he intended to be at a UCLA football game the next day and be seen by many people there. That morning, though, the kidnapping was suddenly canceled after JFK was assassinated in Dallas. “No matter what you were doing that day, your plans were changed,” said Barry Keenan.

  Kidnapping Frankie

  The news of JFK’s assassination struck Frank Sinatra, as it did the rest of the world, like a thunderbolt. Frank was in a cemetery filming Robin and the 7 Hoods for Warners when he heard about it. After he was finished filming cemetery location shots for the film, he went to his Palm Springs compound, where he stayed in seclusion for three days, canceling the Martin Luther King benefit concert with Frank Jr. and the Count Basie band. “My father was a private man, and never more so than when he was grieving,” recalled Tina Sinatra. “He wasn’t good alone, but he healed alone.”

  “After he disappeared, I couldn’t reach him for those three dark days,” Nancy Sinatra recalled. “He had gone home to Palm Springs and locked himself away in his bedroom, the only part of the house that was the same as when his friend, the president, had visited. He never stopped loving and supporting Jack Kennedy. He thought JFK was great for the country, great for the world.” Frank wanted to go to the funeral. However, for some reason, he wasn’t invited. He wasn’t offended; it wasn’t a party, after all, it was a funeral. Whatever the reasons, he accepted that he would not be present in Washington on that dark day.

  Meanwhile, as Frank grieved the loss of his friend, the clock was ticking. Unbeknownst to him, his only son’s safety was in jeopardy. His kidnappers had hoped to abduct him at the end of November, but the Kennedy assassination had quashed those plans. Then they hoped to nab him at a singing job at the Arizona State Fair in early December; however, the logistics for that abduction didn’t work out either.

  By this time, Keenan’s pal Joe Amsler was beginning to have second thoughts; he wanted to back out. He had dated Nancy on several occasions and was beginning to feel guilty about the plans that were afoot. In order to keep him and John Irwin interested in the plot, Keenan began doling out fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills to them. It would later be learned that this money was coming from Dean Torrence, of Jan and Dean, one of the top recording groups in the country. However, Torrance would insist that he didn’t know what Keenan planned to do with the money, only that Keenan had promised him a big payoff in a few weeks.

  Keenan knew he had to act. He learned that Frank Jr. would be appearing at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe with Sam Donahue and musicians from Tommy Dorsey’s band. Telling Amsler that they would both be working for a construction company in Tahoe, he managed to get his friend to Nevada before he broke the news to him: Frank Sinatra Jr. was in town and they were going to go and get him. Keenan then telephoned Reprise Records to find out where Frankie was staying during the engagement; whoever answered the phone actually divulged that young Sinatra was at Harrah’s two-story South Lodge, in Room 417. The lodge was across the parking lot, about a hundred yards from the casino.

  On the snowy Sunday evening of December 8, 1963, at about 9:30 p.m., Barry Keenan made his move. With Joe Amsler outside the room on the lodge’s landing between the first and second stories and John Irwin in Los Angeles (where he was told to wait for further instructions), Keenan knocked on the door to Room 417.

  Inside, Frank Jr. had just finished eating dinner with John Foss, a twenty-six-year-old trumpet player with the Dorsey band. Sinatra Jr., in his boxers and freshly shaved for the ten o’clock performance, was killing time before putting on his tuxedo.

  “I knocked,” Keenan remembered. “Someone said, ‘Who is it?’ I said, ‘Room service. I have a package for you.’ Junior, I think, said, ‘Come in.’ I walked into the room, and it appeared that I was delivering a liquor order to him, because I had a wine box with me. It was actually filled with pinecones. I put the box on the table.

  “Then I tried to whip the gun out, a long-barreled blue steel .38 revolver. But I couldn’t get it out of my pocket, I was so nervous. I actually had to struggle with it. When I did get it out, I pointed it at Frank Jr. ‘Don’t make any noise and nobody’ll get hurt,’ I told him. Then I repeated it, ‘Don’t make any noise and nobody’ll get hurt,’ like a stuck record.

  “I knew Junior was a gun collector,” recalled Keenan. “While he was away at boarding school, Nancy and I would go into his room just to see what was in there, snooping, I guess, and he had all kinds of guns. Gun aficionados know when they’re looking at an empty or loaded weapon. So I knew that if I didn’t have a loaded gun, he would have known it; therefore I made sure it was loaded.

  “Joe [Amsler] walked in at that point. He was in a state of shock, as was I. This was the real thing. It was really happening. It was as if I was in a director’s chair, looking down at a film as it was being made.”

  Frankie recently recalled, “When someone under the pretense of delivering a Christmas package screws a .38 in your ear, it gets your undivided attention and you become conscious of many things. The first thing that struck me was that I needed to change my shorts.”

  As Sinatra’s son, Frankie was usually very aware of his surroundings; he’d had close calls in the past. Once when he was working on Long Island, a man followed him back to his motel room and confronted him, saying that his father had stolen his girlfriend back in 1941. He was very irate. Facing him in the doorway, Frank Jr. warned him, “If you take one step into this room, I’ll consider it burglary and take whatever steps I have to take to protect myself.” The guy charged into the room. “I picked up an ashtray and hit him right on his head and fractured his skull,” Frank recalled. “The sheriff came and there was blood all over the floor and he said, ‘Whose blood is that?’ I said, ‘His.’ ” Frank Jr. was asked if he wanted to press charges; he didn’t. There had been other incidents as well, so Frankie was usually not caught off guard. On this night in Lake Tahoe, though, he was taken by surprise.

  “ ‘Where’s some money?’ I demanded,” Barry Keenan recalled. “We were completely out of money, and we needed to rob Junior before we could kidnap him because we didn’t have enough gas to get to the hideaway house in Los Angeles.”

  “But I don’t have any money,” Frank said, his fear rising.

  “You gotta have some money,” Keenan said. “Whatever you got, you bett
er give it to me, now.”

  Frank started rifling through his pockets. “I’ve got a twenty-dollar bill,” he offered, “and some change. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “Fine. Hand it to me. What do you have?” Keenan asked John Foss.

  “I’ve got nothin’, sir,” John Foss answered, scared out of his wits.

  “Okay, well, we’d better take one of you guys with us,” Keenan said. Trying to act as if he was making a random decision, he pointed to Frank Jr. “You. You’re coming with us.”

  “But I’m in my underwear,” Junior protested.

  “Then get dressed, because you’re coming with us.”

  “I taped up John Foss with adhesive tape,” remembered Keenan. “Joe was freaking out by this time. So I had the gun on Joe, telling him what to do, to calm down, put a strip of adhesive across Foss’s mouth, put a blindfold on Frank.”

  After taking both men’s wallets, Keenan and Amsler forced Frank Jr. into the cold night at gunpoint. He was now wearing gray slacks, brown shoes without socks, and a dark blue windbreaker over a T-shirt, and was blindfolded with a sleep mask. The temperature was twenty-five degrees, and it was snowing heavily. As they left, Barry Keenan shouted at Frank’s constrained companion, “Keep your trap shut for ten minutes or we’ll kill your friend. We mean business. If we don’t make Sacramento, your pal is dead.” Then he turned around, went back into the room, and ripped the telephone cord from the wall.