“Women were treated like chattels,” Deiro said, “and Sinatra was probably the first real star to have groupies. Some women threw their room keys onto the stage. But most of the women he fooled around with were professionals—hookers.”
DURING “THE SUMMIT” SHOWS, the sybarites at the Sands were to play host to a distinguished visitor from Washington, Senator John F. Kennedy, Peter Lawford’s brother-in-law. With hindsight, Frank’s 1957 reconciliation with Brother-in-Lawford, as he took to calling him, had been so swift and total as to seem peculiar. The Lawfords had begun weekending at Frank’s Palm Springs home so often that they kept clothes there. So warmly had Frank acted toward Patricia Kennedy Lawford that Frank’s valet Jacobs thought he planned to seduce her. The Lawfords named the daughter born to them in late 1958 Victoria Frances—Victoria in honor of her Uncle Jack’s reelection to the Senate, Frances for Francis Sinatra, who became her very generous godfather.
Looking back, however, Lawford would reflect on the fact that Frank had made up with him at the very time his brother-in-law was being talked up as the hot candidate for the 1960 Democratic nomination. “I think we were very attractive to Frank,” he said later, “because of Jack. . . . Frank could see a bandwagon coming.”
23
The Guest from Chicago
JOHN F. KENNEDY appeared to bring to his presidential candidacy much more than his keen intellect and a record of bravery in World War II. As he entered his forties he seemed youthful, robust, a family man with a stylish wife and baby. The image was to woo millions of voters, but it was in large part bogus.
Kennedy was suffering from a chronic, painful illness that would have destroyed his candidacy had it been made public at the time. He had been hospitalized time and again for intestinal ailments, back trouble, and Addison’s disease, a condition of the adrenal glands that reduces the body’s ability to resist infection. The extent of the health problems became, in the words of the scholar Robert Dallek, who had access to medical records at the Kennedy Library in 2002, “one of the best-kept secrets of recent U.S. history.” Only intimates learned of Kennedy’s profligate use of drugs, some prescribed by his doctors, some— amphetamines—provided by a celebrity quack to help Kennedy cope with pain and stress, some purely recreational.
“Peter Lawford and the future president did lines of cocaine” at Palm Springs on several occasions, according to George Jacobs. Kennedy said the cocaine was “for his back,” then followed up with a “bad-boy wink.”
Where sex was concerned Kennedy behaved, as future secretary to the Cabinet Fred Dutton put it, “like God, fucking anybody he wants to anytime he feels like it.” “I once asked him why,” said the writer Priscilla Johnson, who worked for Kennedy in the 1950s, “why he was taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. . . . Finally he shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know really. I guess I just can’t help it.’ ” “Where sex was concerned,” Kennedy’s friend Senator George Smathers once said, “he felt he could walk on water.” The same applied to his—and his father’s—involvement with the Mafia.
Joe Kennedy had been deeply involved in bootlegging, and that had led to dealings with some of Lucky Luciano’s closest associates. Frank Costello said he and Kennedy were “partners” in the illegal liquor business. According to Richard Mahoney, who has written on the history of the Kennedy family, they still had business links in the mid-1950s; they fell out, then, over a Manhattan property deal. Other criminals, Joe Stacher, Moe Dalitz, and Owney Madden, all spoke of Kennedy’s Prohibition era activity. “I discussed the Kennedy partnership with him many times,” Madden’s attorney Q. Byrum Hurst said. “Owney controlled all the nightclubs in New York . . . and Joe wanted the outlets for his liquor.” John Kohlert, a musician Al Capone took under his wing for a while, recalled being present in 1926 at a meeting at which Joe and Capone discussed a bootleg liquor deal. In Canadian customs documents for the same year, Kennedy’s name appears along with those of Capone and mobster Jake Guzik, listed with them as an “importer” of whiskey to the United States.
Joe’s close friend Mike McLaney, whose name has been linked to syndicate operations, said in a 1994 interview that he knew Kennedy used routes “controlled by Lucky Luciano” to bring in bootleg liquor. Kennedy features in two bootleggers’ stories of liquor truck hijackings, in one of which, in southern New England, eleven men were shot dead. Dolly Sinatra, her granddaughter Tina recalled, spoke of Joe as a “rum-running son-of-a-bitch.”
After Prohibition, Joe Kennedy added to his fortune by importing liquor legally. As his glittering public career proceeded—as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Maritime Commission, and as United States ambassador to Britain—he continued to deal with mobsters. The Kefauver Committee heard testimony that a lawyer Kennedy picked to represent his liquor company, Tom Cassara, was a Mafia front man. In 1946, when Cassara was gunned down in Chicago, Kennedy promptly sold the company and its inventory of Scotch to two former bootleggers for $8 million ($74 million today). One of the purchasers was a longtime associate of Willie Moretti.
Joe got out of the liquor business just as his son John was getting into politics, and that was probably no coincidence. The whiskey trade, as Joe’s biographer Richard Whalen put it, had become “vaguely embarrassing ” now that he was focused on putting a Kennedy in the White House. Joe’s abysmal performance as ambassador to London, the diplomatic blunders and opposition to U.S. involvement in the war against Nazi Germany that had culminated in his resignation, had long since put paid to his own presidential prospects. He was now pinning his hopes on his son Jack.
John Kennedy was at first ambivalent about entering politics but, his father recalled, “I told him he had to.” Winning at any cost was an overriding imperative for the Kennedy children, and Joe brought all his resources to bear when it came to winning in politics. “Everything Joe got he bought and paid for,” said a close aide, “and politics is like war. It takes three things to win. The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.” Kennedy cash flowed at an unprecedented rate during John’s congressional campaign of 1946, much of it distributed covertly.
With his election to the House and then the Senate, John Kennedy showed that he had the potential to fulfill his father’s hopes. “I will work out the plans to elect you President,” Joe was heard by a Kennedy staffer to say as early as 1952 during his son’s run for the Senate, as though winning the White House were already a fait accompli. Those plans were to involve the Mafia.
ACCORDING TO BILL BONANNO, son of Mafia boss Joe Bonanno, Joe Kennedy visited his father at his Arizona retreat in 1954, long before the start of overt campaigning for the presidency, and again in 1956. Joe Bonanno, who had originally come to power in New York as a Luciano ally, was a member of the “Commission” that arbitrated relations between the Mafia families. He was a longtime friend of Frank Costello, whom he admired, he said, for his “skill at cultivating friendships among politicians and public officials.” Decades earlier, Bonanno’s illegal arrival in the United States had been facilitated by Willie Moretti.
“No Democrat in New York got elected,” Bill Bonanno has said, without a go-ahead from the city’s key Mafia families. His father was not only head of one of those families, but also influenced politics in the Southwest. Before the 1956 election, according to Bill, “Kennedy told my father that he wanted to get his son on the national ticket—if only to prepare the way for a real run at the presidency in 1960. . . . My father— and his allies in New York and in the Arizona Democratic establishment—agreed.” West Coast mobsters duly produced money for the Kennedy campaign chest.
In 1958, FBI agents reported, John F. Kennedy attended mass in Tucson with Joe Bonanno’s best friend, Gus Battaglia, a senior official of the Arizona state Democratic Party. According to Bonanno, he himself met with Kennedy at Battaglia’s ranch. He was also in touch with Frank Sinatra, whom he invited to sing at a family weddi
ng, and, according to FBI reports, would be a guest of Frank at a gathering in Atlantic City in 1959.
In the end, though, it was not Bonanno who served as the Kennedys’ principal mob connection during the race for the White House.
SAM GIANCANA was one of the most powerful criminals of the mid-twentieth century. Born Salvatore Giangana in 1908, the son of poor Sicilian immigrants, he left school at eleven, was jailed for auto theft at seventeen, and arrested for murder at eighteen—a charge dropped when a prosecution witness was killed. By that time he had become Sam “Mooney” Giancana, a thin-featured youth with a sadistic streak and a growing reputation in Chicago as a getaway driver. He was soon jailed again, for armed robbery.
After World War II, he was often seen at the side of Al Capone’s heir, Tony “The Big Tuna” Accardo. By the 1950s, the Chicago crime empire controlled myriad clubs, jukebox rackets, elements of the movie industry, gambling in Las Vegas, and enterprises in Cuba. And in 1957, when Accardo stepped aside, the power passed to Giancana.
He lived to all appearances like a respectable middle-class family man. Home was a yellow-brick house in a leafy suburb, spacious but not ostentatious, shared with a loyal, industrious wife. Their three daughters attended private Catholic schools, and Giancana played golf at a country club. He gave to worthy charities, collected paintings and antique porcelain. When his wife died young, he was seen on his knees in church, weeping.
Giancana dressed, one of his daughters thought, “like someone in a Fortune 500 executive photograph . . . could have been mistaken for the president of General Motors.” The tailored suit, white shirt, and tie might have passed muster, though the solid gold cuff links, with the initials in diamonds, were over the top.
Some thought Giancana charming. Eddie Fisher saw him as “a warm, vital, funny man, who just happened to have these big, burly guys hanging around him all the time.” “He’s such great fun,” said Joe Shimon, a former Washington police inspector, who welcomed Giancana to his home more than once: “My wife thinks he’s lovable.”
Others disagreed. Yul Brynner’s son Rock Brynner remembered him as “scary, so profoundly ugly it was hard to look at him. His ugliness, unlike most people’s, seemed to reflect his soul.” “He was as serious as death and taxes,” said Michael Corbitt, a gas station owner who got sucked into crime by Giancana, “very moody. He could give you a look that was second to none. A killer look.” The Mafia boss beat one of his daughters, and had to be restrained from causing her serious injury. He once shot a television to pieces when it did not work properly. An FBI report characterized him as “ruthless, without human feeling.”
Giancana lived by the gun, the instrument used in crimes in which he was implicated, the robbing and killing of a barber in 1926, in another murder two years later, in a kidnapping in 1946, that Giancana ordered to be used to kill a banker in 1948, then to finish off a “friend of the family” involved in the same case. That victim, the forensic evidence indicated, had been tied hand and foot, forced to kneel, then strangled and left riddled with bullets.
Frank Sinatra would one day insist, in sworn testimony to the Nevada gaming authorities, that he had not met Giancana until about 1960. In 1959 he told the FBI that he did not even know how to reach Giancana, months after the bureau had established that the mobster had Frank’s home and business numbers. The connection between the two men had in fact been forged years earlier, as a mass of information confirms.
They had first been introduced, an FBI document suggests, by the New Jersey mafioso Angelo De Carlo, who had hired Frank when he was starting out. In the early 1950s, when Frank’s career stalled, Giancana found him work. “That hoodlum,” Frank told Ava Gardner, “is responsible for giving me a job.”
Giancana’s daughter Antoinette recalled Frank having sung at a charity performance her mother organized in 1953. Her father and Frank embraced and seemed “very affectionate,” she said, when they met privately the following year. Often, though by no means always, they were discreet about meeting. “My father would be the go-between,” said Marilyn Sinatra, daughter of the Sinatra cousin who worked for Frank in California. “Sam would come to our house with his men. Or my dad would take them to meet Frank wherever Frank said it was possible to meet.”
George Jacobs recalled an occasion in 1956, when Giancana came to stay at Frank’s Palm Springs house. He was clearly a “special guest,” and Frank was “nervous about everything being just so, the linens, the soap, the caviar.” When the mobster showed up, accompanied by fellow gangsters, Frank seemed “thrilled.” He followed Giancana around, Jacobs said, always “on perfect behavior, like a little altar boy.” “What he and Giancana talked about,” Jacobs recalled, “was business, the business of running casinos. The numbers I heard them throw around made my head reel. . . . Sinatra owned a piece of the Sands, in return for his making it his exclusive venue in Vegas, and he loved the notion of being a capitalist, a proprietor. He wanted to own even more. Sam Giancana was his mentor in these ambitions. . . . Mr. S. insisted the man was a wizard, a business mastermind.”
In early 1958, when Frank performed at the Sands, he and the Mafia boss were seen together at another casino, El Rancho Vegas. In the summer, when Frank was in Indiana making Some Came Running, Giancana was there too. One of Giancana’s men, who served him as bodyguard, driver, and chef, cooked for Frank, as he would on location for other movies. Shirley MacLaine, who met Giancana during the filming, did not at first know who he was and one night, when the mobster kept beating her at gin rummy, jokingly pointed a water pistol at him. He responded by pulling a very real .38 pistol on her.
The same month, when Frank arrived in Chicago, Joe Fischetti picked him up at the airport. The following day, accompanied by Dean Martin, he was driven to the residence of Giancana’s predecessor, Tony Accardo. There, the FBI was told, the pair gave a private “command performance.” Frank and Martin also sang for Giancana and “a closed group of individuals” in 1959, according to FBI files, at the Armory Lounge, the former speakeasy Giancana used as his headquarters.
Records indicate that in July, when Giancana threw an elaborate wedding for his daughter Bonnie at the Fontainebleau, Frank flew from California to attend. The same month, while playing the 500 Club in Atlantic City, Frank rented the entire first floor of the Claridge Hotel for a “private party” that included both Giancana and Joe Bonanno.
Giancana enjoyed having entertainers around him, and liked to manipulate them. It was to him that Sammy Davis Jr. had turned when threatened by the mob because of his affair with Kim Novak, and it was he who, after Davis married a black girl, told him the threat had been lifted. According to information the FBI later received, Giancana was the secret owner of the Worldwide Actors Agency, which numbered among its clients Jimmy Durante, Sonny King—and Frank. He was distracted too by the glitz and glamour of show business. He had been “in heat” since his wife’s death, as his biographer William Brashler put it, and that gave him and Frank a common interest. FBI reports reflect Frank having introduced the mobster to a woman, and vice versa. Keely Smith also became close to Giancana.
Frank went out of his way to please the Mafia boss. When he learned that Giancana liked a particular Cuban cigar, he arranged for a supply to be flown in. More significantly, he presented the Mafia boss with a star sapphire pinkie ring. Giancana, who admired Frank’s work, obtained a print of From Here to Eternity and viewed it time and again. He referred to Frank as a “skinny little runt,” but in tones that for him, his daughter Antoinette thought, denoted a measure of affection. She did not, however, think her father had much respect for entertainers. He merely used them, she said, “to further his own interests.”
Politicians ranked even lower in Giancana’s estimation. “They’re all rats,” Antoinette recalled her father saying, “lower than a snake’s belly . . . low-life individuals.” Politicians did, however, like entertainers, have their uses.
24
The Candidate and the Courtesan
/> JOHN F. KENNEDY and Frank had first met in 1955, when Frank addressed a Democratic Party rally. Some people, Frank had told the audience, thought entertainers should stay out of politics because political involvement could ruin a career. So deeply did Sinatra believe in the cause that brought him to the rally, Senator Alan Cranston recalled him saying, that “if it meant the end of the entertaining phase of his life, then so be it.”
Frank had long been a registered Democrat, had campaigned for Roosevelt, Truman, and Adlai Stevenson, and would support Stevenson again in 1956. At the Democratic convention that year, he sang his personal civil rights anthem, “The House I Live In.” He was sitting with Kennedy’s supporters when, after Stevenson had been selected as his party’s candidate, Kennedy failed in his bid for the vice presidential slot. Frank heard Stevenson praise Kennedy as “the real hero of the hour” for the way he conducted himself at the convention, and he heard the Kennedy side’s reaction. They were enthusing, already, about the 1960 campaign.
Frank had enthused over earlier leaders because of their policies. He and John Kennedy, however, were drawn together by other factors. They were of the same generation, wealthy to an extent that made money an irrelevance, and both basked in an aura of glamour. On trips to the East Coast in the mid-1950s, Frank began visiting Kennedy at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. The senator kept a hideaway there, a room where he gave dinner parties for celebrity guests, and Frank was now one of them.
Kennedy probably first visited Frank at Palm Springs in the summer of 1958. Called upon to give Kennedy back rubs, George Jacobs found himself peppered with prurient questions. “Does Shirley MacLaine have a red pussy?” Kennedy wanted to know. Were her legs as good as Cyd Charisse’s? If MacLaine was not going with Frank, how come she had been cast in Some Came Running?