By the summer of 1963, revamped and known now as Sinatra’s Cal-Neva, the resort was into its third season of gambling and top-flight entertainment. A prostitution operation was being run from the front desk. Skinny D’Amato had been brought in from Atlantic City, and Rosselli and Johnny Formosa were seen at the Lodge. Formosa appeared to have a management role. Nevada Gaming Control Board investigators suspected irregularities, but could prove nothing. In 2003, however, the co-pilot of Frank’s private plane remembered flying what the crew knew as “the skim run.” “They’d call up and tell us we were going to Truckee-Tahoe, and from there to the Sands and on to Burbank, which meant they were going on a money run,” Dan Arney said. “I remember once there were three briefcases, and I got to go back during the flight and see inside one of them. The cash was in $10,000 stacks.”
Money also flowed in from Giancana in Chicago. Giancana’s associate Joe Pignatello told a friend, Tony Montana, about a courier mission he performed. “Giancana gave Joe a package filled with money,” said Montana. “He said, ‘Take this to Tahoe and give it to Skinny D’Amato. If anyone takes it from you, the only thing that’s going to save you is if you have a hole in your head. In other words, the only way you give up the money is if you’re dead.’ Skinny happened to be away in San Francisco, so Joe had to stay in a room for two days with the money chained to his arm.”
Giancana made at least one appearance at the Cal-Neva in the summer of 1962, when Marilyn Monroe was there. She was just days away from death, agonizing over her relationships with John and Robert Kennedy. People who saw her at the Lodge thought she was in a miserable state, visibly either drunk or drugged. Billy Woodfield recalled how, sometime afterward, Frank asked him to process and print a roll of photographs he had taken at the Cal-Neva. “I developed the film,” Woodfield recalled, “and some of the pictures, about nine frames, showed Marilyn, on all fours. She looked sick. Astride her, either riding her like a horse or trying to help her up—I couldn’t make out which— was Sam Giancana.”
Monroe appeared in the photographs to be in distress, and Woodfield wondered what Frank had been thinking of to use his camera at all. “Frank asked me what I thought he should do with the pictures,” Woodfield said. “I said I’d burn them. He took out his lighter, burned them, and that was the end of it.”
Though both Monroe and Giancana were fully clothed in the photographs, the mafioso told several people he and the actress had sex at the Cal-Neva. Monroe said so, too, according to Jeanne Carmen, who was her friend. Giancana mocked her poor performance, and she spoke of the episode with disgust.
These goings-on would have been of great interest to officials of the Nevada Gaming Control Board, because Giancana should not have been at the Cal-Neva in the first place. As one of the notorious mobsters listed in the board’s Black Book, he was not allowed to set foot in any casino in the state. In fact, as Nick Sevano recalled, “He’d sneak in to see Sinatra, by helicopter, would you believe. Money was spread around with the police, so no one checked. Sinatra had a separate place in Cal-Neva that nobody knew about. They used to sneak in there to have dinner. I was there.”
In late July 1963, word reached the authorities that Giancana had been at the lodge with his lover, the singer Phyllis McGuire, and had gotten into a noisy fistfight involving McGuire’s road manager, Frank, and George Jacobs. Afterward, Giancana had left for Palm Springs. The police had been called, however, and Gaming Control Board officials investigated. Frank denied there had been a fight. D’Amato and the maître d’ obstructed the board’s agents. Then, on Labor Day weekend, Frank brought serious trouble on himself when he called board chairman Ed Olsen.
Olsen’s chief investigator and the Gaming Commission secretary listened in on extensions as Frank subjected their boss to a long tirade. It was peppered with so much foul language that Olsen’s memorandum for the record bore the label “OBSCENE OBSCENE.” Frank opened by telling Olsen he was “acting like a fucking cop.” Could they not, he asked, talk off the record?
Olsen declined, saying he would subpoena Frank if he wanted a formal interview. “You just try and find me,” said Frank. “And if you do, you can look for a big fat surprise . . . a big, fat, fucking surprise. You remember that. Now listen to me, Ed. . . . Don’t fuck with me. Don’t fuck with me. Just don’t fuck with me.”
Olsen asked if this was a threat, and Frank replied very deliberately—as vividly indicated in the original text of Olsen’s memo: “No ... just don’t fuck with me . . . . And you can tell that to your fucking Board and that fucking Commission, too.” Later, when board agents arrived at the Cal-Neva for a prearranged inspection, Frank had them ejected. The following day, when they showed up again, D’Amato tried to bribe them with hundred-dollar bills.
Olsen briefed the gaming authorities and the governor of Nevada. The board issued a formal complaint, noting that Frank’s corporation had broken the law by knowingly hosting Giancana even though he was banned from Nevada casinos, had defied the authorities by saying he would continue the association, by having an employee refuse to testify, and by attempting to “intimidate and coerce” the authorities.
Frank was cornered, and he knew it. He announced a month later that he would not fight the charges but divest himself of his interests in Nevada, at the Sands and at the Cal-Neva. Coming as it did after his problems with the Kennedys, this was a huge financial and psychological blow.
Frank had felt let down, abandoned, for more than a year, ever since the president decided not to stay at his house. “If he would only pick up the phone and call me and say it was politically difficult to have me around,” Angie Dickinson recalled Frank saying, “I would understand. I don’t want to hurt him. But he has never called me.”
John Kennedy had not abandoned him entirely. On a trip to Las Vegas during the Cal-Neva debacle, the president put in a word on his behalf. “What are you guys doing to my friend Frank Sinatra?” he asked Governor Grant Sawyer as they drove together in an open limousine. The governor replied, he recalled in his memoirs, “Well, Mr. President, I’ll try to take care of things here in Nevada, and I wish you luck on the national level.” Though Sawyer did not mention the fact in his book, he told his friend Ralph Denton that Kennedy had in fact gone a little further. “Is there anything you can do for Frank?” he had asked. Sawyer replied, “No.”
It is unlikely Frank knew of this. Eddie Fisher thought the break with the Kennedys “devastated” him. “It was hurt beyond hurt,” said Leonora Hornblow, another friend. “With Ava, one of the great pains of his life.”
At a key moment in the Cal-Neva fiasco, Frank had flown Giancana to Palm Springs aboard his private plane. The FBI knew that, as it now knew virtually every move the mobster made. So intensive was the surveillance, Giancana said, it was as if he were living under a communist dictatorship. Worse, FBI eavesdroppers heard Giancana complain, many of his usual sources of funds were being cut off. He told a friend that the Cal-Neva mess had cost the Chicago mob $470,000. There were rumors he might be ousted from the leadership. An October surveillance report noted that Giancana, stymied at every turn, was cursing the government.
The Nevada gambling authorities formally stripped Frank of his licenses on October 22. In early November Giancana was again reported staying with Frank in Palm Springs.
THE WEEKEND BEFORE JOHN KENNEDY’S TRIP to Dallas, the president watched the movie Tom Jones at his father’s home in Florida. After dinner, close aides remembered later, he launched into “September Song,” the melancholy Kurt Weill number Frank had recorded early in the presidency:
. . . the days dwindle down to a precious few September, November . . .
In California that week, Judith Campbell was feeling distraught and confused. She had not dated either the president or Giancana for months—though Giancana stayed in occasional touch by phone—and the FBI, aware of her involvements from telephone surveillance, was constantly on her heels. Once, when Campbell was at the Key Club in Palm Springs, Giancana and Fran
k had studiedly behaved as though they did not know her.
Nevertheless, phone records reflect sixty calls between Campbell and the Mafia boss in the summer of 1963, and sixteen to Frank while he was at the Cal-Neva. The calls were guarded, for all three knew the FBI was watching and listening. She said she felt “like I was in a giant maze . . . sick of the intrigue, of not knowing what was going on.” On November 20, Johnny Rosselli installed Campbell in a hotel room in Beverly Hills.
On November 22, in Texas, President Kennedy was assassinated. Frank was on location that day, playing a mobster in Robin and the 7 Hoods, a parody of the Robin Hood legend set in 1920s Chicago. They were shooting a scene in a Los Angeles cemetery, and there had been laughter earlier when someone spotted an old gravestone inscribed “John F. Kennedy.”
When the news from Dallas came, Frank walked off among the graves. Then he made a call to Washington, finished the cemetery scene, and left for Palm Springs. He stayed there for several days, George Jacobs said, living on sandwiches and “vast amounts” of Jack Daniel’s. Frank was not invited to the president’s funeral, but sent flowers.
The following week he seemed uneasy, distant, during Thanksgiving dinner. Eight days later, Frank Jr., now nearly twenty and starting out on a singing career of his own, was kidnapped at a Lake Tahoe lodge. Two gunmen gained access to his room on the pretext of making a delivery, forced him into a car during a blizzard, drove him to a house near Los Angeles, and made ransom demands.
Frank spent two days and three nights flying to and from Nevada by rented airplane, fielding calls from the kidnappers, and arranging for the delivery of $240,000 ($1.5 million today). His son was released, the money recovered, and the kidnappers caught and jailed. They turned out to be a trio of apparent amateurs, one of whom had gone to school with the Sinatras’ elder daughter. Testifying in court during their trial, though, Frank Jr. said he had heard his kidnappers talking as though they “were only executing a plan concocted by higher-ups . . . higher-ups in organized crime.”
During the ordeal, Tina Sinatra has said, her father was haunted by the notion that the kidnapping was a message from the mob, a warning to him to stay silent about anything he might know that implicated the Mafia in the president’s assassination.
At the time, such a notion would have seemed bizarre. The public was told that the president had been shot by a lone gunman. The doubts raised when Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby were dispelled when the Warren Commission depicted Jack Ruby as a misguided loner. Any suggestion of conspiracy focused more on the Soviet Union and Cuba. Today, however, many of those who believe there was a conspiracy think the Mafia was involved. The chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Robert Blakey, has said flatly that “the Mob did it.”
Those who share this view focus on three Mafia bosses in particular—Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Sam Giancana. Within hours of his brother’s death, Bobby Kennedy had asked Julius Draznin, a rackets specialist with the National Labor Relations Board, to look for mob leads in Chicago. “He meant,” said Draznin, “Sam Giancana.”
For five days after the assassination, Judith Campbell shut herself up in the hotel room in which Rosselli had left her, refusing even to speak on the telephone. Rosselli then took her to Palm Springs and there, at the Canyon Country Club, she encountered Frank. He looked straight through her, and they never spoke again. Giancana and Rosselli abandoned her soon thereafter.
In the days after the assassination, according to George Jacobs, “Sinatra wondered aloud (though not too loud) if Mr. Sam [Giancana], who knew Jack Ruby from the strip-club circuit in which he had a hand, could have had something to do with it.”
It was not until sixteen years later, when the Assassinations Committee’s report was published, that the extent of Ruby’s organized crime connections became generally known. He had grown up in Chicago and become a petty criminal in cahoots with Chicago mafiosi. His eventual move to Dallas, he said, had been on mob instructions. When Giancana associates convened in Dallas to discuss bookmaking operations, a few months before the assassination, they met at Ruby’s Carousel Club.
The assassination saga touched in an odd way on Reprise, the recording company Frank had founded in 1960. In November 1963, when discussing the promotion of a rock ’n’ roll record with a musician in Dallas, Ruby had claimed “connections” with the company. He had made several calls in recent months to the various phone numbers of Mike Shore, an adviser and publicist for Frank who had an office at Reprise. Shore testified later that the calls had related to problems Ruby was having with a then mob-dominated union, the American Guild of Variety Artists. The same day as one of the calls to Shore, four weeks before the assassination, Ruby also phoned a man named Irwin Weiner in Chicago. Weiner, an underworld figure who was an associate of Giancana, had grown up with Earl Ruby, Jack’s brother, and with Mike Shore. Weiner was to claim in a 1978 interview that Ruby’s call to him had not been about the union problem. A few months later, testifying under oath to the House Assassinations Committee, he said it was.
After Ruby murdered Oswald, Shore said, he responded to a call from Ruby’s brother by helping to find Oswald’s killer a defense attorney and to raise funds to cover legal fees. Plans were made for photojournalist Billy Woodfield to interview Ruby in jail, with the lion’s share of the anticipated income going to Ruby. My Story, by Jack Ruby and Woodfield, was published in serial form and appeared in newspapers around the world. Shore said he never discussed the Ruby matter with Sinatra.
Tony Oppedisano, a producer who was to become Frank’s closest male intimate in his declining years, said the president’s murder was something on which Frank said “things in confidence that I wouldn’t divulge. . . . He had his own opinion as to the scenario that led up to it.”
SAM GIANCANA NEVER DID FORGIVE Frank for his role in thefailed relationship with the Kennedys or for the loss of the Cal-Neva. According to a member of the mobster’s family, only the intercession of East Coast associates persuaded Giancana not to have Frank killed in 1963. “That motherfucker,” he said when Frank arrived unexpectedly at the Armory Lounge, “is lucky to be alive.”
In the years that followed, the Mafia boss alternately socialized with Frank and terrorized him. Once, when Frank was performing in Las Vegas, Giancana sent word that he wanted to see him. Then he said he did not want to see him. Then he sent abuse. Frank cut short his performance and left. Giancana continued to speak from time to time of having Frank killed.
On June 19, 1975, after the Mafia boss was found shot dead at his home in Chicago, investigators noted that—aside from the execution bullet fired into the back of his head—one shot had been fired into his mouth and five others under his chin. The six additional shots, it was said, were to indicate that the Mafia knew Giancana could no longer be trusted to remain silent, and to warn others not to make the same mistake. As noted earlier, Senate Intelligence Committee staff members had that very day arrived in Chicago to make arrangements for Giancana to testify.
A few months later, when it became clear that the committee was not going to interrogate Sinatra, William Safire published the long list of questions that he felt Frank should have been asked. The final question, the columnist wrote, should have been: “Before or after the Kennedy assassination, did Giancana or Rosselli ever mention the name of Jack Ruby to you?” Sinatra, Safire wrote, “might emerge from such an interrogation with honor bright. Perhaps he can put the lie to any sinister insinuations. But we can put our dreams away for another day. . . . We are left to ponder what might have been learned if only ‘Old Blue Eyes’ had been required to sing.”
The allusion was to the melancholy song Frank had made his theme song in the 1940s. His last recording of it had been released three months before the assassination:
Put your dreams away for another day . . . it’s time to make a new start.
28
The Lonely Millionaire
THE NEW START ALMOST ENDED befor
e it began. In May 1964, while wading in the surf on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, Frank went to the aid of a woman friend who was being pulled out to sea by the undertow—only to be swept away himself. Both came very close to death. “He looked like a goner,” recalled Brad Dexter, who played a key role in the rescue. “They were both suffering from hypoxia—which occurs when you lose all the oxygen in your head, and you’re blind. Frank said ‘I can hear you, but I can’t see you! . . . Save her, and leave me . . . I’m going to die.’
“I said, ‘Frank, for Christ’s sake! Be a man, and let’s fight this through.’ But he couldn’t, he just didn’t have the physical strength. When I’d grabbed him, there was no musculature at all. He was not a strong man. . . . Then came these two Hawaiians with giant surfboards, and they took them in. They were both unconscious . . . and when I got to the shore I gave them artificial respiration. . . . The water poured out of Frank’s lungs.”
A little later, when Dexter went to see how Frank was doing, he found him sitting with his daughter Nancy. “He said, ‘My family thanks you,’ ” Dexter remembered, “not just ‘Thank you.’ He never, ever thanked me for saving his life.”
Frank kept Dexter close by for several years afterward, and sent film work his way. When they eventually fell out, however, Frank claimed privately that Dexter “didn’t really save my life. It was an old guy on a surfboard.” “If Brad hadn’t been there,” said Ruth Koch, the widow of producer Howard W. Koch and the woman who shared Frank’s ordeal that day, “I don’t think Mr. Sinatra would have survived.”
“Frank and I had a great relationship,” Dexter said later. “He loved me, and I loved him—as friends. But he couldn’t stand the fact that I’d saved his life. I never let him feel he was beholden to me. But he would have preferred to have saved my life, because then I would have been beholden to him.”