Mr. S (17 page)

The other thing he didn’t want to know about was JFK’s drug use. On several occasions in Palm Springs I was there when Peter Lawford and the future president did lines of cocaine together in Lawford’s guest room. The first time it happened Jack must have seen the shocked look on my face. “For my back, George,” Kennedy said to me, with his bad-boy wink. Peter was more direct. “For God’s sake, George, don’t tell Frank,” he beseeched me with a serious look. But to his brother-in-law, it was all one big lark. “National security,” he added, laughing, then offered me a line. Just as I kept the secret from Mr. S about Peter’s drug obsession, I wasn’t about to break the bad news about Jack, whom Mr. S put on such a pedestal. Sex and alcohol may have made Jack a better man in Sinatra’s sight. Cocaine was a different story. The leader of the free world with his finger on the trigger and a straw up his nose? It was an image that I didn’t want to contemplate.

While Mr. S and JFK kept their dialogue to affairs of the flesh, whenever Sinatra was with Sam Giancana, their former long sessions on the casino business now gave way to talk about politics, handicapping the odds whether Kennedy could beat Nixon, and whether or not it was a good idea. Mr. Sam preferred Nixon. He would have pre
ferred Harold Stassen, because he had a blood rage against Bobby Kennedy. Even though Sam and Joe were brothers under the skin who had done big deals together, Sam now distrusted Joe as having come too far from his roots, of getting “uppity,” as Sam called it. With Joe there may have been distrust; with Bobby there was dead certainty. “Bobby’s the fruit that poisons the whole tree,” Sam summarized his deep misgivings. Sinatra did his best to pacify the Chi Man, to assure him the nasty little brother was chump change. “Jack’s the candidate, not the weasel,” Mr. S hard-sold the kingpin. “Jack’s our friend.” I am certain, however, that had Mr. Sam not given Mr. S his blessing, Mr. S and company would have never devoted most of 1960 to getting the Kennedys their impossible dream. But given how much Mr. Sam distrusted Bobby, he had to have expected some serious tit for tat.

The first tangible token of Mr. Ambassador’s gratitude was the Cal-Neva Lodge, a rustic wigwam-inspired fishing-gaming retreat straddling the state line on the shores of Lake Tahoe. The Kennedys had been coming to this Alpine paradise since the Roaring Twenties. Every year, the lodge would cut and ship the Kennedys the Christmas trees for their assorted compounds. Because of its unique situation halfway in anything-goes Nevada, the lodge had been a haven for gangsters from its earliest days. Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and other bullet-ridden legends had played there. The Kennedys loved the place. So did Sam Giancana. For the Kennedys, it was a kind of Western White House before they took power. For Giancana, it was also a Western White House, or big house, to use prison jargon. There were secret underground passages, endless safe rooms, private cabins in the deep woods that made it an ideal hideaway and getaway.

In the late fifties the nominal owner of the lodge was “Miami hotelier”(short for Meyer Lansky lieutenant) Wingy (because of his missing arm, perfect name for a slot machine guy) Grober. Mr. S liked Wingy, who cozied up to the Sinatra crowd by bringing out Sinatra’s
dear friend Skinny D’Amato from Atlantic City to run the place. Wingy was just a front man for the ambassador, Mr. S said. In 1960, before the election, Grober “sold” a half interest in the lodge, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, a fortune back then, to a consortium of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Hank Sanicola, and Peter Lawford, who were fronting for Sam Giancana. They
had
to be fronting for Mr. Sam, because Peter Lawford never paid for
anything
, except drugs, with his own cash. However they got it, Mr. S and his guys now had a piece of the rock, Joe Kennedy’s rock. At last Sinatra was in business with big business, and he hoped this was just the beginning.

The Rat Pack was how the public came to know the crew that made
Ocean’s 11
based at the Sands in 1960. The real name the guys used for themselves was the Clan, but that sounded like the Ku Klux Klan, and Jack Kennedy already had enough problems in the South being a Catholic that he didn’t need this rainbow coalition of showbiz minorities giving themselves an inflammatory name. They were inflammatory enough on their own. That was the point, to use these hip Hollywood Unsquares to play at being cool mob/Vegas types and get a young and changing America to vote for JFK and against the ultimate square Dick Nixon. If the whole
Ocean’s 11
experience was something of a subliminal long liquor ad, the famous Vegas shows at night during the filming were an equally subliminal, and frequently direct, plug for the Kennedy campaign, as key to JFK’s image as the Broadway musical
Camelot.
You didn’t see Nixon at the Sands, but Kennedy was right there at the A table, for the country to ogle. The way the Rat Pack was utilized to sell the president, including the Sinatra-sung, Cahn and Van Heusen-written campaign song “High Hopes,” was all the brainchild of the Godfather father, Mr. Ambassador. He was evil, but he was a strategic genius. He had fucked up on Hitler and was going to make up for it now.

Dean Martin had nothing but contempt for Joe Kennedy. Dean
was totally apolitical, and, because he knew about JFK’s bad habits, he thought that any country that had to choose between Kennedy and Nixon was in bad shape. He resented being used as a Democratic shill, but, pro that he was, he did his shows, he shot his scenes, and then he golfed. Not that Dean was a saint. Despite his big and happy family, he loved the whores as much as Mr. S. He just loved them for a shorter time, so he could get to bed and get up early to be on the links. If Mr. S was respected and feared in Vegas, Dean Martin was
adored.
Whenever he came to town to do a show, before or after
Ocean’s 11
, the showgirls and cocktail waitresses at the Sands would have a lottery to see what lucky lady would have the honor of giving Dean his welcome-back blow job.

The Sands girls that Mr. S fancied fell into two extreme categories. The first were the most drop-dead gorgeous showgirls, the newest of whom would be dispatched to the Sinatra suite by Jack Entratter at four
A.M
. after the show as an on-the-house “nitecap” for Mr. S, who, it must be remembered, was a significant shareholder in the Sands, and not just a VIP. These beauties worked for him, and they were plenty afraid of their temperamental boss, who might have them fired if he didn’t like the way they did their hair or wore their costume. That was Frank the Tyrant. The other category of Sands girl who appealed to the
other
Frank, Frank the Samaritan, was the sweet and needy cocktail waitress, the one with the sick baby or the troubled marriage. Mr. S got an erotic charge in rescuing a damsel in distress. The affair might not have lasted long, but the gratitude did. He paid the college tuition of several of the coffee shop girls, and the medical bills of many more. Moreover, as he strode through his domain, if he ever heard a customer abuse a waitress, he would be down the lout’s throat in a split second. “Get this bastard off
my
property!” the Chairman would declare. At the Sands, the customer wasn’t always right, not if he happened to cross swords with the Main Event.

During the Kennedy campaign, I had never seen Mr. S happier since I began to work for him. He was in even better spirits than when he won the Oscar. Now he had a purpose, a higher purpose than Hollywood stardom. “We’re gonna take this mother, George,” he’d say constantly, as if he were going to win one for the Gipper. Except that the Gipper here was no saintly Knute Rockne, but the devil himself, Joe Kennedy. Despite JFK’s decadent playboy indulgences, I never sensed that Sinatra was personally troubled in any way by the character of “his leader.” Nor did he seem repulsed by the repulsive behavior of his leader’s father. That is, not before two occasions during the run for Washington when Old Joe made Mr. S feel lower than Lew Wasserman or Sam Spiegel ever had.

The first was when he was trying to put a movie together based on the book
The Execution of Private Slovik,
about a soldier who was executed by the U.S. Army for desertion. Mr. S was planning to direct it, his first effort behind the camera. It was a total downer, but, as Mr. S put it, “You don’t win Oscars for comedies.” He still really wanted that Oscar. He hadn’t given up on being taken seriously as a filmmaker, and he knew that
Ocean’s 11
wasn’t going to do it for him.
Ocean’s
was for the Kennedys, the campaign.
Slovik
would be for him. But he made a fatal mistake. In trying to get a great script, he hired an old friend he thought was a great writer, Albert Maltz, who had scripted such films as
This Gun for Hire
and was known as a master of “message” movies. Unfortunately, Maltz was better known as one of the Hollywood Ten. Blacklisted in the McCarthy witch-hunts as a “Red,” Maltz had fled to Mexico. He had not had a screen credit, at least not under his own name, for years. Mr. S was giving him a chance at a comeback. That was something Mr. S loved to do.

But not Joe Kennedy. Sinatra’s movie plans hit all the papers, and Joe freaked out over what he read. “What is this commie Jew shit?
You stupid guinea!” the ambassador unloaded on the Chairman over the phone, and Mr. S took it. Of course this was after half the country had been whipped up into a red scare by the press over the issue. In Hollywood, John Wayne had come out against poor Maltz. Mr. S had told the press to fuck themselves, he told the Duke to fuck himself, took out ads in the trade papers asserting his right to free speech, his right to make his own movies. But he didn’t say fuck you to Old Joe. He said, “Yes, sir.” And that was it. This shows that politics were more important to Mr. S at this point than Hollywood. If winning an election meant dropping a film, so be it. JFK was considered left enough, compared to Nixon. Mr. S justified dropping Maltz (he paid him in full) and the project on the grounds of helping Jack, but it still killed him to have to eat Joe’s humble pie and give up his own dream. He went on a three-day Jack Daniel’s binge and totally destroyed his office at the Bowmont house. “Who gives a shit? I’m outta this fucking business!” he screamed, ripping up books and scripts, hurling over bookcases. This time I felt his rage and frustration were understandable.

Although Mr. S would never talk back to Joe Kennedy, he soon vented his spleen on Teddy Kennedy, who showed up at a campaign appearance in Honolulu with three of the cheesiest-looking bimbos. You couldn’t find junkie hookers this low in the worst part of Times Square, but somehow Teddy had dug deeper and hit paydirt. Even if they weren’t hookers, they
looked
like hookers. Mr. S had a strong sense of decorum. He was outraged that Teddy could do something that would make his brother look bad. But I think he was really reacting to Joe’s abuse of him. If he had to fire Albert Maltz for the sake of appearances, he wasn’t going to let this big spoiled drunken Harvard brat get away with a far worse appearance. So he reamed Teddy out, cursing him at the top of his lungs, right in the hotel suite in front of dozens of high-level campaign workers and donors. Teddy got scared
and disappeared. I think he flew back to the mainland that night. And Teddy gave Mr. S a wide, wide berth after that.

The second time Joe Kennedy rained on Mr. S’s parade was at the biggest party Mr. S ever threw, the inaugural party for John F. Kennedy in January 1961. Mr. S was so crazed then that he had forgotten his specially made striped tuxedo pants that were to go with his big-night outfit, which included a cape. I told him he looked like Dracula. “Shut up, or I’ll bite your neck,” he gave it back to me. I was with him in D.C. when he discovered that he had packed the wrong pants. He could have blamed me, but he knew he had done the packing of this precious costume. I had to fly back to L.A. in a massive snowstorm to get the right pants, then fly back the same night into the same snowstorm. Friendly skies, my ass.

Nothing, however, got Mr. S more crazed than Old Joe’s edict that Sammy not be allowed to perform at the inaugural. Sammy was the ambassador’s sum of all fears. He was black, he was Jewish, he was married to a blond Aryan, he was a superstar. That drove Old Joe crazy, that Sammy had beaten all the odds. But he wasn’t going to beat
Joe’s
odds. Joe had absolutely no gratitude for the indefatigable campaigning Sammy had done for Jack as a key pillar of the Rat Pack. To him Sammy was just a pushy nigger who could only give his son a worse name in the throwback places like the South where he already had a bad one. Sammy had had to eat a lot of shit during the campaign, jokes like was he going to be JFK’s ambassador to Israel or to the Congo. He also had postponed his wedding to Swedish goddess/star May Britt until after the election, so as not to turn off voters at the last minute. This was done by Sammy as a huge favor to Mr. S, who was to be Sammy’s best man at the Jewish ceremony, which took place in mid-November, once the White House was in Jack’s bag.

Mr. S had asked me to counsel Sammy about being married to a Scandinavian, but Sammy had dated more blonds than I could
dream of. All I could do was to say how well my own marriage was going (a big lie at the time) and how indifferent Nordic people were to color (and to everything else, which was one of my big problems, though I didn’t share this, either). Sammy didn’t need my wisdom. He did need Mr. S’s approval. Desperately. So it was brutal when Old Joe put his jackboot down on Sinatra’s fingers one more time and, in a dictatorial telephone conversation with Mr. S, barred Sammy from this Show of Shows, a cavalcade of America’s greatest talent. If anybody belonged in the program, front and center, it was Sammy. Mr. S begged him, but Joe said No. Ella Fitzgerald was okay, so was Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole. But to Joe, they were “nigger niggers.” They knew their place. They kept in their place. But “the nigger bastard with the German whore,” as the presidential patriarch referred to America’s most controversial “fun couple,” that was beyond the beyond. Not at his son’s debutant ball for the world to see. At the pinnacle of his new power, the master of ceremonies of the coming out of the New Frontier, Mr. S, in all his glory, could only see an Ugly Past, of the bigotry, prejudice, and elitism that, minus a few breaks, could have mired him forever in the slums of Hoboken. He looked like the King of the World, but all he could taste were ashes. It was a foretaste of worse, far worse, to come.