Mr. S (20 page)

Mr. S’s total humiliation occurred in early spring 1962. JFK was planning a high-profile visit to Southern California that would inaugurate our new Palm Springs digs. We worked for weeks getting everything perfect, planning parties, doing guest lists, trying to include everyone and not piss anybody off. Then, at the last minute, Peter Lawford, who had set up the visit to begin with, calls from L.A. to tell Mr. S that Jack isn’t coming. At first Sinatra assumed the trip had been delayed, some political crisis. Then Lawford says, totally sheepishly, well, he’s still coming, but he’s not coming
here.

Lawford first tried to blame the Secret Service, saying it was a security issue, then he finally admitted that it was a
Frank
issue and that Bobby was the mastermind behind it. Mr. S smashed the phone he was talking on against the wall. He went into another room and was able to get Bobby on the line in Washington. “What
is
this shit?” I remember him repeating. Unfortunately, this shit was all coming down on Mr. S. Bobby basically told him we can’t have the president sleeping in the same house where Sam Giancana slept. And Mr. S said he’s
already
slept here, so what’s the big fucking deal. Bobby played hardball. He said it’s
my
deal now, and Jack ain’t sleeping there and hung up. There went another phone, smashed to smithereens. We
were lucky to have had all those extra lines installed. I felt sorry for Mr. S. He was like the girl who got stood up for the prom, all dressed up with no place to go. He had spent a fortune on the house, just for JFK, and now the house was off-limits. It wasn’t fair. And the house was just a symbol of all he had done for the Kennedys. How could they treat their friend this way, he wailed to me, like a little kid and nearly in tears.

He called Peter again to try to figure out some other way to fix this. Frank appealed to Peter desperately, saying flat-out he could not lose face this way. And then Peter came out with the worst news of all. There
was
no other way. They already had new lodgings for JFK. So why didn’t you tell me this on the first call, Sinatra asked Lawford, his face getting redder and redder. Peter claimed Frank had cut him off without giving him a chance. So where, where, Sinatra pressed. There was an endless silence. Then Mr. S simply dropped the phone on the floor. He stood there staring out at the desert, as if someone had told him his folks had died. It took about five minutes before he could tell me. Guess where the president was staying instead? Bing fucking Crosby’s! That was the cruelest blow of all. Bing Crosby was a Republican! He was an Eisenhower, Nixon guy. He represented old-guard, old WASP Palm Springs, the community that looked at Sinatra as a “there goes the neighborhood” kinda guy. Or, as he put it, losing all of his normal control, “like a fucking nigger.” He and Crosby were superficially buddies, Crosby had been an idol, a king who had surrendered his throne to Sinatra. And now here he was taking it back.

Yet Sinatra didn’t blame Crosby. He didn’t blame Bobby, because he had no way to get at Bobby, not yet at least. He didn’t blame Jack, who didn’t even call to apologize. Mr. S felt so betrayed, he had no idea how to deal with Jack. Instead he blamed it all on Lawford, his once-dear “Charley,” the one guy close at hand he could vent his wrath upon. Fuck him. Once the import of the last call to Lawford
had sunk in, Mr. S went on the most violent rampage I had seen. Lawford’s clothes were ripped out of the closets, ripped personally to shreds. His golf clubs were bent in half. Pat’s makeup and perfume kit was crushed under foot. I followed Mr. S around the house on his search-and-destroy mission, just to make sure he didn’t die of a cerebral hemorrhage, his blood pressure was so off the charts. I didn’t dare try to stop him, or even say, “Cool it, boss. This ain’t worth it.” He probably would have killed me.

My main job was to take all the stuff and throw it into an off-site garbage dump a few miles away “to destroy the evidence.” I left thinking the rampage was over. But it wasn’t. When I got back, I found the whole compound was a sea of glass shards. Mr. S had smashed every Kennedy photo. He had also kicked the bedroom door in, but somehow he couldn’t pry the
KENNEDY SLEPT HERE
plaque off of it, and it would remain as a bitter reminder of how he had been used and dumped. “Now I know how whores feel,” he confessed to me in the week or so afterward that it took him to calm down. No one came near him during this period. Who knew what to say? Any sort of condolence would have been seen as pity, and it would have been better to shoot Mr. S than pity him. Press coverage of JFK’s change of plans didn’t help things. Each article was salt in Sinatra’s wounds. As punishment, Peter was immediately excommunicated by being cut out of the two upcoming Rat Pack movies
Four for Texas
and
Robin and the Seven Hoods
. Lawford, and his career, never recovered.

At the same time Mr. S was getting the brush from the Kennedys, he was getting the squeeze from the mob. Sam Giancana was giving him the old “I told you so.” But Mr. S knew that Mr. Sam never stopped at mere scolding. Sam made Sinatra nervous, especially now that he realized he had made an error of judgment. Fuck-ups, in
this
world, were not well tolerated. “Why, oh why,” Sinatra asked himself aloud over and over, “did Joe get that fucking stroke?” “It’s gonna give
me one,” he declared. The minute Old Joe hit that wheelchair, Bobby unleashed the dogs of J. Edgar Hoover on organized crime in general, and Sam Giancana in particular. That winter Mr. Sam came out to Palm Springs to play golf. Mr. S had been anxious about Sam’s arrival, buying brand-new Italian linen sheets for his bed, a silk robe from Sulka, the best caviar, going more overboard than usual to make him happy. I was relieved that, once Giancana arrived, relations between the two, at least on the surface, were exactly as before.

One morning, Mr. S called me into Mr. Sam’s room, and they showed me all these expensive golf clothes. “Put them on, George,” Mr. S told me. “Let’s see how they look.”

“But I’m no golfer,” I said.

“You are now,” Mr. S ordered.

It turned out that I was about the same size as Mr. Sam. I needed a tight belt to hold the pants up, and the sleeves were a little short, and I had to use a pair of Mr. S’s golf shoes. I was still totally confused. Then they put a wide-brimmed golf cap on me and sent me outside. There was a black car waiting with three other golfers, other guys from Chicago who barely spoke to me. We were driven off to a golf club, the one where Mr. Sam came to play. What was going on was that I was being used as a decoy for Sam Giancana. The FBI was tailing him and bugging him everywhere he went, including the links. That day, however, I was the missing link. Sam loved his golf so much that he went to play somewhere else. Meanwhile, I went to his club and shot the highest score ever recorded. Every ball went into the rough, a lake, a sand trap. The Chicago boys were pissed, but they were under orders from Sam. Still, they gave me a hard time. “Golf was not designed for niggers,” they ribbed me, saying I should stick to caddying, and I couldn’t disagree with them at the time. I wonder what these clowns would have to say about Tiger Woods. I was a little pissed myself, but who was I to get pissed at Sam Giancana? I felt as if
I was in that Jerry Lewis movie
The Caddy,
and I tried to look at the whole episode as one big joke. I’d live longer that way.

Just as Frank Sinatra blamed Peter Lawford for his fucking over by the First Family, Sam Giancana blamed Frank Sinatra. But Mr. Sam, unlike Mr. S, knew how to keep his temper under control. World-class killers, which is what Sam was reputed to be, were like that. Never show emotion. I don’t know what happened in the election, but Mr. Sam often mentioned “the marker” and how the Kennedys were welching on it. I do know Skinny D’Amato did get invoved in the key West Virginia primary, and Skinny wasn’t your typical campaign volunteer. His prison time had left him well connected, but how that translated into votes, I’ll never guess. I also know Sinatra was on the phone to Giancana dozens of times on election night, while he was anxiously watching the televised returns that had Nixon ahead. “It’s gonna turn, it’s gonna turn,” Mr. S would reassure Van Heusen and Sanicola and some other Dagos, who were watching the returns with us. Van Heusen had a bunch of hookers on hold to celebrate with, but the contest was so tight, they never showed. By morning, Illinois, the state that Sam owned,
had
turned. “Ye assholes of little faith” was all that Sinatra could say, with a weary victory smile. Now the Kennedys were trying to handcuff the hand that had elected them, and Mr. Sam was pissed.

Mr. Sam was always offering me a job, ever since we first met. It was a running joke between him and Sinatra. I was never sure whether he really meant it or not. “Come work for me, George,” he’d say.

“Mr. Sam, I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?’

“I don’t wanna get killed.”

“Sinatra never hit a fly,” Giancana said, scoffing at the notion of Mr. S as tough.

“Not by him, Mr. Sam. By these G-men who want your scalp.”

He laughed his high-pitched chuckle, the sound that Bobby Kennedy drew eternal wrath for by likening it to a little girl’s giggle. “You’re more likely to get hit in Hollywood than Chicago,” Sam said ominously. “At least I can protect you.” From whom, I wondered, and actually had a twinge of fear for Mr. S’s life.

There have been lots of rumors that while the FBI was pursuing Sam Giancana to put him in jail, the CIA was also pursuing Giancana to kill Fidel Castro. America had been humiliated by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The mob had been deeply damaged financially by losing their Havana casinos. Thus there was a unity of interest in seeing Castro disposed of. Also, as we have now seen, the FBI and the CIA are rarely on the same page, often at deadly cross-purposes with each other. Many times I heard Sinatra and Giancana talking about the “good old days” in Havana, where I regretted that I had never gotten to go. They would have loved to reclaim what was theirs, but no one could hate the “G” (for government), or the “feds,” more than Sam Giancana. I can’t imagine him getting in bed with them, not with Bobby K running the Justice Department. It would have been more likely for Mr. Sam to get in bed with Castro to retaliate against the “Ks.” He gave them the office; all he wanted in return was a little peace and quiet. Couldn’t they give him a fucking break?

Judy Campbell continued to spend an occasional evening with Mr. S at the same time she was seeing both JFK and Mr. Sam. She thought she was pretty hot shit at this point, playing Mata Hari with two archenemies. By now, Mr. S’s loyalties were squarely with Giancana, and against the Kennedys. He was always Sam’s man (once in, never out), but he was trying to have his
tiramisù
and his Irish stew at the same time, and that was one food combination that would prove toxic. I’m sure Judy was giving more information to Sam about JFK than she was giving JFK about Sam. JFK couldn’t have cared less about the spy stuff; he wanted sex. Like Marilyn, Judy may have been momentarily
deluded that Jack would leave Jackie for her, also like Sinatra may have been deluded that Pat would leave Peter. But those dreams died fast, and Judy, like Frank, realized that Sam was the more dangerous figure to trifle with. The little giggler scared the devil out of all of us.

Not that the Kennedys were pussycats. Mr. S found one more reason to hate them on his suspicion that they killed Marilyn that awful summer of 1962. On the other hand, he needed to believe in this sort of conspiracy theory. If he didn’t he might have had to blame himself. Marilyn loved him, more realistically than either Kennedy. He was her guardian, her lover, her friend, her soul mate. She trusted him more than anyone else in her life, except her shrink. Mr. S had his own conspiracy of control over Marilyn. Her beloved shrink, Ralph Greenson, was the brother-in-law of Sinatra’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin. The men’s wives were sisters. Mickey, whom Frank met through Judy Garland, would give his life, and anyone’s else’s, for his cash-cow client Mr. S. There was another strong medical tie: Marilyn’s gynecologist was Red Krohn, who also treated the doctor-phobic Mr. S and performed all necessary abortions whenever Sinatra knocked someone up (never stars, but mostly one-night-stand waitresses and showgirls). Dean Martin was the costar of Marilyn’s final film,
Something’s Got to Give.
I had been Sinata’s surrogate watchman over Marilyn until she moved to the little house in Brentwood where she died. She almost OD’d at Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge coming up to watch him sing a week before her final tragedy. And it was Sinatra himself who had pushed her into the clutches of the Kennedys. It reminds me of
Rosemary’s Baby
. Every road Marilyn took led to Frank. And to oblivion. Talk about guilt and dirty hands.

Mr. S also felt bad that he had used his affair with Juliet Prowse to “punish” Marilyn for her affair with Jack Kennedy. (If he believed the affair with Bobby to be true, she would have been beyond punishment.) Juliet was the South African dancer whose shaved pussy was
such a curiosity to Jack Kennedy. It must have been special to Mr. S as well, for she went from conversation piece to fiancée in about a year. She wasn’t a superstar, but she was different from the other actresses Mr. S had been seeing. First of all, she was exotic, born in Bombay, raised in South Africa and had that classy English accent Mr. S was a goner for. He was also a leg man, and hers were state-of-the-art. She was a top ballet dancer before being discovered for Sinatra’s
Can-Can
, where she also caught the eye of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was visiting the set. Sinatra put her in the Kennedy inaugural, in shows at the Sands, and at Cal-Neva.

He even took a break from his concert tour in Germany and went to Johannesburg, South Africa. He took me along. There were a lot of houses in Johannesburg that looked like Tara in
Gone With the Wind,
and had as many servants. This was during apartheid, and the rich whites in South Africa lived in a style resembling that of the old plantations on the River Road outside New Orleans, much grander than anything in Beverly Hills and with far more help, all black. From the little we saw of it on our weekend trip, it seemed as if the Old South had risen again down there in South Africa. The black people I saw appeared very downtrodden to me, with no spirit whatsoever. I was depressed for them, but not in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I way. I knew those people would rise up eventually; there were too many of them not to take control of their country. Mr. S, who was the archenemy of racism, disagreed with me. He said the situation looked hopeless, too hopeless even for him to try to remedy, that the ruling whites were too entrenched. I’m sure he was thrilled when those walls were finally torn down. I got funny looks at our fancy hotel, but not
too
funny because I was in the room next to Mr. S. I guess I got to go where few other black men had been in that country, but that was the story of my life. I wanted Mr. S to take us on safari, but he had bad associations with wild animals after having dejectedly
followed Ava Gardner to Africa when she made
Mogambo
. Instead he sent me to the Johannesburg Zoo.