Sinatra and the Dark Side of Camelot

George Jacobs worked as Frank Sinatra's valet from 1953 to 1968. For Mr. S., as Jacobs called him, these were the Glory years, when Sinatra Reigned as the most Powerful man in show Business. Jacobs not only dressed his boss, he also cooked for the man's girlfriends, paid his hookers and Babysat some of the most Glamorous names in Hollywood. The Closest thing Sinatra had to a confidant, Jacobs was also a keen observer of Sinatra's inner circle, which included Dean Martin. Sammy Davis Jr. and the rest of the Rat Pack. But Sinatra's most complicated—and Mysterious—Relationship was with the Kennedy Brothers. The Architects of Camelot. Jacobs has never shared these tales with any reporter or Sinatra Biographer—until now.

The story begins in 1958, as Sinatra, in his quest for Political influence, prepares his California home for a party to honor Joseph P. Kennedy, the Powerful Patriarch of the Kennedy Dynasty and the father of Jack, Bobby and Teddy.

Mr. S. had entertained so many gangster types in his Palm Springs compound that I assumed the wiry, bespectacled man who spoke in long a's was another pillar of the underworld. I had met Italian gangsters and Jewish gangsters. Why not an Irish gangster?

Mr. S. certainly rolled out the red carpet for him: five fantastic hookers flown down from Vegas, and a whole staff of waiters and maids in starched gray uniforms, some from Watts, others he had me round up from the Indian reservation in the Coachella Valley. We had plenty of bedrooms, but when things got too crowded the hookers would double up and bunk together. They'd see the guests in the guests' bedrooms, so space was never a problem. When they weren't "in session," the girls would swim in the pool, work on their tans, eat and drink like any other guests. Mr. S. wouldn't stand for orgies on his property. He was too much of a neat freak. We treated them as honored guests, not as hookers. They just got paid when they went home.

The hospitality that was laid out that weekend was truly extraordinary. Even Sam Giancana didn't get this kind of treatment. Nor did Mr. Sam lay on the abuse this 70-year-old guy (whom Sinatra called Mr. Ambassador) heaped on all of us. He told nigger jokes throughout the meals, he'd call Indians savages and blacks Sambos and curse the hell out of anyone who served him from the wrong side or put one ice cube too many in his Jack Daniel's. "Can't you get any white help?" he would needle Mr. S. "Aren't they paying you enough?"

Such was Mr. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, father of our country's most captivating president. If anyone had the guts to spit in his face—a bravery that my boss sadly lacked—Mr. Ambassador should have been called Mr. Asshole.

Joseph Kennedy was, if anything, cruder about Jews than he was about blacks. As a guy who once owned a Hollywood studio (RKO), he must have had a tough time with his competition. To him they were "sheeny rag traders." He referred to the august Louis B. Mayer as a "kike junkman." The Jewish jokes didn't stop. The worst one I can recall: "What's the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza doesn't cry on its way to the oven." Poor Mr. S., having to sit through this, having to force a smile when he should have thrown the guy out to the coyotes. The anti-Semitism was shocking, yet it was nothing new. I was too young to remember Joseph Kennedy's craven appeasement of Adolf Hitler when he was Franklin Roosevelt's ambassador to the Court of St. James, a position, like every other, he was said to have bought. I was even younger when he made his fortune as a bootlegger in Prohibition and as an insider trader on Wall Street before it was illegal and, ironically, before Roosevelt made him head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Because everybody loved JFK, we have mythologized his family into our American aristocracy and our image of Joe Kennedy is that of a Boston Brahmin patriarch. That's about as far off the mark as saying JFK was faithful to Jackie. Joe was mobbed up to his fancy collar pins, with Sam Giancana at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, the world's largest commercial building, which he owned; with Meyer Lansky in Miami; with the one-armed bandit Wingy Grober in Tahoe. If anyone's fortune was tainted, it was that of Mr. Ambassador. Mr. S. worshiped Joe Kennedy's brute force. His money was fuck-you money. Old Joe said fuck you to everyone. Sinatra respected his arrogance. Here was a poor mick, a street guy who had "passed" for class, getting into Harvard, buying his way into government, laundering his entire image. He was the embodiment of the great American success story.

By I958, Frank Sinatra was so successful in movies and music that even taking control of the business side of show business looked as if it might be too limiting to the juggernaut he was on. What else could there be for the man who had everything? The answer was power, political power, and crafty old Joe Kennedy knew just how to play to Mr. S.'s vanity, as well as to his insecurity. The road to power would be his road to respect. Kennedy dangled an ambassadorship to Italy, he threw out the idea of senator from Nevada.

I never lied about how I felt about Joe Kennedy. Mr. S. felt the same way about the old man, but (continued on page 126)Sinatra(continued from page 92) he liked the boy. He believed in the product the old hustler was promoting. It was the best investment, the ambassador said, that Sinatra could ever make. But to do this, Mr. S. had a lot to overcome. He had an instinctive hatred of the Irish from Hoboken, when the shanty gangs were the dago gangs' worst enemies, never to be trusted. Mr. S. had an immediate mistrust of Joe's son Bobby, though he hadn't met him in person. How could he trust this nasty kid, a street-fighter type despite his Harvard sheepskin? This kid was working for Joseph McCarthy one day, chasing Commies in Hollywood among Mr. S.'s friends. Then the next day he was working for another kind of witch-hunter, Senator John McClellan, the phony devout Southern Baptist chasing Teamsters in Chicago, again among Mr. S.'s friends.

What was worse was Bobby's efforts to harass Sinatra's sacred cow, Sam Giancana. When Bobby subpoenaed Mr. Sam before him, the polite don took the Fifth, and always with a smile. "I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana," Bobby said, insulting the owner of Chicago on national television. "Can you believe this little weasel?" Mr. S. shouted when he saw it. "Can you believe how crazy this goddamn mick is!"

If Mr. S. didn't naturally cotton to the Irish, he had even more reservations about the English. "Never trust that fancy accent," he warned me. That was especially true, he said, of Peter Lawford, the slimy limey himself: Cheap, weak, sneak and freak were the words Mr. S. most often used to describe Lawford, who happened to be his showbiz link to the Kennedys. Sinatra and Lawford had met in their early days in Hollywood on the MGM lot in 1946, when they co-starred with Jimmy Durante in It Happened in Brooklyn, and to Mr. S., Lawford had been one of the "classiest" guys he had met. Young Peter the child star was a cash cow for his parents and he would always be under the gun, whether from his family or from the Kennedys.

•

Because Lawford was an eligible bachelor in the swinging late Forties, Mr. S.—still married to look-away Nancy—brought him into his circle of musical swingers, including Jule Styne, who wrote the score for Sinatra's Anchors Aweigh and later for Marilyn's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Peter Lawford, like these other guys, preferred hookers. Peter was whips-and-chains kinky and not the slightest bit ashamed of it, at least around me. He told me how his mother used to dress him up as a girl, then beat him with a hairbrush if he became a mischievous boy while in little-lady drag. His remembrance of things past would get him going. "Let's go buy some puss, old boy" was his call to action. Alas, his expensive tastes were not matched by his struggling-thespian pocketbook, and he got a reputation for stiffing working girls. That was a real no-no among the Mr. S. group, which had deep respect for hookers and treated diem with gallantry. Sinatra often said to me he preferred an honest hooker to a conniving starlet.

Peter had married Pat Kennedy in 1954, in one of the society weddings of the year. Now, propelled by this frontpage marriage, he was star of the TV version of The Thin Man, a detective comedy that made him the Cary Grant of the small screen. Suddenly he was the smoothest, slickest guy in America: debonair, English, a Kennedy, a star. He had it all. Except the full acknowledgement of Frank Sinatra, which at that point was in Hollywood what a by appointment to her Majesty tag was in Britain.

Pat gave birth to a daughter, Victoria Francis, that the Lawfords said they were naming after their dear friend Francis Albert. Talk about flattery! Mr. S. ate it up. With Mr. S.'s eyes trained on Pat, Peter became his new best friend. Lawford overnight became one of the clan. Sinatra cast him in the new war movie with Gina Lollobrigida (Get-talittlebitofher, Sinatra droolingly renamed her), Never So Few. They drove twin Dual-Ghias, a supercool Euro-style roadster produced by Chrysler. I think they got them free, for the publicity.

At the Sands, when he was singing something like I've Got the World on a String and Pat Kennedy was sitting at the front table, he would come up and train his baby blues right on her, as if he were serenading her. She was gone. I don't know exactly what went on between Pat and Mr. S., but they spent a huge amount of time together, both in Los Angeles and in Palm Springs, and Peter, who never lost his penchant for hookers and walks on the wild side, was often missing in action. There was definitely something in the air between them.

"Do you find Pat attractive, George?" Mr. S. asked me.

"She's a lovely lady, Mr. S."

"Are you saying she's a dog, George?"

"No way, Mr. S. How can a Kennedy be a dog?"

"Be honest, George. Don't shit me."

"If she wore makeup and did her hair...."

"You wouldn't fuck her, would you, George?"

"I'm a married man, Mr. S."

"I suppose you wouldn't fuck Gina Lollobrigida either?" Mr. S. gave me a "gotcha" smirk.

I couldn't believe Mr. S. was asking my opinion of Pat, but sometimes he would if he was truly confused about a situation. Pat was an outdoors girl. Sports were her thing, a Kennedy thing, but somehow I didn't see Mr. S. playing touch football in Hyannis Port.

One area where Lawford was clearly ahead of the curve was drug use. Drug-hater that he was, Mr. S. would have cut Peter dead if he had known about his enormous ingestion of cocaine, not to mention a level of pot smoking that would have impressed the hippies in Berkeley nearly a decade later. I feel bad about it, because I was something of what the folks in AA call an enabler. I would go with Peter on coke runs to Watts in a nondescript Chevy that he owned for his maids to use. It was the only time I ever saw him spend his own money on anything.

I also babysat him many times when he got high. He talked about sex and about celebrity body parts, often in the company of his brother-in-law Jack Kennedy. To Jack's delight, Peter had actually been with some of the stars he described, hence tales of Lana Turner's perfect breasts, Judy Garland's perfect blow jobs, Judy Holliday's perfect ass, before she got fat. For all his stars, however, Peter said flat-out that he preferred whores. I can see how he and JFK bonded—over pussy. Peter had a special thing for black girls. Not for mulattoes like Lena Horne, but for jet-black pure African types, who were not seen on the silver screen in those days nor readily available through Hollywood madams.

•

On his visits to Palm Springs, Joe Kennedy, who expected to be serviced gratis, courtesy of his host, took a liking to one of Mr. S.'s favorite call girls at the time, a dark Irish Catholic beauty named Judy Campbell. She was the perfect Eisenhower-era pinup of the girl next door. That she charged for her wholesomeness was beside the point. Money was incidental to Mr. S. and friends. Judy would go on to American infamy as the fourth corner of a quadrangle that included Sinatra, Giancana and JFK. But before the son took a bite of this poison apple, father Joseph was there first.

In her memoirs, Judy Campbell was the lady who protested too much. She insisted she never took a penny from either JFK or Sam, that she traveled to Washington, Chicago, Vegas—planes, trains, luxury hotels—all of it at her (continued on page 140)Sinatra(continued from page 126) own expense, because she cared so much about them. Barbara Hutton could barely have afforded Judy's travel bills.

Frank Sinatra had a terrible weakness for Sweet Irish Rose convent-school types. So how did Judy Campbell go from the convent to Sinatra's den of iniquity? Just in her early 20s, she had already escaped a bad marriage and, before that, a broken family. Still, she acquired a taste for the good life. So Judy began turning discreet tricks. If there was a new trickster on the block, Mr. S.'s good friend, the notorious whoremaster Jimmy Van Heusen, would sniff her out. That's how she got to Mr. S.

Aside from her looks, which combined a little Liz Taylor with a little Jackie Kennedy, Judy had other special qualities. A former Jersey girl, she knew all Frank's songs, and knew a lot more about music than the typical call girl. Mr. S. liked to talk to his hookers, and Judy spoke his language. He may have been one of the best johns in history, because he treated his whores like ladies. I'd feed them, buy gifts for them on his orders, pick them up, drive them home, take care of the money for them (a top girl would get $100 a night back then). And, if they were good, and Judy was supposed to be very good, he'd invite them back and pass them through to his special friends. It was like a hot tip on a new restaurant. I may have given the money, typically inside a Hallmark "thank you" greeting card, to Judy at the beginning, but once she graduated to the inner circle, she stopped charging Frank, as a commission for the introductions.

Sometimes Mr. S. would treat his call girls so well that they forgot, as they would love to forget, how they met him. Judy may have been that way at first. But when she started making the rounds, to Eddie Fisher and "Cheap Pete" Lawford (who I'm sure was the one guy who got away without paying), then to Mr. Ambassador and Mr. Sam and Mr. President, she knew damn well that she was not the innocent "good-time girl" she pretended to be.

Given that old Joe had had a long famous affair with Gloria Swanson and that young Jack would have a short famous one with Marilyn Monroe and other stars, I was surprised that either guy would have bothered for more than a session or two with Judy Campbell. But I guess the Irish boys liked coming home to roost.

•

As much as I disliked his father, that's how much I was crazy about John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was handsome and funny and naughty and as irreverent as Dean Martin. "What do colored people want, George?" he asked me the first time he came to visit Palm Springs, not long after Sinatra and Peter Lawford became bosom buddies.

"I don't know, Mr. Senator."

"Jack, George. Jack."

"What do you want, Jack?" I asked.

"I want to fuck every woman in Hollywood," he said with a big leering grin.

"With a campaign promise like that you can't lose, sir."

"You're my man. Jack."

"No, it's George, sir."

"Who's on third?"

"Pardon me, sir?"

"Jack, goddamn it. Call me Jack, or I'll send you back to Mississippi."

"Louisiana, Jack. They eat Catholics down in Mississippi. They hate you worse than me."

That was the way we'd go on, giving each other shit all the time, no master—servant games. He and Mr. S. got along great. They had everything in common: charisma, talent, power. They were about the same age, but JFK seemed much younger. After all, like his dad, he was a Harvard man. And a war hero. And a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. And a senator. Mr. S., dropout 4-F Hoboken man that he was, stood in awe of JFK and his Ivy slickness, his heroics, his acclaim. Yet JFK was far more in awe of Mr. S. than Mr. S. was of him. Because Frank Sinatra controlled the one thing JFK wanted more than anything else: pussy. Mr. S. was the pope of pussy, and JFK was honored to kiss his ring. The pontiff could bestow a Judy Campbell or, if he was feeling magnanimous, a Marilyn Monroe, such was his beneficence.

Marilyn was Mr. S.'s celebrity version of Judy. He brokered assignations not only between her and JFK, but also Giancana and fellow gangster Johnny Rosselli. I saw father Joe pinch her ass many times, but that may have been as far as it went, though with Marilyn it was hard to tell. She was the ultimate Girl Who Can't Say No. If a man showed interest (and rabid passion was the more typical emotion) she was so flattered that she thought it would be terribly rude to turn him down. Marilyn was nothing if not polite.

So here was Mr. S., the big Hollywood matchmaker, the Hello Dolly of Sunset Boulevard. As far as he was concerned, he was just as happy to fix up his friends with the girls of Hollywood as he was having them himself. It was a case of been there, fucked that.

I don't think Jack had a clue about Frank's interest in his sister. Jack didn't worry about things like that. For all his charm, he was one of the most self-centered guys I ever met. He focused on what was essential to him. That, I suppose, is how he got the job done. I am, however, amazed he achieved anything politically, given his endless obsession with sex and gossip. He wanted to know all of the Hollywood dirt—who was a drunk, who was a junkie, who had black lovers, everything. Maybe it was because being with Sinatra was a holiday for him that he showed so little enthusiasm for politics. I would ask him about Castro or Khrushchev, but he wanted to know if Janet Leigh was cheating on Tony Curtis. He read every issue of Confidential magazine. To him, that scandal sheet was a lot better than Foreign Affairs.

Aside from gossip and scandal, John Kennedy was obsessed with Mr. S.'s love life. Because Mr. S. wasn't a kiss-and-teller, JFK figured he could get the real skinny out of me. He loved getting massages when we talked, and he claimed that I gave the best rubdowns outside the Senate gym. JFK lived with enormous pain. He wore a kind of stiff girdle to support his bad back, which must have been hell to get into and out of for all the quickies he got. I would work on his back for a good hour, all the while being peppered with prurient questions about his favorite topic: celebrity poon-tang, as he liked to call it.

"George, does Shirley MacLaine have a red pussy?"

"I've never seen her pussy, Jack."

"Come on. Isn't Shirley here in Palm Springs all the time?"

"Why would she be here?" I asked.

"To fuck the boss."

"It's not happening, Senator. No red puss from old Shirl."

"Then why in blazes did he cast her in those movies?"

"Her acting, Jack."

JFK roared. "You kill me, George. George, tell me something."

"What?" I asked.

"If she's not doing Frank, and she's not doing Dean, who is she doing?"

"Maybe she's doing herself, Senator."

"I like that, George. I like those legs of hers, don't you?"

"They are good, yes, sir."

"As good as Dietrich?"

"Hard to beat, even now," I answered.

"She stroked my dick once, George."

"Good for you, man."

"It was in the south of France. Hôtel du Cap. I was visiting my father for the summer from boarding school. I think she may have been fucking him. He may have put her up to it."

"Where did she do it, Senator?"

"The whole thing. Up and down."

"I mean, in your room, the pool ...?"

"Grand ballroom. I think it was Cole Porter. Begin the Beguine. It was dark and hot, lots of candles. She smelled like a French whore, George, this terrific perfume. She was leading me, holding me so tight, and then she slipped her hand right down my trousers." JFK was getting into some heavy nostalgia. "Can you imagine what that was like for a goddamn teenager?"

By the time I rolled him over to do his trunk and thighs he had an enormous erection. He turned beet red, but he didn't ask me to stop, or to stop talking. "We better get you laid, Jack."

"You darn well better," he agreed. "There's something about this desert air."

•

Even after John F. Kennedy declared for the Democratic presidential nomination, I never heard him talk about government or the plans for his New Frontier. I didn't expect him to talk about this stuff with me, except maybe as an ear to the black community, of which I was not really a part. I did, however, assume he and Mr. S. would have a lot of politics to talk about. After all, Mr. S. did have that framed and signed photo of FDR in a place of honor on the wall, and I figured that once he agreed to board the Kennedy campaign train, he would get deeply versed in politics. But, no. Here Mr. S. was with the man who was en route to becoming the great leader of our time, and what do I hear them talk about? Juliet Prowse's shaved mons veneris, what we now call a Brazilian wax. A lot of dancers and showgirls were shaved, but few normal women were, and JFK was intrigued by the whole thing; he pushed Mr. S. to arrange for him to meet some dancers, for the sake of "scientific curiosity," as the senator put it. "Naked lunch" was what he wanted. Mr. S. didn't get the joke. JFK had to explain his reference to the title of the hip heroin novel by William Burroughs. Mr. S. said he'd never heard of it. Why the hell would a guy like the senator be reading about a heroine? Sometimes Mr. S. could be incredible funny, usually at someone else's expense, and sometimes he could be as square as a Dubuque Rotarian. Where pop culture was concerned, if he himself wasn't the culture, he didn't want to know about it.

The other thing Frank Sinatra 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. 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, who Mr. S. had put on a pedestal. Sex and alcohol may have made Jack a better man in Sinatra's sight. Cocaine was a different story.

While Mr. S. and JFK kept their dialogue to the 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. "Bobby Kennedy is the fruit that poisons that whole tree," Sam said, summarizing his deep misgivings. Sinatra did his best to pacify the Chi Man, to assure him the little brother was chump change. "Jack's the candidate, not the weasel," Mr. S. said, hard-selling 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 never have devoted most of 1960 to getting the Kennedys their impossible dream. But given how much Mr. Sam distrusted Bobby, he surely expected some serious tit for tat.

The first tangible token of Mr. Ambassador's gratitude was the Cal-Neva Lodge, a rustic wigwam-inspired fish-and-game retreat that straddled the state line on the shores of Lake Tahoe. The Kennedys had been coming to this Alpine paradise since the Roaring Twenties. 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 and other bullet-ridden legends had played there. The Kennedys loved the place. So did Sam Giancana.

In the late Fifties the nominal owner of the lodge was "Miami hotelier" (and 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 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 including Sinatra, Dean Martin and Peter Lawford, who were fronting for Sam Giancana.

•

The Rat Pack was how the public came to know the crew that made Ocean's 11, which was based at the Sands in 1960. (The option on the script was paid for by Pat Kennedy Lawford.) The name the guys used for themselves was the Clan, but that sounded like the Ku Klux Klan. Jack Kennedy already had problems as a Catholic in the South without being connected to a bunch of ethnically diverse performers with a moniker like the Clan. These guys 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 long subliminal liquor ad, the famous Vegas shows at night during the filming were a 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 used to sell the president—including the Sinatra-sung, Cahn—Van Heusen—written campaign song High Hopes—was all the brainchild of Mr. Ambassador.

Mr. S. was happier during the Kennedy campaign than at any other time since I began to work for him. He was in even better spirits than when he won the Oscar for From Here to Eternity. Now he had a purpose, a higher calling than Hollywood stardom. "We're gonna take this mother, George," he would say constantly. Despite JFK's decadent 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 studio head Lew Wasserman or producer 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 Army for desertion. Mr. S. was planning to direct it, his first venture behind the camera. It was a total downer, but, as Mr. S. put it, "you don't win Oscars for comedies." 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. 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 was known as a master of "message" movies. Unfortunately, Maltz was even better known as one of the Hollywood 10. 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. When Sinatra's movie plans hit all the papers, 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. 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." 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 humble pie and give up his dream. He went on a three-day Jack Daniel's binge and totally destroyed his office at the Bowmont Drive house. "Who gives a shit? I'm outta this fucking business!" he screamed, ripping up books and scripts, turning over bookcases.

Nothing, however, got Mr. S. more crazed than old Joe's edict that Sammy not be allowed to perform at JFK's inaugural. Sammy was the ambassador's sum of all fears. He was black, he was Jewish, he was married to a blonde Aryan, he was a superstar. It 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 to eat a lot of shit during the campaign, jokes like he was going to be JFK's ambassador to Israel or to the Congo. He also had postponed his wedding to Swedish goddess May Britt until after the election, so as not to turn off voters at the last minute.

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 OK, so were Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole. 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 of the New Frontier, Mr. S., in all his glory, could only see an ugly past filled with 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 world, but all he could taste were ashes. It was a foretaste of worse, far worse, to come.

10 things the Valet knew (But you didn't) About Frank

George Jacobs reveals the chairman's secrets.

1 He was a neat freak who showered and changed clothes four times a day.

2 He had an enormous penis, which he concealed by wearing custom-made undergarments.

3 He despised Marlon Brando, whom he called "mumbles." Brando called him "Baldie."

4 He always got laid the night before a recording session.

5 He rewarded himself with a hooker the night he almost nailed pat Kennedy Lawford.

6 He stood five-foot-seven and wore lifts in all his shoes.

7 He loathed Elvis but studied his records to see if he could understand the king's Magic.

8 He talked like a Gangster in bed and hated sexy lingerie.

9 He once set fire to Peter Lawford's clothes.

10 He wore a good-luck toupee on opening nights.