THE DAY KENNEDY DITCHED SINATRA
A new book reveals why JFK cut all ties with the crooner who helped him reach the White House
SLEDGEHAMMER in hand, an apoplectic Frank Sinatra swung savagely around his newly renovated home in Palm Springs, California. Ol’ Blue Eyes had rebuilt the house at vast expense to welcome his good friend, President John F Kennedy. He had remodelled it, adding rooms for White House staff and Secret Service agents, and installed a bank of 25 phone lines. He even built a helicopter pad in the garden.
But days before JFK’s planned visit in March 1962, the president abruptly ended his friendship with Sinatra – the bitter aftermath of a shared penchant for dangerous women and Mafia connections.
Sinatra stormed through his house “smashing up everything in his way before taking a sledgehammer to the concrete helipad outside”, reveals Michael Sheridan, author of the gripping new book Sinatra And The Jack Pack, detailing their remarkable friendship and its dramatic ending. “He was deeply wounded by what he regarded as a huge personal insult.”
Sinatra had his famed Rat Pack – Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jnr and the president’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford – but he craved more. “Sinatra desperately wanted to be part of John F Kennedy’s gang,” says Sheridan. “The guy Ol’ Blue Eyes really wanted to hang with was the real chairman of the board, John F Kennedy.”
He adds: “He and his father [Senator Joe Kennedy] had covertly used the Mob, through Sinatra, to get the vote out and to, in some cases, fix entire electoral areas. He had used Frank to encourage his Hollywood and entertainment industry friends to support the Kennedy presidential election campaign.”
FOR hard-drinking, brawling, Mafia-connected womaniser Sinatra, raised on the hardscrabble streets of New Jersey, the friendship offered an entrée to Washington DC’s ultimate circle of power, and a veneer of respectability. Kennedy loved the singer’s Hollywood glamour, and access to the world’s most beautiful women.
Sinatra was even put in charge of JFK’s inaugural gala ceremony and parade in Washington in January 1961, assembling a stellar cast including Gene Kelly, Bette Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Ethel Merman.
“Since the election Sinatra had sought access to, and approval from, the president with a new intensity” and “bombarded Kennedy with letters, messages, gifts and suggestions,” says Sheridan.
Sinatra hosted lavish parties and fundraisers for JFK, and privately they womanised together. Both bedded screen siren Marilyn Monroe, and FBI files disclose POWERFUL PALS: Frank Sinatra with John F Kennedy in 1960. JFK was allegedly involved in a love triangle with Judith Campbell Exner, inset above, and mob boss Sam Giancana, below, thanks to Sinatra that both were investigated for a fling with two New York prostitutes, the book reveals.
Among the women Sinatra pimped for JFK was brunette Judith Campbell Exner, who Sinatra – in an appalling display of bad judgment – also introduced to Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. Thanks to Ol’ Blue Eyes, the president and the US’s top mobster shared the same lover for more than two years.
But while Kennedy kept his affair with mobster’s moll Exner under wraps, Sinatra made no secret of his affection for Mafia hoodlums. This posed a mounting problem for the president’s brother, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who had vowed to crush the mob and viewed Sinatra’s links to organised crime as a political time bomb.
An FBI probe exposed Sinatra’s extensive mob ties. Its file would ultimately fill more than 2,000 pages. By 1962 Kennedy reluctantly acknowledged that it was political suicide to remain friends with him. He ordered brother-in-law Peter Lawford to break the bad news – his visit to Sinatra’s Palm Springs home was cancelled.
“I was scared,” Lawford admitted. “When Jack called me, he said that as president he just couldn’t stay at Frank’s and sleep in the same bed that Giancana or any other hood had slept in.”
OL’ BLUE EYES phoned Robert Kennedy in a rage, “to be told that the reason for the cancellation was the disreputable company he was keeping and the need for the administration to distance itself from people such as himself,” says the author. He adds: “Sinatra called the attorney general every name in the book before slamming the phone down.”
Cut off from the White House, Sinatra threw himself back into Hollywood, filming Robin And The Seven Hoods with Rat Pack pals Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jnr. He omitted Lawford, livid that his friend had sided with the Kennedy clan.
When Sinatra learned of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, he halted filming and phoned the White House, only to discover that his privileges had been revoked.
“Sinatra, despite his celebrity, was just another caller that afternoon,” says the author. The president’s family and close friends went to Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, for the funeral but, in a final indignity, Sinatra was snubbed.
He later turned his support to Republican Richard Nixon, and then Ronald Reagan, despite having branded him “a bore”.
After JFK’s slaying, Sinatra reportedly had an affair with his widow Jackie Kennedy – perhaps the ultimate revenge. But in later life he spoke kindly of the friend who had shunned him. “For a brief moment, he was the brightest star in our lives,” Sinatra said of JFK. “I loved him.”
Sinatra And The Jack Pack by Michael Sheridan with David Harvey. £16.99 Skyhorse Publishing. Call the Express Bookshop on 01872 562310. Or send a cheque or PO to Jack Pack Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth, TR11 4WJ, or visit expressbookshop.com UK delivery is free.