The Devil May Dance Page 3

  GIANCANA: No, I’ve got other plans for them.

  “Who’s Formosa?” Charlie asked.

  “Just another one of these thugs,” Kennedy said. “You know the kind, they got ’em in New York too.”

  Charlie looked at him again, trying to read his face. Did he know about the union toughs? He saw no indication one way or the other in Kennedy’s eyes.

  The carol drew to a close, and the church was briefly, dramatically silent save for the hushed stirrings of worshippers lighting candles and finding seats. Charlie looked around; no one seemed to recognize him or his famous pew mate.

  “Sinatra thinks the president is going to stay with him when we go out to California in March,” Kennedy said quietly. “He’s been on the president’s case about it ever since the inauguration. Apparently, he’s had all this work done at his Rancho Mirage estate prepping for a visit. Whole place wired for sound. A press filing room. He’s even building a helipad.”

  Charlie had to smile at the excess. “You don’t want the president to stay there?” Throughout the 1960 election, Sinatra and the Rat Pack had gone all in for Kennedy, and the campaign had been only too happy to capitalize on the fame, the glamour, the money. Sinatra had even rerecorded his Oscar-winning song “High Hopes,” written by Sinatra songmeister Jimmy Van Heusen, with new lyrics:

  Everyone is voting for Jack

  ’Cause he’s got what all the rest lack

  Everyone wants to back—Jack

  Jack is on the right track!

  As if reading Charlie’s mind, Kennedy shrugged. “When I started at Justice, an agent asked me how he could be expected to go after Mob bosses when my brother’s most famous supporter is paisans with a bunch of them. I took his point. Unfortunately, the FBI doesn’t have any evidence supporting the rumors that Frank is mobbed up, but now he shows up in this wiretap.”

  Charlie, encouraged by Kennedy’s willingness to confide in him, ventured a question. “What does Hoover say?” he asked. “Why don’t you ask the FBI to investigate Sinatra?”

  Kennedy considered his answer. Finally, he said, “The FBI has been looking into it, but in all honesty, it’s not a priority for them. It’s not as if Sinatra and the Rat Pack are actually robbing five casinos in one night, right?”

  “I would imagine not,” said Charlie.

  Kennedy sighed; he clearly wasn’t telling Charlie everything he had on the subject of Hoover, who’d been running a rogue fiefdom for years. “I really would prefer to have my own intelligence sources, the way Eisenhower once did,” he said. “You ever hear anything about that, Congressman?”

  Charlie froze. He had never spoken of his secret work for Eisenhower, which started back in ’54. “Ike’s Platoon,” as its members referred to themselves. Or as they once had; with Ike’s retirement, the group largely disbanded.

  “Don’t think so,” Charlie lied.

  Suddenly, breaking the choir’s silence, a lone treble voice rose above the murmuring.

  Once in royal David’s city

  Stood a lowly cattle shed,

  Where a mother laid her baby

  In a manger for his bed

  “We know a lot of folks in Hollywood,” Kennedy said. “Sinatra’s working on a picture now for United Artists. It’s about a soldier who goes into politics, like my brother. Like you.”

  “Your brother was a sailor, I believe. I might’ve heard that somewhere,” said Charlie sarcastically, given the vast amounts of PT-109 folklore to which the nation had been subjected—campaign tie clips, a bestselling book, a newspaper serialization in the Herald Tribune, a TV dramatization, yet another heroic retelling in Reader’s Digest, and there was much more to come. A Hollywood studio was currently casting for the feature film of the story—would the lead be played by Warren Beatty? Peter Fonda? The White House would get final approval; Charlie hoped to God that wasn’t what Kennedy was referring to.

  “It’s called The Manchurian Candidate,” Kennedy continued. “I don’t really care for the project as it’s been explained to me. Sinatra called to talk to the president before accepting.”

  “Right,” said Charlie, still thoroughly confused.

  “You’re about to enter an election year, so congressional recesses are going to be long,” Kennedy said. “The head of the studio is a friend, Arthur Krim. What if you became a consultant to the picture? For the next month or so, you can help coach them all in how to walk and talk like soldiers. You can cozy up to Frank and see how legit these rumored Mob ties are. Befriend him. Let me know everything you learn. Everything.”

  Charlie knew he’d be well out of his element among the Hollywood set. “And after I do that, you’ll make your decision about your brother’s visit,” he said.

  “Yes,” Kennedy said.

  “So if I figure out what this favor is that Giancana asked of Frank, you’ll resolve this situation with my father?”

  “We announce the LA trip next month, February latest,” Kennedy said, ignoring the question. “You won’t have much time.”

  “Absolutely,” Charlie said, hating that he was acquiescing to what was essentially extortion. Nearly a decade in Congress could turn any would-be James Dean into Sal Mineo.

  “This stays between us, Charlie,” Kennedy said. “Addington here will be your point of contact. Don’t trust phones.”

  “Copy,” Charlie said. “And maybe then—”

  “No quid pro quos, Charlie,” Kennedy said, anticipating Charlie’s next question.

  Charlie nodded. His dad was in a cell and he had to get him out. He had no choice. He would do whatever Kennedy told him to do.

  Chapter Four

  Hollywood, California

  December 1961

  One minute she was missing her children and the next she was lusting for the wiry crooner with the icy blue eyes. Sinatra, whose ballads had once driven schoolgirls to shriek and even faint, was no longer a skinny kid but rather a middle-aged man with an expanding waist and a matching chip on his shoulder. But his charisma was unmistakable—and Margaret stared as he sauntered across the movie set, stepping over cables and around equipment, bringing with him an atmosphere of excitement and, yes, sex. She felt guilty for being there. The kids are fine with their grandmother, she thought, grateful that her mother, Catherine, had flown from Ohio to New York to take care of Lucy and Dwight. Catherine had been staying with Margaret’s sister, who was in the midst of a family crisis that made Margaret’s problems seem trifling by comparison—Margaret’s teenage niece, who’d always been somewhat troubled, had run away from home.

  She mulled over all that, then resumed drooling over Sinatra. In this particular scene, Major Bennett Marco—played by Sinatra—was sweating. Standing at attention, ramrod straight, unblinking, but with a sheen on his forehead and upper lip that betrayed his nerves. Next to him, in front of the gathered crowd, Senator John Yerkes Iselin, played by James Gregory, glanced sideways at Marco, trying to assess his stability. Marco looked ready to hit him.

  “You have something to say, soldier?”

  “Cut!” John Frankenheimer, lanky and intense, sprang from his canvas director’s chair and shot an exasperated look at his crew. The actors broke character and exhaled.

  “What was wrong with that?” Major Marco had lost his military poise and become once again Frank Sinatra, irritated and impatient.

  “The boom was in the frame,” Frankenheimer said.

  “Sorry!” yelled Joe Edmondson, the soundman.

  “Let’s take ten,” Frankenheimer said. Sinatra glared at him, then looked around the set for a cigarette.

  The set—a Senate hearing room—sat in the corner of an immense soundstage that housed various other sets for the film. In one section, the set designer had constructed a train car. In another, the first floor of a house. In the middle of it all stood the Spring Lake Hotel lobby, where a poster promised FUN WITH HYDRANGEAS. Dozens of lights hung from thick chains. Construction workers, crew members, makeup artists, caterers, executiv
es, and others heard Frankenheimer’s announcement and began buzzing.

  “Whatever happened to those wireless mikes you were working on?” Frankenheimer asked Edmondson. “These booms will be the death of me.”

  “Still working on them. Last prototype was too staticky.”

  The director shook his head. “It’s 1961, for the love of God. We’re still using technology from Birth of a Nation.” Frankenheimer turned to Charlie. The director had initially seemed irritated to have the congressman and his wife foisted upon him. But after Margaret praised his earlier television work on Playhouse 90, and Charlie proclaimed The Young Savages the best film of the year, Frankenheimer warmed right up.

  “Does this feel right to you, Congressman? Would an army major get in the face of a senator like that?”

  “Soldiers tend to defer to people in power,” said Charlie. “Especially those in the civilian command structure. But if he’s desperate enough, maybe.”

  Charlie and Margaret had flown to Los Angeles on the Justice Department’s dime, dropped off their belongings at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, and gone to the set. The studio had told Frankenheimer to use Charlie as a resource for any question that was military or political. Margaret’s decision to accompany Charlie was explained to Frankenheimer as a fringe benefit for him because of her keen academic eye for detail and her ability to advise Angela Lansbury on the behavior of congressional spouses. Oh, the stories Margaret could tell—of the voice-of-God television anchor with breath like a warthog and hands like a squid, the strutting cowboy-booted senator who shrank from confrontation as if he’d been gelded, the 2 Corinthians–quoting reverend who seemed personally to cotton more to Sodom and Gomorrah. Margaret had seen it all—in power, out of power, shiny new thing, old hat, all the highs and lows. Charlie had been stunned that she’d insisted on joining him with the kids still so young and needy, but she had convinced him that she might come in handy. Plus she could meet some movie stars and get a little time in the sun. The truth was she was worried about Charlie and his drinking and his having to fend for himself three thousand miles from home.

  “Of course, Marco’s in something of a manic state,” Margaret noted. “He wouldn’t be thinking clearly.”

  “Yes, the manic state conveyed so subtly by coating my face with petroleum jelly,” Sinatra said.

  More than two decades of fame and fortune had done little to smooth the rough edges of Sinatra’s New Jersey origins; there was a combative arrogance to him that reminded Charlie of his dad. Since arriving in Los Angeles, he hadn’t heard from Addington White, didn’t know if his father had been moved to a less harsh prison or how he was doing. He hadn’t felt so disconnected from his father since the war, and given the precarious state in which he’d last seen him, a hum of anxiety was his constant companion.

  Sinatra grabbed a towel off the shoulder of a production assistant and rubbed the Vaseline off his face. His makeup guy, a short old man whom Sinatra called “Brownie,” scurried quickly to his boss’s side and offered him a Chesterfield cigarette, the kind the singer helped advertise—Man-Size Satisfaction; Clean, Smooth, Fresh!—and a light. Sinatra inhaled deeply, then turned to the director. “I’ll be in my dressing room when you get your act together here.” He stalked off the set, Brownie following in his wake. As Sinatra walked by an attractive young woman presumably from the wardrobe department—she was carrying three dry-cleaned Chinese army uniforms—he said, “Hiya, doll.” She blushed.

  Frankenheimer rolled his eyes. “He’s gifted, but he never has more than one good take in him,” he said dryly. “It’s usually the first one.”

  The director reached into his pocket, dug out a pack of Pall Malls, and offered cigarettes to Charlie and Margaret. Smoothly, his lighter appeared in his other hand and he offered them his flame.

  Frankenheimer was ascendant. He’d been labeled “television’s boy genius for 1954,” and in 1957, convinced movies were where an artist could take risks, he directed The Young Stranger, a film that everyone pretended to have seen but no one had. Four years later, in 1961, the transition to film was complete with the release of his critically acclaimed “thinking man’s crime drama,” The Young Savages, starring an uncharacteristically restrained Burt Lancaster. Executives saw promise in his craftsmanship and his ability to direct films that could make audiences think while earning studios buckets of money. The wunderkind’s bloodshot eyes and bloated face indicated that he might be equally precocious in his noncinematic pursuits.

  Margaret discreetly looked around to make sure no one could hear them.

  “Oh, this is hardly a secret,” Frankenheimer said. “Frank himself told me he’s a performer more than an actor.”

  “Whatever it is, it was good enough to get an Oscar,” Margaret said.

  Some hammering from the corner of the studio reminded Frankenheimer. “Tomorrow we’re shooting the scene on the train,” he said.

  “The shell-shock scene,” Margaret said, helpfully reminding Charlie, who was looking blankly at the director. “Marco is blinking, unsteady, hands shaking so much he can’t light a cigarette.” Charlie was glad Margaret was there. She seemed to have memorized the entire script already.

  “Have you seen a lot of that among your fellow vets?” Frankenheimer asked.

  “I’ve seen battle fatigue manifest itself in all sorts of ways,” Charlie said. “The scenes I read with the nightmares rang truer. To me, at any rate.”

  “Do you think it works for the train scene?” Frankenheimer asked. “We need a quick way to telegraph he’s having a rough go of it.”

  Charlie stroked his chin. “Sure,” he said. “It’s not just standard battle fatigue that Marco has, right? It’s the brainwash thing.”

  “But what would read as more, you know, standard for a veteran?”

  “I’ve been married to a veteran for sixteen years, since Charlie got back from France, and I’ve met a ton of veterans since then,” Margaret said. “Washington is lined with them. But those are the ones who came back and instead of healing were determined to keep working, keep moving, never stopping, never slowing down, no time to think, no time to let the mind wander. The whole goal is to keep running, to hide it, to pretend there’s nothing wrong.”

  Charlie looked at his wife, who returned his gaze with earnestness. Was she talking about him? Of course she was.

  “I have yet to see any veterans in DC with the shakes, with outward signs of pain,” Charlie said. “They—we—put one foot in front of the other like everyone else.”

  “I agree with that,” Margaret said. “One foot, then one foot, then one foot, never stopping, because were they to stop, they might feel something they couldn’t stand.”

  Frankenheimer was listening intently.

  “So maybe Marco has the shakes or maybe he drinks a lot more than he knows is healthy, just grabs it and downs it all the time when no one’s looking, but never enough to stumble or embarrass himself. He drinks the perfect amount so he’s somewhere between numb and bumbling, smooth as China silk,” Margaret added, and Charlie knew that she knew.

  “Ready?” United Artists PR honcho Manny Fontaine asked Charlie and Margaret.

  Margaret nodded and Charlie shrugged and Fontaine knocked briskly on Sinatra’s dressing-room door, then rested an ear against it to detect signs of movement. He grimaced slightly in Charlie’s direction and gaily called out: “Knock-knock!”

  Fontaine was slick and handsome and young—late twenties, early thirties—and it would be easy to conclude he was just another mindlessly ambitious studio drone, preternaturally optimistic and cheery. But in the two days since Fontaine had picked them up at Los Angeles International Airport, Charlie and Margaret had come to appreciate the wit he deployed like a surgeon with a scalpel. He was deferential to stars and directors and executives, but it was always with a wink in his inside jacket pocket; he clearly knew how silly it all was. “Just a movie,” he would say under his breath, “just some popcorn.” Fontaine further tr
ied to bond with Charlie as a fellow veteran; he claimed to have served in Korea with the Eighth Army Ranger Company. Charlie knew those Rangers. They were small Special Forces units expert in what was called “irregular warfare”—tough, nasty stuff.

  Sinatra’s dressing-room door cracked open to reveal Brownie.

  “Why, hello, Mr., um, Brownie,” Fontaine said. “I told Mr. Sinatra yesterday that we had hired Congressman Marder here to serve as a consultant on the film, purely as a resource if Mr. Sinatra wants to get more background for his role. Charlie’s a war hero. Fought in France. Just wanted to make a cursory introduction, won’t take more than thirty seconds.”

  Brownie remained silent, turning his head toward the room behind him. Charlie remembered a similar maneuver by his father’s assistant, blocking and guarding his dad’s study door when Charlie was in high school and needed money, permission, a signature on a report card. Echoing that past, Brownie made a regretful expression, then he shook his head no.

  “Completely understandable, sorry for bothering you!” Fontaine said brightly. “Tell Mr. Sinatra we are happy to set up another time for him to meet the congressman, at his pleasure and convenience!” Brownie closed the door firmly. Fontaine, unfazed, turned to Charlie and Margaret, arms outstretched, and shooed them back down the hall.

  “That went about as well as I thought it would,” he said, walking quickly.

  Margaret was never one to suffer fools or rude behavior, even if the offender was one of America’s biggest stars. “I thought you’d set up this time for Charlie to meet him?”

  “I did,” Fontaine said with the rueful smile of someone who knew the routine. “Don’t worry about it; we’ll figure something out.” He was already heading toward an exit, waving over his shoulder. “Promise.”

  Margaret took Charlie’s hand. He looked at her grimly; he’d never be able to help his father if he didn’t get close enough to Sinatra to learn something that Kennedy and White would find helpful.