The Cool School (48 page)

They took the train to Los Angeles that night, and resumed filming at Warner Brothers the next morning.

Ocean’s Eleven
was completed on March 23. Three weeks later,
Who Was That Lady?
opened at the Criterion in New York. In it,
Variety
had noted, “Martin strengthens the false impression that he isn’t acting at all. It should be so easy!” The
Times
did not much care for it— these were the days when the paper of record found Jack Kerouac’s
Pull My Daisy
“truly arresting”—but did declare that “Mr. Martin, especially, is fine.” On May 9, with André Previn conducting, Dean recorded the soundtrack album for
Bells Are Ringing.
A day later, with Nelson Riddle, he recorded “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” the song that James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn had written for
Ocean’s Eleven.
In mid-June—they could not draft him now—he underwent an operation on his hernia at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital.
Bells Are Ringing
opened at Radio City Music Hall on June 20, two days before he was released from the hospital.

The
Daily News
called
Bells Are Ringing
“a knockout, even better entertainment than it was on the stage.” Dean, as Holliday’s “partner in singing, dancing and romancing,” was “a perfect choice.”

H
IGH
HOPES
.
That summer, the Rat Pack sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” to open the Democratic national convention in Los Angeles. The delegates from Mississippi loudly protested Sammy Davis’s presence on the stage. But Mississippi had the lowest average income level and the fewest television sets per capita of any state. Jack was not playing to them. His bleeding heart went out to the downtrodden of that state, but only through the wonder of television could they truly experience the integrity of that heart and the probity of the sharecropper’s friend. As every black man in Hyannis Port knew, young John Kennedy was a man whose sense of justice was real. Television conveyed that reality, as it conveyed all realities.

Dean, who earlier in the year had brought the realities of Fabian and André Previn together on his NBC show, found himself becoming more involved in the shadow play that surrounded Sinatra’s infatuation with the prince of the New Frontier. Jack Kennedy’s kid brother Bobby, a worse spoiled brat than he, was chief counsel to the McClellan Senate committee’s investigations into labor racketeering. Bobby’s holy war against Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters had stirred trouble far and wide. It seemed that the little rabbit-mouthed
irlandese
was out to crucify not only the new head of the Teamsters but every wop in America along with him. One of those who had been called before the committee in 1959 was Sam Giancana, boss of the Chicago mob, whom both Dean and Sinatra knew from his earliest days of power following the death of Charlie Fischetti. Wearing sunglasses and a cheap hairpiece, Sam had sat there holding a three-by-five-inch card bearing the words of the Fifth Amendment, whose protection he invoked in response to every question Kennedy put forth. The heat had not diminished, and it came to be believed that the only way to get Bobby Kennedy’s nose out of everybody’s business was through Jack. The Teamsters, of course, could not publicly endorse Jack, though Hoffa himself became one of the believers in the hope of his intercession. But, through Giancana, a large donation to Kennedy’s presidential campaign was drawn from the Teamsters pension fund and passed to Jack beneath the blind eyes of his brother Bobby, who took time out from his wop-hunting to serve as Jack’s campaign manager. There were also disbursements from the campaign fund made through Sinatra to Skinny D’Amato in Atlantic City. Under Giancana’s guidance, D’Amato was to purchase the influence of several West Virginia election officials known to him through the 500 Club.

Giancana, cheap hairpiece and all, was far from a fool. He led Sinatra to think that the donation in support of Kennedy, as well as the influence-buying in West Virginia, was prompted to a great degree by the faith in Kennedy that Sinatra had expressed to him. By giving the impression that he was relying on Sinatra’s judgment and
that he was doing Sinatra a favor—Sinatra would be able to further ingratiate himself to Jack by taking credit for the donation and newfound support—Giancana rendered Sinatra beholden to him. Not only, Giancana figured, would he now be able to use Sinatra as a money-maker toward his own ends, Sinatra would be able to deliver that other one, that aloof bastard, that unreachable
menefreghista,
toward those same ends as well.

The McGuire Sisters, the three singing daughters of an Ohio minister, had risen to national prominence with a string of hits in 1954, the year that Sam Giancana had become a widower. Sam, who knew the act from the Chez Paree, had run into Phyllis McGuire in Las Vegas in early 1960, about the time that Kennedy announced his candidacy. She was twenty-nine, recently divorced, drinking, and gambling heavily; the days of the McGuire Sisters’ big hits were past. She became Giancana’s lover. Not long after they began their romance, Sinatra introduced Giancana to Judy Campbell, the woman who was now Kennedy’s mistress. Again, he liked the idea. Now the three of them, Frank, Jack, and Sam, were sharing the same
braciole
.

High hopes: a casino of his own. Elmer “Bones” Remmer, the San Francisco gangster who owned the Cal-Neva Lodge, at Crystal Bay on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, had gotten in trouble with the Treasury Department, trouble that went deeper than the $800,000 he owed the Internal Revenue Service. Control of the Cal-Neva had passed to Bert “Wingy” Grober, who had his problems too. In June 1960, there was talk of Grober’s reducing his stake in the troubled casino. On July 13, 1960, the day Kennedy won the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles, it was announced in Carson City that a group of four men had applied for permission to take over a fifty-seven-percent, majority interest in the Cal-Neva Lodge. Those four men were Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sinatra’s longtime friend, piano player, and legbreaker, Hank Sanicola, and Skinny D’Amato. Under the plan, Wingy’s interest would be reduced to eighteen percent. Sanicola would hold sixteen percent; D’Amato, thirteen; Dean,
three. Sinatra’s proposed twenty-five-percent interest, the largest piece, would be shared in secret with Sam Giancana, whose behind-the-scene machinations had enabled the four men to strike an above-board takeover price with Wingy of only $250,000.

On that same night of July 13, as Kennedy’s nomination was being announced, Dean opened at the Sands.

“I’d like to tell you some of the
good
things the Mafia is doing,” he said. There was a momentary hush, then a long, slow wave of rising laughter.

His singing had begun to take on a new tone. He was no longer merely selling the lie of romance. Stabbing sharply and coldly here and there into the songs with lines of wry disdain, he was exposing his own racket as well, selling the further delusion of their sharing in the secret of that lie itself. It was an elaboration on his tried and true style of singing to the men rather than the women, of singing to them as if they alone could truly understand him. It was also a natural emanation of the way he felt. He simply no longer cared. He began more songs than he finished, dismissing most of them with a wisecrack partway through. Some, with the help of lyricist Sammy Cahn, were simply reduced to gross parody.

“If you think I’m going to get serious, you’re crazy. If you want to hear a serious song, buy one of my records.”

In the first week of August,
Ocean’s Eleven
was previewed at the Fremont Theatre in Las Vegas. The
Los Angeles Examiner
declared it “something you should keep your children away from.”
The New Yorker
dismissed it as “an admiring wide-screen color travelogue of the various effluvia—animate and inanimate—of Las Vegas.” But
Variety
’s prediction proved true: despite “serious weaknesses in both material and interpretation,” it would “rake in chips, thanks to cast.”
Ocean’s Eleven
became the ninth biggest money-maker of the year, behind such formidable pictures as
Psycho
,
Spartacus
,
Exodus
,
La Dolce Vita
,
Butterfield 8
, and
The Apartment
.

On September 13, the Nevada Gaming Control Board issued a
recommendation for approval of the Cal-Neva takeover. Dean by then had finished another film:
All in a Night’s Work
, produced by Hal Wallis and directed by Joseph Anthony, who had done
Career
. Shirley MacLaine once again had the female lead; Cliff Robertson played a romantic ringer in the background. As in
Career
, Wallis found MacLaine “difficult,” but Dean “was never a problem.”
All in a Night’s Work
, as
Variety
later put it, was an “essentially predictable, featherweight comedy,” excellently directed and with a strangely classical score by André Previn. “Never for one moment,”
Variety
said, “is Martin believable in the role of the youthful publishing tycoon, but his easy-going manner and knack for supplying the comedy reaction gets him by.”

On November 1, Sinatra joined Dean on “The Dean Martin Show,” which was presented as “Honoring Frank Sinatra.” Seven days later, John F. Kennedy was elected president. It was close: a plurality of only 118,574 votes, the narrowest presidential victory of the century.

“Listen, honey, if it wasn’t for me, your boyfriend wouldn’t even be in the White House,” Sam Giancana would tell Judy Campbell.

“Frank won Kennedy the election,” Skinny D’Amato would say.

But it was television that won it for him. It was Nixon’s poor appearance before the debate cameras that gave Kennedy the votes he needed to scrape by.

The following night, November 9, Dean returned to the Sands: “I just talked to Jack this morning and he made me secretary of liquor.” He was,
Variety
reported, “hotter than ever” and “one of the most potent lures for gamblers.” He was also “more relaxed than ever—in fact he appears to be imitating his imitators.”

Camelot
opened in New York on December 3. The show was beloved of the new president, and his administration came to be known by its name: the Camelot years. Jack and Jackie became the fairyland royalty of the land of whiter whites.

High hopes: a record company of his own. Capitol’s current contract with Sinatra’s Essex Productions company, binding him to release his recordings exclusively through Capitol, would lapse to a
nonexclusive basis in February. In early December, it was announced that Sinatra would then begin releasing his records through a new company of his own. On December 19, he made his first recording for his new company, which now had a name: Reprise Records.

Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams
, 1992

After spending years at the low end of the journalism food chain, as sportswriter, copyboy, newspaper stringer, and writer for underground newspapers, Hunter S. Thompson spent a year riding with the Hell’s Angels, which resulted in his first book,
Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.
The success of that book gave him entrée into respectable venues such as
Esquire
and
Harper’s,
then
Rolling Stone.
Few cultural publications have exhibited less tolerance for humor than
Rolling Stone,
but they almost made up for it by giving Hunter S. Thompson carte blanche—even if many times owner Jann Wenner jerked Thompson’s leash and ended up killing stories that might have been masterpieces, such as his take on the fall of Saigon. Thompson’s
Rolling Stone
debut chronicled his run for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, and marked the beginning of the gonzo journalism that gave us
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
excerpted here. Thompson’s style was the entheogenic apotheosis of the New Journalism
.

S
ATURDAY
MIDNIGHT
 . . . Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide-pegs, is a pocketful of keno cards and cocktail napkins, all covered with scribbled notes. Here is one: “Get the Ford man, demand a Bronco for race-observation purposes . . . photos? . . . Lacerda/call . . . why not a helicopter? . . . Get on the phone,
lean
on the fuckers . . . heavy yelling.”

Another says: “Sign on Paradise Boulevard—‘Stopless and Topless’ . . . bush-league sex compared to L.A.;
pasties
here—total naked public humping in L.A. . . . Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/
gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers . . . house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd.”

A
LONG
time ago when I lived in Big Sur down the road from Lionel Olay I had a friend who liked to go to Reno for the crap-shooting. He owned a sporting-goods store in Carmel. And one month he drove his Mercedes highway-cruiser to Reno on three consecutive weekends—winning heavily each time. After three trips he was something like $15,000 ahead, so he decided to skip the fourth weekend and take some friends to dinner at Nepenthe. “Always quit winners,” he explained. “And besides, it’s a long drive.”

On Monday morning he got a phone call from Reno—from the general manager of the casino he’d been working out on. “We missed you this weekend,” said the GM. “The pit-men were bored.”

“Shucks,” said my friend.

So the next weekend he flew up to Reno in a private plane, with a friend and two girls—all “special guests” of the GM. Nothing too good for high rollers. . . .

And on Monday morning the same plane—the casino’s plane—flew him back to the Monterey airport. The pilot lent him a dime to call a friend for a ride to Carmel. He was $30,000 in debt, and two months later he was looking down the barrel of one of the world’s heaviest collection agencies.