Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [201]
Frank would testify in absolute secrecy. Gelb chose a law office on an upper floor of Rockefeller Center, at four o’clock in the morning on March 1, 1951.
At 4:00 a.m. on the dot—no being two hours late for this one—Sinatra and Gelb stepped off the elevator to find Nellis and a court reporter, stenotype machine in hand, already waiting. Frank’s famous bluster was nowhere in sight: the Kefauver Committee, with its implicit threat of fatal publicity, had thrown the fear of God into him. He looked “like a lost kitten, drawn, frightened to death,” Nellis recalled. “He kept shooting his cuffs, straightening his tie, and he smoked constantly.” His right hand shook so badly each time he tried to light a fresh cigarette that he had to hold it with his left.
“He knew that I was going to ask him about Willie Moretti and Lucky Luciano,” Nellis said, “but he didn’t know about all the photographs that I had. He also didn’t know that I had a report about a rape he had allegedly been involved in and the blackmail that had reportedly been paid to keep that story from ever being published.”
The rape story was the first of many such Sinatra rumors that would pop up, like malodorous bubbles in a swamp, over the years. The venue was usually Las Vegas or Palm Springs. Usually prostitutes were involved; so, usually, was Jimmy Van Heusen. For all his vaunted courtliness where ladies were concerned, Van Heusen—a self-confessed sex addict—was obsessed with prostitutes, and allegedly had some outré tastes. Sinatra allegedly shared some of these tastes. “Van Heusen was a wild man, they said—a crazy man as far as women were concerned,” said Gloria Delson Franks, Sammy Cahn’s first wife. “Sometimes not in a nice way, too; he abused a lot of women, apparently. Pushing them around. Whatever. I think there was a time when Nancy felt he was a bad influence on Frank. Not that Frank was a choir boy before.”
And Sinatra’s association with Jimmy Tarantino was coming back to haunt him. Tarantino was the former Varsity member whom Frank had helped set up in business with a scandal sheet called Hollywood Nite Life. No good deed goes unpunished. Maybe Frank knew at the outset that Tarantino’s modus operandi was blackmail: that celebrities had to pay for good publicity in the rag or get the bad kind. Maybe the $15,000 he invested was really protection money; or perhaps he was just being kind to a compadre. In any case, the minute Tarantino got wind of squalid doings in Vegas involving Sinatra, he tried to shake Frank down. This was complicated, given that Tarantino had Hank Sanicola and Mickey Cohen as business partners, and maybe Willie Moretti, too. Furious, Frank told Sanicola to tell Bobby Burns to write Tarantino another sizable check, ostensibly as a business loan, and to deliver the following proviso: this was the end of the line for Tarantino as far as Sinatra was concerned. The whole thing stank, but it was the kind of nonsense that happened all the time on the fringes of show business.
Now here was this Washington lawyer with his eyeglasses and narrow stare, getting in Frank’s business.
“We have information,” Nellis intoned, as the stenographer clicked away, “to the effect that you paid Tarantino quite a large sum of money to keep him from writing a quite uncomplimentary story about you.”
“Well, you know how it is in Hollywood,” Sinatra said—as if this prick had any idea. “Jimmy called up and said he had an eyewitness account of a party that was supposed to have been held down in Vegas in which some broads had been raped or something like that. I told Jimmy if he printed anything like that, he would be in for a lot of trouble.”
“Did he ask you for money?” Nellis asked.
“Well, I asked Hank Sanicola, my manager, to talk