His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [168]
Given these Republican jibes, Frank had figured that Sahl would provide good entertainment for 100,000 cheering Kennedy partisans. He certainly didn’t expect the comedian to make fun of the candidate, and he cringed when Sahl opened by announcing that Nixon had sent a wire to Joseph P. Kennedy, saying, “You haven’t lost a son. You’ve gained a country. Congratulations.” It was no better when Sahl ended by saying, “We’ve finally got a choice, the choice between the lesser of two evils. Nixon wants to sell the country, and Kennedy wants to buy it.”
After that evening, Frank’s relationship with Sahl was never the same.
The convention over, Frank campaigned hard for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. He appeared before two thousand women at Janet Leigh’s Key Women for Kennedy tea and sang three songs. He sent a $2,500 check to the campaign headquarters. He brought Hollywood friends to the Democratic Governors’ Ball in Newark, New Jersey, and sang before forty thousand people. He staged luau benefits in Hawaii during the filming of The Devil at 4 O’Clock, and campaigned with Peter Lawford throughout the islands.
“Frank and I won Honolulu for Jack by one hundred twenty-eight votes,” said Lawford. “We hit all the islands, just the two of us. I’d smile and Frank would sing, picking up local bands along the way.”
Frank also arranged a behind-the-scenes meeting for Ambassador Kennedy with his good friend, Harold J. Gibbons, national vice-president of the Teamsters Union, so that the ambassador could try to heal the wounds caused by Bobby’s investigation of labor racketeering and get labor’s endorsement for his son’s presidential ticket. The teamsters never endorsed Kennedy, but Frank’s friend Sam Giancana steered teamster dollars out of their $200 million pension fund into the Kennedy campaign. Giancana did it partly to get Kennedy elected—and thereby end his own surveillance—but he also must have wanted to please Frank, with whom he now had a common business interest. A few months before, Giancana had quietly made preparations to become a secret owner of the Gal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe. The owners of record were to be Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Hank Sanicola.
Curiously, former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy was staying at Cal-Neva at the time as Sinatra’s guest, and, according to Justice Department files, “had been visited by many gangsters with gambling interests.” The Justice Department refused in 1985 to release any further information to explain the “deal” made between Joseph Kennedy and the “gangsters with gambling interests.”
Seeing an opportunity to embarrass the Republican nominee, Frank gave Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s campaign manager, a copy of a private investigator’s report disclosing that Richard Nixon had made periodic visits to a New York psychiatrist, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, news that would have been highly damaging if published in 1960. Bobby Kennedy’s aide recalled that Sinatra, who personally employed the private investigator, was surprised when Bobby refused to use the information and locked it in his office safe instead. “Frank then sent a reporter around to try to surface it, but Bobby was out of town at the time,” said the aide. “He never said anything to Frank, but he sat on the report and refused to make it public.”
On September 12, 1960, Frank set aside politics for the wedding of his beloved daughter, Nancy, to Tommy Sands at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in front of thirty-five friends and family. Little Nancy had intended to marry Sands