His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [169]
Her mother watched with mixed emotions as Nancy, Jr., rushed into marriage with the young singer who, as a teenage idol, had. sold a million copies of “Teen-age Crush” for Capitol Records. “It’s my own life happening twenty years later,” said Big Nancy.
The twenty-three-year-old groom wore his airman third class Air Force uniform and the bride wore a white street-length dress designed by her father’s designer, Don Loper. Frank refused to pose for photographers. “This is Nancy’s day, and I don’t want to horn in,” he said.
Frank cried when he saw his twenty-year-old daughter ready to walk down the aisle. “He looked at me in my white gown and veil,” she said. “He saw the bouquet and the little diamond star earrings he’d given me for a wedding gift. He just stood there with tears streaming down his face.
“ ‘I love you, chicken,’ he said.
“I said, ‘I love you, too, Daddy.’ And off we went down the aisle, both in tears.”
Later Nancy said, “You know what most mothers give their daughters for a wedding present? Silver or china or money for a romantic trip. My mother gave me a sewing machine.”
The marriage was to be tough for Tommy because Nancy was constantly calling her father for advice, and begging him to put Tommy in his movies. Tommy insisted that they move to New York to be away from the Sinatra influence. “Frank let me know that he felt it was a foolish idea, that I’d be hurting myself professionally by pulling up stakes and moving away from Hollywood,” said Sands. “I didn’t care though. I had to do what I thought was best … Nancy was unhappy about leaving her family, all her childhood ties, and it was only natural for her father to give me his advice because she was involved.”
“I remember when we went to the Sinatras one Christmas when Nancy was married to Tommy,” said Mickey Rudin’s former wife, Elizabeth Greenschpoon. “Nancy opened her present from her father, which was a ten-thousand-dollar leopard coat. That was something Tommy could never have afforded to give her, and when she opened the present she started screaming. Everyone oohed and aahed over Frank, and poor Tommy left the room.”
Five years later, Tommy Sands would walk out on Nancy, saying he no longer wanted to be married to her. Once again, she would see her father cry as she collapsed in her mother’s Bel-Air home, where she stayed in bed for weeks.
On Election Day, November 8, 1960, Frank stayed in his office at Essex Productions in Los Angeles. His secretary, Gloria Lovell, kept an open telephone line to Jake Arvey in Chicago, where Giancana controlled the first ward and several river wards. Arvey, Democratic National Committeeman from Illinois and a close friend of Giancana’s, reported the state’s returns to Frank every half hour. By midnight, NBC’s John Chancellor was predicting a Republican sweep, with Richard Nixon the winner. At three o’clock in the morning, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley called Dave Powers in Hyannisport. “We’re trying to hold back our returns,” he said. “Every time we announce two hundred more votes for Kennedy in Chicago, they come up out of nowhere downstate with another three hundred votes for Nixon.”
At 3:10 A.M., Nixon made a television appearance in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with his wife, Pat, who was on the verge of tears, but he refused to concede the election. This so angered Frank that he picked up the phone and called the hotel, demanding to be put through to Nixon’s suite. The operator refused to connect him. “Do you know who this is?” he screamed. “This is Frank Sinatra, and I want to talk to Richard Nixon.” He was determined to tell the Republican candidate to give up and get it over with, but he couldn’t reach him.
A few hours later, Jake Arvey called Frank to say that the black wards in Chicago were coming in strong for Kennedy, but in the end he carried the state by only 8,858 votes. The national