His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [170]
Although Chicago’s Mayor Daley later took the credit for Kennedy’s election, gangsters around the country pointed with pride to the syndicate control of the West Side Bloc, which produced that victory.
“The presidency was really stolen in Chicago,” said Mickey Cohen, the Los Angeles mobster.
Sam Giancana later bragged about his contribution to John F. Kennedy’s victory. As he frequently told Judith Campbell: “Listen, honey, if it wasn’t for me, your boyfriend wouldn’t even be in the White House.”
Skinny D’Amato credited Sinatra’s mobilization of mob support for the victory. “Frank won Kennedy the election,” he said many years later. “All the guys knew it.”
A month after the election, a contractor and construction crew began breaking ground around Sinatra’s Palm Springs compound to add a heliport and a large new guest house with a dining room capable of seating forty for the future president and his Secret Service agents. Frank spared no expense on this project and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime to get the job done in a hurry. Frank worked with the carpenters day and night and even flew in lumber by helicopter, for he was convinced that his house on Wonder Palms Road would become the Western White House, a vacation retreat for the president of the United States.
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The Caroline, the Kennedys’ private plane, landed in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 1961. Frank jumped out with Peter Lawford and a little dog wearing a black sweater. A maroon Lincoln Continental limousine whisked them off to the National Guard Armory, where they would be spending the next thirteen days planning an inaugural gala to honor the president-elect the night before his swearing-in. This invitation-only show for ten thousand people paying one hundred dollars apiece for seats and ten thousand dollars for boxes would raise over one million dollars to cover the Democrats’ campaign deficit.
“It will be the biggest one-night gross in the history of show business,” said Frank.
He had thought of little else since the election, when he began making calls all over the world to assemble an impressive array of stars to pay a show business tribute to the president who so loved Hollywood. He persuaded Ella Fitzgerald to fly in from Australia to sing for five minutes, Shirley MacLaine was coming from Japan, Gene Kelly from Switzerland, Sidney Poitier from France, and Keely Smith and Louis Prima from Las Vegas. Frank negotiated with Leland Hay-ward to release Ethel Merman from Gypsy for one night and managed to close another Broadway show, Becket, for the evening to free Anthony Quinn and Sir Laurence Olivier. Sinatra wanted Fredric March to do a dramatic reading of Abraham Lincoln’s farewell speech, the one he delivered from the back of the train that took him from Springfield to Washington. Frank called Eleanor Roosevelt, who, despite her support for Adlai Stevenson, was thrilled to participate. He engaged Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen to write special songs, and Goodman Ace, Norman Corwin, Jack Rose, Leonard Gersche, and Mel Shavelson to write dialogue. Joey Bishop was to be master of ceremonies, and Leonard Bernstein promised to conduct “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The rest of the cast consisted of Harry Belafonte, Milton Berle, Nat King Cole, Helen Träubel, Juliet Prowse, Mahalia Jackson, Alan King, Jimmy Durante, Pat Suzuki, Kay Thompson, Bette Davis, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis, plus Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. Only Dean Martin, locked into a movie, and Sammy Davis, Jr., who had recently married Swedish actress Mai Britt, would be conspicuously absent.
Sammy Davis did not want his interracial marriage to mar the gala in any way. He had postponed his wedding until after the election, because Frank was to be best man and Sammy didn’t want that fact to hurt Kennedy’s chances for election. “Right or wrong, fair or not, my wedding was giving the Nixon people the opportunity to ridicule Kennedy and possibly hurt him at the polls,” he said.