His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [191]
Ava had had enough of Sam Giancana and, according to Victor LaCroix Collins, Sam had had enough of her. “Sam didn’t like her at all,” said Collins. “He always said that she was a crazy bitch. I only met her that one time, but I’d met Frank before, when Sam and the girls and I spent Easter with Sinatra and his former wife, Nancy, in Palm Springs. That was in April of 1963, and it was another drunk. Sam sent him Easter lilies, which I remember because I had to sign the card for him as Dr. Goldberg—he’d never sign his name to anything—and we had a big fight about how to spell Sinatra’s name. We spent the day sitting in Frank’s den watching him listening to his own music I helped Nancy make cold meatball sandwiches in the kitchen.”
“It wasn’t that memorable a weekend,” said Phyllis McGuire. “Frank is one of the most insecure people I’ve ever met in my life. He’s so damn boring. His stories haven’t varied in the last twenty years. He talks about when his father brought him the horse in this little bar in Jersey … and after the horse is in the bar, his father couldn’t get the horse back out. And how much he loved his father when really all the time it was his mother that he feared. His mother dressed him like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Martin Sinatra was a fabulous man, but he was quiet and sweet. Frank’s mother was the ballsy one. The boss of that whole family.”
During that weekend, Nancy Sinatra took Phyllis into Frank’s bedroom and pointed to the photograph of Ava Gardner next to the bed. Then she pointed to the pictures of Nancy, Jr., Tina, and Frank, Jr., sitting on the bureau. “Ava couldn’t do that for him,” she said, looking at her children’s photographs. “Despite all the women he’s had, I’m the only one who gave him children.”
Walking to the bureau, Nancy opened her jewelry box to show Phyllis all the pearls that Frank had given her through the years. Holding up strands of chokers and long ropes and delicate necklaces, she cited the occasion for each gift. “He got these for me when we were in New York and these I got because …”
Phyllis listened with sympathy as Nancy displayed her pearls. “It was so pathetic,” she said, “but Nancy is a very sweet lady and has handled herself very well, considering. It’s no secret that the dream that keeps her alive is of Frank returning to her someday. It’s so sad, so very sad.”
The McGuire Sisters were scheduled to perform at Cal-Neva the week of July 27, 1963. Sam accompanied Phyllis to Lake Tahoe and stayed with her in Chalet Fifty. During the day, FBI agents photographed Giancana and Frank playing golf on the South Shore. In the evening, the two men met in Chalet Fifty for drinks and had dinner together in the Cal-Neva dining room. Victor LaCroix Collins joined the girls and Sam for drinks in the chalet, but soon became irritated with Phyllis, who playfully punched him in the arm every time she passed his chair.
“The dame’s got quite a blow on her, and my arm was getting sore,” he said. “So I told her, ‘You do that again and I’m going to knock you right on your butt.’ A half hour later, she punches me again, and so I grabbed her by both arms and meant to sit her in the chair I got out of, but I swung her around and she missed the chair and hit the floor. She didn’t hurt herself … but Sam came charging over from across the room and threw a punch at me wearing a huge big diamond ring that gouged me in the left eyebrow. I just saw red then and grabbed him, lifted him clean off the floor, and was going to throw him through the plate glass door, but thought, ‘Why wreck the place?’ So I decided to take him outside and break his back on the hard metal railing on the patio. I got as far as the door and then got hit on the back of the head. I don’t know who hit me from behind, but the back of my head was split open.