His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [196]
“He [Hank] called me, and I arranged for Jack Jones to take over the billing,” said Chuck Moses. “I went out and got the best, most expensive gold watch in existence and had it inscribed, ‘For Jack—Thanks so much. Frank.’ But there was nothing I could do to get Frank and Hank back together again.”
Speaking to each other only through intermediaries, Hank told Frank that he wanted out of Cal-Neva, precipitating the worst fight the two men had had since they had first started working together in 1936.
“Out of Cal-Neva, out of everything,” said Frank, instructing Mickey Rudin to buy out Hank’s interest in all the financial ventures they had put together in twenty-seven years. Frank was so strapped for cash at the time that in lieu of money, he gave Sanicola all the Sinatra music companies—Barton, Marivale, Sands, Saga, Tamarisk, and Ding Dong Music—containing catalogues of more than six hundred songs, an inventory worth close to one million dollars.
“In the beginning, Hank was indispensable to Frank,” said Ben Barton. “He rehearsed him, ran his errands, fought his fights, and kept him protected. He did everything for Frank. Everyone tried to get the two of them back together, but once Frank cut him off, that was it.”
“It’s true that Frank barely spoke to Hank again,” said Nick Sevano, “and the day of Sanicola’s funeral, sixteen years later, Frank drove around the church with Jimmy Van Heusen so everybody could see him in the car. I don’t know if he wanted people to think that he’d come to the funeral or just wanted to show everyone that he carried a grudge to the end and wouldn’t come inside to pay his last respects. I don’t know. I gave up trying to figure out Frank a long time ago.”
Cal-Neva also ended Frank’s friendship with Sam Giancana because the gangster never forgave him for losing his temper with Ed Olsen.
“I talked to Sam the next day, and he told me that Frank cost him over $465,000 on Cal-Neva,” said Joe Shimon, a former D.C. police inspector who was a good friend of Giancana. “He said, ‘That bastard and his big mouth. All he had to do was keep quiet, let the attorneys handle it, apologize, and get a thirty- to sixty-day suspension … but, no, Frank has to get on the phone with that damn big mouth of his, and now we’ve lost the whole damn place.’ He read him off for using all that filthy language with Ed Olsen and said he was a stupid fool. He never forgave him. He washed Frank right out of his books.”
Even one of Frank’s closest friends took Olsen’s side. Seeing Olsen at the Sands a few months after Sinatra’s license had been revoked, Sammy Davis, Jr., approached the Gaming Board chairman and said he’d like to speak with him privately.
“Oh, God, I thought, here comes a brawl for sure,” recalled Olsen. “Davis gets me off in a corner, and I don’t know whether he had a few drinks or what. He had just come off the stage not ten minutes before, so I’m sure he couldn’t have had. And he undertakes to tell me in many of the same four-letter words that Sinatra used what a great thing I had done. He says, ‘That little son of a bitch, he’s needed this for years. I’ve been working with him for sixteen years, and nobody’s ever had the guts to stand up to him!’ Coming from Sammy Davis, Jr., that just threw me. And he went on for, oh, five or ten minutes of… the same thing.”
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Frank was on Stage 22 of the Warner Bros. lot making Robin and the 7 Hoods when he got the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. For the first time in a long time, he went to church to pray. Years later, when he learned that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched Suddenly a few days before shooting the President, he withdrew the 1954 movie in which he played a deranged assassin paid to kill the president. He also forbade the re-release of The Manchurian Candidate, his 1962 movie dealing with a killer who is brainwashed to gun down a politician.