His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [197]
That November evening, Frank called the White House. He expressed his sympathy to Patricia Lawford, but did not talk with her husband, Peter.
“Frank was pretty broken up when he talked to Pat and would have given anything to come back to Washington for Jack’s funeral, but it just wasn’t possible to invite him,” said Lawford. “He’d already been too’ much of an embarrassment to the family.”
When Frank returned to work a few days later, he was dismayed by the comments he heard among the cast and crew. Over the loudspeaker system he said, “I have heard some unfortunate remarks on this set about Texas. This indicates that we are still not unified, despite the terrible happenings of the past week. I beg of you not to generalize about people, or make jokes about anyone from Texas. Or say anything that will keep us divided by malice or hatred. Now is the time for all of us to work together with understanding and temperance—and not do or say anything that will prevent that.…”
A few weeks later, Frank turned to Peter Lawford for help when Frank’s nineteen-year-old son was kidnapped at gunpoint on December 8, 1963.
“Frank woke me up with his phone call a few hours after they grabbed young Frankie,” said Lawford. “There was no hello, no apology, nothing like that. He just said for me to call Bobby and get the FBI in on the case and get Back to him in Reno. I called the attorney general right away and he told me to tell Frank that they were doing everything they possibly could. Bobby had put men on the detail, and FBI agents in Nevada and California were working around the clock. He’d also ordered roadblocks set up at all state borders and police were checking all the cars. Bobby said, ‘I know how Frank feels about me, but please tell him that everything is being done, and we’ll get his boy back as soon as possible.’
“Bobby called Frank himself the next day, but I gave him Bobby’s message that night, and he listened. I think he said thank you before hanging up, but that was the last time we ever spoke to each other. We hadn’t been in much communication since the President had stayed at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs—and to make things just terrific for me with Sinatra, Jack had stayed at Bing’s on two different trips. I did see Frank briefly when we took Marilyn [Monroe] up to Cal-Neva, but he got so mad at her after she overdosed and had to have her stomach pumped that he just snarled at everyone. Young Frankie’s kidnapping was the only time I’d ever really heard him kind of scared. He sounded quite frightened.”
Frank, Jr., had quit school to start a singing career of his own. He had worked a while with the Dorsey orchestra and now was playing a lounge act in Tahoe. He tried to imitate his father’s style, singing in a tuxedo like his dad, telling some of his father’s stale saloon jokes, and performing some of his father’s most famous songs, but he was a pale imitation.
The kidnapping began on Sunday night at nine-thirty P.M., when Barry Worthington Keenan, twenty-three, and Joseph Clyde Amsler, his best friend from high school, also twenty-three, knocked on Frank, Jr.’s, door at Harrah’s Lodge in Lake Tahoe. Frank, Jr., was eating dinner with Joe Foss, a musician in the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, before their first show in the lounge. Pretending to be from room service, the two amateur kidnappers barged into the room, bound and gagged Foss, and carried Frank off at gunpoint to their car, a 1963 white Chevrolet Impala with a broken muffler, which carried them through a mountain blizzard to a rented house in Los Angeles, where they held young Frank for ransom.
In a few minutes Foss freed himself and called the hotel’s press agent, who called the police. Frank’s manager, Tino Barzie, called Frank, Sr., who was at his home in Palm Springs. He chartered a plane and flew to Reno, where he was met by Bill Raggio, the district attorney of Washoe County. The two men were joined by four FBI agents from Nevada; Frank’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin; and Jim Mahoney, the new Sinatra publicist who had replaced Chuck Moses by promising Frank a