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By Root 1836 0

of the Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.); Tom Pryor of Variety; St. Clair Pugh; Peter Ross Range; Barbara Raskin; Wendall Rawls; Rex Reed; Thomas C. Renner of Newsday; David Richards, drama critic of The Washington Post; John Riley; Jerome D. Rowland, formerly with the Chicago American; Mann Rubin; Murray Schumach; Vernon Scott of United Press International; Barbara Seaman; Art Seidenbaum of the Los Angeles Times; Martin Short; Nancy Siracusa of the Hudson Dispatch; Martha Smilgis of People magazine (Los Angeles bureau chief); Martin Smith of the Sacramento Bee; Malvina Stephenson of Knight-Ridder; Anthony Summers; Basil Talbott, Jr., of the Chicago Sun-Times; Gay Talese; Jack Tobin of Sports Illustrated; Wallace Turner of The New York Times; Denny Walsh of the Sacramento Bee; Wayne Warga; Benton J. (Jack) Willner, Jr., formerly with the Chicago Daily News; Paul Witteman of Time magazine (San Francisco bureau chief); and Maurice Zolotow.

I’m especially grateful to those writers who gave me their unpublished interviews for this book. My thanks to Ovid Demaris for his interview with Bobby Garcia; to David Horowitz for his interview with Milt Ebbins; to Bill Martin for his interview with Budd Granoff; and to Michael Thornton for his interviews with Ava Gardner. I’m also very grateful to Dick Partee for the hundreds of tapes he gave me of Frank Sinatra’s “tea breaks”—the intervals during his performances when he addresses personal remarks to his audience.

My thanks also to the presidential libraries of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the archivists of Hubert Humphrey’s papers at the Minnesota Historical Society. The oral histories at Columbia University and the University of Nevada-Reno in Las Vegas were most helpful, as was the assistance I received from the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University. The information provided by the American Film Institute and the Margaret Hedrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin, and the Performing Arts Research Center of the New York Public Library was invaluable. I’m grateful to the staff at the University of Southern California for providing access to the Warner Bros, collection, to the Special Collections Office at the University of California at Los Angeles for the Stanley Kramer papers, and to Herbert Nusbaum, legal counsel of MGM/UA, for giving me access to the studio’s legal files. Patrick F. Healy, executive director of the Chicago Crime Commission, was most helpful, as were Virgil Peterson, former executive director of the Chicago Crime Commission; David Schippers, former chief of the organized crime and racketeering section, U.S. District Attorney’s Office in Chicago; Terrance A. Norton, assistant director, Better Government Association, Chicago; and Joe A. Nunez of the U.S. District Court, Los Angeles. My thanks also to the family of Thomas Thompson—his brother Larry, his former wife, Joyce, and his two sons Kirk and Scott—for giving me unrestricted access to Tommy’s papers.

Backed by extensive research, I began my interviews in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Frank Sinatra was born and raised. I tried to locate people who had known him and his family, and could speak with authority about his childhood. I made several trips to the area and talked to neighbors, friends, and classmates. I’m grateful to Anthony DePalma for his orientation to the mile-square city, to playwright Louis LaRusso, who lives in Hoboken and wrote Lamppost Reunion, and to all who shared their recollections, including Vinnie Amato, Bob Anthony, Mary Caiezza, Steve Capiello, Connie Cappadona, Minnie Cardinale, Anne Cardino, Rose Bucino Carrier, Fran Capone Ciriello, Doris Corrado, Josephine DeAngelis, Sister Mary Consilia Dondero, O.S.F., Ed Fitzsimmons, Laurence Florio, Frank and Minnie Garrick, Ellen Gates, Agnes Carney Hannigan, James Lanzetti, Joseph Lanzo, Joe “Gigi” Lissa, Eileen Clancy Lorenzo, Mike Losito, Tony Macagnano, Jerry Malloy,