THE KIDNAPPING OF Sinatra’s son just two weeks after the assassination of JFK was the work of amateurs. Sinatra paid the ransom, and followed the elaborate instructions for delivering it. Because the kidnappers demanded that he phone them from phone booths exclusively, he started carrying a roll of dimes in his pocket at all times—a habit he never broke.
Frank Jr. was released on December 11, 1963, the day before his pop’s forty-eighth birthday. The three felons who snatched the boy, then nineteen, were arrested and swiftly brought to trial. Most of the ransom money was recovered, and Frank Jr. did not seem the worse for wear. In court, the kidnappers’ defense rested on the contention that the kidnapping was a hoax, a publicity stunt staged by Frank Jr. Frank Sr.’s terse comment: “This family needs publicity like it needs peritonitis.” But the fact that the incident happened so soon after November 22 aroused the notice of numerous newspaper columnists then, and continues to interest conspiracy theorists who suspect mob involvement in the death of the president. I do not, incidentally, use the term “conspiracy theorists” with the intent to deprecate their efforts. The category of those who doubt that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman includes two presidents, J. Edgar Hoover, a Warren Commission member, many Kennedy associates, the presidential physician, the mayor of Chicago, the producer of 60 Minutes, and Frank Sinatra.*
At the time of the kidnapping, Frank Jr. was touring as part of a Tommy Dorsey nostalgia package that included a chorus group modeled on the old Pied Pipers as well as the “voice of the name bands,” Helen Forrest, who had sung with Artie Shaw (“All the Things You Are”), Benny Goodman (“Taking a Chance on Love”), and Harry James (“I Had the Craziest Dream”). Back in 1943, Helen had topped a Down Beat magazine poll as the nation’s favorite female vocalist—ahead of a formidable list that included runners-up Helen O’Connell and Anita O’Day, not to mention Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, Dinah Shore, Billie Holiday, Marion Hutton, Mildred Bailey, Lena Horne, and Ella Fitzgerald. (On the male side, the top three were Sinatra, Crosby, and Bob Eberly, O’Connell’s counterpart in the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra.) When she sang with Sinatra’s nineteen-year-old son in 1963, Forrest stole the show. “She never sang with Dorsey, but she sang with the best and is the best,” wrote a Canadian reviewer. “Oh, yes, Frank Sinatra, Jr., also sang,” the scribe added. On the occasion of Frank Jr.’s New York café debut, the writer for Billboard opined that Miss Forrest remains a “wow of a performer,” but that the younger Sinatra “sings like, sounds like, and gestures like his father, almost to the point where it’s unfortunate.”
Well, maybe they’re right, those commentators who say he should have pursued a different line of work. But maybe it is inevitable that he didn’t. In any event, the claim that the young man staged his own kidnapping for whatever complicated reason is a legal maneuver that becomes a calumny when repeated. As if having the name Frank Sinatra, Jr., wasn’t burden enough, he needed this ordeal and these rumors, too.