CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FEBRUARY 7, 1960
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
10:00 P.M.
Frank Sinatra sees an old friend in the audience.
A thick haze of cigarette smoke hangs over the packed Copa Room. Near the stage, where Sinatra performs, Antonio Morelli conducts an eighteen-piece orchestra. Each of the 385 audience members is ecstatic, having secured tickets to the hottest show in America.
A little more than a decade after Bugsy Siegel’s murder, Las Vegas has become the gambling mecca he once prophesied. More than eight million Americans travel each year to “Sin City,” as Las Vegas is becoming known, spending more than $160 million annually on food, drinks, gambling, and lavish stage shows. Of course, the Mob has a big piece, having divided up control of the Sands, Flamingo, Tropicana, Desert Inn, and Riviera casinos between the Chicago, Detroit, and New York families.
Tonight’s performance will last precisely one hour. Going just one minute longer will delay the audience’s return to the gaming tables, which is where the Sands Hotel and Casino makes its real money. Entertainment is just a diversion to draw gamblers through the door. So the audience sits at closely packed tables draped in white cloths, sipping their two-drink minimum, enthralled by the mellifluous singing of Frank Sinatra.
But they also know that something special is soon to come. The “Summit at the Sands” is the act’s formal title, but almost everyone in the crowd tonight calls it something else: the Rat Pack.
Sinatra, now forty-four years old, is soon to be joined by friends Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis Jr. for some witty banter and group harmony. Nothing is rehearsed. Nothing is sacred. By day, the group is filming a heist movie called Ocean’s Eleven on location here in Las Vegas. By night, they perform at the Copa. The grueling schedule includes after-show parties followed by a visit to the steam room to sweat out the booze before a very late bedtime.
Making the act even more unusual is that a different member of the Rat Pack headlines each show, performing his own songs until the others step onstage to interrupt the act, joking and singing along. The audience is never told ahead of time who will come on first—or what outlandish behavior they can expect. One bit has Martin and Bishop walking onstage in their underwear and tuxedo jackets, then launching into song along with Sinatra—all the while maintaining straight faces.
The Pack is so popular that more than eighteen thousand requests have been made for hotel reservations at the Sands during the three-week run from January 26 through February 16. Unfortunately, the resort has just 212 rooms. Many patrons choose to sleep in their cars or even in the hotel lobby. And while the average gambler is unlikely to find lodging at the Sands, Hollywood stars have no such problem. Cary Grant, Kim Novak, Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, and Cole Porter are just a few of the celebrities who make the journey to Las Vegas to see the frenetic Rat Pack.1
But tonight, there is another celebrity in the house.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Sinatra addresses the crowd. A spotlight plays over the room before settling upon a table up front near the stage. “Senator John F. Kennedy, from the great state of Massachusetts.”
As the audience erupts into applause, Sinatra continues: “The next President of the United States!”
The perpetually tanned Kennedy rises to his feet and takes a bow as the audience gives him a standing ovation. Sinatra announces to the crowd that JFK is an honorary member of the Rat Pack—later even referring to the group as the “Jack Pack.”
The spectators cannot help but notice the young brunette seated next to the senator. Most assume that this is Mrs. Kennedy.
They are wrong.
With his presidential campaign in full swing, JFK should be in the Pacific Northwest. That’s where the candidate will deliver a speech to the Oregon Chamber of Commerce the day after tomorrow. This afternoon, the forty-two-year-old presidential hopeful delivered an earnest talk about developing the West’s natural resources at a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In just one month, voters in New Hampshire will go to the polls to open the electoral primary season, the first step toward winning the presidency.
But as his personal plane, Caroline, named for his two-year-old daughter, takes to the air for the journey to Newport, Oregon, Kennedy orders the pilot to alter his flight plan. Frank Sinatra has invited him to Vegas, promising JFK a good time. Rat Pack member Sammy Davis Jr. has made his personal car and chauffeur available to Kennedy. Sinatra will provide the girls. “We all knew he was a swinger,” Davis will later say about JFK.
According to Sammy Davis, Sinatra procured an “outside girl” from Los Angeles to entertain Senator Kennedy.
So Oregon can wait.
“There was no goddamn reason for stopping there except fun and games,” Blair Clark of CBS News, a college friend of the candidate and one of six journalists on the flight, will long remember.2
But John Kennedy is an astute politician and knows better than to let the public believe he has only landed in Las Vegas to play. So earlier tonight he spoke to six hundred local Democrats at the city’s Convention Center, hoping to shore up the organized labor vote, then attended a cocktail party with key local donors—many of whom are connected to the Mafia through their roles in the hotel and casino industry. Only then did JFK slip away to this evening’s late show.
The Sands, in the words of one Mafioso, is “the hotel for wiseguys.”3 Kennedy is careful not to spend the night there, avoiding any overt association with organized crime. But there is no stigma in visiting the Copa Room to hear Frank Sinatra. The candidate and the singer have known each other for five years. Behind the scenes, patriarch Joseph Kennedy is trying to leverage this friendship, hoping Sinatra will use his Mafia connections to swing the labor vote toward “Jack,” as Kennedy is known by friends and family. The singer was recently invited to the Kennedy family compound in Palm Beach, Florida, where Joe Kennedy also requested that Sinatra sing a few benefit shows for JFK. The elder Kennedy even suggested that Sinatra record a special theme song. This led to the singer reworking the lyrics of “High Hopes,” which he had sung in the movie A Hole in the Head, into a catchy ditty about Jack Kennedy.
Such behind-the-scenes politicking is a normal part of any presidential campaign, where no detail is too small to overlook.
But there are two glaring weaknesses in the Kennedy machine that must be concealed at all costs. The first is Joseph Kennedy’s links to organized crime. The other is JFK’s rampant adultery—a habit learned from his father.
One pivotal aspect of JFK’s public persona is that of a dedicated family man. With the New Hampshire primary so close, it is imperative that this façade be maintained. But while Kennedy loves his wife, Jackie, and dotes on daughter Caroline, he also looks forward to nights like this, where he will share his bed with another woman.
So, as JFK retakes his seat in the Copa Room following Sinatra’s introduction, he is mesmerized by the gorgeous Judith Campbell. This is the “outside girl” Sinatra brought from Los Angeles.
Even though JFK’s twenty-seven-year-old brother Teddy is closer to Campbell’s age, she fights off the younger Kennedy’s relentless advances and focuses her attention on the elder brother. The blue-eyed Judith Campbell does all the talking as the senator zeroes in. “It was as if every nerve in his body was poised at attention,” she will long remember. “As I was to learn, John Kennedy was the world’s greatest listener.”
And the twenty-six-year-old Campbell is the world’s greatest social climber. She grew up the daughter of a wealthy Los Angeles architect with ties to the entertainment industry. One boyfriend from her teenage years was actor Robert Wagner. At eighteen, she married the actor William Campbell, an alcoholic who appeared in horror films.
Just before that marriage, Campbell met the influential and shadowy “Handsome Johnny” Roselli—an enforcer from Chicago who oversees the Outfit’s West Coast and Las Vegas operations for Mob boss Sam Giancana. Despite being almost twenty-five years older, Roselli is smitten. “Beautiful. Looks like Liz Taylor but nicer. A real sweet kid. Comes from a good family. Lots of class,” the mobster will tell a friend.
And Roselli has lots of friends, including Joseph Kennedy, with whom he often plays golf and cards.
Now divorced, with no formal education beyond high school, a monthly alimony payment of just $433.33, and with no desire to enter the work force, Judy Campbell uses her wholesome beauty and intellect to cultivate friendships in the most elite Hollywood circles. This means a steady whirl of parties, nightclubs, and relationships with powerful men.
Among these is Roselli. The two have a brief affair, but the mobster chooses to pass Judy along to Frank Sinatra, whose close friendship with Sam Giancana is second only to that of Roselli. Campbell is soon vacationing in Hawaii with Sinatra. Also making that trip is actor Peter Lawford of the Rat Pack and his wife, Patricia Kennedy Lawford—JFK’s sister.
Soon, the moody Sinatra and Judy Campbell begin to argue. She decides to fly home early, the relationship seemingly over. But it’s not.
June Lang and her husband, John Roselli, at Hopi Point, Grand Canyon, following their elopement. The couple plan a trip to Boulder Dam before returning to their home in Hollywood.
That vacation occurred in November 1959. Yet if Judy Campbell is surprised when Sinatra invites her to spend a weekend in Las Vegas, she does not show it. Nor does she suspect that Frank is using her to ingratiate himself with JFK—at least, not at first. But soon the dynamic becomes quite clear. “They seemed to have a genuine mutual admiration society. Frank was in awe of Jack’s background and his power,” Campbell will later remember. “And Jack was mesmerized by Sinatra’s swinging lifestyle.”
Indeed, those who meet JFK in his unguarded private moments are often amazed at his fondness for women, parties, and the belief that he can get away with anything.
The relationship between John F. Kennedy and Judith Campbell will last for two years. Their dalliance will be kept secret—or so JFK thinks. It all begins with their flirtation in the Copa Room tonight. Frank Sinatra’s guess has proven correct: despite the “bimbos and showgirls” flocking around the table, in the words of newsman Blair Clark, the candidate only has eyes for Campbell. Coincidentally, she bears an amazing resemblance to Kennedy’s wife, Jackie.
The whole thing is a setup. The Mafia knows JFK’s weakness for women and means to use Judy Campbell as a source of blackmail, if necessary. There is speculation that Sam Giancana himself ordered Campbell to Las Vegas, using Frank Sinatra as the go-between.
“They deliberately fed her to Jack,” actor Brad Dexter, a good friend of Sinatra’s, will recall. “And Frank was part of it. Very serious.”
After the show, JFK and Campbell join the raging party in Sinatra’s suite, with free-flowing alcohol, cocaine, and a bevy of beautiful showgirls. Campbell is popular with most men because she still projects the healthy image of a young, wholesome girl. But, at the Sands, she is “notorious in the sense that we knew who she was and that we considered her a high-class call girl who could be bought,” in the words of one gaming dealer.
Kennedy does not know this, nor is he aware that Campbell was procured specifically for him.4
Campbell will later claim Kennedy does not force himself on her this first night—nor does she offer herself. In her version of events, they just make conversation.
“When you talked to Jack,” Campbell will later recall, “he talked just to you. He was endlessly curious about everything and everybody. He loved gossip. That night he did not want me to leave his side.”
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover will eventually get a detailed memo on Kennedy’s “sex activities” from this Vegas weekend, but Campbell will long state that the candidate does not sleep with her on this occasion. She claims she returned to her own room in the early morning hours and he went alone to his suite at the El Rancho hotel farther down the Strip.
According to Campbell, the first voice she hears the following morning is that of JFK, calling to invite her to lunch in Sinatra’s suite. This is the first of many phone calls between the two as Kennedy campaigns around the country. “He called almost every day,” she will later write. “No matter where he was, or how tired.”
One month later, as the race takes Kennedy through New York City, he and Campbell rendezvous once again, this time at the Plaza Hotel. It is March 7, the eve of the New Hampshire primary and the first crucial step on John Kennedy’s road to the White House, when Campbell claims the couple first consummates their relationship.5
Just two weeks after Campbell and Kennedy meet in New York, Frank Sinatra once again invites the young beauty to take a trip with him. And once again, despite the callous manner in which she has been treated, Judy says yes.
This time, the destination is the Fontainebleau in Miami. The singer has been a regular headliner in the luxury hotel’s La Ronde nightclub since 1954, but on this occasion he is taping a television special welcoming Elvis Presley back from his two years in the army. The performance takes place on March 26, 1960, and is bathed in irony. Once upon a time, Frank Sinatra was the skinny young teenage idol for whom all the girls screamed. Now his hair is thinning and his voice husky from constant smoking and drinking Jack Daniels. Elvis Presley is the new icon. His rock ’n’ roll sound has revolutionized modern music, replacing the standards for which Sinatra is known best. In effect, Frank Sinatra is welcoming home his replacement. Within a few short years, Las Vegas will be one of the only venues where Sinatra’s sound will reign—and Presley is soon to make his mark there, too. Thus, the television broadcast six weeks from now will become a seminal moment in entertainment television history.
But even more interesting than the show are the actions taking place behind the scenes in Miami. Frank Sinatra has brought Judy Campbell here to be his plaything, considering her a “hooker.” In the beautiful and willing young woman, Sinatra also sees a means of expanding his personal empire by keeping his powerful friends happy.
“I don’t think it takes a great deal of imagination,” Campbell will write years later, “to think there is a possibility I was used.”
So, during a private party, Sinatra “introduces” Campbell to a gentleman. “Come here, Judy,” she will write in her memoir. “I want you to meet a good friend of mine, Sam Flood.”
Campbell will long claim that this is her first meeting with Sam Giancana, as he is actually named. The fifty-two-year-old widower is twice Campbell’s age, a dour and physically unattractive man, but his tailored sharkskin suit, expensive alligator shoes, silk shirt, and powerful bearing signal a man of means.
In truth, there is a good chance Judy Campbell already knows the gangster, even if they have not been properly introduced. For Giancana is the best friend of her former lover, Johnny Roselli. And it is already a well-known fact that she has had several relationships with Mafia figures. Rat Pack member Peter Lawford specifically refers to Campbell as a “Mob moll.”
What Judy Campbell does not know is that, on this night in March, she is about to become the center of a complex maelstrom of sex, politics, and crime.
Sex: Judith Campbell is having an affair with John Kennedy and is about to begin another with Sam Giancana.
Politics: Joseph Kennedy recently had lunch with Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana at Felix Young’s restaurant in New York City to discuss ways in which the Mafia could assist JFK’s campaign. This comes less than eight months after Bobby Kennedy famously grilled Giancana before the McClellan hearings. The Mob boss tells a nervous Joe Kennedy that he does not have a problem with JFK, but he is still angry about Bobby’s public attacks on him. Joe Kennedy argues that his son’s disrespect is in the past and reminds Giancana that “it’s Jack who’s running for president, not Bobby.” Kennedy also tells the mobster that if he helps get JFK elected, the president will owe him a favor. “This is business, not politics,” Kennedy concludes before leaving the dinner early so that Roselli and Giancana might discuss the matter alone.
Crime: Sam Giancana has bribed and blackmailed politicians and law enforcement officials throughout Illinois, a state vital to winning the presidency. He has the power to rig an election—but he’s still not sure JFK should be supported.6
So it is that Judith Campbell sleeps with Sam Giancana, even as she continues to speak with JFK on the phone every day and bed the candidate whenever his schedule allows. All of these private actions take place in the midst of the very public spectacle of the 1960 presidential campaign. At first, JFK does not know about Giancana. But the Mob boss surely knows all about Campbell and the senator—and is thrilled that JFK has “a regular” who might prove a source of blackmail and insider knowledge.
Judy Campbell is now a conduit, providing a direct connection between a man seeking the most powerful office in the world and a man that commands the underworld.
And, all the while, J. Edgar Hoover is listening in.