Cover

Title Page

Dedication

For Alice and Jack

I love you the most

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Epigraph

Trouble just seems to come my way—
unbidden, unwelcome, unneeded.

—Frank Sinatra, 1971

Chapter One

Glendale, California

January 1962

Frank Sinatra handed the congressman the bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“These places give me the heebie-jeebies,” Sinatra said, looking around the graveyard. “What about you, Charlie?”

Congressman Charlie Marder paused as he surveyed the small group circling the makeshift bar: stacks of paper cups and whiskey on top of a marble crypt.

“Sure,” Charlie said. “I mean, who likes graveyards?”

“Graverobbers,” said Peter Lawford. A young woman laughed. Her friend, who was a model or actress of some kind, rolled her eyes. They’d joined up somewhere along the way.

“How about maggots?” added Dean Martin in his rich baritone, prompting Ewws from the ladies. Earlier, Charlie had asked his wife, Margaret, if she’d caught the girls’ names. “Betty and Veronica,” she’d replied. “Or might as well be.”

The Rat Pack—which tonight included Sinatra, Martin, Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr., and Shirley MacLaine—and their assorted hangers-on had come to Forest Lawn Memorial Park not to mourn the dead but to rage against death, to celebrate, to drink and be merry. Just a couple of hours earlier, at Puccini—the restaurant Sinatra co-owned with Lawford—they had received word that an old acquaintance, Salvatore Lucania (better known as mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano), had dropped dead of a heart attack in Naples. It put them in a reflective mood. The news was especially disconcerting because they’d gathered at the restaurant to toast the memory of innovative TV comic Ernie Kovacs, who’d been killed in a car accident two weeks earlier.

It had been pouring the night of Kovacs’s crash, but the skies were clear now. At this moment, before dawn, the heavens twinkled with scattered stars, and the lush grass of Forest Lawn Memorial Park glistened with dew.

“Fill ’er up, Smoky!” said Sinatra to Sammy Davis Jr., using the nickname that was a nod to his four-pack-a-day habit. Sinatra placed his empty glass on the marble crypt in front of Davis, who was holding the bottle of Jack Daniel’s at that moment.

As Davis poured the whiskey, ash from his cigarette drifted onto the rim of Sinatra’s glass. Davis glanced over to see if Sinatra had noticed, then quickly dusted it off. “Clark Gable’s over there,” Sammy said to no one in particular, gesturing up a hill.

“Where?” asked Betty. “I don’t see anyone.”

“He’s been dead for two years, ya quin,” snarled Sinatra.

“Now, Pope,” cautioned Martin.

“Unless I’m mistaken,” said Margaret, “wife number five arranged to have Gable buried next to wife number three.”

“Interred,” said Charlie.