He was ashamed that Margaret knew enough about his drinking to be disappointed in him but decided to make the most of the moment. He told Margaret everything then, about the photograph of him and Lola in the hot tub and about how he couldn’t stop drinking. She listened, and when he finished, she kept driving in silence south toward their Manhattan home, the bare trees and milky light of the late-winter afternoon adding to his already pronounced sense of despair.

Chapter Seventeen

New York City

February 1962

Midway through another night of revelry, Sinatra surprised the crowd in the restaurant by standing up at his long table in the middle of the room, raising his highball, and toasting his fiancée. Their engagement had been announced in January but few had seen him with Juliet Prowse, a statuesque, full-lipped redhead who’d costarred with her beau in Can-Can two years before. She stood and beamed a smile toward her future husband while the guests clapped and hooted appreciatively, then sat back at her table with Frankenheimer, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury.

Shooting of The Manchurian Candidate had wrapped earlier that day, and the cast and crew, along with invited guests, were gathered for a celebratory dinner Sinatra was hosting on the third floor of Toots Shor’s legendary restaurant. Charlie and Margaret, like other honored-but-less-important guests, occupied a small table on the outskirts. They’d arrived late after reading bedtime stories to Lucy and Dwight, then leaving them in the care of Margaret’s mother—again—and tiptoeing out of the house with renewed pangs of guilt.

Margaret’s response to Charlie’s admission of having been photographed in a compromising position with Lola was mixed. Fortunately, she believed him and had no doubts of his fidelity. That was the good news. But after he told her the story on their drive back from Sing Sing, it was almost as if a barrier had been constructed between them, one built out of disappointment and embarrassment.

“Well, there’s Meehan’s motive,” she had noted. “If he ever gets that photograph, he’ll come at you like a bull.” She didn’t mention that he’d imperiled their entire world. Scandal, blackmail, defeat—anything was possible. She remained civil to him, but distant. He figured he was getting off easy, so he didn’t fight it. He’d been overjoyed when she’d agreed to come with him to Toots Shor’s tonight.

“I thought this place was on Fifty-First Street,” Margaret said.

“It used to be,” Charlie said. “Then some real estate guy who was trying to build a skyscraper told Toots he would rebuild his place one block over and give him one and a half million dollars if he moved.”

“Quite an offer.”

“Isaiah says Hoffa put up a loan from the Teamsters’ pension fund to underwrite it,” Charlie said. “Four million!”