APRIL 29-30, 1992: LET THE L.A. RIOTS BEGIN

Legsville.com

April 29, 2022

 

©2022 By Burt Kearns

(On April 29, 1992, jurors in Simi Valley, California acquitted five Los Angeles police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King. Los Angeles citizens responded to the news with a display of widespread civil disobedience and destruction that became known as the Los Angeles Riots. The evening the violence began, Burt Kearns, a producer of the syndicated nightly tabloid magazine series, Hard Copy, was sharing a pizza with correspondent Rafael Abramovitz at Santopietro’s restaurant. Thirty years later, the following is adapted from his memoir, Tabloid Baby.)

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We were over the hill in Studio City, Raf and I eating pizza and watching television along with everyone else in the middling Italian restaurant and bar on Ventura Boulevard owned by Vanna White’s husband. The expressions of nausea on the faces of the all-white clientele could not be blamed on the food. On the screen, a white man was being dragged out of a semi-truck by a group of young black men. The LIVE chyron hung in the corner of the picture as Reginald Denny was bashed about the head with a cinder block and fire extinguisher.

Our acquaintance, Johnny Roastbeef, a star of Goodfellas, supped with a group of actors from Who’s the Boss. He patted his lips with a napkin and shook his head. “This is very fucking bad,” he said. “This would never happen in New York.”

Hours earlier, in another valley, a jury of ten whites, one Latino and an Asian acquitted five Los Angeles police officers in the videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King.  All around Los Angeles, African American citizens and their sympathizers were responding to the verdict.

“It’s a fucking riot mate,” I said to Raf. “Should we drive down into it?”

“No,” Raf said. “We’re not working, so we stay away. You don’t be a tourist on something like this. Remember that.”

We left the restaurant and stopped at a nearby sporting goods store to pick up some socks. The manager rushed from the back and met us at the door. “I hope you’re not looking for guns, ’cause we’re all sold out!”

***

“Mate, you should see this! Shopping centers are on fire. People are running around with guns, looting.” The next morning, Raf was phoning from a car taking him to the airport, an inadvertent tourist to the riots as he headed back to New York. “It’s amazing!”

I was in Peter Brennan’s office in the Hard Copy building on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. The promo guy was crying. He was in the office, on the couch, to discuss show advertising, but as he watched the continuous live television coverage, it all became too much. He removed his granny glasses and pressed the bridge of his nose. “Boo hoo hoo,” he said.

Onscreen, local news helicopters followed mobs of Angelenos moving from one shopping center to another, smashing through display windows and taking what was inside. With each helicopter news report that police weren’t stopping the thievery, more people switched off their TV’s and joined in.  The promo man watched and sniffed.

“They’re coming!”

I wished Rafael good luck and looked toward the door with everyone else. “Who’s they?” Brennan and I said together.

“The — the looters! They’re two blocks away!” It was a usually quiet producer in a literal sweat. He was supposed to begin editing a sweeps piece, but was more likely to hit the road at any moment.  “We gotta get out of here! We could be in danger!”

“Joe,” I suggested calmly. “You’ll be in an edit room in the basement of a building in the middle of the guarded Paramount lot. I don’t think anything’s gonna happen.”

“Can you guarantee my safety?”

Neal Travis puffed his pipe and stifled a laugh.

There was panic. A few blocks away, bands of festive neighbors stepped over shattered storefront glass on Western Avenue and wandered off with couches and the like.

Chief Daryl Gates and his criticized police force had proven their point by letting the riots get out of control. By afternoon, Paramount had been shut down and the usually quiet producer was sent to a safe edit house in the Valley as the city prepared for a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

Brennan and I drove west along heavy Melrose Avenue traffic and into a scene out of a bad apocalypse movie. Merchants hammered plywood over storefront windows in haste. Women sobbed inside locked BMWs. Cars sped from service station pumps with the nozzles left hanging from their tanks. When a lone Black driver attempted to wedge into traffic, everyone stopped to let him through.

We made it to the Sunset Strip, left our cars with the Bel Age Hotel valets and walked to the back of the restaurant with the window beneath which the Los Angeles basin was laid out like a game board. With our feet up on the windowsill, we watched as portions of the city burned below us. To the east, past Dodger Stadium and south toward Compton, entire blocks raged unchecked, the smoke rising black with hints of orange flame. The outbreak spread like forest fires, where embers drift for hundreds of yards on the winds before settling at random and exploding another distant patch of dry wood. As the arsons neared the Beverly Center and the West L.A. aristocracy, they’d be extinguished quickly, the black smoke turning papal white as if the lawman had drawn an imaginary fire line at Pico Boulevard.

Visible through the restaurant windows was a billboard on the corner of Sunset and Larrabee, advertising a radio station with a painting of Marvin Gaye and the question, “What’s Going On?” Sly Stone’s answer raged before us. There was a riot going on. Brennan and I drank soberly, brushing the ashes from our Stoli and tonics, fiddling while our new home burned.

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Burt Kearns produces nonfiction television and documentary films and writes books, including Tabloid Baby, The Show Won’t Go On (written with Jeff Abraham), Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy (available for pre-sale on Amazon.com), and the recently-announced Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel.

MAKING THE WILDEST SHOW IN LAS VEGAS PART I: SAM

Legsville.com

April 27, 2022

©2022 By Burt Kearns

 

(Louis Prima, Keely Smith and Sam Butera revolutionized Las Vegas, the lounge scene and 20th century popular music when they launched their spectacular act in December 1954 at the Sahara hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip. The story of their success has never been told in full, and never accurately – until now. Based on long-hidden interviews with the principals and extensive research, Burt Kearns reveals how all the parts fell into place, long before that historic debut. In Part One, we meet the man who answered the call of The Wildest, the key player without whom this success story would never have happened.)

 

For Sam Butera, it all began with a phone call on Christmas Eve.

 

“Sam! It’s happenin’!”

“What?”

“Las Vegas! Las Vegas is happenin’ for us!”

“Boy, that’s great, Louis.”

“When can you come up?”

“Well, I don’t know. When would you want me?”

“Come tomorrow!”

 

It was just like that. Sam Butera, the hottest white rhythm & blues saxophone player in New Orleans and probably the country, was resting up after a car accident by playing a couple of easy nights, seated, in the Carousel Lounge, the room with the revolving bar in the grand Hotel Monteleone on Rue Royal. Coolin’ it in the French Quarter, a block from Bourbon Street, Sam had plans to take his band, the Night Trainers, back on the road, when somebody handed him the phone and a call to drop everything except his tenor sax and cut from the delta to the desert. But there was a catch: Come tomorrow? You serious, man? Do I have to remind you? I guess I do.

 

“Tomorrow’s Christmas!”

“What’s the matter? What difference it make?”

 

The difference was that Sam had a family, his wife was already cooking for tomorrow and he wasn’t about to split on Christmas Day. Then again, the difference was that the cat on the other end of the line was none other than Louis Prima, the biggest star to come out of New Orleans since Louis Armstrong. In fact, they called Prima “The Italian Louis Armstrong,” a singer, trumpeter, composer, big band leader and all-round entertainer who’d been around for decades and surfed the trends like a Sicilian Duke Kahanamoku. Born in 1910, Louis played straight jazz in the 1920s, swing in the ’30s, big band in the 1940s, and now, in December 1954, jump blues and whatever else would work with a small combo and his latest girl singer, who happened to be his latest wife.

 

Leon Prima’s 500 Club on Bourbon Street

 

“I worked for Louis Prima’s brother Leon for four years at the 500 Club on Bourbon and St. Louis.” Years later, Sam recalled the joint in the heart of the French Quarter that featured hot jazz, honking and grinding R&B, and exotic dancers like Lilly Christine the Cat Girl and Alouette Leblanc the Tassel Twirler. “And I always loved Louis Prima. My mother and father used to tell me stories about him when I was a little boy growing up. Louis had his older brother, Leon. And then his sister Marianne was a nun. And then Louis. Louis was the baby. Louis Prima used to play at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans when they had vaudeville and stuff in the theatres in New Orleans, and my mother and father loved the way he sang and loved the things that he did. I was always interested in meeting him one day, maybe getting a chance to work with him.”

 

The meeting happened the previous summer, when Sam was playing Sunday afternoon jam sessions at Perez’s Oasis, a club out on the Airline Highway in Metairie. “Louis Prima was working there. This is when Louis and Keely were, well… ‘on their last leg,’ you might say. They were there with a twelve-piece band, playing stock band arrangements, and things were not going well for Louis or Keely. Mr. Perez told Louis, ‘I got this kid.’ Kid. I was twenty-seven. He says, ‘I’ve got this young man who plays the Sunday afternoon jam session. Would you mind if he did it with you?  Cause he has a wonderful following here.’ I had a hell of a following. And Louis said, ‘Of course not. It would be a pleasure.’ So I went out and I got an arrangement, walked on stage, told the guys the key and just played with the rhythm section.  Never sang. Just did all instrumentals.

 

“Louis and Keely were very impressed with my performance — the way I handled myself and such onstage.”

 

Keely Smith and Louis Prima, 1954

 

After the set, Louis pulled Sam into a corner for a little chat. “He said, ‘Well, we’ll be leaving here. I don’t know where we’re headed for, but –’ he said, ‘if ever something happens, I’d love to have you with me,’ and so on. I didn’t — you know, you hear one thing, in one ear and out the other. I said, ‘Well, whatever.’  You know, fine.”

 

Easy Rocking

 

Well, whatever. Fine.  That’s about right. Louis may have been a New Orleans legend, but Sam Butera was the local hero, a prodigy, the golden child with a golden horn. Sam’s old man, a butcher who owned Poor Boy’s Grocery and Market, played guitar and concertina when he wasn’t chopping carcasses, and he encouraged his boy’s musical interests. Sam was seven when he picked up the saxophone. He turned pro at fourteen, blasting and grinding in every strip bar on Bourbon Street. His parents weren’t so happy about it, but Sam made some cash, the strippers paid him attention and he learned to improvise. The rest he learned on his own. “I didn’t have like they have back East, places where the big bands played. I didn’t have that to go and see the big bands. Only thing I had was a phonograph.”

 

At nineteen, Sam Butera was onstage at Carnegie Hall after winning an “outstanding teenage musician” talent contest sponsored by Look magazine. By then, he’d turned down scholarships at Notre Dame and had hit the road with Ray McKinley’s and Tommy Dorsey’s big bands. He’d mastered Dixieland, bebop jazz, and swing, and by the time Sam was fronting the Night Trainers (piano, bass, drums, and trombone), he was wailing and honking rhythm & blues and the first sounds of rock ‘n’ roll. And 1954?  Not the time to pull up stakes and stop the train.

“No. Not Christmas. I got to spend Christmas home.”

 

Young Sam Butera

 

Louis Prima was asking Sam to get on a plane to Las Vegas at a time the young man’s career was taking off. RCA Victor records had signed Sam as a solo artist in September 1953, and weeks later released his first single, “Chicken Scratch.” Variety gave the platter a rave: “Although ‘Chicken Scratch’ is strictly in the rhythm & blues groove, it has solid chances to make a dent in the pop market. Butera’s orch captures the driving beat for socko results.” The reviewer predicted that the flip side, “Easy Rocking,” “will pick up good share of the spins.”  A quick and steady serving of singles followed on RCA Victor and its R&B subsidiary label, Groove.

“I was doing very well financially in New Orleans because of the hit records I’d had in the South.  ‘Easy Rockin’’ was one.’ ‘Chicken Scratch.’ ‘These Are The Things I Love.’ ‘Shine The Buckle.’  I wrote that. All these things were hits in the South.  And also in the East. Like Cleveland, they played the shit out of ‘These Are the Things I Love.’”

 

Moondog’s Cavalcade

 

The man playing the shit out of Sam’s record in Cleveland was a disc jockey who was about to become one of the most important and targeted figures in the industry. Alan “Moondog” Freed had found success serving up “race” music to a wide mainstream audience. Other stations played white cover versions of authentic black rhythm & blues records. Freed played the real thing, and took it a step closer to the audiences’ face with the idea of taking the artists whose records he played on tour, in big shows for racially-mixed audiences. Most in the crowd were surprised when the host who walked onstage was a white man.

 

Alan Freed at the Moondog Coronation Ball

 

His first show took place on March 21, 1952 at the Cleveland Arena. Freed called it The Moondog Coronation Ball. There’d be little dancing at this ball.  There was no room, as a mob of twenty-five thousand hepcats tried to fit into a hall that could hold ten thousand. Historians call it the first rock ’n’ roll concert. When the cops moved in to shut down the show after an hour, the papers called it the first rock ’n’ roll riot.

 

Not that it wasn’t a success. It was only the beginning. On the first of May 1954, Freed produced his first Moondog Coronation Ball outside of Ohio. The show in Newark, New Jersey, featured the “Cavalcade of Rhythm & Blues Stars,” a lineup that featured Sam Butera along with Black artists including the Clovers, Muddy Waters, Charles Brown, Arnett Cobb, and the Harptones, backed by jump pianist Buddy Johnson and his orchestra. Once again, there was no dancing at this Coronation Ball. Ten thousand people were packed inside the Sussex Armory, too tightly for any dancing, while three thousand were outside, trying to squeeze their way in.

 

The Billboard pointed out that “about twenty percent of the crowd was made up of white youngsters. Not since the hey-day of the swing bands has such a dance in the East created such excitement or pulled so strongly.” Race music, cat music, R&B, rock ’n’ roll – the kids wanted the music with a primal beat that made them dance, made them, in the parlance of R&B, want to rock ’n’ roll. Predicted The Billboard: “One of these days a smart dance hall operator with a good location is going to book some of these orcs with a beat… into his terp hall, and he is going to end up with the most profitable evening.”

 

 

To swing or not to swing

 

On May 25, Sam and his Night Trainers were playing for a very different audience across the Hudson River, at the Basin Street nightclub in Manhattan. The group was on a bill headlined by Ella Fitzgerald and also featuring drummer Louis Bellson and jazz comic Lord Buckley. Opening night was a celebration of Ella’s nineteen years in the business and twenty-two million records sold. Dorothy Kilgallen wrote that “invitations to the soiree look like bids to Buckingham Palace,” and according to The Billboard, “practically everyone of note in the music business, as well as people from the theater and radio, turned out to do her homage.” Steve Allen was emcee. Heiress Doris Duke and her boyfriend, bebop pianist Joe Castro, were among those forced to stand because all the seats were taken.

 

The Billboard decided that Sam was a “good sax man and the group is okay, but his type of rocking blues is not for the modern jazz club here.” Variety though, called Sam’s group “top exponents of the r&b groove. They’ve got the beat down pat and know how to stir up plenty of listener enthusiasm with their driving style. Butera’s expert sax works sparks his aides for an overall exciting score.”

 

That night, Lord Buckley proposed in his hipster take on Hamlet: “To swing or not to swing? That is the hanger!”  Sam swung, all right, and hard, and he could swing and rock for grown-ups as well as the kids. A player who could lay down the latest sounds and sell it to the squares was just what Louis Prima needed to fulfill his plan. Louis had an idea for a new act to surround his young wife and secret weapon, Keely Smith. With Sam, Butera, he had the sparkplug.

 

“So getting back to the time I was working at the Monteleone Hotel, all of a sudden I get a call. It’s from Louis Prima,” Sam remembered. “He said, ‘Las Vegas is happening for us!’  ‘Come tomorrow!’ I said, ‘Tomorrow’s Christmas!’ He said, ‘What’s the matter? What difference it make?’  I said, ‘No, I got to spend Christmas home.’’

 

Then Sam took about two more seconds to think about it.

 

“’I’ll be up on the twenty-sixth.”

“Well, bring a drummer and a piano player with you.”

“What about the money?”

“Don’t worry about the money!”

 

 

(IN PART TWO, it’s another phone call that changes Louis Prima’s life and career when he agrees to haul his pregnant young wife across the country and accept a two-week gig in a lowly Las Vegas casino lounge. Louis Prima changed the face of Las Vegas and made rock ‘n’ roll safe for mainstream America, but not in the way you may think, in the true story of the Casbar lounge, the Mary Kaye Trio, Cab Calloway, Bill Miller and the night Sam Butera came to town.)

## 

Burt Kearns produces nonfiction television and documentary films and writes books, including

Tabloid Baby, The Show Won’t Go On (written with Jeff Abraham), Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy (available for pre-sale on Amazon.com), and the recently-announced Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel.

 

SOMETHING HAPPENED TO FRANK SINATRA’S GRAVE

Legsville.com

April 4, 2022

©2022 By Burt Kearns

 

I’d heard that something had happened to Frank Sinatra’s grave. That someone defaced the memorial to the most important musical artist of the 20^th century.  Attacking Sinatra? This was like taking a wrecking ball to Graceland. Reading about it was one thing. I had to see for myself.

I always make a stop at Sinatra’s final resting place whenever I travel to Palm Springs or any of the other desert cities along the Sonny Bono Memorial Highway. Palm Springs is about a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. The Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City is about nine miles from the center of Palm Springs, three and a half miles from the former Sinatra compound in Rancho Mirage. It’s a serene oasis of green grass and shade trees amid miles of scrub and desert stretching to the San Jacinto Mountains. From whichever direction you approach, getting there is a journey through a barren purgatory of old show business, driving along or crossing streets named for people like Danny Kaye, Bing Crosby, Fred Waring, Dinah Shore, Barbara Stanwyck, Monty Hall, and, of course, Sinatra himself.

It’s sort of fitting that Sinatra’s grave, and not one of his local watering holes like Melvyn’s or Lord Fletcher’s, is where I pay my respects. Though I’d seen Sinatra perform many times, from Carnegie Hall to the Greek Theatre to the stage monitor at the Jerry Lewis Telethon in Las Vegas, the only time we actually met, or at least made eye contact, was in a cemetery. That was in May 1990, at Forest Lawn, over the hill from Hollywood, outside the Hall of Liberty, where Sammy Davis Jr.’s memorial service was coming to a close. Sinatra and his fourth wife Barbara made a discreet exit through a side door. I, invited and on assignment, followed with a camera, and once in the daylight, a few steps behind him and setting up the money shot, called out his name — “Mr. Sinat—” and was tackled by several Forest Lawn security guards in green polyester sport jackets. As they swarmed and pushed my face into the grass, Sinatra turned his head and looked at me, through me, past me, impassive, as he stepped into his limousine. The goons held me down until the limo had rounded the corner and disappeared over the hill. Then they stood up, wiped the dirt off their hands, adjusted their jackets, and left me there.

Twin Palms

Sinatra, with homes in Beverly Hills and New York City, had been a regular in Palm Springs since 1947, when he had architect Stewart Williams design him a midcentury modern four-bedroom house on East Alejo Road in “The Movie Colony,” where other Hollywood stars like Cary Grant and Al Jolson owned homes. That place, Twin Palms, probably had some bad vibes after a while. He’d moved in with first wife, Nancy and their three kids, Frank Jr., Nancy and Tina. Frank and “Big Nancy” announced their separation on Valentine’s Day 1950. He was an unfaithful dog, currently leg-humping Ava Gardner. He married Ava weeks after the divorce in 1951, and Twin Palms was often a battleground for two stars who coupled like nitro and glycerine. The marriage lasted officially until 1957, but by 1954, Sinatra had pulled up stakes and moved about ten miles south to a compound on Wonder Palms Road in Rancho Mirage. His career kicked up around then and his swinging lifestyle went into overdrive. Big Nancy raised the kids in Beverly Hills, and they all stayed close to their “Poppa.” That close relationship stood the many tests of time, and figures into the story of what happened to Frank Sinatra’s grave.

The helipad

“The Compound,” two-and-a half acres along the 17th fairway of the Tamarisk Golf Club, included a main residence, five guest houses and ultimately a caboose where Sinatra would keep his beloved electric train set. After Ava Gardner had enough of him, this was the place where Sinatra and pals like songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen whored it up, and where he got John F. Kennedy laid while helping get him elected president. After Kennedy’s inauguration, Sinatra screwed a “John F. Kennedy Slept Here” plaque into the wall of the bedroom where JFK had screwed hookers, installed new telephones, accommodations for the  Secret Service and a helipad in the middle of the circular driveway, all in expectation that the Compound would be the new Western White House. JFK’s nasty little brother Robert, the new Attorney General, changed that tune. Sinatra’s “connections” – the Mob ones that helped put Kennedy over the top – put him on the blacklist. When JFK visited Palm Springs, he’d stay at Bing Crosby’s place. Crosby was a Republican.

When Sinatra got word, he went ballistic with bipolar rage. As legend has it, He took a sledgehammer, went out to the driveway and pounded that concrete helipad to pebbles. That image offers a nice parallel to what happened to Frank Sinatra’s grave.

The family: Nancy Jr., Frank Jr., Barbara, Frank, Dolly and Tina

 

The night Sinatra died

When Frank Sinatra died on May 14, 1998, he was eighty-two and had been married for twenty-one years to his fourth wife, the former Barbara Ann Blakely, a showgirl from Missouri who’d been known as Barbara Marx ever since she worked her way up the respectability food chain and snared Zeppo, the “fourth” Marx Brother, as husband number two. Frank Sinatra’s daughters Nancy and Tina didn’t mind back in 1966 when at age fifty, he married twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow. Mia was close to their age, and fun to be around. Barbara, they hated. Maybe because Barbara wanted to be known as the only Mrs. Sinatra, while their mom Big Nancy was still holding a torch and holding down the fort for her wayward man. It didn’t help when Barbara tried to get her new hubbie to adopt her adult son from her first marriage, Bobby Marx (though Zeppo never formally adopted him). “Who adopts a twenty-five-year-old man?” Tina posed the question her 2000 memoir, My Father’s Daughter. “Wouldn’t he be embarrassed? Or did he get a new name each time Barbara snared a husband?” Ouch.  All relations between the Sinatra daughters and Barbara were sledgehammered the night Sinatra died. Barbara had him taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center—and did not inform Tina or Nancy. Tina would never forget. Never forgive.

My pal A.J. Benza knows the Sinatra family; was close to Nancy. “Nancy is sweet,” he told me. “Tina’s the tough one.”

 

The neighborhood

To find Frank Sinatra’s grave, you drive through the Desert Memorial gates on DeVall Drive, take a left and roll slowly along the road as it loops around through the middle of the cemetery until you find the small sign that reads “B-8.”  All the gravestones are at ground level, so you wander a bit under the shade trees and see who else is in the neighborhood.

Hey! There’s Jimmy Van Heusen. He’s the one who introduced Sinatra to Palm Springs, who allegedly saved Sinatra’s life in 1953 after the singer slashed a wrist over Ava Gardner. Van Heusen was born Edward Chester Babcock. He took the name of the shirt brand and wrote the music for Sinatra classics like “Come Fly with Me,” “Come Dance with Me,” “Swinging on a Star,” Love and Marriage,” “(Love Is) The Tender Trap,” “High Hopes,” “Only the Lonely,” “My Kind of Town”… the list, as they say, goes on. George Jacobs, Sinatra’s longtime valet, described Van Heusen as “Sinatra’s best friend… whore wrangler… decadent womanizer, an Olympian boozer, a war hero, a daredevil pilot…role model for the swingin’ music man that Frank would become.”

Jacobs wrote in his book, Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra, that “Chester the serial Playboy and sex addict had succumbed to monogamy in his late 50s.” His bride, Bobbe, formerly of the singing Brox sisters, is buried beside him. Bobbe’s gravestone says she’s “Forever Singing in the Rain  (she and her sisters were among the first to introduce the song in 1929). Jimmy is “Swinging on a Star.”

Working up a row toward Sinatra, you’ll find Broadway musical composter Frederick Loewe. Among the songs that Loewe wrote with Alan Jay Lerner was “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” that creepy number about an underage prostitute that Maurice Chevalier sang in Gigi. Loewe’s maker says “Thank heaven for Frederick Loewe, World Beloved Composer.” He’s not far from two Gabors – not the famous ones, but sister Magda and mama Jolie.

 

The Sinatra Row

 

That gets us to the Sinatra pack. Jilly Rizzo, immortalized as “Sinatra’s right-hand man” is six graves to the left of his pal. His marker notes that “He was the best.”  According to George Jacobs, Jilly was “a saloon keeper… the owner of a nondescript bar in New York’s theatre district that had one unusual distinction: it served Chinese food, perhaps the worst Chinese food in New York… Mr. S thought it was magnificent, the franks and beans of the mysterious East… Jilly was a short, squat, square guy, but he was tough as nails, with a temper as quick and violent as Mr S’s.” You can see Jilly as a bartender in the Sinatra movie, The Detective. In Rancho Mirage, Jilly lived across the golf course from Sinatra.  On May 5, 1992, he was all excited, cooking up Italian sausages for a big party in his backyard to celebrate his 75th birthday the following day. He expected at least eighty people, including the Sinatras, to show. A little after midnight, he got into his white Jaguar to drive to his girlfriend’s house. where he was going to spend the night. Jilly was crossing Gerald Ford Drive when his car was hit head-on by a drunk in a Mercedes. Jilly’s Jag burst into flames. The other driver got out of his car – and ran away on foot while Jilly burned up like an Italian sausage.

Down the other end of the row, three graves to Frank’s right, is Anthony Martin “Marty” Sinatra, his dad the fireman. Marty was seventy-four when his heart stopped in 1969. Alongside Marty is his wife Natalie. Frank’s mother was powerful political figure when he was growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey. Everyone knew her as “Dolly.” Her side hustle, running a backroom abortion service, led to the nickname “Hatpin Dolly.” After Marty died, Frank brought Dolly, kicking and screaming, to the desert, and brought her a big luxurious house next door to the Compound.  She wanted to stay in Jersey. George Jacobs observed that “the only thing Dolly hated more than California was Barbara” – especially after her son took Barbara as his fourth wife in 1976.  In January 1977, when Sinatra invited Dolly to Las Vegas to him perform at the Circus Maximus showroom in Caesars Palace, she refused to fly on the same plane with her new daughter-in-law.  So Sinatra chartered Dolly a Lear Jet.  At showtime on January 6, he was worried because she hadn’t arrived. He opened with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and found out after the show that the jet carrying Dolly and three others had, shortly after takeoff in Palm Springs, smashed into a mountain. She was eighty.

Frank’s Uncle Vinnie

 

Between Dolly’s grave and Frank lies Vincent Mazzola. Vincent who? Vincent was Frank’s uncle, a World War I veteran who’d lived with the Sinatras since the 1920s in Hoboken. Vincent was, how do you say in Italian? Citrullo. A simpleton. Not all there in the head. He died at in 1973, seventy-nine, and he sleeps between Dolly and Frank, probably the way the way he did in the small flat in Hoboken.

There they were. That’s life. One big happy family, with grave markers reflecting a common theme.  Marty’s read ‘BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER,” Dolly was “BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER AND GREAT GRANDMOTHER.” Frank was “BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER,” under the headline, “THE BEST IS YET TO COME.” For years, that was the line-up when I’d show up, stand over Sinatra’s grave and spend a few minutes reflecting on the approaching September of my own years. Some people left Jack Daniels bottles, pennies, or dimes on the marker – Frank’s daughter Tina says she slipped ten dimes into his pocket when he was in the coffin. Sinatra always kept ten dimes in his pocket in case he needed change for a payphone. That went back to 1963, when Frank Jr. was kidnapped and Sinatra relied on payphones to contact the abductors.  Tina said she also slipped something else into her dead father’s pocket: a note.

 Barbara Sinatra showed up some years after I began to visit Frank Sinatra’s grave. She died in 2017. She was ninety— impressive, but Big Nancy hung in and survived her by almost a year. She died at 101. Barbara, buried to the right of Frank, joined the family tradition, listed on her marker as “BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER & GRANDMOTHER.” She also gave herself a headline above her name – and not  “Gold Digger” or “Former Showgirl.” Frank may have been “The Voice,” but Barbara was “A VOICE FOR CHILDREN.” Well, certainly not Frank’s children.

 

“The Mystery of Frank Sinatra’s Grave”

Then came COVID. I hadn’t visited Palm Springs or Desert Memorial Park in about a year when I’d heard the rumor that something had happened to Frank Sinatra’s grave. What had happened was suddenly “The Mystery of Frank Sinatra’s Grave.” At least that was the headline almost exactly a year ago, when the story was published in Palm Springs Life. While well-placed in one of the best of the city-dedicated magazines, David Lansing’s investigative piece would have fit comfortably in Vanity Fair or GQ, and deserved to be picked up nationally. Lansing wrote that he, too, would make it a point to stop by Sinatra’s grave — only, being a resident of Palm Springs, he’d visit on his way out of town. It was in January 2001 that he saw that the familiar headstone, the one that read “The Best Is Yet to Come,” had been replaced. Now, it read simply, “Francis Albert Sinatra, 1915-1998,” and at the center: “Sleep Warm, Poppa.” Curious, as one would be, Lansing phoned the cemetery district manager to ask why the marker had been changed, and who changed it. The manager told him she couldn’t divulge any details. “I don’t want to get in the middle of what happened,” she said, and suggested he talk to daughters Nancy and Tina Sinatra.

When Lansing followed up with a Freedom of Information request with the Cathedral City Police Department, the police provided a report that was redacted. All he wanted to find out was who changed Frank Sinatra’s gravestone, who authorized it, and when. Tina and Nancy Sinatra ignored his requests for comment. Their kids wouldn’t comment, either.  When Palm Springs Life sent an official request for the public records, the cemetery district manager replied that the information was on a need-to-know basis, and they didn’t need to know.

Lansing did his research, and found the backstory of the bad blood between Barbara and Sinatra’s daughters. And then came that classic journalistic twist: the Deep Throat tipster. Lansing wrote that he received “a somewhat cryptic note from someone who has been connected to the Sinatra family for over 45 years and knows, literally, where all the bodies are buried.”  The source told him that the defining incident took place over the Thanksgiving weekend 2020. In the dead of night during the holiday when families gather and give thanks, someone hopped the wall of Desert Memorial Park, found Frank Sinatra’s headstone and attacked it, chipping away at the granite, maybe with a hammer and chisel. Banging and breaking it up the way Sinatra had destroyed the helipad sixty years earlier, the perpetrator left the headstone defaced and destroyed. But not all of it. Where it had said “Beloved husband and father,” the word “husband” had been obliterated. The headstone had to be replaced. That’s the story. No names.  No finger-pointing. That’s all you need to know.

Frank Sinatra’s new headstone was simple. Now, as he had in life, Frank Sinatra stood out from, yet at the center of the family. Simple: name, dates, and “Sleep Warm, Poppa.”  Sinatra would be remembered not as a husband and father, but simply a father. Sleep warm, Poppa. The note that Tina Sinatra had placed in her father’s casket read: “Sleep warm, Poppa – look for me.”

So there it was. Standing over Sinatra’s grave, his new grave, a few weeks ago, taking photos to replace the old ones, regarding the new headstone, it came to me that “Sleep Warm, Poppa” just might be a better epitaph than “The Best Is Yet to Come.” What best? One reason Sinatra’s voice and influence resonates beyond his generation and into another century is that he lived for the day. He played hard, he stayed up late. He didn’t hold back in anticipation of some best-is-yet-to-come afterlife. He had little faith in “the hereafter.” Sinatra knew it. Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Davis Jr. knew it. The best is now. Sleep when you’re dead. So sleep warm, pally.

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Burt Kearns produces nonfiction television and documentary films. He wrote the book Tabloid Baby and cowrote The Show Won’t Go On. His book, Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy, will be published on November 29 by the University Press of Kentucky and is available for pre-sale on Amazon.com.