“I sure hope Isaiah got all that out in the van,” Margaret said. “Thank God he’s more technologically savvy than us.”
“You hearing all this, Isaiah?” Charlie said, knowing his friend wasn’t able to respond.
Charlie looked at his gorgeous, brilliant wife and smiled. She kissed him tenderly on the lips. He grabbed her hand and intertwined their fingers as they left the room and began walking down the stairs.
“What’s up?” he asked Margaret, repeating Dwight’s morning ritual.
“My sense that this is all finally over,” she said.
“What’s down?” he asked.
“My anxiety,” she said.
“What’s right?” he asked.
“Very little in this world,” she said, “but we can keep trying.”
“What’s left?” he asked.
“For us to go home,” she said.
And so they did.
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Sources and Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction, but obviously many of the characters and events depicted are real. In addition, some of the dialogue is from actual conversations. Resources from which I drew information, inspiration, and sometimes dialogue include, in alphabetical order:
Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard, by Russell Miller. London: Sphere, 1987.
Breaking My Silence: Confessions of a Rat Pack Party Girl and Sex-Trade Survivor, by Jane McCormick with Patti Wicklund. St. Paul, MN: Rapfire Press, 2007.
The Cinema of John Frankenheimer, by Gerald Pratley. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1969.
The Dark Heart of Hollywood: Glamour, Guns and Gambling Inside the Mafia’s Global Empire, by Douglas Thompson. London: Mainstream Publishing, 2013.
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams, by Nick Tosches. New York: Dell, 1992.
Double Cross: The Explosive Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America, by Sam and Chuck Giancana. New York: Warner, 1992.
Frank: The Voice, by James Kaplan. New York: Doubleday, 2010.
Frank Sinatra: A Life in Pictures, edited by Yann-Brice Dherbier. London: Pavilion, 2011.
Frank Sinatra: An American Legend, by Nancy Sinatra. Santa Monica, CA: General Publishing Group, 1998.
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright. New York: Knopf, 2013.
Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli, by Lee Server. New York: St. Martin’s, 2018.
His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, by Kitty Kelley. New York: Bantam, 1986.
Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, by Janet Reitman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
JFK and Sam: The Connection Between the Giancana and Kennedy Assassinations, by Antoinette Giancana, John R. Hughes, D. M. Ozon, and Thomas H. Jobe. Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 2005.
The Manchurian Candidate, by Greil Marcus. London: British Film Institute, 2002.
Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra, by George Jacobs and William Stadiem. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. (Please note, the offensive songs Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. sing to each other in the book are from here.)
My Story, by Judith Exner as told to Ovid Demaris. London: Circus/Futura, 1977. (Conversations with Sinatra, Kennedy, and Giancana, as well as the Kennedy phone numbers, are taken from this book.)
The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection, by Ronald Brownstein. New York: Pantheon, 1990.
Rat Pack Confidential, by Shawn Levy. London: Fourth Estate, 2002. (The Formosa and Giancana transcript is taken from this book.)
Robert Kennedy and His Times, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. New York: Ballantine, 1978.
Sammy: An Autobiography, by Sammy Davis Jr. and Jane and Burt Boyar. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000.
Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, documentary film by Alex Gibney, produced by Alcon Television Group, Jigsaw Productions, and the Kennedy/Marshall Company, 2015.
Sinatra: Behind the Legend, by J. Randy Taraborrelli. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015.
Sinatra and the Jack Pack: The Extraordinary Friendship between Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy—Why They Bonded and What Went Wrong, by Michael Sheridan with David Harvey. New York: Skyhorse, 2016.
Sinatra: The Chairman, by James Kaplan. New York: Doubleday, 2015. (The Giancana and Rosselli transcripts are taken from this book.)
Sinatra: The Photographs, by Andrew Howick with a foreword by Barbara Sinatra. New York: Abrams, 2015.
Sinatra on Sinatra, compiled by Guy Yarwood. London: W. H. Allen, 1982.
Tell It to Louella!, by Louella Parsons. New York: Putnam, 1961.
Tippi: A Memoir, by Tippi Hedren. New York: William Morrow, 2016.
What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America, by Mathew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar González. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Why Me? The Sammy Davis, Jr. Story, by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Jane and Burt Boyar. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989.
Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr., by Sammy Davis, Jr. and Jane and Burt Boyar. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965.
Some other sources include:
Automobile information was offered by David Burge as well as Joe Sheppard in the Daily Mail online, “Drive Me to the Moon! One of Five Vintage Italian Cars Given to Members of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack Emerges for Sale for £300,000,” August 13, 2017.
Description of the Tombs came from description of visitation from James Rhem et al., Plaintiffs, v. Benjamin J. Malcolm, Commissioner of Correction for the City of New York, et al., Defendants. No. 70 Civ. 3962. United States District Court, S. D. New York. January 7, 1974.
Palm Springs was described in Explorer’s Guide: Palm Springs and Desert Resorts, by Christopher Paul Baker, Explorer’s Great Destinations 2008. Sinatra’s Rancho Mirage compound was covered in Architectural Digest in December 1998 and Palm Springs Life on November 6, 2014.
Information about the Daisy (yes, I know it was actually founded in 1962, after this book takes place) from martinostimemachine.blogspot.com. As a general note, I took liberties with events that occurred in 1961–1962. “Boys Night Out,” which members of the Rat Pack sing in December 1961 within these pages, wasn’t released by Sinatra until March 1962. I similarly played with the release dates of Lolita, the Jimmy Dean song “PT-109,” and so on.
Information about and attitude of John Wayne drawn from a 1974 BBC interview with him and from two UPI stories, “Sinatra Blasted for Writer Choice,” March
