Frank: The Voice (101 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
The hell with
St. Louis Woman
. He’d rather work with Marilyn Monroe.
Click.
At last, they made a provisional agreement to make up. The minute Ava’s work on the dumb costume epic was completed, she and Reenie threw all her things into her bags. She was bored with England anyway. Clark Gable, who’d stayed in London after
Mogambo
wrapped, came over for a farewell drink—and reminded her that she’d completed only half of the eighteen months’ foreign residence the IRS required for a massive tax break.
“
Ava, honey, you do know what you’re doing, don’t you? You’re packing up and throwing away a hundred fifty thousand dollars in those suitcases.”
She didn’t give a flying fuck. She wanted to see her husband.
Gable smiled, squinty eyed, over his highball glass. Lucky husband.
But at the last minute, Ava decided to stop over in Madrid: Spain made her happy, and she had new friends there, not the least of whom was Luis Miguel Dominguín.
As always, the press took note of her every movement, and since Frank read the papers like everyone else, he got wind of her layover. As far as he was concerned, she had stood him up, but he wasn’t about to tell the reporters that. No comment, was what he said instead. He was booked at the 500 Club through Labor Day—the very day Ava arrived in New York. Frank stayed put.
Ava walked off the plane at Idlewild, her big sunglasses hiding the circles under her eyes, and ran smack into a crowd of eager reporters.
Where was Frankie? Were she and he not getting along?
She adjusted the shades and walked coolly through the pack. “I have nothing to say about it,” she said. She believed he had a singing engagement in Atlantic City.
Did she plan to see him?
“Not today,” she said. “I have no definite plans.” She pulled off her gloves—every man watching her hands with widening eyes—and put them in her bag. “I don’t want to discuss it.”
The reporters crowded closer. One suggested that her answers strongly implied there was some kind of rift.
“It doesn’t imply anything,” she said, getting into a waiting car. The driver closed the door, and then she was gone.
Frank came to New York the next day and checked into the Waldorf. Ava was in the Hampshire House.
The press smelled blood. “
A close friend said the couple had been squabbling and that things might be patched up with a telephone call or ‘blow sky high in 24 hours,’ ” the United Press reported on September 9. And, the next day:
FRANKIE AND AVA FEUDING
NEW YORK (UP)—Ava and Frankie are feuding in frosty silence today just 12 city blocks apart …
Sinatra … told his friends he was completely mystified over Ava’s unannounced return three days ago and her anger. He refused to say why he didn’t pick up the phone and ask Ava.
“I hope to see Frank before I leave next week,” Ava said. “That’s what I came home for.” She wouldn’t say why she neglected to phone him or where she intended to go from here.
“I don’t care to talk about it further,” she said pleasantly, leaning back on the couch and exposing her bare legs. The question of hemlines arose.
“If women follow that very short skirt fad they’re fools,” Ava said. She paused and smiled. “But then, we’re fools.”
It sounded like a high-school quarrel. Speaking to another reporter, Sinatra was the soul of disingenuousness. “
I saw a picture of Ava at the airport,” he said, “and that’s the first inkling I had that she was in town. I don’t understand it. We’d had no trouble. I can’t make a statement because I don’t know what she is planning. It’s a crying shame, because everything was going so well with us. Something may work out, but I don’t know.”
Ava replied (to another reporter): “
You start with love, or what you think is love, and then comes the work. I guess you have to be mature and grown up to know how to work at it. But I was the youngest of seven kids and was always treated like the baby, and I liked it, and played the baby. Now I’m having a hell of a time growing up.”
While Frank opened at the Riviera, she went with a girlfriend to a Broadway show—as it happened, the premiere of
Carnival in Flanders
, book by Preston Sturges, music and lyrics by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke. Despite the brilliant creative team, the critics murdered the show, which ran for only six performances. The failure hastened
Burke’s decline into alcoholism and steeled Chester’s resolve to stick to writing for the movies. (But as Ava sat there that night, she got to hear John Raitt debut Van Heusen’s greatest song, “Here’s That Rainy Day”—of which Sinatra would record the greatest version six years thence.)
Meanwhile, across the river, Frank was knocking them dead. “
Every big star—except Ava Gardner—was at Frank Sinatra’s big, spectacular opening at Bill Miller’s Riviera,” Earl Wilson wrote. “(Martin & Lewis couldn’t get a table!)”
It was true: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, virtual protégés of Frank’s, and now arguably the biggest stars in the world, were refused the ringside table they demanded. It was a maître d’s dream and nightmare: the place was simply too jammed with celebrities to admit any more. The duo walked off in a huff. It was a subtle changing of the guard.
Dean and Jerry missed a hell of a show. “
Electrifying,” said Eddie Fisher, who had been more prudent about getting a reservation. “
Frank let loose a vocal tour de force, accompanied by Bill Miller at the piano and a seven-piece band,”
Variety
’s critic wrote.
He held the floor a solid 60 minutes and while he might and should cut 10 minutes there was no gainsaying the consistency of his socko. He’s in for $10,000 a week, for two weeks, and both he and [club owner] Bill Miller owe a lot to Harry Cohn for what the Columbia picture did for all concerned. Oh yes, he also sang “From Here to Eternity” and wisely sh-sh’d some exuberant bobby-soxers who squealed an occasional “Oh Frankie.”
Frank was in great voice and delighted to be performing for an American audience, and a hip one at that. He could even make fun of his marital troubles: when he sang Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” he mimed getting booted in the butt, as if by you-know-who, to
gales of laughter. “
Frank Sinatra’s intimates say he hasn’t been as happy in years, despite the rift with Ava,” Dorothy Kilgallen wrote early in the second week of the stand. “The success of his dramatic effort in ‘From Here to Eternity’ plus his great hit as a ballad singer at the Riviera have lifted him out of the bitter depression that was beginning to worry all his associates. In the long run, his career seems to be more important to him than any luscious female.”
While this was true in the long run, Sinatra was paying a bitter price. Friends like Van Heusen and Sanicola and Jule Styne, friends he made stay up with him every night until dawn, took the true measure of his misery. And no matter how many laughs he enjoyed with his buddies, Ava made him miserable. He couldn’t dominate her; he couldn’t understand her. The more inconstant she was, the more he needed her.
On September 12, Earl Wilson, who fancied himself a friend, devoted almost his entire column to a jocular account of his failed attempt to bring Frank and Ava back together. “
As a Cupid, I’m stupid, for I just made a gallant effort to melt the deep freeze between Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra … and fixed everything up so good that the freeze is now twice as deep,” he wrote.
Ava and I met in a large eatery run by a large eater. After talking about her next picture, “Mogambo,” in which she is a real sexpot, I happened to mention her Herculean husband whom she considers has neglected her, which—if it’s true—makes him this century’s man of iron.
“You still haven’t seen him or talked to him?” I asked.
“No.” She sipped her tea … She was wearing, I noticed, Frank’s wedding ring, also a large frosty smile of independence …
“Can I be an intermediary?” I asked. “I know a lot about patching up quarrels with wives. First the husband says it was all his fault and after that everything’s easy.”
“Nobody can help us but ourselves,” she answered. “You
must talk, you must understand each other. Listen to me. Lady psychiatrist!”
“I still think you should have been [at the Riviera],” I said.
“I don’t have to defend myself,” she said, “as long as I’m sure in my heart that I was right.”
Dolly sailed into the breach. Talking to her son on the phone, she instantly heard the sadness in his voice.
He went on and on about the crowds at the Riviera. He was doing great.
Dolly grunted. Bullshit.
She phoned Ava at the Hampshire House. Ava asked her please to come right over. “
She kissed me, and after a few minutes she began to cry,” Dolly recalled.
She had been tired, she said, when the plane came in, and when she didn’t see Frank, she felt bad. Then she found out he was in Atlantic City with me and said, “Mama, I don’t know how to explain this, but I know how little you get to see him. I thought for once you’re together, just the two of you, and I didn’t want to spoil it.”
“Frankie is so upset,” Dolly said. “It’s drivin’ him nuts you two not speakin’.” He was drinking; he was taking pills to sleep. Ava’s mother-in-law looked her up and down.
“Jesus Christ! You know you two kids love each other! So quit all this fuckin’ shit, for God’s sake!”
And so Dolly hatched her grand plan. She invited Ava to Weehawken for a big Italian dinner the next night, then she phoned Frank and invited
him
.
“Who’s gonna be there?” he asked suspiciously.
“Never mind—you just come.” Seven sharp. If he was late, she would feed his dinner to the dog.
Ava came at six thirty; Frank, at seven. They stood in the hall and stared at each other, smiling a little bit. “Hey,” Dolly told her son and daughter-in-law. “Come into the kitchen and see what I’m making for you tonight.”
They followed like obedient children. “We walked to the stove,” Dolly recalled, “and I took the big spoon I use for stirring the gravy and I made them both taste it. Then they both began to laugh and talk and before you knew it they were hugging each other and then they grabbed me and the three of us stood there just hugging and laughing and I think we all felt like crying a little bit too.”
After dinner, Dolly and Marty and Ava and Frank drove to Fort Lee for Frank’s late show. He forgot all about the boot-in-the-ass shtick from “I Get a Kick Out of You”—now he sang the song right to her. Her eyes gleamed. “
The Voice unleashed a torrent of sound at the sultry Ava,” the
New York Journal American
’s reviewer wrote. “Emotion poured from him like molten lava.”
The next day, Frank moved out of the Waldorf and into Ava’s suite at the Hampshire House.
Ava at the Los Angeles premiere of
Mogambo
, October 8, 1953. Alone. She and Frank were headed inexorably toward separation.
(photo credit 36.1)
I
t couldn’t last, of course: it never had, and it never would. In the end, Dolly’s Cupid act was to prove no more effective than Earl Wilson’s. Cupid didn’t have enough arrows in his quiver for this pair.
