Frank: The Voice (109 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
AVA GARDNER, SINATRA SILENT ON RECONCILIATION, read the December 30 wire-service headline, datelined Rome.
Actress Ava Gardner, in bed with the flu shortly after resuming housekeeping with husband Frank Sinatra, was reported “feeling much better today.”
A doctor said she probably would be able to leave her apartment to keep several appointments later today.
Miss Gardner went to bed yesterday several hours after she and Sinatra arrived in Rome from Madrid. He flew from the United States and followed her to Spain for Christmas, giving rise to reports of a reconciliation.
On arrival here, they went straight to the actress’ luxurious apartment on the fashionable Corso d’Italia, but neither would comment on whether she is abandoning her previously announced plans to get a divorce.
Reached by telephone, Sinatra gave no hint of love or romance. Asked about a reconciliation, he snapped:
“This doesn’t concern anyone but us. This is nobody’s business but our own.”
Twentieth Century Fox was frantically trying to keep
Pink Tights
alive. Monroe’s and Sinatra’s salaries were being paid week after week, but nothing was happening. Darryl F. Zanuck was struggling to keep the film on track, but both stars were out of town and preoccupied: Marilyn holed up in San Francisco with the man she was about to marry, Joe DiMaggio; Frank in Rome, “
trying to work things out” with his wife, as he kept cabling Fox.
With the press camped outside, Frank and Ava spent three days sequestered in her apartment, drinking, talking, shouting (not quite as loudly as they used to), even taking a shot at making up, without much success. She told him apologetically that she still felt like shit—but they both knew her health had nothing to do with it.
Rome, December 29, 1953. Sick, miserable, and about to be a couple no more.
(photo credit 38.2)
They threw a New Year’s Eve party—Ava’s idea—at the Via Veneto cabaret run by Cole Porter’s legendary muse Bricktop. Getting out of the apartment was a relief, as was being around other people—even if they barely knew the other guests: Eddie O’Brien and Rossano Brazzi plus some of the crew from her movie, dissolute Roman society nobs and equally dissolute expatriates and a few people from the embassy. Loud music, close quarters, lots of smoke; the usual requests for Frank to sing. He shook his head sadly. Sitting on his lap, Ava tried to cheer him up, amid the forced gaiety and phony sentimentality (1954! who knew what it would bring?). But when she and Frank kissed at the stroke of midnight, the tears running down her cheeks were quite real.
On Monday morning he sneaked off to the airport, leaving by a service entrance to avoid the reporters, and flew back to America alone.
Humphrey Bogart and Ava at a cocktail party for their film
The Barefoot Contessa
, Rome, early 1954. Frank was in Hollywood, 7,000 miles away, still pining for her.
(photo credit 39.1)
W
hile Frank was in the air, on Monday, January 4, Capitol released
Songs for Young Lovers
as a ten-inch LP, containing the eight songs from the November 5 and 6 sessions: “My Funny Valentine,” “The Girl Next Door,” “A Foggy Day,” and “Like Someone in Love” on side one; “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Little Girl Blue,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and “Violets for Your Furs” on side two. It was Frank’s first album since
Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra
on Columbia over three years earlier.
T
he cover of
Sing and Dance
had shown a hatless Frank (with a full head of hair), looking neat and collegiate in a striped necktie and light-colored jacket, smiling amiably against a bouncy pink background, complete with a couple’s dancing feet. The cover of
Young Lovers
established a new, infinitely moodier Sinatra: against a dark background, the singer, in a dark suit and fedora, stood under a lamppost, a lonely figure with a cigarette, looking meditative while a pair of couples promenaded by. Sinatra and the young lovers were in separate universes—he was their serenader, not their friend.
George Siravo had arranged seven of the eight songs, but Nelson Riddle, the arranger of “Like Someone in Love”—a master at expressing emotional complexity and sexual tension—was poised to carry the baton forward.
Frank was living the reality of that figure on the album cover. Arriving back at his Los Angeles apartment, he found he couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, didn’t feel like singing, and had little to do with his days besides see his headshrinker and do the radio show (“
You may have heard it—if you’ve got a car,” he told a television audience, which, like most of America, wasn’t gathering around the radio in the living room anymore). On the movie front, Zanuck had suspended Monroe for noncompliance, and apart from pre-recording a couple of songs for
Pink Tights
, Frank didn’t have much to do besides collect his paycheck. If he picked up a newspaper, he could read reports that Ava, who’d told him that she wasn’t feeling well enough to see him off at the airport in Rome, had that very afternoon gone to the atelier of the sculptor Assen Peikov to begin posing, “
in a chilly studio without much on,” for a statue to be used in
The Barefoot Contessa
. Oh, and by the way, other reports said that she’d taken up with Shelley Winters’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Vittorio Gassman.
Frank needed company, and fast, so he went to extreme measures: he moved Jule Styne into his apartment. “He
literally
moved me in,” Styne recalled. Sinatra simply went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the recently divorced composer was renting a bungalow, and had Styne’s belongings packed up and carted over to Beverly Glen.
The affable and energetic Styne was flattered—at first. The odd-couple arrangement would last for eight months in all, but it was a trial from the beginning. Frank thought and talked of little but Ava through the long days and nights. “
I come home at night and the apartment is all dark,” Styne remembered.
I yell “Frank!” and he doesn’t answer. I walk into the living room and it’s like a funeral parlor. There are three pictures of Ava in the room and the only lights are three dim ones on the pictures. Sitting in front of them is Frank with a bottle of brandy. I say to him, “Frank, pull yourself together.” And he says, “Go ’way. Leave me alone.” Then all night he paces up and down and says, “I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep.” At four o’clock in the morning I hear him calling someone on the telephone. It’s his first wife, Nancy. His voice is soft and quiet and I hear him say, “You’re the only one who understands me.” Then he paces up and down some more and maybe he reads, and he doesn’t fall asleep until the sun’s up. Big deal. You can have it.
Frank was in a sleep-deprived daze. Driving his Cadillac convertible through Beverly Hills one afternoon, he crashed into a small English sports car at an intersection. It was a mismatch. The collision threw the other driver, one Mrs. Myrna McClees, out of her vehicle and onto the pavement: she was taken to the hospital unconscious, with a fractured skull and lacerations. Frank swore he had come to a full stop and looked both ways before proceeding. The woman recovered; Frank stumbled on.
His ex-wife, too, felt his pain. “
Nancy Sinatra’s pals are worried about the thin, drawn look that’s replaced the bright, happy air sported by the crooner’s ex for the last few years,” Erskine Johnson wrote in his column. “They blame it on Nancy’s involvement, through her kiddies, in Frank’s current mental depression.”
Maybe it also had something to do with those 4:00 a.m. phone calls. She was not only exhausted, but furious: She was propping him
up, and for what? So he could make up for the thousandth time with that bimbo?
There had been times when the membrane between his private sorrows and his onstage persona was porous: when his depression undermined his timing, his presence, his voice itself. Lately, though, the stage was more and more a refuge. On January 17 he returned to
The Colgate Comedy Hour
, singing “Young at Heart” and “The Birth of the Blues” in fine style and bantering easily with the audience about the romantic elopement of Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe—which, unfortunately, had held up the movie Frank was supposed to be starring in with Miss Monroe, over at 20th Century Fox. He made a comically resigned face.
In the meantime, his new joke on
Rocky Fortune
was working the phrase “from here to eternity” into every episode, at least once, and often several times. Sometimes he wondered if anyone was listening.
Then, in the last week of the month, things began to pick up. Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, hearing the Oscar drumbeat grow louder for
From Here to Eternity
, called Frank in to discuss a multipicture deal. Louis Mayer’s son-in-law Bill Goetz, who was leaving his job as production chief at Universal International to become an independent producer (and trying to get out of the long shadow of his brother-in-law David O. Selznick), called Frank in to talk about playing one of the leads in a screen adaptation of the hit musical
Guys and Dolls
.
