Frank: The Voice (111 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
On Valentine’s Day, a gloomy Sunday, Frank sent Ava a cable. He loved her and missed her and hoped she’d be coming back to him soon.
Then he went home and got drunk.
He’d called in a group of friends to play cards. “
When we got there he was on the phone to Nancy,” one of them recalled.
But this time she was mad at him. She wouldn’t talk to him.
By the time we got the game started, he didn’t even want to play anymore. He went into the den, opened a bottle, and started drinking alone. Okay. So we keep the game going awhile, and then Sammy Cahn gets up and he goes in to try to get Frank to join us. So what does he see?
There’s Frank drinking a toast to a picture of Ava with a tear running down his face. So Sammy comes back and we start playing again. All of a sudden we hear a crash. We all get up and run into the den, and there’s Frank. He had taken the picture of Ava, frame and all, and smashed it. Then he had picked up the picture, ripped it into little pieces, and thrown it on the floor. So we tell him, “Come on, Frank, you’ve got to forget about all that. Come on and play some cards with us.” He says,
“I’m through with her. I never want to see her again. I’m all right. I’ve just been drinking too much.”
So we go back to the game and a little while later Sammy goes back to Frank, and there he is on his hands and knees picking up the torn pieces of the picture and trying to put it back together again. Well, he gets all the pieces together except the one for the nose. He becomes frantic looking for it, and we all get down on our hands and knees and try to help him.
All of a sudden the doorbell rings. It’s a delivery boy with more liquor. So Frank goes to the back door to let him in, but when he opens it, the missing piece flutters out. Well, Frank is so happy, he takes off his gold wrist watch and gives it to the delivery boy.
The next day, the nominations for the 1953 Academy Awards were announced.
From Here to Eternity
got thirteen nominations: for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Deborah Kerr), Best Actor (both Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster), Best Supporting Actress (Donna Reed), Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design (Black-and-White), Best Sound Recording, Best Film Editing, Best Music Scoring. And, of course, Best Supporting Actor (Frank Sinatra).
Ava was also nominated, as Best Actress in a Leading Role, for
Mogambo
. When she heard about it in Rome, she laughed out loud.
Frank, however, began to pray. We know this; what he said was between him and God. He could barely remember the last time he’d set foot in a church—every once in a great while, when he was in New York, he stopped by St. Patrick’s and lit a candle for his sins (though he never dared to set foot in a confessional: where would he start?)—but that
Monday afternoon, before going to the airport (and several times in the weeks that followed), he drove over to the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, a lovely, Spanish Mission–style complex on Bedford and Santa Monica in Beverly Hills, went inside, and knelt in a pew.
The interior was cool and fragrant with the scents of incense and polished wood, the nave flanked with simple arches in smooth white stucco, the altar standing in a light-washed apse surrounded by tall stained-glass windows. He was alone in the sanctuary, except for one woman sitting a few rows ahead. Frank bowed his head.
Joe DiMaggio was advising his new bride to face down 20th Century Fox the way he’d faced down the New York Yankees: the studio owed her a raise, he told Marilyn, and something a hell of a lot better to do than
Pink Tights
. In the meantime, Zanuck looked for another female lead—maybe Jane Russell, maybe a sultry blond ingenue named Sheree North—and Sinatra consoled himself with the cash. “
Frank Sinatra—who’s collecting $50,000 for not working in ‘Pink Tights’—grabs $23,000 for 9 nights at the Miami Beachcomber,” Earl Wilson wrote in early February. And, a few days later: “
There’s a tug-of-war going on between La Vie en Rose and the Copacabana over Frank Sinatra’s next NY singing date. Monte Proser of La Vie says Frank promised to appear for him. ‘If he doesn’t,’ says Proser, ‘I’ll get out of the business.’ Frank’s also got a fat offer from the Copacabana, which has about twice the capacity of La Vie and could therefore pay him about twice as much.”
Everybody wanted him except Ava. But everybody else wanted him a lot. All at once, he was hot as a pistol. There were nightclub dates, TV spots, and, most of all, all kinds of movie offers: Besides the role of Nathan Detroit in
Guys and Dolls
(for which a director had already been tapped—Joseph L. Mankiewicz), he’d been offered the title role in another adaptation of a Broadway musical,
Pal Joey
. And then there was a dark thriller, in which the lead role, a crazed presidential assassin,
was a showpiece for a real actor. The script was called
Suddenly
, and Frank liked it a good deal.
While he rehearsed at the Beachcomber, the wire services ran, next to reports of Marilyn Monroe’s spectacularly successful trip to entertain the U.S. Marines in Korea, a story picked up from New York’s
Daily News
.
QUADRANGLE: ROME COMIC SINATRA’S TOP RIVAL was the headline; the piece was datelined Rome, February 16.
Walter Chiari, 28-year-old comedian known as the Danny Kaye of Italy, is the reason why Ava Gardner and Frankie Sinatra have not kissed and made up, according to the talk in Rome film circles today.
Ava and Chiari have been seen together frequently, both before and since Frankie flew here for four days last month in a fruitless attempt at reconciliation.
One Italian newspaper today named Ava as the fourth corner of a quadrangle, saying that Chiari had split with Lucia Bosé, Miss Italy of 1947, because of Miss Gardner.
It was all gossip, of course, but it was hard to ignore. And the quadrangle image, while picturesque, omitted a fifth leg, which complicated the romantic geometry considerably: the bullfighter Dominguín.
1
Frank did a week at the Beachcomber, relaxed for a few days in the Florida Keys, then Chester flew him up to New York to try to put a smile on his face. While there, he had a brief but memorable encounter, as noted by Winchell on February 26: “
Frank Sinatra and Artie Shaw met in Lindy’s revolving door the other 2 a.m. Both took a coolish 5-second take and then walked away.”
Frank kept busy. There was work and there was after work—paid company, chance encounters, old flames. The work made him happy, but it still left a lot of hours in the day. Winning the Oscar, he sometimes thought (knowing the thought was childish), would solve everything, would bring him work and wealth and maybe bring Ava back too.
At the same time, he felt pessimistic, superstitious. The other nominees—Eddie Albert and Robert Strauss and Jack Palance and Brandon De Wilde—were
actors
. What was he? (One thing he knew he wasn’t, in an era when academy members voted only within their own categories, was popular among other performers. Albert and Palance were very popular.) Frank told Bob Thomas of the Associated Press that he probably wouldn’t even be in Los Angeles for the Oscars. “
I’m a saloon singer,” he said plaintively. “I gotta go where the work is.”
But remarkably, his wandering wife seemed discontent, too. In a lengthy syndicated interview at the end of the month, Laura Lee of the North American Newspaper Alliance sat down with Ava in Rome and found her in somber, regretful spirits. “
What does Ava Gardner want most in the world? A baby,” Lee wrote.
She didn’t have to think twice before answering. The thing she has wanted most in life for a long time is a couple of babies and a normal, happy marriage.
What stands in the way?
Miss Gardner swallows, bows her head and shakes it ever so slightly, as if to say, “Who knows?” …“Some day” is all she ventures by way of reply—“It must be some day.”
If she is putting on an act, Hollywood’s No. 1 box-office star is a better actress even than her many fans believe.
“Marriage for two people in the field of entertainment is a very difficult thing,” Ava concedes. “Bogie …, who has been married to four actresses, and I were discussing this just this morning.”
