Frank: The Voice (57 page)

In the meantime, he was largely idle. On Saturday nights came
Your Hit Parade
, with its occasional pleasures but mostly its tribulations: in January, he sprinted through a version of “Too Fat Polka” (“
I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me”) so dispiriting that to listen to it is to risk bursting into tears. Worse was to come. He did a couple of guest spots on Jack Benny’s and Maurice Chevalier’s radio shows. But mainly, he did a lot of drinking and poker playing with the Varsity.

Frank had officially moved out of his penthouse at the Sunset Tower apartments years before, but had held on to it—for the times he recorded late at night and had to be at the studio early the next morning; for business meetings; for other things. For a while, Axel and Sammy Cahn had roomed together in a suite a couple of floors below: now Sammy was married, but he still liked to stop by Frank’s place now and then for a drink, a few hands of cards, some laughs.

One night, after some of each, Sammy and Frank were out on the terrace, looking down over the Sunset Strip. A violet evening, the little lights twinkling in the Hollywood hills. Sammy pointed, a little unsteadily, across the street. Did Frank know who lived down there?

Frank just shook his head at him.

“
If you looked down from Frank’s terrace,” Cahn wrote in his autobiography, “you’d see, across the street, a series of little houses, one of them owned by Tom Kelly, a noted interior decorator; the occupant of that house was Ava Gardner.”

When Sammy told him this, Frank shook his head again, this time in wonderment. For a moment, he stared fiercely into the twilight. Then he cupped his hands to his mouth. “Ava!” he yelled. The big voice carried far into the quiet evening. “Ava Gardner!”

Sammy Cahn looked at his hero and grinned. Nobody like him. Now he cupped his hands to
his
mouth. “Can you hear me, Ava?” he called, in his high, hoarse tones. “We know you’re down there, Ava!”

“Hello, Ava, hello!” Sinatra called. As if he were yelling down a wishing well.

The two men looked at each other and began to giggle. Giggling turned to laughing. Laughing became hysteria. Soon they were both clutching their sides painfully and bellowing into the night. Down on the sidewalk, one or two passersby—in those days there weren’t many pedestrians on the Strip—stared up at the terrace.

And then a miracle: in the little house nestled into the trees on the north side of Sunset—torn down many years ago and replaced by a railroad-car restaurant—a curtain was drawn, a window opened.

Ava stuck her head out the window and looked up. She knew exactly who it was: the voice was unmistakable. She grinned, and waved back.

Was it an accident that they ran into each other just a few days later, in front of her place? And then again, a few days after that, near Sunset Tower? Frank wasn’t much for walking, but suddenly there was something compelling about those stretches of sidewalk. The third time, they both spotted each other a half block away; both began laughing as they converged.

He grinned as he said hello.

Ava’s eyes searched his. Was he following her?

He met her gaze boldly. If he were following her, he’d be behind her.

She put a hand on her hip. Uh-huh.

“Ava, let’s be friends. Why don’t we have drinks and dinner tonight?”

“
I looked at him,” she wrote in her autobiography.

She accepted his invitation, and they went to Mocambo, just up the Strip. There were a lot of drinks. She had taken up the habit soon after she married the tyrannical Artie Shaw, to quell the feelings of intellectual inferiority he so easily aroused in her. This night there were different feelings to quell. In any case, alcohol, in quantity, made her forget her deep self-doubt, made her feel like a different person—glamorous, intelligent, desirable, a person worthy of the attentions of Frank Sinatra. She had always had a thing for musicians: Shaw, with his Svengali act, had taken advantage of that. But Sinatra was in a category all his own. He was, she’d felt from the first time she heard him, “
one of the greatest singers of this century. He had a thing in his voice I’ve only heard in two other people—Judy Garland and Maria Callas. A quality that makes me want to cry for happiness, like a beautiful sunset or a boys’ choir singing Christmas carols.”

And now here she was, sitting with him. She leaned her head on her hand tipsily and looked sideways at him. He was telling a story, animatedly.
She could barely make out the words. It didn’t matter. Could she be in love with this man? She shook her head, as if in wonderment at something he was saying, but really to herself: this wouldn’t do.

Frank was not immune to guilt either, though alcohol and admiration could quickly make him feel that other rules applied in his case. He had told himself that with dozens of girls—but Ava was different. Marilyn Maxwell had been sweet and sincere and deliciously naughty; Lana was gorgeous and fiery but ultimately too self-protective and shallow: her deepest belief was in her own celebrity. This one stared at him—and stared at him and stared at him—and her green-gold eyes said that she knew all his secrets. The smile that curled one corner of those amazing lips confirmed it. And his deepest secret was this: she possessed him.

After a long time they realized they were hungry, and they ate a little something. But—there were more drinks with dinner—mostly they devoured each other with their eyes. And laughed, when the tension became unbearable. He lit both their cigarettes with a gold lighter, then paid the check. He took her hand (she kept stealing glances at his hands; they were beautiful) and led her to his car.

She resisted for a moment, then she didn’t.

Just a little while.

As drunk as she was—and her head seemed to be floating a vast distance over her feet—she swore her deepest oath to herself: she would not sleep with him. Somehow, whether he knew it or not, he was testing her, and she was testing herself. If she crossed this line, he would categorize her. If she crossed this line, she would be back in the bad place she had been with Artie, adrift and uncertain, a poor fatherless girl from nowhere, and nothing.

They went someplace—she was never sure, later, just where. Not his place was all she knew. A beautiful apartment, someplace. With paintings, and big windows with a view of the city, and music—his—and a divine fragrance she couldn’t get out of her mind for days afterward. He took her hand and led her to the bedroom, and she stopped
in the doorway. He gave her the gentlest pull, but this time she stood firm. So they sat on the couch in the living room and kissed. Kissed and kissed. She had never kissed like this before. Kissing him, she thought, was in a different universe from fucking almost anyone else.

He reached around and began to unzip her dress. And though she loved her own body, and in most cases was out of her clothes in a second, at this moment she hesitated. She touched his arm.

Francis.

No one had ever called him this before.
¹
He moved his hand back, and they kissed some more. For a long time.

He said her name, softly, after a while. Then he took her home.

Neither of them slept that night. It would be months before they saw each other again.

The house in the desert was finished on time and, thanks to the round-the-clock construction schedule, phenomenally over budget. Twin Palms wound up costing $150,000, a huge sum in 1948, and five times the original estimate. But it was finished, and it was beautiful, and now Frank and Nancy and the children had an incomparable weekend refuge. Palm Springs looked like no place else. There were a couple of paved streets; the rest was just sand and stones and palms and orange groves and blazing flowers and crystalline air—it all made you feel you’d landed on a different planet. Frank felt freer there; the lines on his forehead smoothed out. He’d bought an Army-surplus jeep for fun, and he drove the kids over the sand (of course Nancy couldn’t go in her condition), gunning the engine and beeping the horn and bouncing and whooping and laughing.

When they got back, Nancy was sitting by the pool in the sun, her belly rising like a hill in her maternity bathing suit. As the kids bounded into the water, Frank leaned down and kissed her on the top of the head; she patted his hand, pressing her lips together.

She knew almost everything, knew that this was the way it was
going to be until—or unless—they weren’t together anymore. She had fooled herself, till the pregnancy was too far along to change anything, that this time might be different. Tonight he would disappear once more: even in the desert, there were places to go. When he returned, deep in the night, she would smell the liquor and tobacco and perfume on him; when he patted her shoulder, she would turn and pretend to be asleep.

Many years later, Nancy Sandra remembered one of these weekends at Twin Palms: Her father had gone out there first, then the next day big Sam Weiss—the song plugger who had helped Frank out during the Mortimer encounter at Ciro’s—drove Big Nancy and the children to the Springs. Three hours over two-lane blacktop, the warm wind shooting through the open windows, Nancy and Sam chatting in the front seat, then falling into long silences. “
On this trip,” Nancy Sandra writes in
Frank Sinatra: My Father
,

And Weiss, Nancy writes, was “disgusted” with both children—the three-hour drive back to Toluca Lake felt like twelve. When they got home, the children’s new governess, Georgie Hardwick—until recently employed by the Bing Crosbys—came out to meet them:

The account is chilling—the gruff, ultimately unsympathetic bodyguard; the frightened children; the distraught mother. The ever less present father. Frank himself is little more than a cipher in the episode:
a voice on the radio … a picture in the newspaper
, as Nancy had recalled of her earliest childhood. Nothing had changed.

I guess you’d better go with them
.

Why couldn’t they all just have stayed? Was it pity that made him send them away, or impatience—or did he not really want them there in the first place?

What was the reason for Big Nancy’s tears?

And what is it that makes a scared child a spoiled brat?

The trail leads straight to the governess with the Dickensian name, Georgie Hardwick. She had left the Crosby household for a very specific reason. “
When the Crosby kids talk about being punished and beaten, it was Georgie who did most of it, not Bing,” Crosby’s biographer Gary Giddins said. Bing’s son Gary Crosby wrote in his autobiography: