Frank: The Voice (60 page)

“Jack, we’re in trouble,” Sinatra said.

It was his one phone call. He and Ava were in the Indio police
station, feeling much soberer than they had an hour before, when, whooping and hollering, they had both emptied their pistols, then reloaded and emptied them again, shattering streetlights and several store windows. Then there was the town’s single unfortunate passerby, drunk as the shooters, whose shirtfront and belly had been creased by an errant .38 slug.

Keller shook his head. Sinatra always knew how to up the ante. Still, there was only one thing that concerned the publicist.

“Have you been booked? Do the papers know anything?”

Frank looked at the police chief, who was smiling expectantly at his famous guest, secure in the knowledge that for whatever unknown reason, the gods of chance had dealt him one hell of a payday. Sinatra told Keller that nobody knew nothin’, but that Jack had better get down fast, with plenty of money.

And so, legend has it, Jack did just that. Gardner, in her memoir, denies the episode ever happened, but Keller taped a reminiscence of it before his untimely death—he was a four-pack-a-day smoker—at the age of fifty-nine in 1975; he also told the story to Peter Bogdanovich. In his account of that wild night in Indio, the publicist wakes up a pal, the manager of the Hollywood Knickerbocker hotel, who happens to have $30,000 in his safe. Keller borrows all of the money, charters a plane, flies to Indio, and papers the town with high-denomination currency to keep everybody quiet.

Everybody certainly kept quiet. Whatever happened that night in the desert, no one ever talked, and the dead tell no tales—unless they happen to leave a taped oral history.

“
A lot of silly stories have been written about what happened to us in Palm Springs, but the truth is both more and less exciting,” Ava Gardner wrote in her autobiography, which, while entertainingly blunt in its language, is unfortunately euphemistic when it comes to her many exploits.

Perhaps Frank and Ava really were as chaste as junior-prom sweethearts that night. Yet Keller’s story, while too good to be true, is too irresistibly crazy not to be. Sinatra certainly carried guns—once Lee Mortimer dropped his assault charges, the suspended pistol permit was reinstated—and he certainly drank heavily, as did Ava. There are copious records of wild, booze-fueled behavior on the part of Sinatra and Gardner once they became a bona fide couple. Why should the night they fell in love not have set the pattern?

Frank fell as fast as she did. In a blinding flash, all his self-discontent—a combustible amalgam of artistic failure and disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes—alchemized into the most powerful feeling he had ever known. He was deeply in love with Ava Gardner. He phoned her, dead sober, when he got back to town, and asked her out.

Not surprisingly, Frank’s fabled confidence was starting to crack. That autumn, vocal problems cropped up for the first time. In October, when Sinatra made a guest appearance on the bandleader Spike Jones’s
Spotlight Revue
, Jones, famous for cutting up, asked him seriously, “
How you feeling tonight, Frank? Is your voice all right?”

Frank tried to make a joke out of it. “Well, I think so—lemme see,” he said. He blew a pitch pipe and let out a big off-key bellow, much to the audience’s amusement. “I am majestically in voice!” he crowed—and then, ominously, as the orchestra played the intro to “Everybody Loves Somebody,”
³
coughed. He then proceeded, on live national radio, to blow the first note of the song.

In November, three days after
The Kissing Bandit
opened to universal groans, mostly about its star (“
Mr. Sinatra’s performance … is not in that vein of skipping humor which more talented comics traverse,” Bosley Crowther wrote, less unkindly than most), Frank started work on
It’s Only Money
at RKO. It seemed curious, and somehow ominous, that the studio’s new chief, Howard Hughes, whose anti-Communist witch hunts had purged more than half of RKO’s workforce, had decided to hire Sinatra. Remembering the time in Palm Springs when Ava had come to Chi Chi with Hughes, Frank wondered if the studio head simply wanted to humiliate him by sticking him in this silly piece of crap.

Since Frank could behave badly among movie collaborators he respected, it’s easy to imagine how he conducted himself on a quickie comedy (the shooting schedule was just three weeks) at the off-brand studio he thought he’d outgrown, alongside the remote and distrustful Groucho Marx and the menacingly protuberant Jane Russell (whom the delighted boob man Hughes had discovered a few years earlier—not working at his dentist’s office, as the myth has it, but through his casting department). “
Frank and my father did not get along at all,”
Groucho’s son, Arthur, recalled. “Sinatra always showed up on the set like a real star, like two hours late, and my father would be fuming because he already knew his lines, which Sinatra usually did not know. So they weren’t too compatible and the movie wasn’t too good either.”

Yet Frank got along swimmingly with Jane Russell, who, like him, was not especially happy to be working on
It’s Only Money
. “
It was nothing,” she said. “It was not a very good picture. Frank and I certainly knew it.” And he was a perfect gentleman with Russell. “Frank was always very polite and very sweet,” she remembered. “There was no funny business at all.”

For good reason. “Ava was sitting up in the sound booth most of the time while we made the picture,” Russell said. “She certainly was a character. A raving character.”

It’s Only Money—
such a stinker that RKO wouldn’t release it until 1951 under the hokily lecherous new title
Double Dynamite—
was the least of Frank’s problems. His life was coming unmoored. His recording career was dead in the water; his one performing outlet, besides the occasional radio guest spot, was the reliably lousy
Your Hit Parade
. In December, a headline in the industry journal
Modern Television & Radio
read,
IS SINATRA FINISHED? Around that time Frank told Manie Sacks, according to Nancy junior, that “
so many things were going wrong that he felt like he was washed up. Sacks replied that life is cyclical, and that he was too talented not to bounce back. ‘In a few years,’ he said, ‘you’ll be on top again.’ ”

In the meantime, though, he had fallen off the mountain.
Down Beat
’s end-of-the-year poll for Best Male Singer, which Sinatra had easily topped since 1943, found him in the number-four spot, beneath Billy Eckstine, the leather-lunged Frankie Laine (“Mule Train”), and Bob—not Bing—Crosby.

Frank was still making big money—MGM paid him $325,833 that year—but as always, he spent it faster than it came in. Taxes were for chumps. The IRS respectfully disagreed. In her year-end wrap-up for
Silver Screen
, the columnist Sheilah Graham estimated that Sinatra
had made $11 million in the last six years, yet he “
not only can’t save anything but … is behind with his income tax.”

Frank’s solution was to buy a new house.

Holmby Hills, just north of Sunset and to the east of Beverly Glen, was a pricey enclave whose denizens included Loretta Young, Walt Disney, and Humphrey Bogart. Three-twenty North Carolwood Drive was a sprawling redbrick Mediterranean on three acres. There was no lake, but the summer heat didn’t settle in the way it did in the Valley, and the drive to MGM was just fifteen minutes instead of forty-five. The house cost a fortune—a quarter of a million in 1948 dollars—but then, that’s what movie stars had to pay for a house in those days.

Why the Sinatras moved just then is something of a mystery. They had paid a huge sum for the Palm Springs place not a year before, and Frank’s career was on the downswing. What’s more, he was in love. But as always, no matter his circumstances, he liked to have the best of everything. Still, however nice the new digs, the uprooting must have been difficult. Nancy junior, eight at the time of the move, writes that her father bought 320 North Carolwood “
to be nearer his work so that he could spend more time at home.” This sounds more hopeful than realistic. A photograph from the period shows Sinatra sitting in an armchair holding baby Tina as his adoring family surrounds him: Big Nancy at one shoulder; Little Nancy at the other, gazing at her sister; little Frank is resting his elbow on Dad’s knee. Frank himself is directing a ghastly fake smile at his young son (maybe the needy Frankie was already starting to get on his nerves). He looks as if he can’t wait to get the hell out of there.

Tina, always more clear-eyed than her sister about her father’s character, has a different take on the move to Holmby Hills: it was, she writes, a move “
up in the world.” This rings truer. If Frank couldn’t act with Bogart, at least he could live across the street from him.

Yet he was restless and discontent. He was recording again, but not well. The yearlong layoff during the AFM strike, in combination with the weekly travesty of
Your Hit Parade
, had eroded not just his artistic
confidence but his relationship with Axel Stordahl. The two men weren’t making magic anymore; they were just making music, much of it not very good. The week before Christmas, in his first post-strike recording with Sibelius, the all too appropriately titled “Comme Ci Comme Ça,” Sinatra’s voice seems utterly without conviction:

And this was what he was leaving. The Sinatras at home, 1948.
(photo credit 22.2)

At this moment, unfortunately, the lyrics—filled with petulant world-weariness, the ennui that sets in when a grand passion is absent—fit him like a glove.

“
It wasn’t a very happy Christmas in 1948,” Big Nancy recalled, “but it was the cutest card I’d ever seen.” Cute, yes: the card was a cheery cartoon of a Christmas tree, with photos of the family members printed inside globe ornaments. Little Nancy and Frankie each occupied one of the upper globes; underneath, Big Nancy and baby Tina cuddled cozily inside one ornament, and Frank—all alone—grinned from another.