Frank: The Voice (61 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
Jimmy Van Heusen with Ava and Frank, early 1950s.
(photo credit 23.1)
Look at him! Who you got waitin’ for ya in New York? Ava Gardner?
—Jules Munshin, as Ozzie, to Gene Kelly’s character, Gabey, in
On the Town
I
t hadn’t been a very happy Christmas thanks to Frank’s extreme emotional distance—an air of distraction that drifted in more and more often, like a fog bank, at which point he would simply walk out of the house to God knew where. Nancy finally admitted to herself that whatever he promised, whatever he bought her, he was never going
to change. Out in the world, Sheilah and Hedda and Louella were stepping up the drumbeat about his affairs. Years later, Nancy junior wrote:
One day while I was playing dress-up in Mom’s dressing room, I climbed up on a chair to get a shoe box off a shelf and knocked to the floor a stack of magazines that Mom had hidden in her closet. I sat down in the midst of the pile. They were movie magazines like
Photoplay
and
Modern Screen
, and they were filled with pictures of Dad and … Mom and Frankie and Baby Tina and me. There were also pictures of Dad with other ladies. I remember Marilyn Maxwell and Lana Turner. I was devastated.
For a long time Frank’s wife had shielded herself from the extent of his infidelities, but more and more she realized, with a sorrowful but hardened resignation, that just about everything she’d heard or imagined was true. He came and went as he pleased and did exactly what he wanted, with whomever he wanted. Nancy tried to busy herself with fixing up 320 North Carolwood, but there were times when she couldn’t take it anymore. At those times she would phone George Evans and complain; Evans would listen sympathetically and tell her he’d talk to Frank. And he did talk to Frank, for all the good it did.
At a January engagement party for Mel Tormé and the Columbia starlet Candy Toxton, Frank and Jimmy Van Heusen showed up uninvited (and in Frank’s case, loaded). Sinatra was carrying a magnum of champagne wrapped in ribbon. “Here ya go, Mel. Happy Birthday,” he said, handing the bottle to the younger singer—whose birthday had been in September—and calling loudly for the bride-to-be, on whom he apparently had a crush. “
The moment Candy saw him walk in,” Tormé recalled, “she rushed up the stairs to my bedroom and locked herself in.” Tormé ran up the stairs,
on the heels of Sinatra, who announced that he wanted to “wash up.” He went into my bathroom, tried the door to my bedroom, found it locked, and began to bang on the door. Invited or not, he was a guest in my home, so I tried to reason with him …
He tossed an expletive at me and continued to pound on the door. I heard Candy, inside my bedroom, say, in a small, rather sad voice, “Go away, Frank, please.” Van Heusen, a true gent, shamefacedly came up the stairs and pried Frank away from the bedroom door.
“Come on, Frank. Let’s go,” he pleaded.
“No,” Sinatra said sullenly. “Wanna see Candy.”
I gritted my teeth. I could now hear Candy crying in the bedroom. “Frank, I think you’d better get out of here,” I said.
Van Heusen tugged at his arm. “Yeah, he’s right, pal. Let’s go.” Frank hesitated at the top of the stairs and gave me one hard look. Buddy Rich told me that Sinatra was able to handle himself pretty well, and I sure as hell did not want to tangle with him.
Frank stormed out of the house.
When he was drunk, which was more and more often these days, he was a law unto himself. Evans saw it happening and despaired, then he too grew resigned. Around this time, Earl Wilson ran into the publicist at the Copacabana:
I found [him] in a grave mood. “I make a prediction,” Evans said across the table in the lounge. “Frank is through. A year from now you won’t hear anything about him.”
“Come on,” I protested to the man who’d done more than anybody to make him famous.
“He’ll be dead professionally,” Evans said. “I’ve been around the country, looking and listening. They’re not going to see his
pictures. They’re not buying his records. They don’t care for Frank Sinatra anymore!”
“But you’re the fellow that’s supposed to whet up that yearning for him, aren’t you?” I asked.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Evans said. “You know how much I’ve talked to him about the girls. The public knows about the trouble with Nancy, and the other dames, and it doesn’t like him anymore.”
“I can’t believe that,” I said.
“In a year,” Evans reiterated, “he’ll be through.”
In January, MGM celebrated its Silver Jubilee by gathering fifty-seven of its biggest stars, including Lassie, for a historic group photograph. There they sat (except for Lassie, who stood in front), in chairs arranged on bleachers on a soundstage, row on row of them, Tracy and Hepburn and Gable and Astaire and Garland and Durante and Errol Flynn, living proof that the great studio had, if not quite more stars than in the heavens, then at least more than anyone else. Wearing an unflattering light gray suit and looking oddly pallid (and distinctly balding), Sinatra sat at the far right in the second-to-last row, in between Ginger Rogers and Red Skelton (who had broken everyone up when he walked in, calling out, “
Okay, kids, the part’s taken, you can go home now”). Ava sat front and center in the second row, between Clark Gable and Judy Garland, strangely sedate in her blue suit and pearls and bright red lipstick. Her hands, clutching a pair of red gloves, lay demurely folded in her lap.
Appearances—as was always the case where the movies were concerned—were deceiving. As was the distance that separated Ava and Frank in the bleachers.
When she drove onto the studio lot that day, Gardner recalled, “
a car sped past me, swung in front, and slowed down so much I had to pass it myself. The car overtook me again and repeated the process.
Having done this about three times, the car finally pulled alongside me, the grinning driver raised his hat and sped away to the same photo session. That was Frank. He could even flirt in a car.”
The first weeks of February saw an escalating series of transcontinental shouting matches between Sinatra and George Evans, who was increasingly exasperated with his most famous client. Evans, who had eyes and ears everywhere, knew about Ava. And by early 1949, the publicist was at his wits’ end. When Frank wasn’t yelling at him over the phone, Nancy was. She wanted George to do the impossible: Make him change. Bring him back.
Evans had worked wonders before, but in Ava Gardner he saw real trouble. He was sure she didn’t care whose life she destroyed, whose home she wrecked. Evans had gotten a whiff of her heedlessness. “Do you suck?” she liked to ask strangers, when shaking hands for the first time. Lana Turner had been a different story: At least she cared about her career. There was leverage. Gardner cared about nothing except having a good time. She was that most dangerous of creatures, a gorgeous nihilist.
Frank, for his part, had made up his mind about her years before when he saw her on the cover of a movie magazine. “
I’m going to marry that girl,” he remarked to a friend—forgetting, for the moment, that he already was married. Now when Evans told him, over and over, that he couldn’t have her, that she was bad news, that she would drag him and his career down, Sinatra reacted much as he had when Manie Sacks had informed him that he had to pay for his own arrangements—with complete outrage and absolute assurance.
Despite Jack Keller’s heroic efforts on Sinatra’s behalf, Frank demanded that Evans fire his West Coast counterpart. The main problem was that while Keller was an energetic publicist, he lacked subservience. Jerry Lewis, who employed Keller for many years, laughed when he recalled the press agent’s insolence: “
I’d say, ‘How come you
didn’t get my name in the paper this week?’ And Jack would say, ‘I kept it out, you putz.’ ” Keller’s first reaction when Sinatra phoned from Indio at 3:00 a.m. to say “We’re in trouble” had been: “
How can I be in trouble when all night I’ve just been lying here in bed?”
Yet Evans steadfastly resisted firing Keller, who was really just the whipping boy: Frank’s real beef was with George Evans. At the end of February, Sinatra finally called it quits with the man who, in many ways, had made him Sinatra.
