Frank: The Voice (63 page)

The tone of this exchange is markedly different from the Sinatra-Sacks letters of 1945. In those days, the two men had closed their missives with “Love”—even “Love and kisses.” Now it was “Best regards” from Frank, and from Manie—who apparently didn’t want to be outdone in the coolness department—“Kindest regards,” immediately followed, with sublime passive aggressiveness, by “Sincerely.”

Sacks also sent his reply to Sinatra’s office and not to his home address, as he had done previously. Maybe this was just a bureaucratic detail; more likely, it meant Manie’s friendship with Frank was slipping.

All that summer and fall, Frank visited the little stucco house high over Nichols Canyon. Ava had worked hard to make the place her own, hanging the walls with Degas prints, lining the den with massive antique bookcases containing all the volumes Artie Shaw had bullied her into reading:
The Magic Mountain
and
Buddenbrooks
and
The Interpretation of Dreams
and
Babbitt
. She really had read them, mostly—and also, under Artie’s dictatorship, learned to play chess well enough to beat him. All this despite what she once told an interviewer: “
Deep down, I’m pretty superficial.” In truth, she was anything but. Still, her lack of intellectual confidence never left her. On the other hand, when it came to her beauty, she had no doubts.

The house was surrounded by a picket fence covered with yellow roses, a trellis with petunias and honeysuckle, drying laundry snapping in the breeze. Inside was heaven.

But beware, her friend Lana told her:

That cataclysm, along with a number of others, was close at hand.

The roster of Sinatra’s activities that autumn was strikingly sparse. His daughter Nancy, usually the most assiduous (and relentlessly upbeat) of chroniclers, can come up with only two events between the summer and December. “
October 30, 1949: Dad returned once again to
The Jack Benny Show
,” she notes. And, “November 6, 1949: He performed on
Guest Star
, a radio show for the U.S. Treasury Department.” (Trying to butter up the IRS? Or the FBI?) Frank wasn’t shooting a movie, and he was barely recording: between September and the end of the year, he cut just eight songs, in three sessions. (In all of 1949, despite the end of the musicians’ strike, he laid down only twenty-seven sides,
compared with seventy in the pre-strike year of 1947.) He did
Light Up Time
every weekday afternoon, but the quarter-hour show was rushed and frequently superficial. Stordahl’s absence didn’t help, nor, due to NBC budgetary constraints, did the absence of a string section.

As Frank had noted in his pained September letter to Manie, others—even at Columbia—were recording the same songs he was. And selling better. There was a new Italian boy on the scene, with a husky tenor voice so dramatic that some listeners thought he was black. To add insult to injury, he also called himself Frankie—Frankie Laine. (He had been born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio.) He could sing torch songs, spirituals, and up-tempo rip-roarers, and he could crank out gold records (“That’s My Desire”; “Mule Train”). Laine’s career was being shepherded by a brilliant, fiercely ambitious A&R man at Mercury named Mitch Miller—the same Mitch Miller who had turned Sinatra on to the classical compositions of Alec Wilder.

But the king that year was Perry Como. “Anodyne,” with its dual meanings of pain relief and insipidness, applied perfectly to the smooth-voiced, smooth-faced former barber from Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Times change; the culture shifts. Yearning was out of fashion, and Sinatra was now just part of a big pack of popular singers.
Billboard
ranked him number 13 at the end of the year; the
Down Beat
poll put him at number 5. He was officially yesterday’s news. Lee Mortimer all but jumped up and down with glee. “
The Swoon is real gone (and not in jive talk),” he wrote, in his
Daily Mirror
column, noting that all the hysteria over Sinatra had merely been “an unhealthy wartime phenomenon.”

Emotionally, Frank was as busy as it is possible for a human being to be: he was in love. And not sweetly and contentedly in love, but in the throes of a grand passion, one whose DNA was stamped with wildness, violence, contradiction, pain. In Ava Gardner he had literally met his match. In a woman of spectacularly sensuous beauty he had found a soul whose turbulence equaled his own. Like Frank, Ava knew herself to be a kind of royalty, but still harbored profound feelings of
worthlessness. In each, this duality fueled volcanic furies. “
Both Frank and I,” Ava wrote in her memoir, “were high-strung people, possessive and jealous and liable to explode fast. When I lose my temper, honey, you can’t find it anyplace. I’ve just got to let off steam, and he’s the same way.”

Frank had found a true partner in the opera that was his life. All his other women had been supporting players; Ava was a diva. Like Frank, she was infinitely restless and easily bored. In both, this tendency could lead to casual cruelty to others—and sometimes to each other. Both had titanic appetites, for food, drink, cigarettes, diversion, companionship, and sex. Both loved jazz, and the men and women, black and white, who made it. Both were politically liberal. Both were fascinated with prostitution and perversity. Both knew the bottomless loneliness that stalks the deep watches of the night: both distrusted sleep—feared it, perhaps, as death’s mirror. Both hated being alone.

And behind every move each of them made lay a fine and regal contempt for the banal established order of the world.

It was around then, Ava wrote, that Frank told her, “
All my life, being a singer was the most important thing in the world. Now you’re all I want.”

For a man whose ambition had always preceded all else, this was an astonishing statement, even if he felt differently a few hours later. To the extent that he meant it (and to a great extent he did), it was as if his towering ambition had suddenly gone up in smoke. But their love was like a fire that flamed up and consumed them both. And since both were performers, exhibitionism was part of the kick—even at the very outset, there were amazed onlookers. Among them were Sinatra’s manager Bobby Burns and his wife, Betty, who tried to help the adulterous couple early in the affair. Betty Burns remembered:

It’s like something out of
Wild Kingdom
.

“
She was like a Svengali to him,” Skitch Henderson said. “She was an enigma. A mysterious presence. You didn’t quite know how she had done it to him, and I’m not sure I wanted to know. She was ruthless with him. And it used to affect his mood a great deal. It could be horrible to be with him then. Her acid tongue and her ability to just put you away. If ever I knew a tiger, or a panther … I’m trying to think of an animal that would describe her … To be honest—I didn’t let anyone on to this—but I did what I could to stay out of her way. I was scared to death of her.”

She was a pisser. She scared the shit outta me. Never knew what she’d hate that I’d do
. Frank must have found the similarity to the first woman in his life unspeakably exciting. Some part of him was still that little boy, not knowing if he’d get a hug or a rap with the nightstick.

For all Ava’s autobiographical professions of eternal love, she had trouble with intimacy. When she got it—and she’d got plenty since she’d first arrived in Hollywood—she didn’t feel she was worthy of it. And so when a man fell in love with her, she reciprocated for a little while, then she began to torment him.

Jealousy was their emotional ammunition. They both understood it. Frank could trigger it in her literally with the blink of an eye, so conditioned was he to scanning any crowded restaurant or nightclub or party and possessing any beauty he saw.

His suspicions about Ava were better founded. She had it all worked out: if he wouldn’t leave his wife, she told him, she was free to do whatever she wanted. She toyed with her old flame Howard Duff,
who was desperate for her. She teased Howard Hughes, who continued to have her followed. She stepped out with a minor gangster named Johnny Stompanato (who would meet his sad end, years later, at the hands of Lana Turner’s daughter). She had a little fling with her co-star in
My Forbidden Past
, Robert Mitchum. He went back to his wife, whose secret was: she always took him back.

The infidelities—if you could call them that—diverted her momentarily and had their desired effect on Sinatra, stoking his passions. And she had to hand it to him: his fury made the anger of her other lovers pale in comparison. As did his wandering eye. They screamed at each other, they chased each other from room to room, breaking things, and then, their bodies still abuzz with anger, they had the most amazing makeup sex that (they were quite sure) anyone had ever had.

Set against all this, what were the demands of marital duty and family life? Background noise. This was a passion that not only scorched everything in its path but demanded absolute and constant attention. When Frank went to New York City in early December for the premiere of
On the Town
, Ava went too. Strikingly, Manie Sacks, cool and correct toward Sinatra just three months before, let the lovebirds stay in his suite at the Hampshire House: maybe he was feeling guilty. Big changes were afoot in his professional life, changes that would affect Frank profoundly.

On December 8, Frank and Ava attended the Broadway premiere of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes:
book by Joseph Fields and Anita Loos, songs (including the suddenly all too appropriate “Bye Bye Baby”) by Leo Robin and Jule Styne. The pair, with the protective coloration of another couple (Manie and a date), tried their best to blend in with the first-night crowd at the Ziegfeld Theatre. Inside, Sinatra and Gardner laughed and held hands as they listened to the newcomer Carol Channing cooing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Afterward, along with Manie and his lady friend, they ducked into a car and disappeared. The photographers and gossip columnists waiting outside the Ziegfeld (New York had a half-dozen daily papers, only one of which, the
Times
,
refused to stoop to scandalmongering) shook their heads and stared at each other. Was this what it looked like? Remarkably, the papers held off. For the time being. The next morning, in the “Celebs About Town” section of his column, Walter Winchell, after taking note of “
Quentin Reynolds and Heywood Broun’s widder having a lobby confab at the Algonquin,” mentioned “Ava Gardner Period.”