Frank: The Voice (64 page)

It was as if the columnist were biting his tongue, waiting to see what developed.

Nancy Sinatra, wired in as she was to the Hollywood gossip network, already knew. In fact, she had known about Ava for months: almost since the beginning. What was most hurtful to her was the fact that soon everyone else would know, too. That was the hardest thing about being married to Frank Sinatra—whatever he did, everybody seemed to find out about it pretty quickly.

This time Nancy made her decision: the comedy of endless breaches, hollow promises, and public reconciliations was over. She loved Frank, but finally, whether she admitted it to herself or not, she hated him, too. He was ultimately impossible. Her faith told her that Frank Sinatra was her cross to bear, forever, whether they were together or apart. Her faith also didn’t allow divorce. But from here on they would no longer live as husband and wife. It was as simple as that: she had her pride, and her children, to consider.

Dolly Sinatra, who met Ava at the
On the Town
movie premiere, was delighted. She had never liked Nancy much to begin with, and over the last half-dozen years Frank’s wife, with her new teeth and her new gowns and her abiding sense of holier-than-thou, had earned her outright enmity. This Ava Gardner, though, was something else. Three nights later at the Copa, at the thirty-fourth-birthday party the nightclub manager Jack Entratter threw for Frank, the two women got to talk for a few minutes. And Dolly loved every bit of it. Ava drank and swore like a sailor, and Dolly Sinatra could keep right up with her. At the same time—this was the amazing thing—the girl was just stupefyingly beautiful. In Dolly’s travels around Hudson County, she had run
across plenty of dirty girls with dirty mouths, yet with the pretty ones, and especially the beauties, butter mostly wouldn’t melt. But this one! Dolly, like everyone else in the Copa, couldn’t take her eyes off her. And Ava wore her gorgeousness so lightly, smoked her cigarettes so offhandedly, swore so fluently, and laughed so raucously that Dolly fell as hard as her son had. She pinched his skinny cheek and congratulated him on the great fuckin’ girl he’d landed.

Frank smiled at Dolly, too happy to be angry with her (Dolly’s demands for money had stepped up as his bank account dwindled). His every waking hour—there weren’t many sleeping ones—was occupied with thinking of her, seeing her, making love with her, fighting with her, making up with her.

In truth, he was running ragged. In between obsessive bouts with Ava, there were very bad fights with Nancy. Work—what little there was of it—was going badly too. Back in California, on
Light Up Time
, two days after Christmas, he sailed into an up-tempo, jazz-combo arrangement of Brown, DeSylva, and Henderson’s “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” (“
You’re the salt in my stew”) like a ship without a rudder, fast and out of tune and not seeming to care much. Then, in the second chorus, he simply blew the lyric. “You’re the starch in my collar,” he repeated, like a man sleepwalking. “
I said that, didn’t I,” he remarked with a laugh, then tossed off the rest of the song, more of a walk-through than a performance.

Frank arrives at the CBS Playhouse to rehearse for a radio show, mid 1940s. George Evans, in hat, flanks him; Manie Sacks is to the right, in dark coat.
(photo credit 24.1)

F
inally there was good news.
On the Town
got splendid reviews and, more important for MGM, did big business. Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s adaptation of their Broadway musical (originally a ballet by Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein called
Fancy Free
) made for a wonderful picture, a perfect piece of postwar exuberance. The story of three sailors on leave in the big city sparkled, especially in its spectacular opening sequence, shot in Technicolor-glorious locales
around New York. The performances by Kelly, Sinatra, Jules Munshin, Ann Miller, Betty Garrett, and Vera-Ellen were buoyant. But in the end the picture was Gene Kelly’s: Frank was really just along for the ride. Kelly got top billing. He not only co-directed and choreographed; he (along with Donen) had insisted, brilliantly, that they shoot on location in New York instead of on an MGM soundstage.
¹
It had cost a lot more, but the results were worth it.
On the Town
set box-office records at Radio City. “
Never before has any motion picture grossed as much in one day in any theater anywhere,” exclaimed
Motion Picture Daily
.

Frank Sinatra wasn’t celebrating. He didn’t like being outshone by Kelly, and he hadn’t gotten to sing any important ballads in the film (he’d especially coveted the beautiful “Lonely Town,” but it had been jettisoned by the studio, along with most of the rest of Leonard Bernstein’s great score, and replaced with chirpier songs by the less than great Roger Edens). But mostly he was tired of putting on a sailor suit. He said so loudly, and Louis B. Mayer had big ears. There was another big problem: Ava Gardner. Mayer’s stars misbehaved all the time, and, LB knew, often with each other, but most of them had the good sense to keep it hidden from the public. These two simply didn’t give a damn. It got under Mayer’s skin. It was a direct challenge to his power, and with the rise of television and the fall of MGM’s profits, power was something that Louis B. Mayer was fretting about constantly.

And so—much given to saber rattling these days—Mayer had warned months earlier that Sinatra’s contract was in jeopardy, as was Ava’s, if the two didn’t stop their carryings-on.

Frank at least had the good sense to take stock of his career at the beginning of 1950, and everything he saw worried him. In the middle of January he flew to New York and, after taking in Lena Horne’s show at the Copacabana, sat down for a 4:00 a.m. cup of coffee with George Evans.

Evans represented both the Copa and Horne, who was making $60,000 a week there. Lena Horne’s career was booming; Sinatra’s, not. He told Evans all about Ava; he laid his cards on the table. There had been many women, but he had never felt this way before. He was going
to marry this girl. Evans stared at him through the tortoise-rimmed glasses, speechless for a change. He let Sinatra talk it out. Finally Frank put down his coffee cup, looked Evans in the eye, and said he needed his help.

It was a very tall order, one that both Sinatra and Evans knew only Evans could handle. The publicist extended his hand, and Frank took it.

Nancy had first confronted Frank at Christmas. He denied nothing, but told his wife angrily that she was blowing the whole Ava business out of proportion. When she pursued the matter, he insisted he didn’t want to talk about it—and Nancy, for the sake of Christmas, let it go. She stewed through the holiday, though, and when Frank got back from New York in January (she suspected he had gone for another assignation), she let him have it.

Technically on solid ground—Ava had been in Los Angeles while he visited Evans—Frank defended himself angrily, but Nancy’s anger was white-hot: she opened his closet, grabbed a handful of his sports jackets, opened their bedroom window, and threw them out. By this time the noise had awakened the children and Little Nancy was pounding on the door. Frank’s wife stared at him in fury. Did he see what he was doing to the children? Did he
see
?

Frank opened the bedroom door, kissed his terrified daughter on the head, and, without looking back, walked out. The next morning, Sanicola and Al Silvani came and—apologizing fervently to Nancy—removed a carload of Frank’s clothing, shoes, and toiletries and took it to his office on South Robertson, where he had spent the night.

To put some money in the bank (so he could send it right out to the IRS), Sinatra was doing live appearances again, for the first time in two years. In December he had surprised himself and his agents by breaking records at the State Theater in Hartford, grossing $18,000 for two nights; now MCA had signed him for a similarly plush gig at a gigantic,
brand-new hotel in Houston, the Shamrock. The place had been built by a legendary wildcatter named Glenn McCarthy, the model for the James Dean character in
Giant:
those were the days when Texas oilmen strode the earth, making big things happen. On Thursday the twenty-sixth, Frank and Van Heusen set out from Van Nuys Airport in Chester’s plane. When they landed to refuel in El Paso, an airport manager in a leather jacket ran out onto the tarmac and handed Frank a piece of paper bearing an urgent message: he must call George Evans’s office in New York at once.

A secretary answered the phone, her voice trembling. Evans was dead. He had stepped out of the shower that morning in his Bronx apartment, said he didn’t feel well, and collapsed of a heart attack. He was forty-eight. The rumor emerged that he had gotten into a loud argument with a reporter the night before, about Sinatra. It was easy to get into arguments about Sinatra, especially when you had to stick up for him relentlessly. Evans had had a long career of it—seven years, not counting their brief separation. But sticking up for Sinatra and Ava Gardner was another matter.

Devastated, Frank let the Shamrock know he was canceling and had Van Heusen fly him to New York for the funeral, even though he loathed funerals. Evans had meant more to Frank than any other man except Manie; he had been a friend and tireless champion, the architect of his career. “
I’m quite sure that when Frank learned of his death, the first thought that swept through [his] mind was: ‘Thank God, we made up,’ ” Ed Sullivan wrote in his Little Old New York column, a few days later.

It’s pretty to think so. What feels more plausible is that Frank’s first thought was:
My God, I killed him
. Sinatra may have been incapable of apology, but guilt was a key part of his makeup. Money was usually the solution. The day after the funeral, Frank sent Evans’s widow the $14,000 that he owed the press agent. In the weeks to come, he would put Evans’s son Philip, who had recently made George a proud grandfather, on the Sinatra payroll for life.