Living With Miss G (6 page)

“Seconds,” said Miss G. “If you’re flying over L.A. at four hundred miles
an hour, and you can only turn right, and you’ve got to find a place to land….”
She paused for breath, and I ended the sentence for her, “You’d better
reach for your prayer book.”
Miss G nodded but then continued, “Then out of the corner of his eye,
Howard spotted the Los Angeles Country Club golf course.”
“Wide fairways, soft bunkers to land in?”
“Rene,” said Miss G severely, “he’s not a golf ball. He managed to get his
landing gear down but it was too late. There was a suburb down below him –
rows of houses. He bounced off the roof of one house, hit a telephone pole that
sliced off a wing, and then crash! He cascaded into Number 808 Whittier Drive.
The plane exploded and caught fire, and he didn’t have time to feel grateful that
nobody was at home.”
Miss G paused for breath. I said incredulously, “He survived all that?”
“The Marines rushed to his rescue,” said Miss G.
“Miss G,” I protested, “This can’t be funny.”
Miss G said soothingly, “Rene, we can laugh about it now because Howard
is sitting up in bed making jokes, but it’s absolutely true. Not a company of
Marines, but just one of them, Sergeant William Lloyd, was walking along
Wittier Drive when the plane screamed over his head, smashed into the house,
and caught fire. In went the Marine Sergeant and by the grace of God managed
to haul him out. Of course, by this time everybody in Whittier Drive was ringing
for police, fire brigade and ambulances which arrived shortly. Trust Howard to
choose a rather posh neighborhood.”
“How much was left of him?” I asked.
Miss G said, “All his ribs were broken. One had pierced a lung which was
full of blood. He had broken bones all over his body, serious head injuries, and
serious burns. The doctors said that it was only his fantastic will to live that
saved him. That and all the morphine they pumped into him and are still
pumping into him, because he can’t move a muscle without pain.”
Later, we learned that it was Glen Odekirk who did something immensely
ingenious to alleviate that pain. He raced to Hughes Aircraft, gathered some of
the top technicians together, and within twenty four hours they had put together
a special bed consisting of dozens and dozens of soft interlocking pads. When
the body moved, the bed moved with it.
Later we also learned that although the doctors had given instructions that
morphine injections were to be eased off, Howard Hughes with his immense
authority had grown to appreciate the peace it brought and with a little judicious
pressure in the right quarters managed to keep the injections going.
It was weeks later when Miss G reported, “Oh, yes, Howard told me the
story. The doctors noticed his dilated eyeballs and said, ‘That’s it. Morphine
stops now!’ He’s totally off it and back to normal.”
Both Miss G and I believed that version forever afterwards until Hepburn
wrote her autobiography. She had proof. Her doctor was also Hughes’ doctor,
and he knew that Howard had not discontinued the drug and was indeed a
morphine addict. Almost fifty years after this event, I was shocked at this
revelation, because Hughes figured very largely in our lives for many years after
that. Miss G and I remained blissfully ignorant of what was happening. Only
now, looking back and thinking of those newspaper pictures of Howard Hughes
just before his death—hidden away for decades, a haggard skeleton of a man
with shaggy white hair, staring eyes, hollow cheeks, finger nails like talons—
this knowledge makes sense of the strange events that occurred in the years
ahead between Miss G, Howard Hughes, and me.

The locality of our Red Skelton apartment block was the happy working
ground of a bunch of young writers, actors, songwriters and assorted hopefuls,
all trying to make the grade. That was why we were present at the birth of a song
that likely will live forever. Mel Torme and Bob Wells, two young songwriters
on their way up, arrived at our apartment. They strummed their guitars and sang
and said, “Well? What do you think?”

Miss G laughed and repeated, “‘Chestnuts roasting on open fire. Jack Frost
nipping at your nose….’ Great lines!”
I said, “I like it.”
Miss G thought we were the greatest at picking the best songs, and most
girls loved those dreamy dance tunes. I don’t think the boys really needed our
judgment, but Miss G was an actress, and she knew people like Artie Shaw, so
maybe she had leverage. And we were buddies with Mel and Bob.
“Sing it again,” said Miss G. “Give us an encore.” They did. By the time
we got to the closing bars, we’d picked up the melody, and the harmonizing was
superb.
“Great!” we said. “Can’t miss!” We really believed what we said.
“Got to get it off the ground though,” Mel said. “Got to get it plugged on
the radio by a great singer. Any ideas?”
“Bing Crosby.” I suggested.
Mel dismissed him: “Too big, too busy, too pricey.”
Miss G pointed across at the Sunset Towers. “Frank Sinatra lives there,”
she said. “Axel Stordahl and Sammy Cahn and all the songwriters live there.
Frank and his buddies are always shouting across invitations to join them for a
beer.”
Mel pursed his lips. He was still not impressed. But Miss G knew her man.
“Come on now,” she said. “You’ve got ideas of your own?”
Mel ran his fingers across his guitar strings. “We were thinking of trying
this guy who’s up and coming on the radio these days. Name’s Nat King Cole.”
“He’s black,” I said.
Mel responded, “Sure he’s black, and he has a great voice and he’s going
to be top of the heap.”
Well, everyone knows what followed that discussion. “The Christmas
Song,” written by Mel Torme and Robert Wells and first recorded by Nat King
Cole, is still heard and sung around the world. Mel got some money from it and
rose to great fame as a singer as well as a songwriter. And though he was never
directly involved with the song, Miss G got Frank Sinatra.
At this moment in history, Miss G—after two marriages and love affairs
with Howard Duff, Fred MacMurray and Robert Taylor, and with Howard
Hughes hovering in the background believing he had proprietary rights even
though he did not have bedroom privileges—was lonely. She wanted a man she
could marry. She had hopes about Robert Taylor, but it soon became clear that
he was the usual devious married man playing around in secret, inevitably
sheltered from responsibility behind a seemingly virtuous marriage.
Miss G had met Frank Sinatra before his shouted invitations across from
Sunset Towers had begun. During her year of marriage to Mickey Rooney, they
were in a nightclub when Frank arrived and moved across to their table for
Mickey to introduce his new bride. Frank grinned down at her and made his
smart remark. “If Mickey hadn’t met you first, I would have married you
myself.”
Now living next door to each other, it was certain they would meet. Only
natural that Miss G would say to me, “We bumped into each other at the
entrance to Sunset Towers. Frank wants to take me to dinner.”
“Great, when?” I asked.
“Tonight. I know he’s still married to Nancy, but that’s broken up a long
time ago,” she said.
“He’s still dating Lana.” I said.
“Who isn’t?” she replied.
She came home very late. As usual, she woke for her coffee, fresh as a
springtime daffodil. Her eyes were mischievous as she smiled across the top of
the coffee cup. “Rene, nothing happened, and I bet you're disappointed,” she
said, and laughed at my expression.
“No, I am not disappointed,” I said self-righteously. “Was the dinner any
good?”
“We had a lot to drink,” said Miss G.
“Figures,” I said.
I learned that after dinner, they had gone to a shooting gallery and spent
their time shooting pellets at dummy animals. Then he took her back to some
apartment, not the one in the Sunset Towers. She never did remember where it
was, but I guess Frank was expert in that sort of thing.
“Something was wrong with the whole situation,” said Miss G. “We’d had
a lot to drink and we kissed and clutched. Then I thought, this is not good and
I’m leaving. If I’d taken any clothes off, I put them on again and left.”
“Didn’t Frank yell?” I asked.
“He didn’t have time to,” said Miss G. “I was out of the door, down the
elevator and into my car and on my way home before he knew what hit him.
Thank God, we had taken my car.”
That certainly wasn’t the end of the story. They’d lit the fuse, and although
it was smoldering for a long time there was no doubt in my mind that the rocket
would fire.
The stormy years that followed, from 1949 to 1953, reinforced the old
saying about the course of true love never running smoothly. Those words were
never more clearly illustrated than in the love affair, marriage and divorce
between Francis Albert Sinatra and Ava Lavinia Gardner.
Both Miss G and Sinatra loved Palm Springs. Frank, in his affluent years
had bought a house out there. It wasn’t all that fancy, but Frank loved it and was
often in residence. Miss G also adored the clean, desert atmosphere and the high
circling mountains. Occasionally she rented a house there too.
Once when she was there with Bappie, Miss G met Sinatra, and he took her
home. One story constructed by an enterprising lady biographer was totally
untrue. The story alleged the two were driving around shooting out street lights.
It also alleged they slightly wounded a passerby with a stray bullet and that both
Miss G and Sinatra were arrested and held in the sheriff’s office. Sinatra
contacted his manager in Hollywood, who rushed up with thousands of dollars
to cover up the story. The entire story was total invention!
Sinatra and Miss G grew accustomed to that sort of manufactured rubbish.
They were prime targets. Somewhere in the human psyche, envy is endemic. No
one grieved for them. Rubbishing and sneering at all the misfortunes of the
famous is a favorite media pastime.
Frank Sinatra’s history stems from the time in the middle thirties when he
came to the public’s attention on the Major Bowes weekly radio amateur talent
show. He sang with three other guys, and they were known as The Hoboken
Four. Then Sinatra moved on in the forties to be featured vocalist with two of
the great American band leaders – Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. By the end
of the Second World War, his songs were selling a million copies a year and he
was the darling of Columbia Records.
In 1946, MGM was turning out one big feature film a week. Sinatra signed
a five-year contract allowing him numerous spin-off rights that guaranteed him
more than a quarter million dollars a year. He was one of the hottest properties
in the movie and radio business at the time.
As a married man, his success had not been so spectacular. In 1939, he had
married Nancy Barbato, a local Hoboken girl, and together they produced a son
and two daughters. By October 1946, he had walked out on Nancy, and a
divorce seemed inevitable.
For the next three years, a sort of uneasy peace existed between him and
his family. In Hollywood, Nancy turned a blind eye to movie magazine gossip
that Frank was spending time in bed with Lana Turner and Marilyn Maxwell.
Even when Miss G entered the scene, long after the marriage was nothing more
than a hollow sham, Nancy still clung to the illusion that with public opinion,
marshaled by a self-righteous press on her side and the backing of the Catholic
Church, her husband would always come home. Nancy had good reason for
holding on to that opinion.
Even in those early months of meetings between Miss G and Sinatra, Miss
G was aware that his relationship with Lana Turner had been long, erotic and
close to ending with wedding bells. In those first days, Miss G knew this and
was cautious.
“I like Lana,” Miss G said. “She’s a good friend of mine. If Frank’s going
to leave his wife and marry Lana – great!”
Great meant she would accept the situation and probably have her heart
broken in the same way Artie Shaw had done. Miss G kept her scars very
private. Then she met Lana in the ladies room at a party and Lana told her the
story of what had happened, thereby releasing Miss G from all sense of
responsibility to her friend.
As Miss G put it, “Lana just couldn’t believe it. Here she had been head
over heels in love with Frank and thought that he was going to marry her. She
thought that at last she had found someone really worthwhile. She thought that
Frank felt the same way. One morning, she woke up and there was the headline
on the front page of the Los Angeles Times proclaiming that he had gone home
to Nancy!”
Nancy Sinatra had won that one. Now, she no doubt thought that Frank
would soon tire of his infatuation for that wicked woman, Ava Gardner. She was
a wicked, scarlet woman. Everyone could see that from her films.
Nancy was wrong. Sinatra was obsessed, enchanted and mesmerized by
Miss G. Not only that, he was terrified by the thought that she might leave him.
That was proven over and over again during the next two months as the drama
intensified.
After Miss G finished
One Touch of Venus
, her financial situation began to
improve considerably. She had a new agent, Charles Feldman, who pressed
MGM with gentle firmness that they had a star on their hands with only two
more years of her contract left. If Louis B. Mayer didn’t want to lose this
considerable asset, he’d better raise the ante pretty quickly.
Miss G moved from $750 to $1,000 a week. Now I was making $100 a
week. I had a place to live and general outings with Miss G. When Miss G had
money, she scarcely bothered to bank it.
“It’s there to spend, isn’t it?” she said. Clothes, drinks and travel became
her curriculum vitae. She also bought a new car, a Cadillac convertible, favored
by all the stars. Sinatra had one. It would do 110 miles an hour, and Miss G
favored that speed. God help us!
She also decided that our place was a bit small, so she bought a house up in
the hills in Nichols Canyon. By that time we had gone from the Red Skelton
apartment to another apartment in Westwood. Some of the Westwood residents
saw me going in the front door wearing shorts (instead of a maid’s uniform) and
raised hell, so Miss G decided it best to move out after only a few months. We
lived briefly on Olympic Boulevard before moving to the small house in Nichols
Canyon. Let me emphasize “small,” not posh—no swimming pool, no big
garden, just three bedrooms. It came in very handy when Frank and Miss G
decided to cohabitate. It was very snug. In between the rows, they were very
happy.
To a certain degree, they could keep their relationship secret. That was
important because the whole climate surrounding the movie, radio, recording
and the fledgling television industries demanded purity. No scandals, no
hopping into bed with chorus girls, no homosexuality, just decency, happy
endings, villains getting the chop and Mom’s apple pie stretched as far as Louis
B. Mayer’s eye could see.
Sinatra, urged on by a militant Miss G, demanded that Nancy give him a
divorce, which she refused to do. This, of course, was the fuel that ignited
several incidents. The first was the Shamrock Hotel disaster in January of 1950.
The Shamrock Hotel had just been built by a millionaire in Houston, Texas. It
was opening with fireworks, champagne and Sinatra singing in the night club. A
gig that was to last a week.
It was said that a few days before he was due to appear, George Evans,
who had been his agent, mentor and a greatly needed father figure, had dropped
dead of a heart attack. In Frank’s depressed condition, it was a bitter blow. Even
though George and Frank had been quarreling violently—George insisting that
Frank abandon Miss G and behave like a good husband and father by returning
to his wife and children, an action that Frank adamantly refused to take—Frank
was nevertheless devastated by his death. By phone he made this clear to Miss
G, and she came up with a big, bright idea.
“Rene, why don’t I fly down to Houston and surprise Frank and cheer him
up?”
My gentle cough signified disapproval. I knew that only bad publicity
would follow such an action. We were tucked away hiding in the trees high in
Nichols Canyon. Not a single sightseeing coach loaded with eager tourists, the
guide pointing out the houses of the famous stars, passed our door. Once the
press caught onto the notion that Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra were live-in
friends, the coaches would be passing every twenty minutes.
I had no time to argue. Miss G was already on the phone to Dick Jones
seeking support for her rescue flight. Dick was a friend, an excellent pianist, and
a nice guy who composed and conducted for Frank. He reinforced what I
thought. He said, “Ava, I don’t think that is a wise thing for you to do.”
“Of course it is, Dick. We will just be two old friends wishing him luck.”
Off Dick and Ava flew to Houston, where, with compulsive idiocy,
considering they were trying to duck the press circuit, Miss G booked them at
the Shamrock where Frank was already in residence. Frank greeted with
unrestrained delight, never giving a thought to the fact that every chambermaid
in the hotel was now busy ringing up the
Houston Post
with a gossip tip that
Frank and Miss G were now sharing a bedroom.
“I was a dumb schmuck,” Miss G admitted sadly on her return. “Frank had
been told about this great Italian restaurant and off we went to dinner, just the
two of us. There we were just tangling with the spaghetti, when this
photographer slides up and points his lens. Rene, you know Frank’s explosive
fuse is about a hair’s breadth wide, and he explodes as if the guy had pushed an
88- millimeter cannon into his ear. He stands up, throws his napkin down into
his spaghetti and starts out to tear the photographer limb from limb. Up rushes
the manager with nine waiters to help. They had all been quite happy for the
good publicity of a visit from Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. With the prospect
of the place being torn apart, they were very unhappy. Everything got sorted out,
and we left without finishing our spaghetti.”
She looked at me with sad eyes. “You’ve seen the papers?”
This dialogue took place naturally a couple of days after her return. By that
time, the newspapers from every corner of the known world were reveling in the
sensational new love scandal. Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner were hidden away
in a love nest with poor little wife weeping at home.