Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  Ava was preoccupied with a new movie project, Show Boat, and under pressure from MGM to behave herself. She had been getting hate mail—“Bitch-Jezebel-Gardner” one writer called her—and now talked of not seeing Frank as long as he remained married. She stayed in California, mostly, while he struggled with his foundering career in New York. “People don’t understand the psychology of what happened,” said Mitch Miller, the producer who had replaced Manie Sacks at Columbia Records. “It was a different climate in those days. . . . Sinatra, with his public behavior with Ava, and leaving his wife, had the priests saying, ‘Don’t tell the kids. Don’t buy his records.’ ”

  Frank did not have one song on the Billboard list of top tunes for 1951. He worked on, but with little reward. He had a TV show on CBS, but it would fold the following year, when sponsors pulled out. His two radio shows had little impact, and one of them went off the air after only seven weeks. Other singers—Frankie Laine, Johnnie Ray, Eddie Fisher—were now more popular. One night in New York Frank walked past the theater where Fisher was singing. Lines of would-be ticket-holders stretched around the block. Some of the Fisher fans jeered at him. He went back to Manie Sacks’s apartment, where Sacks later found him. Frank was in the kitchen, lying with his head either on the stovetop or inside the oven itself. The gas was on. He was revived, but friends took the episode seriously.

  At a recording session that spring Frank produced two tracks that seemed achingly personal. One of them incorporated lines he had reworked himself:

  I’m a fool to want you, To want a love that can’t be true, A love that’s there for others too . . . I know it’s wrong, it must be wrong, But right or wrong I can’t get along Without you.

  He recorded “I’m a Fool to Want You” in a single take, then rushed from the studio looking distressed. At the same session Frank sang “Love Me”—“Please love, whatever else you do just love me. . . . I’ll die if you should tire.” The words welled out of him, his early biographer Arnold Shaw thought, “in a voice numb with the fear of losing Ava.”

  Two months later, Nancy said she would start divorce proceedings. “I am agreeing to give Frank the freedom he has so earnestly requested,” she said.

  Frank mended fences with his parents and took Ava to Hoboken to see them. She boggled at Dolly Sinatra’s immaculate house, and understood the source of Frank’s obsessive cleanliness. She saw pictures of Frank as a baby, “sweet little photos that mothers treasure and sons would like to stick up the chimney.”

  In Hollywood to work on Meet Danny Wilson—a third-rate movie for Universal in which he played a singer who gets his break thanks to a gangster—Frank was visited on the set by various psychiatrists and a priest from the Catholic Family Counseling Service. Nancy also consulted a psychiatrist. Dr. William Kroger, a pioneer in the psychiatric use of hypnosis, said he “took care of Sinatra’s family, took care of Nancy—tried to save the marriage.” Ava could not wait to see it dismantled. “We vacillated,” she said, “between happiness at our impending wedding and misery as Nancy took longer and longer to actually file for that damn divorce.”

  Frank accepted a singing engagement at a casino in Nevada, with the primary purpose of fulfilling the residency requirement for a quickie divorce. He was frantic now, “screaming and yelling” at the telephone operators at the Riverside Inn in Reno. He had again been interrogating Ava about Mario Cabré. Had she slept with him? “I tried to evade the question,” she said years later, “but Frank suspected and he kept at me.” She had been to bed with Cabré, just once, she said in her 1990 memoir, “a single mistake—after one of those romantic, star-filled, dance-filled, booze-filled Spanish nights.” In Nevada, she admitted it to Frank. “I told him, and he never forgave me. Ever.”

  It was still preying on Frank’s mind a decade later. “He was drinking pretty good and started to cry on my shoulder,” said Brad Dexter, describing a conversation in the early 1960s. “Ava emasculated him, really emasculated him. He suffered.”

  Late in August the couple had more alcohol-fueled fights while vacationing at Lake Tahoe. Frank railed on about her other men, even as the yacht they were aboard ran aground. A few nights later, after another bitter exchange, Ava drove off through the darkness to Los Angeles. When she got home she learned that Frank had taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

  A doctor had been summoned to Frank’s hotel room at 4:00 A.M. to find a patient who identified himself as “Henry Sinolo” and said he had swallowed some barbiturates. Asked how many, he replied, “I don’t know.” The doctor found Frank’s vital signs normal, administered a saline solution to induce vomiting and clear the stomach, and departed. Once Ava had rejoined him, Frank told the press he had “just had a bellyache” after taking “two” sleeping pills. “That’s all there was to it, honest. . . . Suicide is the farthest thought from my mind.”

  “I wanted to punch him,” Ava remembered, “but instead I forgave him in about twenty-five seconds.” To her it had been just another of his “mock suicidal dramas . . . to get me back to his side.” It was the third such episode.

  When Frank made his first appearance in Las Vegas, at the Desert Inn a week later, Ava indulged her own insecurity. “Suddenly she got moody,” Axel Stordahl recalled. “She thought Frank was looking at a girl in the audience a little longer than was necessary. They ended up throwing books and lamps at each other.”

  Then Ava spent some time in the hospital for “exhaustion.” There were rumors of an abortion. She was a really hot property for MGM now, and to avoid further embarrassments executives decided it was best to get her married to Frank as soon as possible. The studio’s attorneys muscled in on the divorce negotiations, and the impasse was finally ended. Nancy obtained her divorce decree in California, and he got his in Nevada. Arrangements were made for Frank and Ava to marry at a supposedly secret East Coast locale.

  Still the madness continued. In New York, Ava remembered, she received a letter “from a woman who admitted she was a whore and claimed she had been having an affair with Frank. It was filthy, it gave details that I found convincing, and I felt sick to my stomach. How could I go on with the wedding?”

  The ceremony was off. Then, after a long night during which friends shuttled frantically back and forth between Ava’s room and Frank’s, it was on again. “We had arranged it for weeks,” she said in 1989, “nobody knew”—except the nation’s press. On November 7, 1951, reporters and photographers gathered at the house near Philadelphia where the marriage was to take place.

  “Frank was so angry, poor baby,” said Ava. “He spent the whole time at the window upstairs screaming at the press, ‘You lousy parasites, fuck off!’ at the top of his lungs. He was tempted—we had to hold him—to go out and fight with them. But we finally got him downstairs, got him in front of the preacher. Dick [Jones, an arranger for Tommy Dorsey] played the piano. It was horribly out of tune. I walked down the stairs. I had a lovely little dress that Howard Greer made. Wonderful designer, but you couldn’t wear a stitch underneath.

  “And we got hitched. I don’t remember the ceremony. There was a photograph—Frank kept it in his wallet for years. We were in such a hassle to get out of there, we forgot all our luggage—not a toothbrush between us. We hired a plane and arrived at some little hotel on the beach. In Miami, I guess. . . .

  “I had no clothes to wear on the beach. I had Frank’s jacket on. I was barefoot, and Frank had his pants rolled up, and we just strolled along the beach. Some fucking photographer got a picture from behind us. Two lonely people holding hands, walking on the beach. It’s a sad photograph.

  “Frank and I didn’t start very good. We went to Havana, in Cuba, and had a fight the first night. Who knows what we fought about? . . . I remember standing up, pissed drunk, on the balcony of the hotel, on the edge. Standing there, balancing. Frank was afraid to go near me. He thought I was going to jump. . . . God, I was crazy! . . . God Almighty!”

  16

  Busted

  IN FEBRUARY 19
52, with just a piano for accompaniment, Frank sang “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”—“this crazy situation has me on the blink”—in a San Francisco club. He told the audience he was singing it for Ava.

  Ava was talking of their future, of how they would fix up the house in Palm Springs, of how much she wanted to be a housewife and mother. Yet the fights continued. Within weeks of their marriage they dropped out of a trip to entertain American troops in Europe. “At the last minute in London,” Janet Leigh recalled, “Ava and Frank didn’t leave on the trip. . . . They’d had a quarrel. Their passion was as stringent as it was romantic . . . hot and cold.”

  Ava was now addressed as “Mrs. Sinatra,” which Frank liked. To humiliate him, though, reporters sometimes addressed him as “Mr. Gardner.” “Friends noticed a very different Frank around her,” Sammy Cahn’s ex-wife Gloria Cahn said. “He was subservient. He bowed to her presence. . . . He was like a little puppy following her, and some people said he’d lost his manliness. And if she wasn’t in the mood she would, you know, like, dismiss him.”

  “Frank didn’t have a job,” Ava remembered. “Poor baby, his voice had gone. He had got to the point where he literally could not sing because he had lost all confidence. And the worst thing, a proud man as Frank is, who wants to be in control and be the boss, was having to rely on a woman to foot the bills, most of them. His ego, no matter what I did, made it all so much worse.

  “He’d done a record with Harry James that was so bad I cried when I listened to it,” Ava said. James himself thought it “the worst thing either one of us ever recorded.” Frank also did some excellent work in the recording studio, but it was not reflected in sales. Without an agent—MCA took space in the trade papers to announce he was no longer a client—he was a singer nobody seemed to want.

  Ava loathed reporters, and Frank railed at the press more than ever. “This is a private affair,” he had snarled during a trip to Mexico before the marriage. “I don’t have to talk to anyone. It wasn’t the press who made me famous. It was my singing and the American public.” In Mexico, Frank and his companions damaged a photographer’s camera and destroyed his film. One of his bodyguards threatened to shoot the photographer. In an incident at the airport in Los Angeles, Frank appeared to aim his car at a photographer.

  When journalists began ignoring him, however, Frank changed his tune. “Most of my troubles with the press were my own fault,” he conceded in 1952 in a long signed article in American Weekly. “I’ll always be grateful to the press for the millions of lines they chose to write which made my name a household word.” He promised the Press Photographers Association he would always “be ready in case you ever want to shoot any pictures.”

  Bob Weitman, who had given Frank his glorious Paramount debut in 1942, gave him another brief run at the Paramount, but the audiences were small. At the Chez Paree in Chicago, a club that could seat 1,500, only 150 customers turned up. “Sinatra had had it,” thought the journalist Burt Boyar, who saw him there. “It was sad. From the top to the bottom in one horrible lesson. . . . He was deserted—by his friends, by his public.”

  He was dropped, too, after nine years, by Columbia Records, where Mitch Miller now said he “couldn’t give away” Frank’s records. Frank had been clashing not only with Miller but, and this was unusual in his career, with the studio technicians. One of them, Harold Chapman, thought him “one of the meanest men we ever worked for, so we engineers and musicians just sat on our hands and let him go down.” The recording session of September 17, 1952, marked the end of a marvelously successful business relationship. “Fuck him,” Miller told a fellow executive who asked about Frank. “He’s a has-been.”

  Frank was humiliated even in Hoboken, when he appeared at a firefighters’ fund-raiser to oblige his father. The local teenagers of a new generation were unimpressed. “He hit some clinkers,” recalled Tony Macagnano, a childhood contemporary. “People booed him and threw fruit and stuff, kidding around. . . . Oh, did he get mad!”

  Jule Styne thought Frank “looked like death” when he sang at the French Casino, a downmarket club in a New York hotel basement. The two friends dined together at a restaurant on Mulberry Street, where once Frank had had to leave by the back door to avoid being mobbed. Now no one gave him a second look. “A pigeon on a theater marquee,” he said a producer had told him, “would cause more attention than my name.”

  The screenwriter Budd Schulberg saw Frank perform at “some second-rate joint” in Philadelphia. “The room was less than half-filled,” he remembered, “openly hostile because ‘The Voice’ wasn’t there anymore. Yesterday’s ‘All’ was ‘Nothing at All,’ a pathetic burnout. A heckler told him to shut up and go home. A few other lushes seconded the motion. . . . ‘I’m doing one more number,’ he threatened, ‘and then I’m going to pass among you—with a baseball bat.’ ” Schulberg thought Frank a classic example of “success in America—the lightning speed with which it strikes and the sudden blackout into which it often disappears.”

  Sinatra fan clubs were disbanding, above all because of Frank’s callous treatment of Nancy and the blatant cavorting with Ava, even if he and Ava were now married. One group of former female admirers mailed Hedda Hopper a record of “Nancy with the Laughing Face” that they had smashed to pieces. They told Hopper their former idol was now “Frankie-Not-So-Hot-Tra.”

  AT FIRST AVA BLAMED SHOW BUSINESS for the troubles in the marriage. “Today is our seventh anniversary,” she told an interviewer in June 1952. “Seven months. You want to see your husband, and where is he? Playing the Chez Paree in Chicago! Then he’s hitting St. Louis . . . it’s rough.”

  Ava’s jealousy and distrust made it rougher, as her nephew Billy Grimes discovered on a visit to New York. After spending an entirely innocent evening together, he and Frank found themselves accused of having visited a whorehouse. “Anything could get me going,” Ava said years later. In September, when her husband appeared at the Riviera nightclub, she spotted Marilyn Maxwell in the audience and claimed that Frank was making “cute little gestures” toward her. She stormed out, flew to California, and returned her wedding ring to Frank by mail. He lost it.

  Whether or not Frank was guilty of infidelity this early in the marriage, Ava was. “I hate cheating,” she told one interviewer years later, “I won’t put up with it. I don’t do it myself.” Yet in the late summer of 1952, while in Utah filming Ride, Vaquero!, she had an affair with the movie’s director, John Farrow. The source is Farrow’s daughter Mia, who would one day become Frank’s third wife.

  Frank and Ava had an epic fight weeks after shooting ended on Vaquero! It took place in October, when the couple got together to make up after the incident at the Riviera. As Ava told it, they started squabbling at home after drinking too much at a restaurant in Los Angeles. Frank yelled, “If you want to know where I am, I’m in Palm Springs fucking Lana Turner.” Then he stormed out.

  Ava knew that Lana and Benton Cole, the agent she and Turner shared, were staying at Frank’s house in Palm Springs. So she set off in hot pursuit in the middle of the night, with one of her sisters for company, in the hope of catching Frank and Lana “in the act.” When the two women drove up to the house, they spotted Frank in his car “cruising around as if he was keeping watch.” Lana and Cole were indeed at the house, still wide awake according to Ava, though it was around 3:00 A.M. They welcomed Ava and her sister, and the four of them “settled down to have a party.” After several drinks, Ava said, “the door bursts open and in storms Frank looking like Al Capone and the Boston Strangler rolled into one.” He delivered a stream of abuse, dismissed Lana as a “two-bit whore,” claimed the revelers had been “carving him up behind his back,” then told all of them to “get the hell out of my house.” Ava said it was her house, too, and began grabbing everything she owned. She piled up pictures, books and records, clothes and cosmetics, and Frank hurled them into the driveway.

  In her version, Lana said she and Cole fled the fracas, then returne
d to find “police cars drawn up in front of the house with red lights blinking, radios squawking. The glare of spotlights illuminated the house. . . . Just as we were getting out of the car, the front door opened and Frank and Ava came out, still fighting. The police moved in to separate them.”

  As Lana put it, a lot of “sick rumors” grew out of that night. One was that Ava arrived to find Frank, as he had threatened, in bed with Lana. Another story had him bursting in to find Ava and Lana having sex, while another had him walking in on a threesome involving his wife, Lana, and another man. An FBI report released after Frank’s death refers to a claim by an unnamed man that he had sex at the house with both Ava and Lana. None of the rumors were supported by facts. That said, the accounts offered by Ava and Lana were not credible.

  Having finally thrown everyone out that night, Frank stuffed some clothes into a duffel bag and went to Jimmy Van Heusen’s house. Asked by a caller how Frank was, Van Heusen said he was “in the bathroom, throwing up.” When Ava changed her phone number, Frank was said to be “close to a breakdown.” “You know,” he told the Hollywood agent Milt Ebbins, “there isn’t a building high enough for me to jump off of.” “Sinatra,” the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen reported, “is frightening his friends by telephoning in a gloomy voice, ‘Please see that the children are taken care of,’ and then hanging up.” He would call back the following day, Kilgallen wrote, to apologize and explain that he had been drunk.

  Deprived of Ava’s phone number, Frank asked Earl Wilson to convey his feelings in his column. He now realized, Wilson wrote, that “he loves her more than anything and must do everything to get back together.” A man who loathed press intrusion was reduced to using the press to get a message to his wife.