Frank sometimes exploded with rage, though not often in front of Peggy. “If he got angry,” she said, “it went from zero to ten. There wasn’t much in between. I was with him once in Italy, and the paparazzi had spoiled everything. You can’t imagine what it’s like. You can’t go shopping, go out to eat, do anything. At the Rome airport, when we were leaving, he finally had had enough. We were seated on the plane, seatbelts fastened, and the buzzards were outside the door still. Suddenly he excused himself and got up and disappeared out the door. He came back only slightly ruffled, and sat down again. I only discovered later that he had punched out one of them.”
Frank could not bear to be touched. When an elderly politician placed a friendly hand on his shoulder in 1956, according to a story in Look magazine, he was rebuffed with a growl of: “Take the hand off the suit, creep.” Frank denied the claim.
“In bars or nightclubs where he was singing,” Peggy recalled, “people would get pally, say ‘Have a drink’ or something, and touch him on the shoulder. He would freeze, look down at that hand on his arm and stare, and not move until the hand was taken off. . . . If someone displeased him, he would indicate it with a facial expression, or just say: ‘I’m gonna buy back my introduction,’ or refer to people as ‘rat bastards.’ He used that a lot. It could be used seriously or jokingly.”
There was nothing funny about what occurred one night in Palm Springs. “We’d been out in town for dinner, and Jimmy Van Heusen picked up two girls and brought them back to the house. I preceded them into the living room and almost immediately there was a ruckus behind me. One of the girls had ‘encroached’ on Frank and, according to Jimmy, Frank had made a characteristic movement—as if to repel her—with his arm. And somehow she fell and hit her head. I didn’t see it myself. And she was cut and bleeding profusely. An ambulance was called and she was gone.
“Frank went and closed himself up in his bedroom, and wouldn’t come out. He was so ashamed and sorry. Finally I went in and he was sitting in the dark on the edge of the bed with his head bent, really abject. He called himself a ‘monster.’ ‘Mommy’ had to say, ‘No, no, no! You’re not a monster. . . .’ But that was small comfort to him.”
Peggy was also at Frank’s side in early 1956, when he suffered a sharp professional disappointment. In the late summer and fall of the previous year he had given his all—a phrase that could not accurately be applied to many of his fifty-six movies—to the making of The Man with the Golden Arm. He had enthused about playing the protagonist, Frankie Machine, from the moment he read the novel. Winner of the very first National Book Award, Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm was the story of a card dealer struggling to overcome drug addiction and build a new life—a little man fighting back, a character Frank could understand.
He had lobbied for the part, won it over Brando, and worked assiduously to get it right. He consulted with medical specialists, sat behind a peephole to watch a real-life addict going through heroin withdrawal. He cooperated with the director, Otto Preminger, usually behaved well on the set, and turned in a remarkable, moving performance. The result was a box office hit.
If ever Frank had earned an Academy Award, the film critic Daniel O’Brien wrote in 1998, it had been for The Man with the Golden Arm. He received a nomination for Best Actor, and in April 1956 attended the Oscar ceremony with high hopes of winning. Instead, Ernest Borgnine won, for his performance in Marty. Peggy Connelly, who was with Frank that evening, recalled how distressed he was. “I had wanted to go on to the parties they held afterwards,” Peggy recalled, “but we walked out, got in the car, and went home. He went into his bedroom, didn’t turn the light on, just sat down on the bed. I finally decided to go in.
“I kneeled down on the floor and put my arms around him. It’s embarrassing now to remember what I said to him, ‘It’s terrible. Ernie Borgnine is fat and ugly. He needs it for his career, but you’re Frank Sinatra and you don’t need it.’ But he had wanted that Oscar like he wanted his last breath, and I was trying not to let him sink. . . . In a few minutes, he got up and walked out.”
“Being an 18-karat manic-depressive,” Frank would tell an interviewer just a few years later, “and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as emotion.” Also, evidently, a capacity for swift recovery. “The next day, the next week,” Peggy noted, “the matter of not having got the award for The Man with the Golden Arm was not brought up anymore. He never missed a step. He had plenty to do.”
Connelly, who has lived in France for many years, saw parallels between the characters of Frank and the actor Alain Delon. “The charm of both of them,” she concluded, “was all wrapped up in the mythology of what the French call the caïd. It’s an old Arab word, used in France to describe a man who is powerfully attractive but outside the law. Such a man is flamboyant, commanding, cocky, swaggering, big with the ladies—like a Mafia figure. He dominates people. Delon played the caïd, Frank lived the part.”
Peggy closed her mind to Frank’s Mafia connection while she was with him. “I used to get so angry at people who’d say, ‘You knew him well. He was Mafia, wasn’t he?’ I used to say, ‘Well, I saw him on the set and in recording sessions, and I never saw him with a machine gun in his hands.’ Funny. But they looked, and I never did.” Later, she admitted to herself that the Mafia factor had been there all the time. There was the story he told her about having attended a high-level Mafia meeting. There was the night in New York when he introduced her to a mysterious group of men, and warned her not to ask for their names. There were the weekend guests about whom he seemed highly sensitive.
Years before she knew Frank, as a teenager, Peggy had seen a movie called The Enforcer and been scared. “I was so frightened,” she recalled, “by the idea that you can be walking down the street and shot by someone who doesn’t even know you. I remember thinking, ‘Please God, protect me from ever coming near to anything like that.’ Yet, while I was with Frank, I found myself in it.
“We’d be going to Palm Springs and Frank would say, ‘There’s gonna be somebody there this weekend. I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do about it.’ It would be Joe Fischetti. He never went out to dinner with us, as I recall. He was just there. He would be there overnight, and then he’d be gone. . . .
“Frank’s bedroom had a little bathroom that I never used because it had saloon doors—doors, you know, that don’t come right down to the floor. The adjoining room was the guest bathroom—off the guest bedroom. One weekend, in the middle of the night, I got up to go to the guest bathroom. And as I stepped through, Joe Fischetti stepped out. Both of us stark naked. . . . I’d walked through the door nude, in front of a mafioso. . . . I shrieked and backed out the door, and so did he.”
Frank, Peggy thought, was going through “a period when he didn’t want to be associated with those people, didn’t want to talk about it, was trying to climb up socially. . . . But he used to say he had to play host to various people. . . . He always winced painfully and said, ‘I’ve got to do this. I can’t get out of it.’ ”
At the same time, she realized, “Frank was fascinated by them. You just don’t throw that off. . . . You do it, and you grit your teeth.”
MORE THAN A YEAR into his relationship with Peggy, Frank remained so close-mouthed on personal matters that she assumed his father was dead. As for his mother, she said, he was “avoiding her like the plague. . . . I remember asking him why he had a valet and not a housekeeper, and he said, ‘I don’t want another dame around. It took me long enough to get rid of my mother.’ ” Frank never spoke of Nancy around Peggy, and rarely of his children, though he once brought his twelve-year-old son to Thanksgiving dinner.
Nor did he share his thoughts about Ava Gardner, who by early 1956 had left the United States and set up house in Spain. As fate would have it, however, Spain was the couple’s destination when, within days of the Oscar ceremony, they flew out of Los Angeles. Frank was there for l
ocation work on The Pride and the Passion, a movie epic based on a C. S. Forester novel about the struggle between Spanish peasant fighters and the French in the nineteenth century. He played the Spanish guerrilla leader, co-starring with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren, and insisted on doing all the things usually left to a double, clambering up mountains, running through explosions and fires. He put in a good performance, but his contrariness surpassed even his own bad reputation.
He refused the location accommodations and insisted on driving three hours each night to a suite at the Castellano Hilton in Madrid. He complained about poor communications and about the length of the shooting schedule. “Sixteen weeks!” he complained to the director, Stanley Kramer. “I can’t stay in one place sixteen weeks. I’ll kill myself.”
“Tension,” Kramer said of Frank, “walks in beside him.” He would be in his dressing room in a “black, angry mood,” sitting for half an hour with his head bowed, pulling on his lower lip. He was preoccupied about his thinning hair, which was compensated for in the movie by an improbable hairpiece. When phoned by a crew member he would sometimes pretend to be someone else, just to put off going to the set. Once, frustrated by the time a night shoot was taking, he said he would urinate on Kramer if they were not finished by 11:30. Peggy, meanwhile, noticed that Frank was drinking far too much Spanish Fundador brandy. Being so close to Ava was hard for him to bear.
Ava had looked forward to his arrival in Madrid. She had earlier arranged a special viewing of The Man with the Golden Arm for herself and followed through with a congratulatory telegram. She was roaring around in a new sports car, a present from Frank, and playing his records constantly. When he arrived, she played the brokenhearted wife.
“We and our crowd used to go to one restaurant every night,” Peggy said. “Ava would come in too. If she were there when we arrived, she would get up and rush out. Sometimes in tears. Or we would be there first, and she would come in, and zip out when she spied us. . . . A friend of mine had told me, ‘Take care. Ava can get physical, she’s capable of throwing a bottle.’ But it was always she who would run out crying, and I knew there would be some kind of denouement. I’m not a fool, and I knew Frank would see her if he got the chance.”
The denouement came when Peggy returned to the suite at the Hilton after a brief trip out of the country. “His timing was bad. The first thing I saw was the unmade bed and the mess in the bedroom, and knew something had been going on. Then I caught a glimpse of Ava through the living room door. But I went in anyway to pick up my mail. She was sitting on the couch, curled up and reading the newspaper and wearing Frank’s bathrobe.
“I had no doubt at all that Ava had spent the night there. I said something like, ‘This is an uncomfortable situation, isn’t it?’ She didn’t reply, just looked daggers, and I picked up my mail and left. I went to the location to see Frank for lunch. He couldn’t have been cooler. A kiss, then he asked me, ‘How were things at the hotel?,’ a completely inane remark unless there was something wrong at the hotel. I said, just as cool, ‘Crowded.’ And he said, ‘Oh, was she still there?’ There was no drama. From the way he spoke Ava could have been any girl he’d left at the hotel, a prostitute even.”
Yet Frank could not wait to get out of Spain. In late July, weeks before his scenes were completed and over the director’s protests, he flew back to the States. As he landed in New York, Ava announced that their long-awaited divorce was nearing completion. She hinted that she might marry her latest suitor, Italian comedian Walter Chiari.
Frank was reported to have reacted “like a wild man” to the stories about Chiari, to have cringed “like a whipped dog” when Ava spoke ill of him in an interview. She took to calling him “Mr. Sinada,” a play on his name and the Spanish word for “nothing.”
Frank compensated with extravagant gestures of affection for others. He gave Peggy a white Thunderbird—the same model he had recently helped Ellie Graham, an occasional lover who had recently aborted his baby, to purchase. At Lipsey’s in Beverly Hills just before Christmas, he bought Peggy a mink coat, another for Nancy, and a third for his secretary. He also proposed to Peggy.
“It was kind of: ‘Don’t you think we ought to get married?’ ” Peggy remembered. “My ego kept me from saying ‘Oh darling, yes,’ because I knew vaguely about his shadowy goings-on with other women. I thought, ‘I’m going to need something more serious than this before I accept.’ ”
The affair with Peggy would last for much of 1957. Frank even proposed again, but she again declined. The encounter with Ava aside, she could no longer ignore the whispers about other women, about Frank’s use of whores; she knew she could never live with that. She wanted to pursue her singing career, moreover, and he did not want her to work. One weekend at Palm Springs, Peggy fabricated an excuse to leave. She never went back, and soon afterward married Dick Martin, who was then an up-and-coming comedian.
In May of that year Frank recorded a new, drawn-out version of “I’m a Fool to Want You,” on an LP entitled Where Are You? Ava was in Mexico, working on her new movie, The Sun Also Rises, and behaving badly. She saw a number of men and drank heavily. She corralled a group of itinerant musicians, took them to her hotel, then phoned Frank in Hollywood so that he could hear their plaintive Spanish love songs. The writer Peter Viertel, whom she begged to sleep at her side one night, thought her in the grip of “almost panicky loneliness.”
Then, before leaving Mexico, she at last sued Frank for divorce—on the grounds of desertion. The decree was issued in early July, a milestone Newsweek summarized as follows:
Divorced: Film actress AVA GARDNER, 34, from singer and actor FRANK SINATRA, 39, after nearly four years of separation.
Frank was in fact almost forty-two. He and his PR people had long been putting it about that he was a year or two younger than he was.
Frank was increasingly lonely. “My father,” Tina Sinatra would say years later, “was a deeply feeling man who could not attain a meaningful intimate relationship.”
EARLY IN 1956, Peggy remembered, Frank had become involved in a musical project based on verses by Norman Sickel, a little-known poet. Sickel had written a series of twelve interconnected poems, each dedicated to a color. Frank commissioned a group of composers to produce music to suit the poems’ mood, and he conducted the resulting orchestration himself. He called the album Tone Poems of Color, and it was issued with the poems printed on the cover.
Gilbert Gigliotti, a professor of English who teaches a course on Sinatra at Central Connecticut State University and has written a book on the singer, devoted an entire chapter to the poems and the album. The verses that so interested Frank, he wrote, “haunt the reader with their darkness . . . depict a tortured universe in which greed, haughtiness, violence and intrigue overpower laughter, love and innocence.” For Gigliotti, Tone Poems reflects a Sinatra who, having once been primarily the idol of female fans, now spoke increasingly to disillusioned American men. The poems, he thought, convey a sense of a man left “bloodied and alone” by love, a man more interested now in controlling women than in romancing them.
Frank once said he favored the color orange above all others because it was “happiest.” The orange of the poems, however, is more about cynicism than happiness:
Orange is the gay
deceiver
and I do deceive
but nicely. . . .
My shade is correct
and stylish,
but never will it pierce
my skin
to affect my soul . . .
As arranged by Frank, the sequence of colors started positively enough with “bridal veil white” and green, an evocation of fulfilling love. As the poems moved across the palette, though, melancholy predominated. Blue, near the end, was for “the dreamer” who had “made a friend of sadness.” Red, the final color, was “violent,” consuming, going faster and faster “not knowing where I go or why.”
Frank did seem to be in an emotional void. When a woman
fell for him, or became special, he tended to dump her. For years to come there was to be more whoring than loving. With the exception of a few old cronies, he now placed less trust in friendship. During his brief professional collapse, he said, he “lost a great deal of faith in human nature. . . . A lot of my so-called friends disappeared.” They had been “like my shadow, only there when the sun shines.”
An occasional refuge was the home of Nancy and the three children, who lived in Holmby Hills. As often as not, when he visited, Frank would wind up fast asleep on the couch. From time to time, Tina has hinted, Nancy even allowed him into her bed. As for the children, Frank tried to make up for long absences with lavish presents; one Christmas, when she was only fifteen, daughter Nancy found a gift-wrapped Chevrolet convertible sitting in the driveway.
Even the children, however, saw the other side of their father. “One night,” said Doug Prestine, a neighbor’s son friendly with thirteen-year-old Frank Jr., “the two of us were watching television in the library of the Sinatra house when Big Frank crashed through the gate in his Eldorado Cadillac. . . . He was real drunk and wearing a white dinner jacket that was torn and dirty. . . . He slurred his words and said, ‘What are you two doing?’ . . . I’d never seen a grown-up drunk before but Frankie wasn’t surprised at all.
“He very matter-of-factly went outside, got his dad out of the car, and carried him into the house, where we tried to wash him up and poured some coffee down him. Then Big Frank passed out on the couch, and we went back to watching TV. Frankie acted like it happened all the time.”
Bing Crosby, in Las Vegas to see Frank during a break in shooting High Society, was told that he was on the verge of collapse, caused by “no sleep or rest, and a great deal of sauce.” At a Friars Club dinner for comedian Jack Benny, Frank downed most of a bottle of whiskey.
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