Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  They were too much alike, perhaps, too much for comfort, for survival, for in the bond they forged there was a devastating insight, one into the other, like an X-ray into each one’s heart and soul, as it would happen an insight dangerous and destructive in its exposure of weakness, vanity, lies, need.

  Not long after the affair began in earnest, Ava ran into her friend Lana Turner. It was an encounter she had been avoiding. Lana had been crazy for Frank a couple of years before, spoken of herself as “engaged” to him despite his marital status, and she had back then confided to Ava many details about their passionate love life. Indeed, that first night Ava had gone to bed with Sinatra, she had been unavoidably reminded of the earlier affair and Lana’s giddy rants about Frank’s priapic endowment; she found out that Lana had not exaggerated those dimensions in the slightest (Sinatra naked, said pal Jackie Gleason, looked like a tuning fork). The Sinatra- Turner affair, though, had ended abruptly and terribly, with Lana rather brutally dumped.

  “Darling,” she said now, “I hear you’ve been seeing Frank. You haven’t fallen for him, have you?”

  “We’re in love, baby,” said Ava.

  Lana gripped her by the forearm. “Don’t let him hurt you, sweetie. He’ll lead you on, he’ll tell you whatever you want to hear, but you mustn’t believe him.”

  “We’re gone for each other,” said Ava. “This is for keeps.”

  “He’ll never leave that wife of his. I’m warning you.”

  “He’s going to leave her if he wants to be with me. And he does.”

  “Have they separated, darling? I haven’t read anything in the papers about it.”

  Nancy Sinatra remained defiantly devoted. She would not be moved by her husband’s proclaimed love for another woman. She had seen it all before, lived through it, survived, and remained Mrs. Frank Sinatra. Frank’s advisers, at the same time, warned him of the backlash that was sure to come if his philandering were to become public knowledge.

  Ava, too, still had ties to past relationships. She had been seeing Howard Duff off and on for more than two years. They went out now one last time, and she told him it was finally over, there was someone else. Duff said, “I know, I know,” repeated it over and over like a moan and could say nothing else and finished his drink and went away without ever looking at her again.

  Howard Hughes, who did not need to be told anything about the developing relationship with Sinatra since his spies had apprised him of every bit of it, demanded Ava meet him for a late dinner, told her that he had some very important news for her that she could not afford to ignore.

  “This man you’ve been seeing,” Hughes said. “You have to stay away from him.”

  “Oh, please, Howard, is that what this is about?”

  “There are things about this man, Ava,” he persisted, “of which you have no idea. He has some very shady associates. I’m talking about criminal associations and things you are better off not knowing, but you’ve got to trust me, I know what the heck I’m talking about.”

  “We’re in love, Howard.”

  “Listen to me, this character has got women all over town.”

  “Howard, you’re one to talk!”

  “I mean call girls, niggers.…I can show you evidence that—”

  “You’ve said enough!”

  “He’s not good enough for you, Ava! You’ve got to listen to me—”

  This time she got up and left the restaurant.

  There was another guy who had been pursuing her then, a young, good- looking thug named Johnny Stompanato, a lieutenant of racket king Mickey Cohen. Stompanato had a thing for young movie actresses (like who didn’t) and had been sniffing around Ava for weeks. Ava told Frank that she barely knew the guy, but when somebody tipped him that she and Johnny had been seen sitting together at the Cock and Bull in Hollywood, he called Mickey Cohen directly and asked to come over to discuss a thing—and right away. Cohen told him it was not a good idea to come over as he was under twenty-four-hour observation by the police just then, but Sinatra insisted.

  “Lookit,” Sinatra said, “I want you to do me this favor. I want you to tell your guy Stompanato to stop seeing Ava Gardner.”

  Cohen, under a lot of stress from trying to stay out of prison, couldn’t believe Sinatra wanted to risk the cops looking him over for a case of “hot nuts.” Cohen told him, “This is what ya call important? I don’t mix in with no guys and their broads, Frank. Why don’t ya go on home to Nancy where you belong?”

  For a time, while Sinatra supposedly negotiated with his wife, they remained discreet, sticking to dimly lit restaurants, nights tucked away to- gether at her house in the hills or various friends’ homes or rented playpens. But neither had a lot of experience with a low profile, and before long they were drawn back to the bright light, to the action. In December, Ava followed Frank to New York, where he was to be a guest on a radio program. They were given a joint birthday party by Jack Entratter, who ran the Copacabana and was negotiating to bring Frank to the club for a long-running gig. In New York they did their best not to provide any revealing photos, but the press caught sight of them together at a Broadway opening. They were in fact sharing a bed in the Hampshire House suite of Columbia Records exec Manie Sachs, Frank’s close associate at the label.

  Now Ava was entering into Frank’s professional world, mixing with the cronies and hangers-on as well as the more serious support group that had helped to make possible his spectacular career. There was, most important, George Evans, a devoted and cunning personal publicist who had orchestrated Sinatra’s war-years climb to the pinnacle of showbiz success. Evans was the man who had famously seeded the Paramount Theater with bobby-soxers paid to scream and faint, causing by example a legendary riot of unhinged swooning in the theater and miles of subsequent press attention. Evans had been there at each new level of success, smoothing the path, helping to mold Sinatra’s public image—modest, demure, family man, notwithstanding the erotic effect of his singing—and he and his team were the people who ran interference on Frank’s many fuckups, picking up the pieces when the notoriously volatile and impulsive entertainer did something—again and again—to risk public disapproval and professional suicide, from drunken brawls to vicious feuds with reporters and columnists (he had notoriously given a beat down to one by the name of Lee Mortimer), from unsavory acquaintance with figures from the world of organized crime to sexual affairs. From the beginning, Sinatra’s obsessive pursuit of women other than his wife had been Evans’s number one concern, behavior that, if exposed, Evans believed would have a devastating effect on the man’s public image as husband and father, the earnest milquetoast of those MGM musicals and humble host on the radio.

  It did not take Ava long to realize the antagonism directed at her by Evans and some of the others who suckled at the Sinatra teat. There were awkward glances and whispered asides that provoked an incipient paranoia, which a few drinks always made worse. There was nothing she hated more than people talking behind her back, she would say. She had had the days when people had mocked her and put her down, and she was not about to take any of that shit anymore, and certainly not from Frank’s flunkies. She saw Frank’s fierce reaction to disrespect and she made it her own. When Evans on one occasion pointedly ignored her and asked Frank to excuse himself for a few private words, Ava abruptly grabbed her coat and stormed off, disappearing completely for days.

  “What do you got to be like that for?” Frank would say when he had tracked her down.

  “Why do you let that jerk tell you what to do? Is he in charge or are you in charge? Maybe I should go out with him if he’s so fucking special.”

  “He does what’s good for me…what I tell him to do.”

  “Didn’t look that way to me, baby.”

  Frank would be caught short: What the fuck? No woman had ever behaved like that toward him. She could go from affection to fury in an instant, and when she wanted to get at him she knew at once the buttons to push. Sometimes he thought
she could read his mind, get right inside his secret thoughts or fears like a witch. Ava seemed to intuit that Evans had been behind the boyish, shy little titmouse image Sinatra had long projected in the movies and on Your Hit Parade, and she needled him, made jokes about it. Frank would snarl back, “Oh, quit your bullshit.” But having her put things like that into words would unnerve him. In no time at all George Evans, his loyal and incalculably valuable associate, became a demeaning presence, an obstacle in the way of Ava’s respect. Evans, meanwhile, sensing that a feud was on, unmindfully charged up his rhetoric against her. He had seen the bimbos come before, and he had shooed them away before, and he believed he could do the same with this one, as if Ava were just another pliable, easygoing Marilyn Maxwell or one of the other gone- tomorrow “broads.” Ava was trouble, he told Frank, and there were too many other problems in his career just now to risk making a mess that Evans couldn’t promise to be able to clean up; why didn’t he get some sense and go back to Nancy and cool off for a while. Sinatra listened, he looked the publicist up and down; then he looked Ava Gardner up and down.

  George Evans was history.

  The problem with Nancy Sinatra proved less easy to resolve. Ava and Frank had begun to talk about marriage. Frank wanted it, Ava was willing, but what to do about Nancy? In January, at Ava’s urging, Frank had made a dramatic show of removing all of his belongings from the family house on Carolwood Drive. Still, his wife insisted it was a temporary situation, and when Frank had gotten over his latest infatuation he would be back. Ava cursed her. “She’s pathetic,” she said. “Why would any woman want to hold a man who doesn’t want her?”

  With a mounting set of debts and tax liens added to his already extravagant spending habits, plus the waning of his popularity in other venues, Sinatra was now being forced to return to concert and club performing, something he had done rarely in the past several years, and then only with a few high-profile engagements. For the last week of January he was booked for a week as the inaugural act at the Shamrock Hotel, a new luxury lodging in Houston, Texas. The opening had to be postponed several days when Sinatra learned, en route to Texas, that George Evans, at forty- eight, had dropped dead of a coronary. Friends would recall Sinatra’s grave concern that his recent harsh words and firing of his old associate had in some way contributed to the unexpected tragedy. Ava had heard about the death from one of Frank’s inner circle, but Frank himself would not speak of Evans to her, ever. She decided on impulse to fly to Houston and surprise him at the Shamrock gig—to comfort him and perhaps to remind him that he had made the right decision in choosing her over his publicist.

  She arrived late for his performance, the house lights down, but even in the dark she caught every eye and provoked a stir of excited whispers across the entire room. When he saw her Sinatra beamed as if he had been hit with a hot red spotlight. If the audience wondered about a possible relationship between the two stars, Sinatra did little to disconnect the dots, compulsively directing each song directly to Ava as if everyone else in the room had gone home.

  Houston’s mayor, Oscar Holcombe, hosted a dinner for Frank and guests at Vincent’s Sorrento restaurant in town. Happy to get the publicity, the restaurant’s owner, Tony Vallone, had okayed a photographer from the Houston Post to approach the mayor’s table.

  “Mind if I take a shot of you folks eating your spaghetti?” the photographer said, bringing the viewfinder to his eye.

  Some of the guests were already lifting their heads and wineglasses and smiling for the camera as Sinatra said, “No pictures, with or without spaghetti.”

  Accounts differ: The photographer didn’t move away fast enough and Sinatra growled, “Beat it, you bum,” leaping out of his chair to chase him off, or the photographer snapped a flash shot anyway and Frank did the leap bit and grabbed for the camera. Ava screamed, “Frank, stop it!” then turned away in anger or embarrassment. Vallone moved in quickly to break it up and rushed the newspaper man out of harm’s way, which was more than he could do for Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. An account of the incident appeared in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times.

  As a result, Nancy Sinatra changed the locks on the house. The public humiliation of seeing her husband’s affair all but confirmed for the whole country became too much. She sought a lawyer. For Mrs. Sinatra, too, the loss of George Evans had proved significant; in the past he had always been on hand to mollify her with a bullshit alibi for her husband’s philandering, and now he was no longer there to tell her that Ava would go away or that a press release would straighten out the facts for her and the world, explain how Miss Gardner had in fact been in Houston merely to visit her dying aunt.

  On Valentine’s Day, 1950, Nancy announced her intentions, bared her feelings for public consumption: “My married life with Frank has become most unhappy and almost unbearable. We have therefore separated. I have requested my attorney to attempt to work out a property settlement, but I do not contemplate divorce proceedings in the foreseeable future.”

  Now, Ava would remember, the shit hit the fan.

  Though both had been fully aware that the potential for scandal was hanging over their affair while Frank remained famously married with children, neither had any premonition of how big the negative reaction would become. A conflagration was about to engulf them. The antagonism came from many and diverse sources, various constituencies, agendas, and vendettas. There were all of the minimally sophisticated movie-magazine-reading citizens who had invested too much faith in the idealized image of Frankie as smiling, humble family man, as well as in the murkier persona of Ava as femme fatale. There was the heartland public that did not take tales of adultery at all lightly those who shared the Sinatras’ Roman Catholic background expressing particular offense (nuns at some Catholic schools supposedly asked the students to pray for Mrs. Sinatra); there were the wives from the same heartland stirred to outrage by Frank’s and his jezebel’s humiliation of Nancy. There was the press, the right-wing columnists who had seethed over Sinatra’s “pinko” sympathies (Ava’s similar politics had gone largely unnoticed), and all those other newsmen who despised Sinatra for his physical and verbal attacks on their brethren in the corps, only too happy to have a chance to strike back. And perhaps goading it all there was the climate of the times, an era of angry moralizing and witch hunts and blacklists: In the same period Ingrid Bergman’s adulterous affair and the controversial politics of various film people had gotten them banned from working in Hollywood. Fearful, hypocritically pious, and vindictive impulses were everywhere. For Ava and Frank it was as though they had stepped into a fire, bad enough in itself, and it had brought forth an army of pyromaniacs all toting five- gallon cans of gasoline.

  Both were flooded with correspondence from an outraged citizenry. Angry letters by the hundreds were also received by Metro, Columbia Records, radio stations, and every movie magazine and Hollywood columnist. One of the singer’s fan clubs reportedly shipped a package addressed to “Frankie Not-So-Hot-Tra,” enclosing a stack of his old records, broken. Many of the missives sent directly to Ava began with such informal salutations as “Dear Bitch.” One reproving letter Sinatra received came from Willie Moretti, the syphilitic don of the New Jersey mob: “I am very much surprised what I have been reading in the newspapers between you and your darling wife.” (It was probably the last time the two would correspond, since, a bit later, Moretti met his end in a hail of bullets at Joe’s Elbow Room in Cliffside Park, New Jersey.)

  Columnist Hedda Hopper’s files filled with combustible letters from enraged readers.

  “I don’t know if I should condemn [Sinatra] or pity him. Any man who would put a wife of Nancy’s calibre in the position of competing with a tramp of Ava’s character—or should I say lack of it—is either a low- down skunk or is just so insane he should be locked up for his own good.”

  Pity was not considered an option in the case of Frank’s home- wrecking lover:

  “Ava is sure a snake in m
y book. ...”

  “She is probably getting ulcers and she should—hope they get perforated ...”

  “Ava has behaved as a call girl might—vulgar language but what else does her conduct look like.…She has had hundreds—do I exaggerate, boyfriends, and I think we can safely say she knows her way around men.”

  “You know there are millions and millions of women like me, wives and mothers who have had to make sacrifices for their husband and children, and when we see one of our own kind, Nancy Sinatra, receive such a deal because of a person like Ava it hurts us to the soul and makes us wish for the destruction of the cause. Maybe it will be very soon. Those hateful, malicious, plotting, scheming thoughts imprint themselves on the face and Ava is definitely showing it. She looks hard as nails.”

  “Though I don’t want to wish Ava harm, I do wish she’d fall down and break her neck. ...”

  “Maneuvering hussy…”

  “Why don’t they mind their own fucking business,” said Ava.

  “You tell ‘em, baby,” said Frank.

  Under the circumstances MGM was considerably relieved to know that their star would soon be leaving the country for several months to make a movie in England and Spain, a deal that had been arranged sometime before the scandal had broken. Ava was delighted, too, having for many years nurtured a dream of visiting Europe. Frank was not so delighted. He was stuck in New York. He asked her to tell the studio to forget it, forget Europe. She refused. His passion for her was burning white-hot. Hers for him, he often feared, was not as strong as that. He had to fight for her love every day—every hour it sometimes felt. He was not used to being without the upper hand. Ava was unpredictable, responsive only to her emotions, the feelings of now. Knowing she was going to be away for months on another continent, with Christ knew what distractions to come, left Sinatra in a state of chronic anxiety.