Ava Gardner

by Lee Server

  They sat and chatted in the humble, spotlessly clean, crucifix-laden Hoboken home, father Marty quiet and withdrawn as usual, Dolly holding court, dragging out albums of photos of baby Frank as grown-up Frank squirmed in comical discomfort. The two women—both soon relaxed enough to revert to their usual four-letter vocabularies—got along like gangbusters.

  Before they left New York, Frank had one more recording session to do for Mitch Miller, on May 10. He had been appearing at the Paramount and on his television show with a young TV personality of the moment, a huge-bosomed blonde named Dagmar (Joe Bushkin: “Frank used to introduce her and say, ‘Please nobody sit in the front row, if she takes a bow you’ll get crushed.’ “). Novelty records were doing well in the market, and Mitch or someone came up with a kooky thing he had Frank record with Dagmar and somebody imitating a horny canine. It was called “Mama Will Bark,” and for Sinatra it would forever symbolize the nadir, the ground zero of his professional decline, the greatest singer in modern history reduced to competing for high notes with a fucking dog.

  On May 29 Nancy’s team of attorneys released a statement: Mrs. Sinatra was divorcing her husband and would file suit sometime in the next two weeks. To celebrate Ava and Frank returned to California, spent the Memorial Day weekend together at the swank Sand and Sea Beach Club. It was a perfect three days, spoiled only slightly at the very end as newsmen caught them exiting the club, Ava trapped as she waited for Frank to come out with the car.

  Frank went back to New York to play a week at the Latin Quarter and do his final television show for the season. Ava began work on her new assignment, Lone Star, in which she was reteamed with her pal Clark Gable. A quasi-historical tale of the battle for the future of Texas, it would offer Gable as the cattle baron hero, Ava as the newspaper publisher heroine, and recent Oscar winner Broderick Crawford as the burly bad guy. Although expensively produced, the movie had an air of utter ordinariness to it—minus a few hundred extras and the star names it could have passed for another Republic Β Western. Gable had largely outlived his usefulness at Metro and was near the end of his long term there; a black-and-white horse opera was considered the best the studio could do for the King at this moment in their relationship, but it was once again a case of two steps forward and two steps back for Ava, following up her magnetic turn in Show Boat with a part that could have been taken by any utility leading lady. Ava loved working with Clark again but hated the front office for sticking her into such a piece of crap. Direction was by the skilled Vincent Sherman, who could not argue with Ava’s opinion of the project. “We both wondered how we had gotten stuck with making this thing,” Vincent Sherman recalled. “It was a terrible picture, and she didn’t really want to do it. But, you know, you need to get paid, and you’re under contract so there wasn’t much choice. She was a lovely gal, and I wish we could have made a better picture together because I thought she was just great.”

  A great deal of drinking went on. Without the Old Testament presence of Louis Mayer inflicting discipline anymore, people tended to bend the rules more openly. Gable and Ava were tippling, and Broderick Crawford was often in an alcoholic stupor while filming. Murray Garrett, a syndicated photographer who spent a day on the set taking pictures, recalled, “We were outside on the back lot and I was standing near the camera and Ava was sitting in a camp chair, and we were watching them shoot this big scene with all these extras and horses, and it was Gable confronting Crawford on horseback, and Crawford wants to take over the town, and Gable shouts some lines about they’ve got to protect the citizens or something. Gable says, ‘What are we going to do about the people?’ and Brod Crawford was out of it, just couldn’t remember his line, didn’t know what to say, and without breaking character he screams, ‘Fuck the people Γ And he rides away on his horse. I was standing near Ava and she just fell on her ass, screaming with laughter. Then everybody did. And Vince Sherman finally says, Oh, shit, let’s break for lunch.’ “

  When they were back in California together for the summer, the couple divided their time between a rented house at the Palisades and Frank’s place in Palm Springs. The heat had come off a bit in terms of the moralizing editorials and public outrage, but the press interest was as large as ever—now they were the reigning romantic couple of Hollywood, the two passionate stars whose love for each other was so great that they had risked career suicide. The press fed on them, said Ava, “like bees on a hon- eypot.” Ignore it, friends advised, don’t let it get to you. Not as easy as you think, Ava would tell them, “when you practically can’t go to the bathroom without finding yourself on page one.”

  In August they decided to get away for what they thought would be a secret holiday in Mexico. But word of the trip leaked out, and the press of two nations went on high alert—there was suspicion that the couple might be going there for a quickie divorce and marriage. Reporters caught up with them at the Los Angeles airport. There was a squabble, angry words. Somebody said, “You shouldn’t act that way, Frankie. The press made you what you are!”

  Sinatra growled, “The press didn’t make me, it was my singing! You miserable crumbs!”

  Observers saw the couple holding hands on the flight, kissing and cooing most of the way to Mexico. Frank was attentive, adoring. On a stopover in El Paso he fought with the airline officials to let him enter the airport and buy some sandwiches: Ava didn’t like the food they served on the plane. In Mexico City they took a pair of adjoining rooms at the Hotel del Prado and locked the doors, had all their meals sent up, and did not come out until they left the city for Acapulco.

  In the Pacific resort they hired as guide and bodyguard Raul “Chupetas” Garcia, an Acapulco legend, the leader and champion of the Quebrada cliff divers. “Ava was so beautiful and so much fun,” Garcia remembered, in Acapulco fifty-two years later. “I take them everywhere here. I take them swimming, to see everything. I take good care of Frank and Ava. They swim, they drink cocktails. They come to see me dive. They go with Teddy Stauffer and Hedy Lamarr at La Perla.” Stauffer, the German bandleader-turned-gigolo-turned-beachcomber, now an Acapulco entrepreneur was married to onetime MGM star Lamarr, who had been on the train that had taken Ava to California in the summer of 1941. “Hedy was beautiful lady. And Ava was more beautiful lady! To see them both faces together—ah, muy guapa Fantastic!

  “Frank and Ava they are so much in love when they come here. But they have such problem with the Mexican photographers. They don’t want to let them be happy. We go to the hotels, to nightclubs, they don’t never want to let them be free. They bother them all the time.”

  The papers would report that in one encounter with an unruly shutter- bug, Sinatra/Gardner’s bodyguard threatened to execute the man with his revolver unless he handed over the film in his camera. Garcia, a half century later, could recall no such gunplay but, yes, it was verdad that there were times when one was reduced to physical violence in dealing with such persons. “I have to fight these bums. I hit one good. I guarantee you. He comes with the camera and I am with Sinatra and Ava, and this kid he takes pictures more times. He say to Sinatra, try to stop him, ‘Come on, come on, what you want to do?’ And so I grabbed him. Boom! That’s it. Sinatra say he not want to come back to Acapulco, and I tell him I will talk to the president of Mexico and stop this problem with the photographers.”

  For their return to the States, Sinatra was determined not to fly back on a commercial flight so that they could avoid public scrutiny and the press. A Mexican acquaintance came to the rescue, wealthy sportsman Jorge Pasquel loaning them his private airplane, El Fantasma, a converted U.S. Air Force bomber. But then at the LA airport there was a delay finding the health inspector, and it took so long to get their mountain of luggage through customs that the press caught up with them anyway.

  “We got a tip that they were landing at a remote part of the airport and in a Mexican military plane” recalled reporter and columnist James Bacon. “I got down there, and somebody from the LA Times and a cameraman from
KTTV—there were about five or six of us. And we were all there when Frank and Ava ran over and got in the car. And Frank was mad right away, I guess, because it was a private flight, and he didn’t expect anyone would find out about it. KTTV had a crippled cameraman who was shining the camera light into his face, Frank said. And Frank got the car going and stepped on the gas. And the wheels, I guess, were turned toward us before, you know—before he could straighten them out.”

  The black Cadillac careened off across the field and even onto the runway before turning noisily in the direction of the exit gate. Waiting there was another newspaper guy, a photographer named William Eccles. Ec- cles was poised to snap a picture as the car approached, but then Sinatra swerved directly at him, so Eccles said, the car bumper grazing the man’s legs, Sinatra screaming out the open window, “Next time I’ll kill you!”

  It had been nearly three months since attorneys had announced Nancy Sinatra’s intention to divorce her husband, and she had not filed suit. Ava began to believe that the woman had been playing with them and still had no intention of letting Frank go. Ava gave him an ultimatum: They had to get this settled right away or maybe they just needed to give it up for good, it wasn’t meant to be. Frank pleaded with Nancy, then made a new plan. He was booked to work that summer at the Riverside in Reno and right after that the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. He would establish a six-week residence in Nevada, file for divorce himself, and hope for the best.

  Ava came to stay with him at Lake Tahoe for the Labor Day weekend.

  With Hank Sanicola and his wife, Paula, they shared a chalet at the Cal- Neva resort. Frank sported a new mustache, something he thought might offset the drawn, lined look of him with all the weight he had lost. Ava told him it looked terrible (“pimplike,” writer Pete Hamill called it). They spent three long days and nights of booze, boating, gambling, more booze. It was the usual roller coaster, as the hours went on and the bottles got emptier, the tongues got looser, old grievances stirred up. Somehow the subject of Mario Cabre was introduced, and somehow Ava, after much badgering and assurances that it did not matter if she confessed, admitted to Frank that she had slept with the bullfighter. Sinatra did not take the revelation well after all. (“He never forgave me,” said Ava. “Ever.”) The arguing simmered and burned and never really stopped. At some point things took an ugly turn, certain words were spoken, Ava took furious exception, and next thing she was gone, roaring across the Nevada highlands to Los Angeles, sipping bourbon to keep off the chill. She had arrived home with the sun just coming up and the telephone ringing. It was Sanicola in Tahoe breathlessly telling her that Frank had been so upset he’d taken an overdose of phénobarbital, and they were all terrified. “Oh, God, Ava, you gotta come back right away, I don’t know what’s gonna happen!”

  Exasperated and skeptical (remembering Frank’s fake-out at the Hampshire House the year before) and yet frantic and knowing her man’s increasingly unstable state of mind, Ava did the only thing she could do and headed for the airport. By midday she arrived back at the Cal-Neva and reached the chalet to find a roomful of agitated and exhausted people. It had turned out to be not so bad as they feared after all, said Sanicola. Frank hadn’t taken quite enough pills to do any harm, didn’t even need the doc’s stomach pump.

  “Our guy’s okay.”

  She went into the bedroom and found him the best-rested person in the chalet.

  And so it went.

  She stayed with him for his entire engagement in Las Vegas. It was his first time working in the town that he would in the years ahead help make a world capital of entertainment, the place that would make him its holy, eternal father. For now it was enough to get a paycheck and humbly sing his songs to the crowd of distracted dice players and shit-kicking cowboys. Ava was pleased to be there, sitting in the audience every night in the Painted Desert Room and cheering him on, filled with pride in his talent, with love for the man.

  But nothing could stop their endless squabbling. Friends, visitors, would be with them in the evening, woefully expectant, knowing the blowup would inevitably come, just not knowing when or what would set it off this time. Axel Stordahl, Frank’s arranger and bandleader, remembered sitting at a table at the Desert Inn that September with Frank and Ava and Stordahl’s wife, singer June Hutton. “Ava was chatting away happily. And then suddenly she went moody. She said, ‘Let’s get out of this trap.’ She thought Frank was looking at a girl in the audience a little longer than necessary. They ended up throwing books and lamps at each other after the show, and Frank walked out in the middle of the night.”

  There was nothing apparently too trivial to stir up their jealousy and resentments. Singer Rosemary Clooney was working up the Strip at the Thunderbird during Frank’s Desert Inn engagement and recalled how Ava would drop by for part of her show. (“She was fresh and funny, so beautiful it hurt your eyes to look at her.”) Clooney sang Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” which Ava told her was a song she loved. “Every time I get a chance, I’m going to come down here and listen to you sing it, even though the old man doesn’t like it much.”

  Clooney couldn’t understand what Sinatra had against the Gershwin classic, till she recalled that Artie Shaw had once had a big hit with it. “Although she’d been divorced for several years, Frank was still gripped by jealousy.”

  “I’m possessive and jealous and so is Frank,” Ava would say. “He has a temper that bursts into flames while mine burns inside for hours.” And vice versa, she might have added, ad infinitum.

  Nancy Sinatra fought the Nevada divorce. But it was an empty, defeated gesture—in the end it became only about money, not about holding on to something she now realized no longer existed. When certain new or promised payments were made, the split was settled, done.

  Two days after the divorce became final on October 30, Ava and Frank took the train from Penn Station in New York to Philadelphia.

  Manie Sachs, Frank’s abiding friend and guru, formerly of Columbia Records, hailed from Philadephia and had offered to host the wedding in a friend’s suburban mansion. At City Hall they filled out a marriage application in the chambers of Judge Charles Klein, handed over blood-test certificates and copies of their divorce papers. The plan was to get married five days later, plenty of time, as it turned out, for arguments, screaming, threats, jealous outbursts, disappearances, and calling off the whole thing, twice.

  The worst of these threats to the happy event occurred the night before they were to leave for Pennsylvania. Amid the crowd of wedding guests gathering in the Hampshire House suite, a bellhop arrived with a letter for Ava. It contained a lurid confession from a woman who identified herself as Frank’s mistress, a position she claimed to retain to the present moment. Determined not to have her story misinterpreted or dismissed as phony, the woman detailed physical characteristics and particular, unusual sexual proclivities of Sinatra’s that could not have been learned about him in the pages of Modern Screen. There were dates and locations of their liaisons.…Ava knew it had to be true (and never changed her mind, but later she would conclude that Howard Hughes was involved in all this, arranging for Frank’s bimbo to tell her tale at just that moment). Reeling and afraid she was going to vomit, she told Bappie to announce that the wedding was off, and rushed away, locking herself in her bedroom. The hubbub in the outer room turned into chaos. In shifts people came in to reason with her, none except Bappie aware of the reason for the latest crisis. In the end, as she did again and again—as Sinatra did too—she put the hurt aside, accepted a fresh new scar on their relationship, and went ahead and fulfilled what was clearly meant to be her and Frank’s destiny.

  On November 7, 1951, on a rainy midweek morning, they came out of the Hampshire House, got into a chauffeured black Cadillac limousine, and headed for Pennsylvania. A caterer had leaked the original location for the wedding and so a last-minute switch had been made to the Germantown home of Manie Sachs’s dress-manufacturer brother, Lester. Somebody leaked this news,
too. When the limo pulled up to the Sachs house a cluster of newsmen and photographers was already waiting.

  “How did you creeps know where we were?” Sinatra growled as Ava rushed inside. “I don’t want no circus. I swear, I’ll knock any guy on his can who tries to get in.”

  Later somebody in the crowd sent a note inside, a formal request for a picture. Sinatra came storming out.

  “Who sent this? Who sent this? Who? You? You? You’re not getting any pictures, understand? You’ll get shots from our photographer when he gets around to it.”

  “I’d like to take my own picture,” said one man with a camera. “I’ll betcha fifty dollars you don’t,” said Sinatra. “And another fifty

  dollars that if you even point your camera at me, I’ll knock you on your ear.”

  Exit, slammed door, back to the happy occasion.

  She wore a gown by Howard Greer, mauve-toned marquisette with a strapless top of pink taffeta. Twenty guests were there, Bappie as Ava’s only family in attendance (just as she had been at her sister’s previous two weddings), Axel Stordahl as best man, his wife, June, the matron of honor, Manie Sachs giving the bride away, escorting her downstairs as arranger Dick Jones banged out The Wedding March on an untuned piano. Judge Joseph Sloane presided over the brief ceremony. Frank and Ava kissed. Sinatra happily reached out to shake the judge’s hand, saying, “Well, we finally made it.” Ava rushed over to where Dolly Sinatra was standing and hugged her new mother-in-law. Dolly burst into tears.

  The guests gathered around the couple and toasted them with champagne. Ava took a knife to the seven-tiered white-frosted wedding cake and messily fed a slice to her husband.

  Outside in the rain, in their rumpled overcoats and wet hats, the crowd of reporters and photographers stood in glum witness to the unseen activities within the house, like a Greek chorus occasionally erupting with commentary: