by James Kaplan
Among the deceased’s possessions was a gold Cartier cigarette case, engraved TO RAGS FROM RICHES.
Sinatra sang at the funeral with tears in his eyes, as much for himself as for his friend: the absolute injustice and indignity of it all made him furious. With few exceptions after that, Frank resolutely avoided hospitals and funerals. Not only were illness and death unpleasant to witness, but they might also be contagious.1
You get word before the show has started
That your favorite uncle died at dawn.
—Irving Berlin, “There’s No Business Like Show Business”
Two days later, Frank was back in the CBS studio, recording four numbers, including “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” His rendition is game enough, but overall—quite understandably—shockingly dispirited: it sounds as though Stordahl’s sprightly thirty-five-piece orchestra, plus the male chorus, is carrying all 127 pounds of the singer.
That was Thursday. On Monday morning, Frank was on the set at Culver City, but he was just phoning it in. It wasn’t just the thought of Rags. Phil Silvers was calling every few hours, sounding desperate. Several weeks before, the comic had snagged a plum booking: the Copacabana, his first time. The problem was that the Copa had signed Silvers and Rags Ragland as a team.
Silvers telephoned Jules Podell the day after Rags’s death to explain that he couldn’t possibly make the booking, and—not entirely to the comic’s surprise—Podell informed him, in terms both blunt and obscene, that Silvers would go on solo or he could forget about the Copacabana forever.
Playing the Copa was a career maker; banishment could have the opposite effect. But Silvers wasn’t a solo. He was a top banana, and a top banana needed a stooge. Could Frank help him out? Phil didn’t have to mention the beautiful music the two of them had made together playing exactly those roles on last year’s USO tour—the tour that, thanks largely to Phil, had rescued Frank’s reputation among thousands of GIs. On the other hand, you couldn’t call in favors with Sinatra. When the comic pleaded, again and again, for the singer to step into the breach, Frank was glum. He hated being put on the spot; he hated not being able to be magnanimous. “I’d come in, but I can’t leave the picture,” he said.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t left it plenty of times already, but that was just the problem. It was one thing to displease Dickie Whorf and Jimmy Durante and Kathryn Grayson; it was something else to displease L. B. Mayer. Now that Sinatra was back on the Coast, the Chief had called him in to his office, to discuss many things, including Frank’s absences.
Going to Mayer’s office was like being summoned by the principal, and then some. It could mean a lecture on any subject at all. First Frank had to face the boss’s assistant Ida Koverman, a former secretary to Herbert Hoover and a formidable presence in her own right. Ida would welcome Sinatra briskly, send him into an antechamber, and close the door behind him. There was a moment of claustrophobic panic—then Ida pushed a button that opened the door to Mayer’s office, revealing a long, long room, the little mogul behind his huge desk at the other end. The desk was on a platform, so that the Chief loomed above all visitors: from his side of the desk, Frank could see LB’s feet, not quite reaching the ground.
His tone with Frank this time was warm and fatherly. But the message was clear: behave. We are a family. Families pull together.
Then Labor Day weekend came. The cast and crew were given both Monday and Tuesday off for the holiday. Frank paced, then decided.
MGM production memo for Wednesday, September 4, 1946:
Sinatra telephoned in to say he was ill but we were later informed that he had left for New York without permission.
Phil Silvers played the Copa dinner show solo on Thursday the fifth. He told jokes, made fun of the waiters, sang a few songs; the clink of tableware and the buzz of conversation were louder than the laughs. A waiter dropped a tray in the middle of a song. Silvers exited to polite applause. He sat in his dressing room, his bald dome still glistening with flop sweat. Like many comics, he was a gloomy, fearful man. This was what it came down to, he thought. You blew off the gig and got banned, or you just plain blew it and didn’t get asked back.
Then there was a bustle outside, and the door popped open. It was Frank, grinning like a cat with a mouthful of canaries.
They sprang into action for the 10:00 p.m. show. Sinatra sat, as unobtrusively as possible, at a ringside table. Silvers marched out, reenergized, to the first few bars of “Fine and Dandy” and beamed at the audience.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the world-famous Copacabana,” he said. “And speaking of famous—turn on the house lights a minute, will ya? If there’s anybody here tonight who’s famous, I want to introduce them.”
Up came the lights, the crowd clamoring at the sight of Sinatra. Silvers stared at the singer without comment. “Okay, turn down the lights,” the comic said.
Full of confidence, he started his routine. Then he touched his tie and Frank rose and joined him. The place went nuts, the audience jumping to its feet. Silvers and Sinatra did the USO routine all over again: singing lessons for Frank, Phil pinching Sinatra’s cheek, even a sharp slap or two when the stupid pupil just couldn’t get it right.
The crowd ate it up. They stood again when Sinatra sat back down without bowing, yielding the floor to Silvers. At the end, Phil beckoned him back, and they took their bows together. Then the comic administered a killer.
“May I take a bow for Rags?” he said.
The place went dead quiet. Even Podell teared up. Sinatra stared at the floor. Fortunately, a Variety reporter was there to witness the whole thing. SINATRA’S STOOGERY FOR PHIL SILVERS NY NITERY PREEM AN INSPIRED EVENT, the headline read the next morning. The accompanying story said, “That appreciative gesture by Sinatra understandably sets him in a niche all his own in the big, sentimental heart of show business.”
The reaction of the sentimental but businesslike Louis B. Mayer is unrecorded.
On Tuesday the tenth, Sinatra was back in L.A., wrung out by the trip. Whorf was doing his best to shoot the movie around him, but at a certain point the director could do nothing without his star. It turned out Whorf would have to wait a while longer. The studio’s production memo for that day reads:
Bobby Burns [now Sinatra’s manager—another theft from Dorsey] phoned 9/10 and said Sinatra arrived from New York that morning, but was tired and would not report, that he would broadcast [his radio show] on Wednesday and report on Thursday.
A couple of days later even the production memos were beginning to sound exasperated:
Called Sinatra for rehearsal but didn’t report. He had an appointment to rehearse with [the choreographer] Jack Donohue at 10:30 a.m. but didn’t come in. Publicity Department also had made appointment with him to shoot magazine cover still. He finally arrived on lot at 2:20 p.m., shot the poster still, and then went to Stage 10 and ran through number once with Mr. Donohue. Sinatra said it was a “cinch,” said he had an appointment and had to leave, which he did, without further rehearsing, at 2:45 p.m.
On the twenty-third, a Monday, Sinatra could barely pull himself out of bed:
Sinatra only worked part of day. He worked from 11:22 a.m. to 12:05, when dismissed for lunch. He was called back to rehearse at 1:05, but he did not report.
It wasn’t just that he was ambivalent about filmmaking: there was trouble at home. The ever-present low-level hostilities between Frank and Nancy had escalated into open warfare. It didn’t matter how much he tried to justify that nightclub picture of him and Lana—yes, they worked on the same lot; yes, Mayer liked his valuable properties to be seen together, et cetera, et cetera. But there was no getting around that giddy look on his face, his tight clasp of her hand. They looked like two honeymooners. In apparent acknowledgment of her guilt, Turner had curtailed her friendly visits to Nancy.
Nancy had other complaints. Frank had just bought Dolly and Marty a new house in Weehawken for $22,000. Out of pocket, cas
h, and without consulting Nancy, who tried hard to control the family purse strings. Furious, Nancy opened her doors, wide, to her own family. At any given hour of the day, three generations of Barbatos were present, nieces and nephews draped all over the place; aunts, uncles, and cousins chatting in the kitchen. Frank, who had done his best to look as though he lived there, now no longer saw the need. He and his wife weren’t speaking: What was the point?
On Saturday night, October 5, he went to a party hosted by Sonja Henie: Lana was there. She and Frank danced together “many times,” a subsequent newspaper account reported. He failed to go home that night.
The next day he phoned Nancy and told her he wanted a separation. A divorce? she asked.
He wanted his freedom, he told her. He didn’t want a divorce. He was going to find an apartment. She slammed down the phone.
A half hour later, having done her best to compose herself, she called Evans at home. Evans’s wife answered, then handed the telephone to her husband. The moment Nancy heard George’s voice, she broke down sobbing.
As soon as he understood that the inevitable had finally happened, the publicist went into crisis mode. He could sit on the story for a little while, but just a little while. If he didn’t shape the narrative, it would spill out raw or exaggerated into public. First, however, Evans attempted a desperation play: he called Frank and tried to talk some sense into him.
Frank, of course, wasn’t having any. He had made up his mind.
So the press would have to be informed. The timing couldn’t have been worse: the papers would be all over the story first thing Monday morning. Evans phoned the gatekeepers, Lolly Parsons and Hedda Hopper, and read them both the same script. “It’s just a family squabble,” he said. “The case of a Hollywood career, plus a man-and-wife fight. There’s no talk of divorce. I think they’ll make up in a few days. Frankie has a few days off so he’s gone to a desert resort for a little privacy. This is the first public battle they’ve ever had, and I don’t think it’s serious. He will be back in three days to work on his current movie.”
MGM production memo for Monday, October 7:
He did not report. He was called to rehearse but because Durante was not available, Sinatra said he would not come in as he didn’t see any point in rehearsing by himself. Mr. Donohue felt that he could have used Sinatra’s services to good advantage, but Sinatra said he would not be in.
The desert resort was Palm Springs.
For centuries desert was all it was, home to the Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla Indian tribe, a scattering of adobe buildings on the edge of the southern Mojave, in a bone-dry, sun-shattered valley surrounded by dead stony mountains. The springs themselves were hot—as though more heat were needed in the godforsaken place—and the palms around them not plentiful, but the waters were reputed to have healing properties. Crazy white people trickled out from the city looking for relief from their big-city ailments, and then the movie people began to come.
It was an ideal retreat from Hollywood: just 120 miles away, but in those days of two-lane blacktop, the drive took at least three hours. Tijuana was fun for whoring and horse racing; the Springs was for lying low, for basking like a lizard on a rock in the healing desert sun. Tan was good in those days. The big hotels, the Desert Inn and El Mirador, opened not long after World War I; the little resorts, with names like Wonder Palms and Lone Palm, cropped up in the 1920s and 1930s: clusters of Mission-style bungalows around crystalline blue pools, in the shade of the signature trees. Labor was cheap. People wouldn’t bother you, the staffs were discreet, agents and publicists and columnists and spouses were far away, at the other end of a long-distance phone line.
Jimmy Van Heusen discovered the Springs in 1940, when he flew his shiny-skinned Luscombe-Silvaire to Los Angeles to go to work at Paramount, writing songs with Johnny Burke for Bing Crosby. Crossing the southwest desert as he entered California, he decided he’d better fuel up for his final approach—he wasn’t quite sure where the Van Nuys airport was. He touched down at a primitive airstrip in the midst of the sand.
In the late summer of 1940 the Palm Springs airport was nothing but a couple of adobe huts and a few fuel drums, and the incredible heat shimmered off the tarmac, yet the minute Van Heusen stepped out of his plane, he was happy. He had suffered all his life from sinus trouble; suddenly he could really breathe. He fell in love with the desert and told all his friends, including Sinatra.
The place grew fashionable, as a secret shared among the rich and well-known. Fancy restaurants were a necessity, so a few opened up: the Palm House, the Doll House, Trav Rogers’s Mink and Manure Club. You could get a superb steak for $2.50 or a lobster flown in on ice from Maine for $3. Then came the nightclubs. Even when you were lying low, entertainment was required. The first, and for a long time the best, was called Chi Chi. Dining, dancing, and big-time entertainment in the Starlite Room.
Frank thought the Springs was the perfect place to hide out: Lana had a little place down there. But Frank craved action and company, and so they went to Chi Chi.
During one fox-trot, Frank felt a tap on the shoulder. He turned and saw Howard Hughes, recently recovered from a near-fatal plane crash, dancing with his date, Ava Gardner, soon to divorce Artie Shaw. Sinatra and Hughes, who knew of each other only through their celebrity, nodded politely; Lana and Ava squealed and hugged. Until very recently Gardner had been a B player at Metro, best known for having been married to Mickey Rooney and Shaw. But in August, she’d finally had a breakthrough role, starring opposite Burt Lancaster in an adaptation of a Hemingway story called The Killers. The part put Ava on the map, and led to a friendship with Lana, who was nothing if not status conscious.
The two had much in common (besides very brief marriages to Artie Shaw), including hardscrabble backgrounds and fathers who’d died young. And an earthy sense of humor. They liked to drink cocktails and giggle together. Ava liked sex a good deal, as young ladies then, even young ladies who acted in the movies, were not supposed to. Lana, on the other hand, was a materialist. She quickly turned clinical while under the influence, comparing her lovers’ respective endowments with the cold eye of a practiced anatomist.
Much information was conveyed in the mischievous glances the two actresses now exchanged.
Smiling obliviously, Hughes suggested to Sinatra that the two couples change partners. Lana’s look suggested that Ava would be getting the better part of the bargain. Then Ava found herself in Frank’s arms. The band struck up “Dancing in the Dark.”
She had been drinking steadily over the course of the night—Hughes bored her—and she was in a saucy mood. Liquor, and success, and the desert emboldened her: she was considerably less demure than the young woman Frank had encountered before.
She looked straight into his eyes: she didn’t usually dance with married men. He liked the challenge, and he liked the way she felt in his arms. In her heels she was as tall as he, maybe slightly taller, lean but curvy, fleshy in just the right places.
Except when she was married to them? The plural was pointed.
She smiled, sideways—with one plural pronoun he’d won the exchange—and put her head on his shoulder.
How about that, he thought.
Then the song was over, and she was back in Hughes’s arms.
Frank and Lana were seen together, as they wanted to be. It was inevitable, a game of cat and mouse. He and Lana Turner had gone to Palm Springs and danced at Chi Chi, among other celebrities, and their presence had been duly noted and reported. Evans read about them within hours. As did Louis B. Mayer.
On Wednesday night, Frank was back in Hollywood to do his radio show, and Mayer was with him, to present Sinatra with an award from Modern Screen magazine as the Most Popular Star of 1946—along with a $10,000 bronze bust of the singer by the sculptor Jo Davidson. Before the mikes went on, however, the fatherly hand came down heavily on his shoulder.
Mayer glared at him. What was all this?
Frank shrugged. It w
as just a personal matter.
Mayer had to disagree. Where he and Lana were concerned, it was very much a professional matter. He must have Frank’s word that he would sort this out quickly.
Frank nodded.
Then the mikes went on.
“Let me welcome you to the MGM family,” Mayer told him. He didn’t have to emphasize the last word.
“I’m proud to be in that family, sir,” Sinatra said.
The studio chief gave him a look that would have done Benny Goodman proud.
The MGM conduct police went into overdrive, piling the pressure on Frank and especially on Lana, the more vulnerable of the pair. Turner’s morals clause, unlike Sinatra’s, was in full effect, and where Mayer was concerned, Lana Turner’s morals were always suspect. “The only thing you’re interested in,” the studio chief had once told her in an office meeting, “is this.” He pointed at his groin.
It would certainly have appeared that way. Turner was never a proponent of monogamy, serial or otherwise. Even as she was carrying on with Sinatra, she was also conducting a torrid affair with the also married Tyrone Power. Yet Turner appears not to have been a mere sex addict. In later, more contemplative years she wrote that sex itself had never been that interesting to her. What seems to have been much more compelling was company, and action, and drama. Turner was a deeply needy woman, in love with the idea of being a movie star. She was an actress playing herself, her daughter wrote in her memoir; she was unable to step out of character. Private life and public life were all of a piece.
The solemn injunctions of Louis B. Mayer held extraordinary power for her. And soon Lana was tearfully reading from a new script. “I am not in love with Frank, and he is not in love with me,” she told Louella Parsons. “I have never in my life broken up a home … I just can’t take these accusations.”