Frank

by James Kaplan

  At the construction site on Alejo Road, out in the desert at the edge of Palm Springs, the bulldozers and cement mixers ran double shifts, working all day and then at night under floodlights as the builders hurried toward the Christmas deadline. E. Stewart Williams had shown Frank Sinatra two very different sets of drawings: one was of the Georgian mansion Frank had requested, and the other depicted Williams’s far more modern concept, a low-lying concrete structure with tall picture windows and a shed roof. The young architect had literally held his breath as the singer scanned the drawings, a serious look on his tanned features. Sinatra’s domineering reputation had preceded him, yet Williams, trying to forge a career, knew that building Georgian in the desert—impractical as well as retrograde—would make him a laughingstock in the field. He would be seen as a servant rather than an artist. Frank nodded, frowning, as he inspected the modern design, then, suddenly looking interested, nodded some more.

  Williams exhaled.

  The house wasn’t quite a mansion—at forty-five hundred square feet, it was large but not gigantic, and there were only four bedrooms—but the rooms and the windows were big, and every window, as well as a sliding glass wall, looked out onto the swimming pool, which was shaped (Williams couldn’t help smiling at this inspired touch) like a grand piano. A breezeway over one end of the pool was designed to shed shadows that would resemble piano keys. Bright sun and sparkling light off the pool filled the living room: if shade was needed, the flick of a switch closed a $7,000 motorized curtain. In the distance stony Mount San Jacinto shimmered white in the fierce sun; in the foreground, two palm trees waved in the desert wind. The house, made pleasant by air-conditioning in the summer and fireplaces in the winter, would be a shelter from the desert around it. Frank would call the place Twin Palms.

  Twin Palms, Palm Springs. Architect E. Stewart Williams designed the desert retreat, complete with piano-shaped swimming pool, for his demanding client and his family; within weeks of its completion, Frank was courting Ava Gardner. (photo credit 21.2)

  22

  No one like her, before or since. “I just noticed the body,” said Sammy Cahn’s first wife. “It just moved like a willow. She was built beautifully. She was a gorgeous creature.” (photo credit 22.1)

  As his wife grew great with child for the third time, Sinatra found more and more reasons to be elsewhere. Pregnancy may be deemed sexy by some cultures in some eras, but in late-1940s America it was anything but. The women got fat and sick and peevish; the men took increasing notice of the unbelievably slim waistlines of the young women they passed. For Frank, the delectable bodies of the young women all around him proved increasingly irresistible.

  It was a time of challenge in general. A new American Federation of Musicians strike had begun on the first day of 1948: once again, there could be no recording with orchestras. The ban wouldn’t end until early December. In the interim, Sinatra would go into the recording studio exactly twice, laying down just three sides—two that would be released later with overdubbed orchestral backing, and one with a choir (“Nature Boy,” a version far inferior to the glorious one Nat Cole had recorded before the strike began).

  Sinatra was not spending much time in movie studios, either. The Kissing Bandit had wrapped, thank God (though Frank’s agony was to be prolonged: extra scenes had to be shot the following March); production on The Miracle of the Bells had finished at the end of September. He would start work on a new Metro musical with Gene Kelly, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, in July.

  In the meantime, he was largely idle. On Saturday nights came Your Hit Parade, with its occasional pleasures but mostly its tribulations: in January, he sprinted through a version of “Too Fat Polka” (“I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me”) so dispiriting that to listen to it is to risk bursting into tears. Worse was to come. He did a couple of guest spots on Jack Benny’s and Maurice Chevalier’s radio shows. But mainly, he did a lot of drinking and poker playing with the Varsity.

  Frank had officially moved out of his penthouse at the Sunset Tower apartments years before, but had held on to it—for the times he recorded late at night and had to be at the studio early the next morning; for business meetings; for other things. For a while, Axel and Sammy Cahn had roomed together in a suite a couple of floors below: now Sammy was married, but he still liked to stop by Frank’s place now and then for a drink, a few hands of cards, some laughs.

  One night, after some of each, Sammy and Frank were out on the terrace, looking down over the Sunset Strip. A violet evening, the little lights twinkling in the Hollywood hills. Sammy pointed, a little unsteadily, across the street. Did Frank know who lived down there?

  Frank just shook his head at him.

  “If you looked down from Frank’s terrace,” Cahn wrote in his autobiography, “you’d see, across the street, a series of little houses, one of them owned by Tom Kelly, a noted interior decorator; the occupant of that house was Ava Gardner.”

  When Sammy told him this, Frank shook his head again, this time in wonderment. For a moment, he stared fiercely into the twilight. Then he cupped his hands to his mouth. “Ava!” he yelled. The big voice carried far into the quiet evening. “Ava Gardner!”

  Sammy Cahn looked at his hero and grinned. Nobody like him. Now he cupped his hands to his mouth. “Can you hear me, Ava?” he called, in his high, hoarse tones. “We know you’re down there, Ava!”

  “Hello, Ava, hello!” Sinatra called. As if he were yelling down a wishing well.

  The two men looked at each other and began to giggle. Giggling turned to laughing. Laughing became hysteria. Soon they were both clutching their sides painfully and bellowing into the night. Down on the sidewalk, one or two passersby—in those days there weren’t many pedestrians on the Strip—stared up at the terrace.

  And then a miracle: in the little house nestled into the trees on the north side of Sunset—torn down many years ago and replaced by a railroad-car restaurant—a curtain was drawn, a window opened.

  Ava stuck her head out the window and looked up. She knew exactly who it was: the voice was unmistakable. She grinned, and waved back.

  Was it an accident that they ran into each other just a few days later, in front of her place? And then again, a few days after that, near Sunset Tower? Frank wasn’t much for walking, but suddenly there was something compelling about those stretches of sidewalk. The third time, they both spotted each other a half block away; both began laughing as they converged.

  He grinned as he said hello.

  Ava’s eyes searched his. Was he following her?

  He met her gaze boldly. If he were following her, he’d be behind her.

  She put a hand on her hip. Uh-huh.

  “Ava, let’s be friends. Why don’t we have drinks and dinner tonight?”

  “I looked at him,” she wrote in her autobiography.

  I damn well knew he was married, though the gossip columns always had him leaving Nancy for good, and married men were definitely not high on my hit parade. But he was handsome, with his thin, boyish face, the bright blue eyes, and this incredible grin. And he was so enthusiastic and invigorated, clearly pleased with life in general, himself in particular, and, at that moment, me.

  She accepted his invitation, and they went to Mocambo, just up the Strip. There were a lot of drinks. She had taken up the habit soon after she married the tyrannical Artie Shaw, to quell the feelings of intellectual inferiority he so easily aroused in her. This night there were different feelings to quell. In any case, alcohol, in quantity, made her forget her deep self-doubt, made her feel like a different person—glamorous, intelligent, desirable, a person worthy of the attentions of Frank Sinatra. She had always had a thing for musicians: Shaw, with his Svengali act, had taken advantage of that. But Sinatra was in a category all his own. He was, she’d felt from the first time she heard him, “one of the greatest singers of this century. He had a thing in his voice I’ve only heard in two other people—Judy Garland and Maria Callas
. A quality that makes me want to cry for happiness, like a beautiful sunset or a boys’ choir singing Christmas carols.”

  And now here she was, sitting with him. She leaned her head on her hand tipsily and looked sideways at him. He was telling a story, animatedly. She could barely make out the words. It didn’t matter. Could she be in love with this man? She shook her head, as if in wonderment at something he was saying, but really to herself: this wouldn’t do.

  Frank was not immune to guilt either, though alcohol and admiration could quickly make him feel that other rules applied in his case. He had told himself that with dozens of girls—but Ava was different. Marilyn Maxwell had been sweet and sincere and deliciously naughty; Lana was gorgeous and fiery but ultimately too self-protective and shallow: her deepest belief was in her own celebrity. This one stared at him—and stared at him and stared at him—and her green-gold eyes said that she knew all his secrets. The smile that curled one corner of those amazing lips confirmed it. And his deepest secret was this: she possessed him.

  After a long time they realized they were hungry, and they ate a little something. But—there were more drinks with dinner—mostly they devoured each other with their eyes. And laughed, when the tension became unbearable. He lit both their cigarettes with a gold lighter, then paid the check. He took her hand (she kept stealing glances at his hands; they were beautiful) and led her to his car.

  She resisted for a moment, then she didn’t.

  Just a little while.

  As drunk as she was—and her head seemed to be floating a vast distance over her feet—she swore her deepest oath to herself: she would not sleep with him. Somehow, whether he knew it or not, he was testing her, and she was testing herself. If she crossed this line, he would categorize her. If she crossed this line, she would be back in the bad place she had been with Artie, adrift and uncertain, a poor fatherless girl from nowhere, and nothing.

  They went someplace—she was never sure, later, just where. Not his place was all she knew. A beautiful apartment, someplace. With paintings, and big windows with a view of the city, and music—his—and a divine fragrance she couldn’t get out of her mind for days afterward. He took her hand and led her to the bedroom, and she stopped in the doorway. He gave her the gentlest pull, but this time she stood firm. So they sat on the couch in the living room and kissed. Kissed and kissed. She had never kissed like this before. Kissing him, she thought, was in a different universe from fucking almost anyone else.

  He reached around and began to unzip her dress. And though she loved her own body, and in most cases was out of her clothes in a second, at this moment she hesitated. She touched his arm.

  Francis.

  No one had ever called him this before.1 He moved his hand back, and they kissed some more. For a long time.

  He said her name, softly, after a while. Then he took her home.

  Neither of them slept that night. It would be months before they saw each other again.

  The house in the desert was finished on time and, thanks to the round-the-clock construction schedule, phenomenally over budget. Twin Palms wound up costing $150,000, a huge sum in 1948, and five times the original estimate. But it was finished, and it was beautiful, and now Frank and Nancy and the children had an incomparable weekend refuge. Palm Springs looked like no place else. There were a couple of paved streets; the rest was just sand and stones and palms and orange groves and blazing flowers and crystalline air—it all made you feel you’d landed on a different planet. Frank felt freer there; the lines on his forehead smoothed out. He’d bought an Army-surplus jeep for fun, and he drove the kids over the sand (of course Nancy couldn’t go in her condition), gunning the engine and beeping the horn and bouncing and whooping and laughing.

  When they got back, Nancy was sitting by the pool in the sun, her belly rising like a hill in her maternity bathing suit. As the kids bounded into the water, Frank leaned down and kissed her on the top of the head; she patted his hand, pressing her lips together.

  She knew almost everything, knew that this was the way it was going to be until—or unless—they weren’t together anymore. She had fooled herself, till the pregnancy was too far along to change anything, that this time might be different. Tonight he would disappear once more: even in the desert, there were places to go. When he returned, deep in the night, she would smell the liquor and tobacco and perfume on him; when he patted her shoulder, she would turn and pretend to be asleep.

  Many years later, Nancy Sandra remembered one of these weekends at Twin Palms: Her father had gone out there first, then the next day big Sam Weiss—the song plugger who had helped Frank out during the Mortimer encounter at Ciro’s—drove Big Nancy and the children to the Springs. Three hours over two-lane blacktop, the warm wind shooting through the open windows, Nancy and Sam chatting in the front seat, then falling into long silences. “On this trip,” Nancy Sandra writes in Frank Sinatra: My Father,

  the plan was … for us to see Daddy for a couple of days, and then for Sam to drive us home, leaving our parents alone. They didn’t get to spend time alone very often. When I realized I was being sent away, I couldn’t stand it. I cried and cried—not a tantrum, not angry, but afraid of leaving my mom; I had never been without her.

  I couldn’t stop crying. Frankie, never lacking emotion, caught it, and we both cried and cried. Daddy, out of pity, or in a desperate attempt to save his sanity, eventually said to Mom, “I guess you’d better go with them.” So Mom packed us up, put us in the car with Sam, and climbed in the back seat next to her spoiled brat of a daughter. When we were out of sight of the two skinny palm trees and Daddy, Mom started to cry softly. She tried to hide her tears behind dark glasses. Now, I had never seen my mother cry before—I mean, mothers don’t cry, children cry. It’s not a mother’s job.

  I was shocked and frightened …

  And Weiss, Nancy writes, was “disgusted” with both children—the three-hour drive back to Toluca Lake felt like twelve. When they got home, the children’s new governess, Georgie Hardwick—until recently employed by the Bing Crosbys—came out to meet them:

  We’d had a few other governesses—Whitey, Kathleen, Dolores, Mamie—but Georgie was the toughest. She was great. And in this situation, expecting to see only two very small people walk through the door sans mother, she flashed me a look I’ll never forget. From that day on, without lectures, without words, Georgie quietly, gently, transformed me into an unspoiled child.

  The account is chilling—the gruff, ultimately unsympathetic bodyguard; the frightened children; the distraught mother. The ever less present father. Frank himself is little more than a cipher in the episode: a voice on the radio … a picture in the newspaper, as Nancy had recalled of her earliest childhood. Nothing had changed.

  I guess you’d better go with them.

  Why couldn’t they all just have stayed? Was it pity that made him send them away, or impatience—or did he not really want them there in the first place?

  What was the reason for Big Nancy’s tears?

  And what is it that makes a scared child a spoiled brat?

  The trail leads straight to the governess with the Dickensian name, Georgie Hardwick. She had left the Crosby household for a very specific reason. “When the Crosby kids talk about being punished and beaten, it was Georgie who did most of it, not Bing,” Crosby’s biographer Gary Giddins said. Bing’s son Gary Crosby wrote in his autobiography:

  I remember her as a short, stocky, fanatically devout Irish Catholic with a Boston accent, wiry hair and a grim face. She was hired on as our nurse when I was about eight and quickly became the lord high executioner of all my mother’s rules. The instant one was broken she went running off to Mom or, more and more frequently, took care of the punishment herself by going after us with wire coat hangers.

  “When Bing realized what a monstrous thing she had made of the home,” Giddins said, “he fired her, and Frank immediately hired her.”

  In the process of his research, Giddins trie
d to draw Nancy junior out about Hardwick: “She said, ‘Well, yes, she worked for us. She was part of the family.’ Long pauses. I finally said, ‘Look, this is what I heard about her.’ There was a long pause, and she said, ‘All I’ll say is, she was very, very—tough.’ That was the end of the interview.”

  Without lectures, without words, Georgie … transformed me into an unspoiled child.

  Leaving the “quietly, gently” open for discussion.

  In February, Frank sat down with Metronome’s George T. Simon—the very man who seven and a half years earlier had had to be sweet-talked into writing up the brand-new singer in the magazine—and did some serious venting about the state of American popular music.

  “Right now certain conditions in the music business really have him down,” Simon wrote. “Chances are that he can’t stand Your Hit Parade any more than most of us can … But his biggest gripe of all right now is the terrible trash turned out by Tin Pan Alley.”

  In fact, Sinatra was more than down—he was hopping mad:

  Frank was a pretty weary guy when he sounded off during a short break on a recording date … but it seems that when you’re really pooped you relax more, you lose your inhibitions, and you say what you want to say. Some of the stuff Sinatra passed along was so libelous that it’s not printable, but all the rest is something The Voice feels just as strongly about, even though the language may be more pianissimo.

  “About the popular songs of the day,” pet-peeves Frankie, “they’ve become so decadent, they’re so bloodless. As a singer of popular songs, I’ve been looking for wonderful pieces of music in the popular vein—what they call Tin Pan Alley songs. You can not find any. Outside of production material, show tunes, you can’t find a thing …

  “I don’t think the music business has progressed enough. There are a lot of people to blame for this. The songwriter in most cases finds he has to prostitute his talents if he wants to make a buck … The publisher is usually a fly-by-night guy anyway and so to make a few fast bucks he buys a very bad song, very badly written. And the recording companies are helping those guys by recording such songs. I don’t think the few extra bucks in a song that becomes a fast hit make a difference in the existence of a big recording company or a big publishing firm. If they turned them down, it wouldn’t do any harm and it would do music some good [italics mine].