Frank

by James Kaplan

  Their eleventh wedding anniversary had been two days earlier.

  The affair, previously just whispered about (though in Hollywood it was the worst-kept secret in town), was officially public. Reading about it over his morning coffee, moving his lips as he read, Frank’s champion and old Hasbrouck Heights neighbor Willie Moretti shook his head, frowning. Never one to keep his opinion to himself (and now, in the grips of secondary syphilis, more disinhibited than ever), Moretti phoned Western Union and, in his high, hoarse voice, dictated a telegram: “I am very much surprised what I have been reading in the newspapers between you and your darling wife,” he said. “Remember you have a decent wife and children. You should be very happy. Regards to all. Willie Moore.”

  Still. Now Frank could—God help him—do precisely as he pleased.

  On February 10, Sheilah Graham wrote: “Ava Gardner’s current travels with Frank Sinatra include a stop-over in San Francisco. Ava is telling her friends that she wants to get married. She did not say to whom.”

  The day after Valentine’s Day, Hedda Hopper’s piece ran in the Los Angeles Times:

  FRANK SINATRA’S WIFE DECIDES ON SEPARATION

  Nancy Sinatra has finally decided to separate from her husband Frank, claiming that her married life with the crooner has become “unhappy and almost unbearable.”

  “But I do not see a divorce in the foreseeable future,” she said yesterday.

  First a property settlement will be worked out, and Nancy will ask for custody of their three children, Nancy, 9; Frank, 6; and Christina, 2. Her attorney is Arnold M. Grant.

  This is the third separation for the Sinatras, who were married Feb. 4, 1939. Frank left home in October, 1946, but reconciled with his wife two weeks later.

  In January, 1950, he again left home, but that time Nancy said, “He’s done it before and I suppose he’ll do it again, but I’m not calling this a marital breakup.”

  With Nancy taking the initiative this time, it looks like the real thing.

  The next day, as Gardner wrote in her autobiography,

  the shit really hit the fan. In the next few weeks, I was receiving scores of letters accusing me of being a scarlet woman, a home wrecker, and worse. One correspondent addressed me as “Bitch-Jezebel-Gardner,” the Legion of Decency threatened to ban my movies, and Catholic priests found the time to write me accusatory letters. I even read where the Sisters of Mary and Joseph asked their students at St. Paul the Apostle School in Los Angeles to pray for Frank’s poor wife.

  Louella Parsons had apparently heard the good Sisters’ plea. She wrote:

  I am very glad Nancy Sinatra will not divorce Frankie—that she will ask for a legal separation, because somehow I believe these two will go back together.

  Frankie is planning a trip to Europe this spring, just about the time Ava Gardner leaves to make Pandora and the Flying Dutchman with James Mason in England.

  But I’ve seen Frankie get these crushes before, and I’m not for a minute taking his friendship with Ava as anything serious. Ava, too, gets crushes, and gets over them. But the one I really feel sorry for is little Nancy, who is such a fine woman.

  And hate mail was only the beginning of Ava’s problems. Soon Dorothy Kilgallen was reporting in her column that, as if Ava weren’t in enough trouble with the country at large, her “romantic episode with Frank Sinatra has put her in the MGM doghouse. She has been warned to avoid further ‘entanglements.’ ”

  Earlier that month, in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy held up a piece of paper and said, “I have here in my hand a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

  The effect of the so-called Wheeling speech on a country already in the throes of Communist paranoia was electric. McCarthy, heretofore a marginal and intensely unpopular legislator, instantly shot to prominence.

  Frank Sinatra, suspected by many of having Communist sympathies and now a certified moral reprobate, was ripe for the pillory. As was Ava. Erskine Johnson’s March 10 column noted: “Ava Gardner’s lines as a husband-snatching hussy in East Side, West Side drew snickers at a preview.”

  There was a satisfying symmetry in the equally squalid Ingrid Bergman affair. On March 15, another senator from the heartland, Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, mysteriously decided that the Bergman and Rossellini affair was the nation’s business. On the Senate floor he called Ingrid Bergman an “apostle of degradation” and declared that the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, of which he was chairman, would begin hearings on “the serious moral questions raised by movieland’s lurid headlines.”

  Bergman or Sinatra? Newspapers could hardly decide which scandal to run with on any given day. The March 17 edition of the Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Daily News carried a page-one story headlined HUSBAND WILL FIGHT BERGMAN IN COURT and, inside, a United Press dispatch that read as if it had been written by Lee Mortimer himself:

  Crooner boy Frankie Sinatra’s charm seems to have gone afleeting.

  His bobby sox brigades are conspicuous—by their absence.

  Frankie currently is sequestered in a 33rd-floor duplex suite at Hampshire House, on Central Park, where reportedly he is paying a little bagatelle of $100 a day.

  By a coincidence, actress Ava Gardner occupies a suite in the same diggings …

  And—horrible thought—the crooner’s once-faithful squealing teen-age admirers aren’t bothering him a bit. Only two fans showed up yesterday at Hampshire House to get a look at their idol.

  One was a youngster of about 13. The other, a patient middle-aged matron, hid behind a potted evergreen in the lobby.

  But the irked Frankie avoided them like the plague.

  Nor was there any word from Miss Gardner.

  Times, it seems, have changed. Maybe the bobby soxers are getting more absorbed in such little matters as the H-bomb.

  Sinatra was in New York to begin an eight-week stand at the Copacabana,3 his first New York nightclub appearance since he’d played the Riobamba five years earlier. He was scared. He had avoided the Copa, worried that its grinding three-show-a-night format would strain his vocal cords. And these days, he had plenty of reason to worry about his instrument: those guilt germs George Evans used to talk about were in the air.

  Walter Winchell, March 19: “Items-We-Doubt: That F. Sinatra’s parting from his wife is a gimmick to attract the attention he used to get by crooning.”

  It was the phone calls that got to him, Little Nancy calling every day and asking when he was coming home, that little voice sounding so far away on the scratchy cross-country connection, the voice of Judgment itself. Frank had the shakes. “I found myself needing pills to sleep, pills to get started in the morning and pills to relax during the day,” he would recall. And it wasn’t just pills. Ava remembered: “Every single night we would have three or four martinis, big ones in big champagne glasses, then wine with dinner, then go to a nightclub and start drinking Scotch or bourbon. I don’t know how we did it.”

  They were both on edge. She was on her way to England to start shooting her movie; the steady barrage of angry letters and bad press was tempting her to get out of the country early. But she stayed for Frank’s big opening on Tuesday, March 28.

  It didn’t help that Nancy’s birthday, her thirty-third, was on the twenty-sixth. He sent her a mink coat: no reply. Ten grand and no reply. For days he pestered everyone around him (except Ava, naturally), agonizing: Should he call her? Should he?

  Sanicola and Van Heusen, who sensed that he really did want to call his wife, advised him to do so.

  So he called her—and reached the maid, who told him that Missy Sinatra was in Palm Springs. Frank phoned there, too: no answer. He found out later that night that her friends had thrown her a big party, that Nancy had made a grand entrance in the mink coat.

  Frank knew he needed help. You couldn’t open at the Copa without specia
l material. Sammy Cahn was the world master of special material—but Cahn had been on Sinatra’s shit list for over a year for some minor infraction. That was the way it went with Frank. (“Someone told Sinatra that at a dinner party at my house his name was, as I believe they say, taken in vain,” Sammy recalled. “He thought I should have slapped the offending person’s face.”)

  Another man might have called and mended fences; Frank just called. Out of the blue, after a year and a half.

  “Sam, Frank.”

  “Hey, Frank.”

  “Sam, you got a moment? I’m opening at the Copa.”

  “Hey, not only did I know that you were opening at the Copa, but I’ve been thinking, if we were speaking, what would I have written?”

  “Will you come to New York?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  So Sammy took the Super Chief to Chicago and the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago to Grand Central—three thousand miles, two and a half days; writing the whole way.

  The night of the opening, Sinatra paced his tiny dressing room, unable to stop sweating. He had to shower and change his shirt twice. Ava was sitting with him, her brow wrinkled with concern. She could be awful, but when he was really in trouble, she could be wonderful.

  She stroked his hand and looked into his eyes. She hated to see him this way. She would call the doctor and get Frank something for his nerves.

  While she dialed, he stared at Nancy’s good-luck telegram on the mirror.

  When the doctor arrived, Ava went out to the table at ringside—there was a stir when the other customers spotted her, incandescent in a black off-the-shoulder dress—and sat down with Dolly and Marty, Sammy Cahn, Phil Silvers, Manie Sacks, Joe Fischetti, and Willie Moretti. The house was packed, the place vibrating with excitement. Then Frank bounded out and went into his opening number, Cole Porter’s “I Am Loved”:

  I’m adored, I’m adored,

  By the one who first led my heart astray.

  The crowd went nuts. They ate it up when he did Sammy’s special material, putting on a coonskin cap, snapping a whip, and blowing a duck call as he sang bawdy new lyrics to Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” and “The Cry of the Wild Goose.” They roared when he ripped the press: “My voice was so low the other night singing ‘Ol Man River’ that I got down in the dirt, and who do you think I found throwing mud down there? Two Hollywood commentators! They got a great racket. All day long they lie in the sun, and when the sun goes down, they lie some more!”

  He was a smash hit. “After the opening, he got great reviews,” Sammy Cahn recalled. “I was so proud, I was so happy.”

  But Cahn’s memory was rose-colored: the show-business crowds loved Frank; the critics weren’t so sure. “Whether temporarily or otherwise, the music that used to hypnotize the bobbysoxers—whatever happened to them anyway, thank goodness?—is gone from the throat,” the Herald Tribune’s reviewer wrote. “Vocally, there isn’t quite the same old black magic there used to be when Mr. Sinatra wrenched ‘Night and Day’ from his sapling frame and thousands swooned.”

  Sammy wasn’t the only one with a forgiving memory. “Frank was nervous before he went on, which was unlike him,” Ava Gardner wrote in her autobiography, “but he sang like an angel, especially ‘Nancy with the Laughing Face,’ a song written about his daughter, not his wife. I’ve always thought it was a beautiful song, and contrary to what everyone seems to believe, it was never the reason for a single quarrel between us.”

  Another account has it somewhat differently. “Did you have to sing that fucking song?” Ava is said to have asked Frank, after the Copa audience snickered during the number. “It made me feel like a real fool.”

  That wasn’t the only thing she was unhappy about. As she loyally stayed for night after night of the Copa stand, MGM pelted her with telegrams reminding her she was overdue to start filming in England. And night after night she found herself in the company of some of Frank’s less classy friends, including the Fischetti brothers and Frank Costello. She was bored, feigning smiles. She and Sinatra were starting to squabble.

  Meanwhile, Artie Shaw was in town.

  Her own Svengali was back from one of his periodic sabbaticals from the music business, playing a gig at Bop City on Fifty-second Street. Shaw had a beautiful apartment on Central Park West. He was getting some interesting people together: Would Ava and Frank like to come up to his place for cocktails?

  Frank wouldn’t like to. Over the years, he would go considerably out of his way to forge bonds with people he considered classy. He just hated Artie Shaw.

  The feeling was mutual. In the early 1940s, Frank had wanted to sing with Shaw’s band, then the hottest in the land: Shaw had turned him down. Over the course of his long life, the pedantic bandleader, always eager to flaunt his intellect, would go to great lengths to deprecate the singer, with subtle rationalizations or faint praise. “We took a plain, ordinary singer, who was a good singer—there was nothing wrong with that; he was able to sing—and we made him into an icon,” Shaw told an interviewer many years later.

  Frank knew that Ava still called Shaw up for advice sometimes. (“Artie solved other people’s problems in a couple of sentences,” she would write years later, with barely disguised irony.) Frank also knew that Artie Shaw was very smart, very talented, and a devil with the ladies, and he had a gnawing fear that Shaw was going to lure Ava back into the sack.

  And after a couple of nights of listening to the Fischettis’ deses, dems, and dirty jokes, she was feeling not just bored—always a dangerous mode for her—but rebellious. Who the hell was he to tell her what she should or shouldn’t do? And worse, what did it say about him that he liked those goons?

  She finally went to see Shaw.

  Accounts of the evening differ. One version says that Ava rebelled and decided to attend one of Shaw’s high-toned gatherings alone. Ava herself—not necessarily the most reliable of narrators—says she and Frank had a fight, ostensibly about his wandering eye:

  Restaurants were frequently where our quarrels began, and I have to confess I started a lot of them, sometimes before the appetizer arrived. A pretty girl would pass and recognize Frank. She’d smile. He’d nod and smile back. It would happen again. Frank would feel the temperature rising across the table and try to escape with a sort of sickly look. I’d say something sweet and ladylike, such as, “I suppose you’re sleeping with all these broads,” and we’d be off to the races.

  She says she stomped out that night and took a taxi back to the Hampshire House. After stewing awhile, she phoned Shaw, who told her his girlfriend was with him but she was welcome to come over and talk. Another account has Ava leaving the Copa, ostensibly to wait for Frank back at their suite, but actually to go nightclubbing with a writer friend, Richard Condon,4 and Condon’s girl. According to this story, the three wound up at Bop City, seated at Shaw’s table, and when Ava phoned Frank, ostensibly to ease his mind about her whereabouts, Frank shouted that he was going to kill himself.

  In Ava’s version, Sinatra shows up at Shaw’s apartment, loaded for bear—or, rather, Frank’s version of being loaded for bear, which meant bringing along Hank Sanicola. This is where Artie Shaw’s side of the Rashomon tale comes into play. Since he told the story frequently, he occasionally liked to freshen it with piquant new details:

  She called at two a.m. and said she had been with Sinatra and the Fischetti boys. One of the guys had thrown a glass of whiskey in the face of one of her girlfriends, and she had to get away. She said she wanted to see me. I explained that I wasn’t alone. But she came anyway, dressed to the nines and saying she wanted to ask me some questions. I asked my girlfriend to go back to bed so Ava and I could talk.

  Ava complained to Artie about Frank and his mobsters, but then, according to Shaw, she got down to the nitty-gritty:

  “When you and I were, you know, doing it”—that was her way of saying it—“was it good?” I said, “If everything else had been anywhere near as good, we’d have been t
ogether forever and I’d never have let you out of my sight.” She gave a sigh of relief. I asked why. She said, “With him it’s impossible.” I said I thought he was a big stud. She said, “No, it’s like being in bed with a woman. He’s so gentle. It’s as though he thinks I’ll break, as though I’m a piece of Dresden china and he’s gonna hurt me.”

  Then, as if the sexual self-aggrandizement weren’t enough, Shaw declares Ava left and Frank entered, along with “the heavyweight fellow.” All that’s missing are the slamming doors.

  It’s all very entertaining. And ultimately, what truly happened is unknowable. But on this score everyone seems to agree: After Ava got back to the Hampshire House, where she and her sister Bappie were sharing one bedroom and Frank was staying in another, her phone rang. “It was Frank, and I’ll never forget his voice,” Ava recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t stand it any longer. I’m going to kill myself—now!’ ”

  Then there was this tremendous bang in my ear, and I knew it was a revolver shot. My whole mind sort of exploded in a great wave of panic, terror, and shocked disbelief. Oh, God! Oh, God! I threw the phone down and raced across the living room and into Frank’s room. I didn’t know what I expected to find—a body? And there was a body lying on the bed. Oh, God, was he dead? I threw myself on it saying, “Frank, Frank …” And the face, with a rather pale little smile, turned toward me, and the voice said, “Oh, hello.”

  The goddamn revolver was still smoking in his hand. He had fired a single shot through a pillow and into the mattress.

  She wasn’t mad at him, only relieved. “He was alive, thank God, he was alive,” she wrote. “I held him tightly to me.”

  At this point—since a gunshot in the middle of the night in a luxury hotel suite will not go unnoticed, even in New York City—the farce continues: the desk clerk phones, Sinatra professes innocence, good old Sanicola is summoned to spirit away the incriminating mattress (in one version he’s helped by, of all people, David O. Selznick, who’s staying down the hall). The NYPD arrives, and different versions of the story hit the papers.