by James Kaplan
That was all he needed. At 2:00 a.m., strictly against Dr. Goldman’s orders, Frank was back at the club, dressed and ready for the last show of the evening. He cleared his throat and dedicated “I Have But One Heart” to Ava. He sang it all the way through. Then Skitch Henderson kicked the band into gear for “It All Depends on You.” What happened next “was tragic and terrifying,” Henderson recalled:
He opened his mouth to sing after the band introduction and nothing came out. Not a sound. I thought for a fleeting moment that the unexpected pantomime was a joke. But then he caught my eye. I guess the color drained out of my face as I saw the panic in his. It became so quiet, so intensely quiet in the club—they were like watching a man walk off a cliff. His face chalk white, Frank gasped something that sounded like “Good Night” into the mike and raced off the floor, leaving the audience stunned.
It may have been tragic and terrifying to Skitch and Frank, but to the newspapers it was a source for gloating:
BALI TOO H’AI; VOICE VOICELESS
Frank Sinatra’s voice deserted him Tuesday and his doctor said it was because the crooner tried to make it do the impossible—hit a soprano note.
Dr. Irving Goldman explained that Sinatra’s normal range is two octaves in the baritone-tenor class. When Frank tried to hit too high a note in the song “Bali H’ai,” the physician said, his left vocal chord [sic] dissented.
In medical terms, Sinatra suffered what the doctor called a “submucosal hemorrhage.”
Doctor Goldman ordered ten days of silence for “The Voice,” who has been appearing at New York’s Copacabana night club. Sinatra is due to open an engagement in Chicago May 12, and if he is to make it, said the doctor, he must keep mum until then—no talking or singing.
Sinatra’s friends said that to keep the ban of silence, Frank will go to a vacation hideaway.
The hideaway was Charlie Fischetti’s mansion on Allison Island in Miami, an establishment where hoarse monosyllables would not be at all out of place.
On May 12, Sinatra was tanned and rested, his voice much improved. But instead of heading to the Chez Paree in chilly Chicago, he was waving to reporters, pointing to his throat, and boarding a flight to sunny Spain with Van Heusen. “Yes, I’ll probably see Ava,” he croaked to the reporters. “But we’ll be as well chaperoned as at a high-school dance.”
“Even if he has to hire sixteen duennas,” Chester piped up.
Frank was, of course, bearing gifts: Ava had said she was missing her gum and her favorite soft drink, so he carried along a carton of Wrigley’s Spearmint and a six-pack of Coke. And a $10,000 diamond-and-emerald necklace.
The suits at MCA were grim faced at the news that he had blithely canceled the Chicago engagement (though the owners of Chez Paree, where the Fischettis had a special table, were quite understanding). But Frank had to reestablish contact with Ava. She had been gone for over a month now—anything could have happened. Knowing her, plenty probably had.
If he was pining for her, the reverse did not seem to be true, as a production assistant on Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Jeanie Sims, recalled. “I remember one time we were shooting a scene of Ava by herself,” Sims told Lee Server.
She was supposed to be lost in some deep thought about the man she was in love with. And she couldn’t sort of get it right for [the director, Albert Lewin] … Al finally went over and said to her, “Ava, is there some one person in your life who you love or have loved more than anyone else on earth?” And she answered him so quietly I could not hear her. And he told her to think of that person and it was just the impetus she needed, and she got it perfect on the next shot. And afterward I was a bit curious, and I asked Al what she had said, who she had loved more than anyone, and Al said, “The clarinet player—Artie Shaw.”
Ava, though, was living for the present. She took her pleasures as she found them, and she found them everywhere. With a kind of beauty that comes along once in a hundred years—not just in her lush and haughty face but also in her long-limbed body, her smoky voice, her feline walk—she transfixed men and women alike. She had never been out of the States before, and Europe, still depressed after the war, was stunned at the sight of her.
“A very, very wild spirit,” recalled her Pandora co-star Sheila Sim. On a quick sightseeing and shopping jaunt to Paris before filming began, Ava and Bappie had ditched their MGM driver and sneaked off to see the real sights. Soon, completely by accident—or so Ava swears in her memoir—they were shocked, shocked, to find themselves in a bar full of men who weren’t really men. Well, Bappie was shocked. As her little sister wrote: “ ‘Ava,’ Bappie said in her dark-brown North Carolina Baptist Belt voice that fortunately nobody understood except me, ‘we are in a House of Lesbians!’ ” From Ava’s point of view, however, “All the girls [were] welcoming, and charming.”
Everyone was smitten with her. Albert Lewin, recalled the cinematographer Jack Cardiff, “thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and he used to just gaze and gaze at her. And we would shoot her, and he would say, ‘I want to do another close-up. Closer.’ And we would do that. And then he would say, ‘Let’s do another one. Different angle.’ Then one more, ‘Closer.’ And on and on like that.”
But her biggest admirer was the bullfighter: the rumors were true, kind of. His name was Mario Cabré, he was thirty-five years old, and he was a second-rate torero but a first-rate self-promoter. He was playing a bullfighter in the film, one of Ava’s suitors, and so he figured, why should fact not mirror fiction? He was instantly bewitched by her, but also saw her as his ticket out of Palookaville. To complicate matters, the MGM unit publicists were eager to promote a romance in order to distract the world from the grand opera of Gardner and Sinatra.
And then there was Ava herself, incessantly complicated. In her autobiography she is at great pains to dismiss Cabré as a mere nuisance:
Someone had passed on to him the concept that there is no such thing as bad publicity: if you want to be famous you’ve got to get into the headlines. And what greater opportunity could he have than an attempt to replace Frank in my affections? His motivation was cynical self-interest. His declamatory rhetoric about this great passion in his life, his love for me and mine for him, made headlines in Spain, America, all over the world, and that’s all he cared about. He gave interviews saying I was “the woman I love with all the strength in my soul,” wrote the most idiotic love poems imaginable, and then marched off to recite them at the American embassy in Madrid.
Initially, I suppose I thought this was vaguely amusing, and since we played lovers in the same film, no one was exactly encouraging me to come out and publicly say he was a nuisance and a jerk. But when he started to involve Frank in his shenanigans, saying he would not leave Spain alive if he came on that visit, Mario became a major pest.
It must be remembered, however, that Gardner dictated her memoir (to not one but three successive ghostwriters) toward the end of her life, when she was sick and the beneficiary of numerous gestures of goodwill, including money, from Frank Sinatra. In the spring of 1950, by the testimony of her colleagues on Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, it was a different story: she was initially resistant, but then not so resistant, to the charms of the handsome torero. At first he was just a very good-looking Spaniard. But when he fought that bull, “it just got into her blood right away,” recalled the set dresser John Hawkesworth. “The excitement and the color and the drama of the thing, she loved it.”
Sinatra’s arrival, on the other hand—he landed in Barcelona on May 11—was an unwelcome surprise. Maybe he wanted to test her. If so, he found the true Ava: When he arrived in Tossa de Mar, she was off someplace with Cabré, and the crew had to distract Frank with a poker game until she could be found. Then she waltzed in, all smiles and wreathed in that perfume, and all his questions—Where had she been? What had she been doing?—evaporated.
“Oh, what a lovely surprise!” Ava exclaimed, at the sight of him. “Darling! How great!”
/> The next few days were a combination of melodrama and low comedy. Upon hearing of Sinatra’s arrival, the torero swore that he would kill the singer. Director Lewin had the good sense to take Cabré at his word and have him sent to a remote location to prepare for his bullfighting scenes. In the meantime, off went Sinatra and Gardner, with the Spanish press in hot pursuit. It rained; shooting was halted. The lovers spent the day in her villa; the reporters camped outside. Inside, Frank and Ava were at each other like wasps in a bottle, fighting about the bullfighter (she denied everything). Then they made up.
The sun came out. Shooting resumed. The sun hurt Sinatra’s eyes. As Chester sat by solicitously, Frank sulked and drank champagne and out of sheer boredom tossed a few bones to the reporters. (“Of course, I knew what people would say when I flew here. I am not a youth anymore,” he said, sounding oddly Spanish. “I expected this curiosity.”)
“Don’t you have anything else to say, Frank?” a reporter asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Bing Crosby is the best singer in the world.”
On Sunday, the lovers and Van Heusen went out tuna fishing. The sea sparkled; the Americans laughed and drank more champagne and caught a couple of big fish. The reporters were far away.
On Monday she had to go back to work. The reporters were clustering again. One of them handed Sinatra an American newspaper carrying a story about Nancy. She had spent Mother’s Day without Frank for the first time ever, the report read. She had received gifts from the children, but nothing from her husband, who had spent the weekend in Spain with Ava Gardner. The story mentioned the diamond-and-emerald necklace.
“They can’t make this one of those things,” Frank growled. He denied the existence of the necklace. “We have been chaperoned every minute we have been together,” he said. He was referring, in all seriousness, to Van Heusen. “We know now that because of this publicity, it was a mistake for me to have come here,” he said, and announced he was leaving twenty-four hours early.
There was another tearful parting, then he and Van Heusen flew to Paris to console themselves with whores.
Earl Wilson tracked Frank down at the Café Lido, a lively nightclub featuring bare-breasted chorus girls. Frank shouted over the phone—partly because he had to, due to the faint transatlantic connection, but mostly because he was upset:
“This bullfighter is nothing to her. NOTHING! This girl is very upset because she’s had nothing to do with this boy,” Frank went on. He was screaming a little; him with not too good a throat, either!
“What did you and Ava do in Spain?” I innocently inquired. A reporter on this kind of story has got to ask a lot of foolish questions.
“We were sunning ourselves all day and we went out for a ride when she wasn’t working,” Frank shouted.
“She and I took a lot of drives. We took a lot of looks at the countryside. We caught a couple of tuna fish.”
And that reminded Frank of something he had been wanting to get across to the whole world and, though that beautiful Lido show with the creamy-skinned beauties was waiting, he took time to explain.
“We’ve kept this clean as anybody could,” he exclaimed. “Just so nobody could hit below the belt, we were well chaperoned all the time. We were chaperoned like a high school dance. ALL THE TIME!”
“And did you talk about getting a divorce so you can get married?”
“I’ve never said a word about it. NOT A WORD,” he fiercely insisted, “and here’s something you can use. Everybody’s talking about Ava and me getting married … EVERYBODY … except Ava and me!”
The trip to Spain had been a fiasco. He wasn’t working (while Ava was): he hadn’t sung in a month. On the way home—and where exactly was home? in his office on South Robertson?—squadrons of reporters met him at every stop along the way, in London and in New York and finally in Los Angeles, all asking the same stupid questions: Was Ava in love with the bullfighter? Was Frank running away from the bullfighter? And by the way, were Frank and Ava planning to get married?
He stopped at his office just long enough to shower and change clothes, then drove out to Holmby Hills bearing gifts: dolls and toys from Paris for the kids, a gold charm bracelet for Nancy, engraved: “Eiffel Tower and stuff.” Not so romantic. It wasn’t meant to be. What note was he supposed to strike? She gave him a look that would have broken his heart if he’d had the courage to hold her gaze.
Instead of an apology, he tried for a molecule of levity, at his own expense: he wished her happy Mother’s Day.
She just stared at him. He averted his eyes again.
He had gone over in the early evening so the kids would still be awake, wanting to see them but also knowing that his wife wouldn’t make a scene in front of them. He was disappointed to find Tina, the baby (she was about to turn two), asleep.
He offered to come back in the morning.
She considered it. Then nodded.
Sinatra and Bob Hope. Hope gave Frank a guest spot on his TV show—Sinatra’s first television appearance—soon after his voice came back, when no one else wanted to employ him. (photo credit 25.2)
He returned the next morning—two visits in twenty-four hours! Little Nancy, thinking this might mean Daddy was home for good, ran and jumped into his arms; Frankie hung back and stared. Tina clung to her mother’s leg. Frank picked the baby up with his other arm, held both his girls at once. The little one didn’t seem quite sure who he was. In the years to come she would have no memory of this visit, nor of many others.
That night he flew back to New York with Bob Hope, who, miraculously enough, had given him a job.
26
The Frank Sinatra Show. “Bad pacing, bad scripting, bad tempo, poor camera work and an overall jerky presentation,” Variety said. The broadcast limped along from late 1950 to early 1952, often sponsorless, until CBS pulled the plug. (photo credit 26.1)
Sinatra’s savior at this juncture was his hardworking lawyer Henry Jaffe, who—since MCA was sitting on its hands where Frank was concerned—had been pestering Hope’s people for months to hire his client for the comedian’s new television variety show. TV was new and scary territory for Bob Hope, but he had to try: his NBC radio show, a mainstay of his career since 1937, was rapidly losing listeners to Crosby, Jack Benny, and Arthur Godfrey. Accordingly, when General Motors offered Hope a five-show contract (at $150,000) for a television broadcast to be sponsored by Frigidaire, Ski Nose jumped at it.
The medium was barely out of its infancy: programmers were making it up as they went along. Sid Caesar’s frenetic, wildly inventive Your Show of Shows, which had premiered on NBC in February, was doing brilliantly. Bob Hope’s Star Spangled Revue (the title was the frightened era’s equivalent of a flag lapel pin) debuted on NBC on Easter Sunday, and did not fare as well. Hope, who had to share the stage with refrigerators, seemed to think it sufficient to put on a vaudeville show in front of the camera. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Dinah Shore played along gamely, but the music-hall pacing, in the given context of early TV—live and uncut—was less than galvanizing, and reviews were less than ecstatic. The second show had to be better.
Hope’s choice of guests for that broadcast was interesting. Beatrice Lillie, an old pal from his London music-hall days, was funny and eccentric; Peggy Lee was ascendant, and sexy; but the best you could say about Frank Sinatra (besides the fact that until a couple of months earlier he could sing) was that he certainly was in the papers a lot.
One place Frank had never been, though, was in front of a TV camera. Acknowledging the fact, Hope introduced him a little nervously: “It takes real courage to get your feet wet in television. I’m really glad this chap decided to take the plunge. I’m thrilled to introduce Mr. Frank Sinatra.”
Yet if Bob Hope was tentative, his first guest was anything but. “Sinatra, astoundingly thin, balletic in his movements, and dazzling with his smile, showed no nerves about appearing on the tube,” writes Peggy Lee’s biographer Peter Richmond. “He nailed ‘Come Rain or Come Shine
’ with a suggestion of cockiness that was in equal parts annoying and appealing. His absolute composure, performing live in front of an audience whose size he couldn’t begin to guess at, made it instantly obvious that he would have no problem climbing back to the top.”
Obvious to whom? Frank’s absolute composure was—now more than ever—mostly an artful illusion. And television was not to be his medium. The whiff of arrogance, whether contrived or real, made him a hot presence on the cool tube: the contrast jangled. Nor did he have much of a gift for comedy, the lifeblood of television variety. He was too angry, too edgy. In a sketch on the Hope show he played—of all people—Bing Crosby, the avatar of cool. The results were less than impressive, counteracting the magic Frank had spun with his singing. “If TV is his oyster, Sinatra hasn’t broken out of his shell,” Variety noted.
The day after his television debut, Frank went back to radio—for one more week. His contract for Light Up Time had expired, and Lucky Strike wasn’t hustling to renew. Yet another company had cut him loose. On Monday, June 5, he was officially at liberty.
In the meantime, Jaffe was in talks with CBS, which was laboring mightily to squeeze some value out of its rapidly diminishing asset, to create a pair of vehicles for Sinatra that fall: another radio program and, against all better judgment, a TV show. Frank was also booked at London’s Palladium in early July; until then, he was facing an empty month, and a vacation was the last thing he needed. His voice was back; he wanted to sing.
In late May and early June, while Sinatra’s first collaboration with Mitch Miller, the dreadful “American Beauty Rose,” was having its brief moment at the bottom of the charts, it became clear to Miller that none of the other eight up-tempo numbers Frank had recorded that spring were tickling the public’s fancy. Accordingly, the producer decided to take a stronger hand with his star. If the public didn’t want to hear Sinatra swing, then maybe he should sing something else.