by James Kaplan
It was all a circus, of course. How could it have been anything else? The newspapers were watching their every move. When Frank and Ava went to the judge’s chambers to apply for their license, they were accompanied by Manie Sacks and another Philadelphian, CBS co-founder and board member Isaac Levy. Levy, who was enormously wealthy, had a mansion on the Main Line in Germantown. It stood to reason that the wedding was going to be held at his house. And since the couple had applied for their license on Friday the second, and Pennsylvania had a seventy-two-hour waiting period, clearly the date would be Monday the fifth.
Then the pair returned to New York for the weekend, and the wedding nearly fell through. On Saturday they went out for a celebratory dinner at the Colony with the James Masons. Afterward, the two couples went nightclubbing in Harlem, and then Frank and Ava returned to the Hampshire House. In the suite Ava was sharing with Bappie, there was a knock at the door. It was a bellman, with a letter. Ava made him wait while she found fifty cents in her purse.
She opened the envelope and unfolded the sheets inside. The letter was handwritten in a looping feminine scrawl, slightly childish, its forward thrust suggesting urgency. It was full of misspellings. As Ava’s eyes traversed the page, her heart began to thud.
The letter described several trysts the writer claimed to have had with Frank. So far, so bad. But as Ava read on (putting her hand to her chest and sitting in a wing chair without even realizing she was doing so), it came to her that the woman had to be telling the truth. There were details, shameless and horrible details about Frank and his anatomy and his proclivities, that only a lover could know.
Except that this woman wasn’t a lover. She was a pro, cold and precise and crude and impertinent, even going so far as to congratulate Ava on attracting a man of Frank’s prodigious endowment—then pitying her because her husband-to-be needed to pay for sex.
The writer of this letter, Ava realized, wanted to reduce her to nothing.
Like an automaton, she walked over to the window and with some effort pulled up the heavy sash. The cold November night wind, ripe with the tang of burning trash, swirled in. Bappie stood in the doorway. Her first horrified thought was that her sister was going to jump.
“Ava—” Bappie moved toward her.
But self-destruction was the furthest thing from Ava’s mind. Gritting her teeth, she pulled Frank’s engagement ring—a six-carat emerald set in platinum, flanked with pear-cut diamonds—from her finger and threw it out into dark space.
She turned to her sister, not registering the look of fear on her face. “The wedding is off,” Ava said. “Finished. Forget it!” She ran to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her. The lock clicked.
“Now the bedlam began,” Ava recalled.
Frank was going crazy, Bappie and Manie Sachs [sic],3 Hank Sanicola, and [the former Dorsey arranger and Varsity member] Dick Jones were all rushing backward and forward between Frank’s room and mine arguing, wheedling, yelling, protesting. They told me no one could cancel a wedding at this late date. It had all been prepared: the cars, the catering, the minister, the flowers, the elegant house. I said I was an important part of that wedding and I could damn well cancel it.
I think it took most of that night with a lot of back and forth before I agreed to change my mind. Thinking about it now, and wondering who could be so malevolent as to arrange for that letter to arrive at such a critical moment and drive me almost out of my mind, the finger points in only one direction.
The diabolical rival Gardner had in mind was none other than Howard Hughes. When the dashing aviation tycoon and movie mogul wasn’t busy crashing experimental aircraft and running RKO into the ground, he was keeping obsessive tabs on a whole harem of real and imagined lady friends, including Jane Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner, the sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Gene Tierney, Jean Peters, and Ava. For the handsome but strangely sexless Hughes, the chief pleasure of romance seemed to lie in the pursuit, even (if not especially) if the object of his desire had told him in no uncertain terms to beat it. This Ava had done any number of times, but then his lavish gifts would soften her a little, again and again. The cycle continued until Frank came along, but Hughes kept having her watched anyway, waiting for something to give—or trying to make something give.
The singer and the tycoon had infinite contempt for each other. For Sinatra, Hughes was a right-winger and a creep, in all likelihood a pervert of some kind. For Hughes, with his ultraconservative Texas oilman’s mentality, Sinatra was a greaseball pinko, bent on undermining American family values. As for the fact that RKO had a soon-to-be-released Sinatra film in the can—well, the studio head would deal with that shortly.
In the meantime, his attempted sabotage failed. On the rainy morning of Wednesday, November 7, Frank and Ava emerged from the Hampshire House holding hands. “They were giggly, obviously very much in love and sober,” recalled Earl Wilson.
I congratulated them and wished them eternal happiness. Frank threw his arm around me; Ava gave me a kiss. They slid quickly into the backseat of a limousine with two friends [Frank’s best man, Axel Stordahl, and Stordahl’s wife, June Hutton, the matron of honor] in the frontseat, and waved to me. Some photographers who had been waiting for them were unable to move quickly enough to get pictures, and that delighted both.
Just before he got into the car, though, Sinatra barked out, “No questions, no questions!” and clamped his hand over the lens of a Movietone newsreel camera. Then the car door slammed behind him and the flotilla of Cadillacs headed off to what the wedding party fervently hoped were parts unknown. To throw off the press, the nuptials had been switched to a top-secret new location, in less palatial but still elegant digs—the West Germantown home of Manie’s brother Lester Sacks, a well-to-do garment manufacturer.
The press was waiting for them anyway. Frank stared incredulously as his car rolled up in front of Sacks’s big fieldstone house. He jumped out of the car while it was still rolling. “How did those creeps know where we were?” he asked nobody in particular as the photographers snapped. It was dusk; a cold drizzle was falling. “I don’t want no circus here!” he called to the press. “I’ll knock the first guy who attempts to get inside on his ass—and I mean it!”
While he sputtered, Ava grabbed his hand and dragged him indoors. But even the company of friends couldn’t cool his rage. “Frank was so angry, poor baby,” Ava remembered. “He spent the whole time at the window upstairs screaming at the press, ‘You lousy parasites, fuck off!’ at the top of his lungs. He was tempted—we had to hold him—to go out and fight with them. But we finally got him downstairs, got him in front of the preacher.”
It was a very small wedding, just twenty guests in all. Frank had his crew—Sanicola and Ben Barton and Stordahl and Jones and Manie (Van Heusen, who would remain allergic to marriage, except for writing songs about it, until his own at age fifty-six, was conspicuously absent)—but Ava only had Bappie, who was hoping that after Mickey and Artie (she’d attended both those weddings, too) the third time might be the charm.
But the portents weren’t favorable. When Dick Jones sat down at the grand piano in Lester Sacks’s living room and began to play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, he discovered that like so many pianos in prosperous homes, this one hadn’t been tuned in ages. Jones tried a simpler number, “Here Comes the Bride.” It didn’t sound much better. Then, as Manie escorted Ava down the stairs, he tripped and they slipped three steps before regaining their balance.
The bride wore a slinky mauve cocktail dress by Howard Greer (“Wonderful designer,” Ava recalled, “but you couldn’t wear a stitch underneath”); the groom, a dark blue suit and a gray silk tie. The ceremony, conducted by the police court judge Joseph Sloane, was brief: the couple spoke their vows, slipped thin platinum rings on each other’s fingers. Then Frank turned to the guests, grinning, and said, “Well, we finally made it! We finally made it!”
As Stordahl filmed the proceedings with a home-m
ovie camera, the guests toasted the couple with champagne; Ava embraced Dolly, who burst into tears and patted her new daughter-in-law lovingly on the arm, unable for the moment to think of a word to say. Then the bride cut into the seven-tiered cake and, to laughter and applause, messily fed Frank a piece. Dolly came up and pinched her son’s cheek. “This marriage is blessed with good luck,” she told the couple. “You got married at the seventh hour on the seventh day of the eleventh month. Seven, seven, eleven. You can’t miss.” Marty smiled.
There was a bustle in the foyer. A butler approached Frank and handed him a note—it was a formal request, from the photographers outside in the rain: Could the newlyweds possibly come to the front door for a picture?
Sinatra went to the door and threw it open. “Who sent this? Who sent this?” he called, pointing to the press corps. “Who? You? You? You’re not getting any pictures, understand? You’ll get shots from our photographer when he gets around to it.”
“My editor wants my pictures,” one of them called back.
“I’ll bet you fifty dollars you don’t get a picture,” Sinatra told him, “and another fifty dollars that if you even point your camera at me, I’ll knock you on your ear.”
He slammed the door and returned to the party, summoning back his smile.
After a while Ava went upstairs and changed into a brown Christian Dior travel suit and the mink stole Frank had given her as a wedding present. When she came back down, Manie took her aside, peering at her with his dark emotional eyes.
“Look after him, Ava. He’s had some hard knocks and he’s very fragile. It isn’t going to be easy living with a man whose career is in a slump.”
“I’ll do anything to make him happy,” Ava said.
“Then help him get back his self-confidence,” Manie told her.
This time they went out the back door. Before the newsmen out front knew what was happening, the couple ran to a waiting car and sped to the airport, where they boarded a chartered twin-engine Beechcraft—a fantastic extravagance; Frank’s idea, naturally—which would take them to Miami, where they planned to stay for a night before going on to honeymoon at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. As Ava stepped onto the plane, she realized that in the flurry of escape she had left the suitcases containing her honeymoon trousseau at Lester Sacks’s house. “All I had with me was my handbag!” she recalled.
Well, there was no point in having a fit; it would rejoin me sometime or other. But hell, I didn’t even have the beautiful little nightie I’d saved for our wedding night. I didn’t have a bathing suit. I didn’t have anything to go to the beach in—nothing! So I slept in Frank’s pajamas, at least the top half of them, and the next day we walked along the empty beach, me in the bottom half of my travel suit and Frank’s jacket.
To throw reporters off the trail, they had chosen an out-of-the-way hotel, the Green Heron, on the beach in the Sunny Isles district north of town. “It was a chilly day for the beach resort and a brisk wind dotted the ocean with whitecaps,” wrote the early Sinatra biographer Arnold Shaw. “As they strolled along the deserted beach in the afternoon, a lone photographer shot one of the most appealing pictures ever made of them. Their backs to the camera, they walk barefoot, hand-in-hand. Frank’s trousers are rolled up above his thin ankles. And Ava is wearing Frank’s jacket over an old blouse and sports skirt.”
It is an appealing picture, and an iconic one, but Ava Gardner had a different view of the moment. “Naturally a photographer was lying in wait and snapped a shot of us, barefoot, holding hands,” she remembered.
I’ve always thought it was a sad little photograph, a sad little commentary on our lives then. We were simply two young people so much in love, and the world wouldn’t leave us alone for a second. It seemed that everyone and everything was against us, and all we asked for was a bit of peace and privacy.
Just two kids in love … not exactly. Publicity was not something that could be turned on and off like a spigot. Ava seems to be setting up the argument that the world came between them, but what possessed him to book their honeymoon at the Nacional, the site of his Mafia disgrace? It only fed the stories in the press.
From the beginning, there was a third party in the marriage: the fourth estate.
In Ava’s autobiography, she recalls their Havana sojourn as idyllic. “We drank a lot of Cuba libres and went out to the nightclubs and the gambling joints,” she writes.
Fortunately, most of the paparazzi seemed to have other things to do, so we were pretty much left alone. I don’t even know if I would have noticed if we weren’t; I was finally on my honeymoon with the man I loved. On one of our last nights, I climbed up on one of the hotel’s high archways, convincing Frank that I was going to throw myself off. But I was just being mischievous, swinging along on rum and Coke with no intention of ending it all. I was having far too much fun.
Yet in a taped interview that didn’t make it into the book, she remembered things a little differently. “Frank and I didn’t start very good,” Ava said.
We went to Havana, in Cuba, and had a fight the first night.
Who knows what we fought about? … I remember standing up, pissed drunk, on the balcony of the hotel, on the edge. Standing there, balancing. Frank was afraid to go near me. He thought I was going to jump … God, I was crazy!
Back in New York there was further unpleasantness with the press the moment they stepped off the plane.
Where were the couple staying?
Frank scowled. None of their damn business.
Ava grinned and shook her head. The reporters followed the couple to the curb, where a black Cadillac stood waiting. Couldn’t Frank give them anything?
He’d give them something. He gestured with his fist as he opened the car door for Ava. Then he got in the backseat and slammed the door in their faces.
SNARLING FRANK, GIGGLING AVA BACK, the Daily News headline ran, over an unflattering photo of the newlyweds (unflattering, mostly, of him: it was hard for her to take a bad picture).
His surliness was getting old, fast. As another tabloid headline around the same time put it, pointedly: WHAT A BORE IS FRANKIE.
“Frank Sinatra evidently craves privacy,” the Hearst columnist George Sokolsky wrote.
When these theatrical folk are on the make, they curry favor and seek notices and hire publicity men to spread interesting and exciting tales about them, true or untrue. Then they try the gag of seeking privacy, which some believe is of human interest. If it is privacy that Frank Sinatra wants he should be kept out of the public eye permanently. Perhaps the day might come when he would like to be remembered.
Soon enough, though, the press would have another tidbit to play with: Frank had had the very sizable bill for the chartered Beechcraft, along with the tab for the rest of the honeymoon, sent to Ava’s financial manager in Los Angeles. Nancy had cleaned him out.
Not only was Frank without bookings, but the press was knocking his new records. Down Beat wrote: “By every ordinary standard, ‘London by Night’ and ‘April in Paris’ are poorly sung. Frank sounds tired, bored, and in poor voice, to boot.”
Sinatra is slightly rough around the edges in those recordings, which had been made the previous fall, but in truth the writers were just kicking him when he was down. He was an easy target in the autumn of 1951.
And he fired back, laying the blame squarely on Mitch Miller. While playing the Desert Inn in September, Frank had gone into another one of his diatribes about the generally downward trend in popular song, singling out Rosemary Clooney’s recently released Columbia single, “Come On-a My House.” It was a zany, fast-moving novelty number with a goofily lecherous lyric by, of all people, William Saroyan (“Come on-a my house, my house/I’m gonna give-a you candy”), set to, of all things, a hard-swinging harpsichord obbligato that presaged rock ’n’ roll. Miller had been proudly responsible for the whole concept, and the record—which Clooney made under protest—sold like hotcakes.4
Frank had nothing bad to say a
bout Clooney. He reserved his venom for Mitch. Word got back and Miller exploded. In November, Billboard noted a “long smoldering feud” between the singer and the producer, continuing: “Chief beef hinges on Sinatra claim that he isn’t getting a fair shake on song material.” The report quoted Frank as saying he was in talks with RCA and Capitol Records.
In fact, this was sheer invention on his part, a ploy to try to stir up some action where there was none at all. Manie Sacks had already informed Frank, with great regret, that he couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for him at Victor. And as for Capitol (the only West Coast–based label), it was doing just fine with Nat “King” Cole, Dean Martin, and Peggy Lee. Who needed Sinatra?
On the November 13 broadcast of The Frank Sinatra Show the guests were Jack Benny and ten-year-old violinist Charles Castleman. Benny’s presence helped Sinatra to garner a good review for a change. “Kidding each other’s known idiosyncrasies for laughs,” Variety wrote, Jack and Frank “sparked the show into one of the better ones [Sinatra has] done this season.”
But it was faint praise: the show was sinking fast, and everyone involved knew it. When the host requested that the broadcast be relocated to Los Angeles, CBS agreed, perhaps feeling that a change of venue might slap some life into the enterprise.
Frank’s return to Hollywood didn’t stir up much excitement—his only real currency in that toughest of company towns was as the husband (“Mr. Gardner,” the latest mean joke had it) of its hottest female star. As far as the movies were concerned, he was all but DOA: a two-picture deal with Universal, at a pathetically low fee, was the closest thing to unemployment.
Meanwhile, the newlyweds made a nod at nesting at Twin Palms. “We’re going to redecorate Frank’s home,” Ava gushed. “I’m going to learn to make all of Frank’s favorite dishes. Mama Sinatra has promised to send the recipes. Oh, it’s all so thrilling and wonderful! And Mrs. Sinatra—you know, I’m not used to my new name and it takes a second before it clicks—Mrs. Frank Sinatra is the happiest girl in the world!”