by James Kaplan
It was a pleasant evening, and Ava got loaded right away. She knew all about Cohn’s reputation as a bully, but wouldn’t have been scared of him in any case. She looked him in the eye. “You know who’s right for that part of Maggio, don’t you?” she said. “That son of a bitch of a husband of mine.”
Cohn stared at her with that bulldog-terrier face. Christ, she was gorgeous.
“For God’s sake, Harry,” Ava suddenly said. “I’ll give you a free picture if you’ll just test him.”
The studio chief smiled as he looked her up and down. What else, he wondered, might she give him for free?
“We bumped into Frank and Ava at Frascati’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, and whatever trouble they might have had is evidently over,” Hedda Hopper wrote.
We’ve never seen a more loving couple. They were extremely considerate and attentive to one another. Ava, a brunette again with a “little boy bob” haircut, looked wonderful. While Ava is doing “Mogambo” in Africa, Frank will stay as closely as possible to her. He told us that there were 60 theaters in Africa in which he could play. When the company goes to England, it’ll be easy for Frank to be on hand, as he has a standing offer from the Palladium. He also wants to tour the provinces.
Touring the provinces … it had such an air of noblesse oblige about it. And it was all talk, of course: if Frank was going to tour any provinces, it would be the provinces of Missouri or Pennsylvania, or wherever else he could dig up a gig or two. The humble act that had gone over so well with Ava was all too real, and the flip side of it was that he felt lousy about himself. All that stuff about staying as close as possible to her in Africa was her idea: that, and a visit to her family in North Carolina, were her price for reconciliation. A family visit he could take; Africa was another matter. In truth, he dreaded the trip—dreaded John Ford with his sharp tongue and his three Academy Awards, even dreaded Gable, the King, with his phony teeth and his easy insouciance (and, perhaps, his assumptions about the leading man’s prerogatives when it came to Ava). What would Frank say to them?
He had heard nothing from Cohn. A day went by, and another day, then a week, and soon Sinatra began to believe that Cohn had just been humoring him. In fact, Columbia was dickering with the stage actor Eli Wallach, whom everybody, Cohn and Zinnemann and Buddy Adler, wanted for Maggio. But Wallach’s agents were being a pain in the ass, insisting that the thespian be paid $20,000 for the role when the studio had budgeted $16,000, tops.
Frank, knowing nothing of all this, was as nervous as a cat. Three nights after Hedda spied him in Frascati’s, he made a guest appearance on Jimmy Durante’s All-Star Revue—a bone tossed to him by his old It Happened in Brooklyn sidekick. Afterward, Frank and Ava went out to dinner with friends in the Valley, and they got drunk, and Frank said something awful. It was all too predictable. “By the time we’d gotten home to Pacific Palisades, my mood had taken on an icy, remote, to-hell-with-all-men tinge,” Ava recalled.
To emphasize the remoteness I felt, I retired to the solitude of my bathroom. So there I was, lying in my tub, soothing myself under the bubbles, when Frank came breezing in, picking up the argument where it had left off.
I was furious. I hate intrusions when I have my clothes off. It’s a bred-in-the-bone shyness, some sort of deep insecurity which I guess comes from my childhood. As I’ve said, with each of my three husbands it took me several drinks and a lot of courage to appear disrobed in front of them.
I reacted instinctively. “Get out of here!” I yelled.
Naturally, that gave my husband the feeling that he was not truly loved.
Frank exploded. He yelled back, “For Christ’s sake, aren’t I married to you?”
That cut no ice with me. I was still outraged.
“Go away!” I screamed.
Which paved the way for what I have to admit was a truly memorable exit line. “Okay! Okay! If that’s the way you want it, I’m leaving. And if you want to know where I am, I’m in Palm Springs, fucking Lana Turner.”
How to get your wife’s attention … Thus began a Hollywood operetta that would become the subject of heated fascination for years to come. History swirls with conflicting accounts of the next twenty-four hours, which commenced with Frank slamming doors, jumping into his car, and screeching off into the night, ostensibly in search of Lana Turner, who was indeed in Palm Springs—a fact of which Frank was well aware because she was staying in his goddamn house. Ava had lent her the goddamn house.
Frank’s old flame was hiding out in Twin Palms under the protection of her (and Ava’s) business manager Benton Cole, because Turner’s boyfriend, Fernando Lamas, had recently beaten her up in a jealous rage. Lana, who possessed an infallible trouble-seeking radar when it came to men, had provoked Lamas’s ire by dancing with the movie Tarzan Lex Barker at the very party (Marion Davies’s) at which Lamas had stared deeply into Ava’s eyes …
In fact, Hollywood in the early 1950s was a slick and dark fantasy world in many ways like the climactic house-of-mirrors scene in Orson Welles’s recent Lady from Shanghai—self-reflective to the point of disorientation. Lamas, a hotheaded Argentinean who was about to co-star with Turner in MGM’s Latin Lovers, had recently slapped her on-screen in The Merry Widow—which, he apparently felt, now gave him license to do the job for real. First, though, he turned his perfect profile to gaze soulfully at Ava precisely as a newspaper photographer snapped the scene—and as Lana sat at his side, looking appropriately humiliated.
All this at a party Marion Davies had thrown for over a thousand guests, including the press, because, said Davies, “I want to have some fun before I die.”
Benton Cole had come to Lana’s aid before. The previous September, in the wake of marital woes and a couple of box-office flops, Lana had (not unperceptively) declared her career “a hollow success, a tissue of fantasies on film,” and slit her wrists in the bathroom of her Beverly Hills house. Cole broke down the door and took her to the hospital.
Now, with her career on the upswing but her personal life a familiar shambles,2 the movie queen Frank Sinatra had once promised to marry was sitting with her manager-protector, smoking and drinking and bruised, in the love nest on Alejo Road as Frank and Ava converged separately on Palm Springs.
Despite his shouted declaration, Frank had absolutely no desire to fuck Lana Turner. He had just been angry. (Not to mention the fact that in her early thirties, she was already starting to look middle-aged.) He had passed over Lana and married Ava for a reason, and it was more than just that the sex was great. Lana Turner was, as witness her long, sad stumble through life, an empty shell of a human being, devoid of intellectual or spiritual resources of any sort. Ava Gardner, on the other hand, was a woman of enormous mettle and variety and spirit, one who would, after Frank, go on to fascinate Hemingway and Robert Graves, and not just because of the beauty of her person.
Frank knew all this (and the sex was great). Ava knew it only intermittently. She wasn’t sure she could act, she wasn’t sure she could think, but she did know she was a physical phenomenon. It was her one piece of certainty, and she gloried in it and suffered from it like any other star—if not more so, because of the depth of her sensibility. Her perpetual state of insecurity often made her feel that at bottom, nothing was really worth anything. The ground was constantly shifting beneath her feet—and beneath the feet of anyone who stood close to her. It made her at once fascinating and impossible.
Some of this may have occurred to Frank as he drove toward the desert in the pre-sunrise twilight, but what he was mainly thinking about was his own problems. He was feeling extremely sorry for himself, and he just wanted to take solace in the one place that gave him any comfort. And he wanted to be there alone. First, though, he wanted to pay a call on Jimmy Van Heusen—who loved the desert as much as Frank did, and had a place out in Yucca Valley—and talk it all out.
The first thing Ava did after Frank’s dramatic exit was call Bappie and ask her to drive with her to Palm Springs. She wan
ted, against all logic, “to catch Frank in the act.” When the sisters reached Twin Palms, Ava climbed over the chain-link fence in back and tried to peer in the windows, but the curtains were all drawn. Then the door opened. Benton Cole had heard her poking around; now he let her in—and Frank was nowhere in sight. Just Lana, “looking lovely as ever,” Ava remembered.
I knew that at one time she felt like she’d been on the verge of marrying Frank, which certainly gave some impetus to my suspicions, but we’d always been good, if not close, friends. And I’d always admired her as a great movie star. I remembered when I first arrived in Hollywood, a starlet green as a spring tobacco leaf. I’d glimpsed Lana on a set one day, and I’d thought, Now, there’s the real thing. She had a canvas-backed chair inscribed with her name and a stool next to it holding her things. What struck me was that among them was a gleaming gold cigarette case and a gold lighter. Without envy I’d thought, Now that’s what a real film star should look like. That’s style.
To say that she was style without substance is perhaps shining too harsh a light on Turner: stardom is a real phenomenon. But the remoteness that combines with physical presence in the peculiar chemical reaction that produces stardom is usually a measure of distance from self. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” Grant once said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.” “It is true,” Earl Wilson wrote, “that movie stars get to believe their own publicity.” It is actually half-true. Stardom is a seductive idea, easier to believe in if the self doesn’t get muddled up in it. Stars find it easier to believe in other stars’ publicity. Now, there’s the real thing. To Ava, Frank’s angry talk had all the power he’d intended: he was, after all, talking about Lana Turner.
On the other hand, in the morning light that filtered in around the edges of the heavy drapes, Ava couldn’t help taking note of the tired-looking woman who sat across from her in Frank’s living room—the tired-looking woman with bruises on her face who kept tapping her cigarette on the ashtray as she drank glass after glass of vodka. Ava and Bappie and Ben Cole and Lana had decided to make a regular party of it, getting pie-eyed and telling scandalous Hollywood stories, hooting with laughter.
That was when Frank burst in, furious.
Chester had not been home. And so Sinatra had headed down to his place, seen the cars parked outside, driven around Palm Springs awhile as the sun rose, building up a head of steam. When the light began to hurt his eyes—he loved the blue just before sunrise, hated the full morning light—he went back to Alejo Road, walked up to the front door, and heard the loud laughter inside. In his goddamn house.
At first the sight of them all sitting there having a gay old time rendered him speechless. Then Ava piped up. “Ah, Frank! I thought you were going to be down here fucking Lana!”
He blinked, looking flustered for a second. “I wouldn’t touch that broad if you paid me,” he said.
Lana jerked upright as if Fernando had slapped her again. It was the truth, and the truth hurt. No one was more sharply aware than she of the new lines on her face and the puffiness under her eyes, not to mention the contusions on her cheek.
For his part, Frank could only think of his own hurt. “I bet you two broads have really been cutting me up,” he said.
Lana was shaking her head, her eyes brimming at the injustice.
“Frank—” Ava warned.
At this point, accounts diverge. Frank either ordered Ava into the bedroom or commanded everyone to get out of his house. Ben Cole and Lana may have left immediately or somewhat later. In her memoir, Lana recalled that Ava shrugged and went to the bedroom, followed by Frank, and that soon the sounds of a terrific battle, complete with crashing furniture, could be heard. According to Turner, Bappie later brought a “battered” Ava to stay with her and Cole. “We did what we could to make Ava comfortable,” she recalled.
Poor Ava. She was badly shaken, and after my own grim experience, I could sympathize with her humiliation. But alone in my room I was surprised that I also felt sorry for Frank. It was a bad time for him. His career had slipped badly, and he was losing Ava.
This has a self-serving sound to it—as though Turner merely wanted a sister in suffering. In her own reminiscences, Ava mentions nothing about a beating, even though her fights with Frank always seemed to devolve into physical mayhem as a prelude to sex. Instead, she claims she gave as good as she got, informing her husband haughtily that it was her house too, and proceeding to pull all her books and phonograph records from the shelves. “Frank seemed to approve of this idea,” she remembered.
Furiously he scooped up everything I’d thrown on the floor and heaved it all out the still-open front door … and onto the pitch-dark driveway. Not to be outdone, I stalked across to the bedroom and bathroom and started to pile my clothes, cosmetics, and every other goddamn odd and end I had in a heap on the floor. And Frank grabbed those as well, raced to the door, and tossed them out into the night to join the ever-growing mess in the driveway.
Soon, according to Ava, Frank had seized her by the waist and was trying to toss her out too, while she clung for dear life to a doorknob. In the meantime, the forty-nine-year-old Bappie—conceivably with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other—was attempting to make peace between the two. “For God’s sake, kids, will you please knock it off?” she said. “This is disgraceful!”
At last somebody, either Frank or the neighbors, or both, called the police, who arrived, in the form of the genial former football star August “Gus” Kettmann—Palm Springs PD chief and, according to Ava, a friend of Frank’s. Kettmann looked at the mess, looked at Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra’s flushed faces, looked at the mess again. He pushed his hat back and scratched his head. There had been a lot of noise but no criminal activity, and the whole episode had taken place on private property. He could book the couple for disturbing the peace, but what would be the point? He told everyone to simmer down and left.
Naturally, word got out. Word always got out.
Two days later the Los Angeles Times put the story, what they had of it, right on page one, under the headline NOT CONFIRMED, and the subhead “Sinatra-Ava Boudoir Row Story Buzzes.”
At that point it was all sizzle and no steak. The Times quoted Chief Kettmann as saying he knew nothing about anything. “I was off duty and there’s nothing on the record about a disturbance,” he claimed, not very convincingly.
The reporter then tried to goad the chief into more of a response by citing “Palm Springs rumors”: namely, “that Sinatra ordered his beautiful film actress wife out of their desert mansion.”
“Well,” harrumphed Kettmann, “after all, if John Smith and his wife had a fight at their house I wouldn’t feel privileged to tell you of any discussion that went on in their bedroom between Mr. and Mrs. Smith and our officers. I know nothing about it.”
Kettmann may not have been telling the press much, but according to Earl Wilson “the Palm Springs police were talking”—their tongues perhaps loosened by some folding money. It was the peak of a big presidential election season—a tight race between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight D. Eisenhower—but the Frank and Ava Show was vying for America’s attention. In the October 21 Fresno Bee, at the top of a page filled with headlines like NIXON SAYS ADLAI HAS RING IN NOSE, BARKLEY PREDICTS SWEEP IN SOUTH, STEVENSON OPENS LAST BIG WHISTLE STOP CAMPAIGN, and MRS. FDR PICKS ADLAI AS HER CHOICE IN RACE, there appeared the following news flash:
COLUMNIST SAYS SINATRA BOOTS AVA OUT OF HOME
NEW YORK—AP—Columnist Earl Wilson reported today in the New York Post Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner have separated after a spectacular quarrel.
When Wilson phoned Van Heusen and asked to speak to Sinatra, Chester said, “Frank’s in the bathroom throwing up.”
In the absence of hard information, rumors sprouted and flourished. Soon the kinds of salacious tales that Ava and Lana had been bandying over vodkas in the living room of Twin Palms were flashing around Hollywood: Ava had walked in on Lana and Frank having sex. Frank had
walked in on Lana and Ava having sex. A more elaborate version even found its way into a subsequent FBI report on Sinatra: Frank had walked in on Lana and Ava having a three way with another man. Why not throw in poor Bappie too?
The fact was, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner were a permanently unstable compound, and no amount of sexual intercourse, no matter how spectacular, was sufficient to keep them bonded. Or as Ava later confided to the singer Bricktop: “The problems were never in bed. The problems would start on the way to the bidet.”
Then they were back together again. Fittingly, since they belonged to the public, the reconciliation proceeded largely through public channels. Phase one was brokered by their hovering chronicler Earl Wilson, who leaned on Frank to admit how miserable he was, then ran a column in the New York Post headlined FRANKIE READY TO SURRENDER; WANTS AVA BACK, ANY TERMS. After friends and colleagues alerted her to the piece, she let it be known that she would accept her husband’s call.
He called.
After the obligatory private phase two, phase three took place onstage at the Hollywood Palladium in front of four thousand people, at a rally for Adlai Stevenson on October 27. Then as now, many of the stars came out for the Democrats, Frank and Ava prominent among them. The couple had been slated to appear together for weeks, but of course in the wake of the previous weekend’s events no one had any idea if they would actually show up.