by James Kaplan
Then Ava walked out onto center stage, wearing a black-satin strapless dress and a mink jacket, and smiled dazzlingly into the spotlight. The audience, filled with her peers, smiled back at her, knowing a great show when it saw one. She stepped to the microphone and waited for the applause to fade. “I can’t do anything myself,” Ava said, “but I can introduce a wonderful, wonderful man. I’m a great fan of his myself. Ladies and gentlemen, my husband, Frank Sinatra!”
The roar that followed was more about them than about him and he knew it, but he smiled anyway as he stepped into the spotlight and put his arm around his wife’s shoulder. Frank looked like hell. He wore a big ADLAI button on the lapel of his dark suit, and as he stood with Ava, he spoke a few words about the candidate they both admired, but he might as well have been moving his lips soundlessly for all the audience cared. Here was a couple whose magnetism trumped that of all Hollywood couples before or since.
Then Frank was kissing Ava, she was waving and stepping out of the spotlight, and the band struck up and he sang—first hard and swingingly, on “The Birth of the Blues”; then soft and feelingly, on “The House I Live In”—and the hushed crowd remembered, for a few minutes, just how great he had been.
She stood in the wings staring at him as he sang, head over heels all over again. He was just fucking magic, she thought. The reporters gathered backstage kept tossing questions at her as she watched and listened, but Ava just gazed at Frank, smiling.
Some guy from a Chicago paper, greasy hair and thick glasses, tried to cut through the clutter. “Hey, Ava—come on!” he called. “What do you see in this guy? He’s just a hundred-and-nineteen-pound has-been!”
Not even blinking, she said, “Well, I’ll tell you—nineteen pounds is cock.”
The reporter stood frozen, his mouth open, his pencil poised over his notebook amid heavy masculine laughter. Ava smiled serenely and kept watching the audience held spellbound by the memory of Sinatra.
Frank and Ava and Bappie landed at Idlewild and found the usual wall of reporters, hoping for a fight, a cross word—anything. Seeing the couple apparently happy, the men of the press did their best to get something going.
“So, Frank—are they going to try and find you a role in Mogambo?”
He gave the guy a look. “Yeah, I’m gonna play a native, in blackface.”
Another reporter: “What’ll Frank be doing while you’re making the movie, Ava?”
“Oh, he’ll do his act in some African nightclubs.”
“Who’s opening for him, Tarzan?” a guy in the back called out.
After braving it as best they could, they had sandwiches and a few drinks, then got on another plane for Winston-Salem. This was Frank’s end of the bargain, or the first half of it at any rate: they had spent plenty of time with his family; now it was time for him to meet hers. It was her first trip back home in three years.
He was not in a good frame of mind. A month had gone by since his lunch with Cohn: no word. Frank now knew Columbia was testing other actors, real actors, for the role of Maggio. He had sent more telegrams signed with the character’s name, trying to be cute, trying not to show how desperate he felt. Silence. Ava, of course, had mentioned nothing of her meeting with Harry’s wife: she understood her husband’s complex Italian pride. She looked at him, worried; she tried to keep his spirits up. The best he could manage was gallows humor. Most of the time he was uncharacteristically silent. He read and reread his rumpled copy of Eternity.
This was his life for now. They would go to North Carolina, then they would go to Africa, where she would work and he would sit. Just before Thanksgiving he would fly back to do two weeks at the French Casino, a club in the Paramount Hotel on Forty-sixth Street, at ten grand a week. It would have been half-decent money if Frank were actually getting any of it. (By comparison, Martin and Lewis, who were all over television, radio, the movies, theaters, and clubs, were then earning a guaranteed ten thousand a night for live performance.) It wasn’t much of a booking, but it was a booking. He had no television or radio show, no movie deal, no record label, no concerts, no nothing. Lastfogel was working on all of it for him, making heroic efforts. “Sinatra smelled like a loser in those days,” the agent would say years later.
So, reeking of failure, Frank went to Winston-Salem. There, at least, he was Frank Sinatra. There, the locals blushed and tripped over themselves at the mere sight of him—or rather, him and Ava. He and his wife and Bappie went to Ava’s sister Myra’s house: a little house, filled with relatives and the smells of delicious cooking. It all took Frank back to Hasbrouck Heights: the smells were different, the voices were different, but the mixed tides of love and claustrophobia were much the same.
Ava gleamed and glittered, too big and bright for the small rooms, her gorgeousness burnished by her success and the proud love of her family. Frank did his best. Myra’s husband, Bronnie Pearce, ran a laundry in Winston-Salem, with a pick-up-and-drop-off diaper service. Frank’s interest in the laundry business was limited … But they were good people, the Pearces and the Grimeses and the Creeches and the Gardners, so he made an effort, answering every question no matter how dumb, making conversation while he held a plate heaped with country food, glancing out at the gray trees and wondering when he could escape.
“Frank was very nice—a little quiet and shy,” Billy Grimes’s sister Mary Edna remembered many years later. A stray moment stayed with her: seeing Sinatra in the living room, sitting on the piano stool and talking with her ten-year-old brother about his clarinet lessons at school. “I heard him tell Michael how he’d learned to play the flute when he was young,” she said. She was struck by Frank’s serious respectfulness with the boy.
He was also depressed. Under the circumstances, one day in North Carolina was about all he could stand. He told Ava he had to get back to Manhattan; he was desperate to recharge his batteries. She wasn’t happy, but she understood. She told him she needed another day with her family. Things were cool between them now: she was rising, rising, like a runaway balloon, and there was nothing Frank could do to stop her. Nor anything she could do to stop him—Ava went to see him off at the airport. Reporters were present, of course: they groaned with disappointment when Frank gave her a farewell peck on the cheek. Once more with feeling, please, for the cameras … And then he was dashing across the tarmac, turning for a second to say one more thing to his wife as he ran to the plane. The men of the press listened carefully, pencils poised.
“Goodbye, Dolly,” Frank yelled, over the engine noise. “I’ll call you.”
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Arriving in Nairobi as Ava heads to work on Mogambo, November 1952. (photo credit 32.1)
They celebrated their first anniversary on board another plane, this time en route to Nairobi, opening a warmish bottle of champagne and exchanging gifts that she had paid for: a diamond-studded ring from him, a platinum watch from her. “It was quite an occasion for me,” Ava recalled. “I had been married twice but never for a whole year.”
Clark Gable came to meet their flight at Eastleigh Airport in Nairobi. “Hiya, Clark!” Ava called, when she spotted him. They embraced. Gable growled hello: she looked as ravishing as always. He looked magnificent in his khakis and bush hat. Frank, standing by in his rumpled airplane suit, his tie loosened, his thin hair flying in the breeze, faked a smile. In fact he needn’t have worried. Though Ava and Gable were old drinking buddies from their co-starring stint in the miserable Lone Star—and had had the obligatory on-location fling—she’d quickly come to see the gulf between image and reality. “Clark’s the kind of guy that if you say, ‘Hiya, Clark, how are you?’ he’s stuck for an answer,” she told friends. She loved him like an uncle—and kept sacrosanct the steamy black-and-white memory of his commanding eyes in Red Dust.
But while the 1932 Red Dust had been shot in its entirety on Stage 6 at MGM, the Technicolor 1950s required greater verisimilitude. Mogambo would be filmed, as Metro’s ad copy trumpeted, “on safari in Africa amid authent
ic scenes of unrivaled savagery and awe-inspiring splendor.” The savagery was a little too real for comfort: the Mau Mau Uprising had recently begun in Kenya, and Kikuyu rebels had killed dozens of whites. “The movie company had its own thirty-man police force,” Ava remembered, “and when we got to what was then British East Africa, we were under the protection of both the Lancashire Fusiliers and the Queen’s African Rifles … Everyone in the cast was issued a weapon.” There is no record of whether Frank brought his own.
East Africa had never seen a safari quite like this: a cast and crew of almost six hundred, including bearers, guides, chefs, nurses, servants, native extras, and no fewer than eight big-game hunters, chief among them a rakish English expat named Frank “Bunny” Allen. The whole contingent moved from location to location in a convoy of fifty trucks, and, Ava recalled,
once we settled our encampment was three hundred tents strong. And if you think those tents were just for sleeping, think again. My God, we had tents for every little thing you could think of: dining tents, wardrobe tents with electric irons, a rec room tent with darts for the Brits and table tennis for the Yanks, even a hospital tent complete with X-ray machine, and a jail tent in case anybody got a tiny bit too rowdy.
Along the Kagera River on the Tanganyika-Uganda border, the stars (twenty-three-year-old Grace Kelly played Gable’s other love interest) lived in Abercrombie & Fitch–like safari splendor: fancy flown-in French food (Sinatra brought a supply of pasta and tomato sauce), fine wines and liquors, even heated water for baths and showers. It might as well have been a penal colony as far as Frank was concerned. The temperatures rose well into the hundreds during the day; dust blew into every crevice. One shower a day didn’t begin to suffice … But mainly, he was a fifth wheel. Ford liked throwing orders at him, with a broad wink to the others: “Make the spaghetti, Frank.” The malicious old Irishman constantly tested everyone around him for weakness, prodding and needling: one of the first things he told Ava was that he’d really wanted Maureen O’Hara to play her role.
For Frank, all of Mogambo boiled down to one object—a camp chair. While Ford took the cast and crew out into the bush every morning to shoot, Frank parked his ass in that damn chair, rereading that goddamn book for the umpteenth time, thinking about all the other actors who were testing for Maggio, and wondering if Harry Cohn was ever going to call him back.
It didn’t make him especially good company. By the time the movie people returned in the evening, he was two or three drinks ahead of them, grumbling into his glass about the dirt and the flies and Columbia Pictures.
Out in the bush at night, there was little to do but drink, and behind thin tent walls there were few secrets. The show people and crew engaged in the usual location mischief—Gable and Kelly had a hot affair; Bunny Allen had quite a few—but Frank and Ava mainly battled. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that she was feeling lousy. Maybe it was dysentery—a lot of people, including Ford, were sick—but by the time Frank had complained for the thousandth time about his troubles, she had had it. “Why don’t you just get on with your fucking life?” she screamed at him one night. Many heard her.
Every morning, the company’s DC-3 would bump down in the clearing the crew had bulldozed, bringing supplies and mail from Nairobi. And one morning, a long week after Frank and Ava had arrived, there was a cable for him in the morning mail.
Some say it was from Buddy Adler; some say it came from Bert Allenberg, one of Sinatra’s new agents at William Morris. In any case, the cable was short and to the point: Frank was to report to Culver City to be screen-tested for the role of Maggio.
He read it over and over again. There was no mention of exactly how he was supposed to get to Culver City from the middle of the goddamn jungle, and he didn’t have the price of a ticket.
Frank hated asking Ava for money, but she didn’t hesitate for a second. She had an MGM account: all she had to do to charge airfare was say the word. It was the best she had liked her husband in weeks—because it was the best he had liked himself in weeks. Go knock ’em dead, she told him.
With the New York gig coming up, he might as well stay through, he said. It meant he wouldn’t be back for almost a month.
She agreed with him, the faintest hint of coolness in her voice. He picked it up, but there was no time to investigate.
He threw his things together in record time, kissed her, and clambered aboard the DC-3, strapping himself into a jump seat behind the pilot and waving out the window as the plane started to bump down the runway. Then he was gone.
He left the location on Friday, November 14, took a long overnight flight from Nairobi to London, and arrived the next day. He stayed at the Savoy, and when he departed on Sunday for New York, he left a brown-paper-wrapped package he’d brought with him in the hotel’s safe-deposit box. Ava had asked him to take the package, containing her diamond earrings and a diamond bracelet, so the Mau Maus wouldn’t get them.
Frank landed at Idlewild on Monday morning. He had handed his declaration sheet to the customs agent and walked blearily through the checkpoint when another agent waved him aside. Suddenly two cops appeared and escorted him to an office. Frank asked what was going on, but nobody said anything. Soon the office was filled with cops and U.S. customs agents. The agents asked if they could open his suitcases, then told him they had the authority to do so whether he agreed or not.
Frank asked once more what the hell was happening. No one answered.
He stomped around a side office for almost two hours, fuming, while the agents inspected his bags minutely. He was going to miss his goddamn flight to Los Angeles. He was going to call a lawyer. He phoned Sol Gelb, who said he would look into it, but that in the meantime Frank should try to be cooperative. Frank phoned Sanicola, who drove out to Idlewild and butted heads with the customs people, who were very polite but very firm. No one would say what was going on. Finally, when it was clear that Frank had indeed missed his flight, customs let him go. Cursing, he got into Hank’s car, rode into the city, checked in at the Regency, and phoned Buddy Adler—who told him that tomorrow would be fine for his screen test.
The next morning he went to Idlewild to catch another flight, and the plane was delayed for three hours by mechanical problems. Frank turned around, went back to the Regency, and opened a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Buddy Adler was understanding. Sanicola said that Sol Gelb had spoken to customs—which informed the lawyer that someone had sent in a crank letter saying that Sinatra was going to smuggle diamonds into the country.
On Wednesday the nineteenth Frank finally made it to Los Angeles. It was after five when he landed, and Adler’s office said Frank could come in the next day. He spent the evening drinking, rereading the Maggio passages for the thousandth time, and wondering if he had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the role.
Ava had suspected it for a while, and by Tuesday of that week she knew she was pregnant. It was definitely Frank’s (she’d been good for a while), but she didn’t want it. “I had the strongest feelings about bringing a child into the world,” she would recall years later.
I felt that unless you were prepared to devote practically all your time to your child in its early years it was unfair to the baby …
Not to mention the fact that MGM had all sorts of penalty clauses about their stars having babies. If I had one, my salary would be cut off. So how would I make a living? Frank was absolutely broke and would probably continue to be (or so I thought) for a long time … [T]he fact that I was pregnant would be showing quite plainly long before [Mogambo] was finished, so Jack Ford had to be told for starters. I felt the time just wasn’t right for me to have a child.
The time would never be right. She was at best ambivalent and at worst terrified; the prospect of motherhood held no charms for her. As the adored and magically splendid baby of the Gardner family, she was the world’s child; there was no room in her life for others. (For all Nancy junior’s starry awe about her, Ava wasn’t always particularly frie
ndly to Frank’s children.) And having a baby would change her body, and she knew where her bread was buttered. “I often felt,” Ava wrote, “that if only I could act, everything about my life and career would have been different. But I was never an actress—none of us kids at Metro were. We were just good to look at.”
It wasn’t just that she felt she couldn’t act. Usually she didn’t want to, much. “The truth is that the only time I’m happy is when I’m doing absolutely nothing,” she wrote in her memoir. “I don’t understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamned duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.”
Nice work if you can get it. “Let’s put it this way,” Ava told Hedda Hopper before leaving for Africa. “I was going to be a secretary. But I’d rather be a star than a secretary … I’ll go along with acting so long as it gives me financial security.”
Oddly enough, though, she was having more fun making Mogambo than she’d ever had on a picture before. Ford was a great director, despite his surliness—or maybe because of it. He was a strange cat: a self-invented character and natural storyteller, obsessed with manliness (and perhaps a closeted homosexual), prone to the most outrageous verbal cruelties … It was said he was the only man who could make John Wayne cry. Ava was made of sterner stuff. She brought the director around, after he’d zinged her early on, by telling him to take that handkerchief he was always chewing—nervous habit—and shove it up his ass.1 That did the trick with John Ford. He put his arm around her shoulder, took her aside, and said, “You’re damn good. Just take it easy.”
Besides, the part she was playing, the tough and careless sexual firecracker pioneered by Harlow in Red Dust, was made-to-order for Gardner. “For someone with my naturally irreverent temperament,” she recalled,