Frank

by James Kaplan

  While Frank opened at the Riviera, she went with a girlfriend to a Broadway show—as it happened, the premiere of Carnival in Flanders, book by Preston Sturges, music and lyrics by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke. Despite the brilliant creative team, the critics murdered the show, which ran for only six performances. The failure hastened Burke’s decline into alcoholism and steeled Chester’s resolve to stick to writing for the movies. (But as Ava sat there that night, she got to hear John Raitt debut Van Heusen’s greatest song, “Here’s That Rainy Day”—of which Sinatra would record the greatest version six years thence.)

  Meanwhile, across the river, Frank was knocking them dead. “Every big star—except Ava Gardner—was at Frank Sinatra’s big, spectacular opening at Bill Miller’s Riviera,” Earl Wilson wrote. “(Martin & Lewis couldn’t get a table!)”

  It was true: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, virtual protégés of Frank’s, and now arguably the biggest stars in the world, were refused the ringside table they demanded. It was a maître d’s dream and nightmare: the place was simply too jammed with celebrities to admit any more. The duo walked off in a huff. It was a subtle changing of the guard.

  Dean and Jerry missed a hell of a show. “Electrifying,” said Eddie Fisher, who had been more prudent about getting a reservation. “Frank let loose a vocal tour de force, accompanied by Bill Miller at the piano and a seven-piece band,” Variety’s critic wrote.

  He held the floor a solid 60 minutes and while he might and should cut 10 minutes there was no gainsaying the consistency of his socko. He’s in for $10,000 a week, for two weeks, and both he and [club owner] Bill Miller owe a lot to Harry Cohn for what the Columbia picture did for all concerned. Oh yes, he also sang “From Here to Eternity” and wisely sh-sh’d some exuberant bobby-soxers who squealed an occasional “Oh Frankie.”

  Frank was in great voice and delighted to be performing for an American audience, and a hip one at that. He could even make fun of his marital troubles: when he sang Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” he mimed getting booted in the butt, as if by you-know-who, to gales of laughter. “Frank Sinatra’s intimates say he hasn’t been as happy in years, despite the rift with Ava,” Dorothy Kilgallen wrote early in the second week of the stand. “The success of his dramatic effort in ‘From Here to Eternity’ plus his great hit as a ballad singer at the Riviera have lifted him out of the bitter depression that was beginning to worry all his associates. In the long run, his career seems to be more important to him than any luscious female.”

  While this was true in the long run, Sinatra was paying a bitter price. Friends like Van Heusen and Sanicola and Jule Styne, friends he made stay up with him every night until dawn, took the true measure of his misery. And no matter how many laughs he enjoyed with his buddies, Ava made him miserable. He couldn’t dominate her; he couldn’t understand her. The more inconstant she was, the more he needed her.

  On September 12, Earl Wilson, who fancied himself a friend, devoted almost his entire column to a jocular account of his failed attempt to bring Frank and Ava back together. “As a Cupid, I’m stupid, for I just made a gallant effort to melt the deep freeze between Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra … and fixed everything up so good that the freeze is now twice as deep,” he wrote.

  Ava and I met in a large eatery run by a large eater. After talking about her next picture, “Mogambo,” in which she is a real sexpot, I happened to mention her Herculean husband whom she considers has neglected her, which—if it’s true—makes him this century’s man of iron.

  “You still haven’t seen him or talked to him?” I asked.

  “No.” She sipped her tea … She was wearing, I noticed, Frank’s wedding ring, also a large frosty smile of independence …

  “Can I be an intermediary?” I asked. “I know a lot about patching up quarrels with wives. First the husband says it was all his fault and after that everything’s easy.”

  “Nobody can help us but ourselves,” she answered. “You must talk, you must understand each other. Listen to me. Lady psychiatrist!”

  “I still think you should have been [at the Riviera],” I said.

  “I don’t have to defend myself,” she said, “as long as I’m sure in my heart that I was right.”

  Dolly sailed into the breach. Talking to her son on the phone, she instantly heard the sadness in his voice.

  He went on and on about the crowds at the Riviera. He was doing great.

  Dolly grunted. Bullshit.

  She phoned Ava at the Hampshire House. Ava asked her please to come right over. “She kissed me, and after a few minutes she began to cry,” Dolly recalled.

  She had been tired, she said, when the plane came in, and when she didn’t see Frank, she felt bad. Then she found out he was in Atlantic City with me and said, “Mama, I don’t know how to explain this, but I know how little you get to see him. I thought for once you’re together, just the two of you, and I didn’t want to spoil it.”

  “Frankie is so upset,” Dolly said. “It’s drivin’ him nuts you two not speakin’.” He was drinking; he was taking pills to sleep. Ava’s mother-in-law looked her up and down.

  “Jesus Christ! You know you two kids love each other! So quit all this fuckin’ shit, for God’s sake!”

  And so Dolly hatched her grand plan. She invited Ava to Weehawken for a big Italian dinner the next night, then she phoned Frank and invited him.

  “Who’s gonna be there?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Never mind—you just come.” Seven sharp. If he was late, she would feed his dinner to the dog.

  Ava came at six thirty; Frank, at seven. They stood in the hall and stared at each other, smiling a little bit. “Hey,” Dolly told her son and daughter-in-law. “Come into the kitchen and see what I’m making for you tonight.”

  They followed like obedient children. “We walked to the stove,” Dolly recalled, “and I took the big spoon I use for stirring the gravy and I made them both taste it. Then they both began to laugh and talk and before you knew it they were hugging each other and then they grabbed me and the three of us stood there just hugging and laughing and I think we all felt like crying a little bit too.”

  After dinner, Dolly and Marty and Ava and Frank drove to Fort Lee for Frank’s late show. He forgot all about the boot-in-the-ass shtick from “I Get a Kick Out of You”—now he sang the song right to her. Her eyes gleamed. “The Voice unleashed a torrent of sound at the sultry Ava,” the New York Journal American’s reviewer wrote. “Emotion poured from him like molten lava.”

  The next day, Frank moved out of the Waldorf and into Ava’s suite at the Hampshire House.

  36

  Ava at the Los Angeles premiere of Mogambo, October 8, 1953. Alone. She and Frank were headed inexorably toward separation. (photo credit 36.1)

  It couldn’t last, of course: it never had, and it never would. In the end, Dolly’s Cupid act was to prove no more effective than Earl Wilson’s. Cupid didn’t have enough arrows in his quiver for this pair.

  A couple of nights after Frank moved back in with Ava, he told her he’d be home by 2:00 a.m.—and stayed out till 5:00, getting congratulated for everything by his pals. He could take a lot of congratulation.

  “Isn’t it a little late to be coming home?” she asked him.

  His lips tightened. “Don’t cut the corners too close on me, baby,” he said. “This is the way my life is going to be from now on.”

  That night Ava’s reserved table at the Riviera was empty. His concentration shot, Frank gave a dud of a show.

  “When he was down and out,” Ava said, “he was so sweet. But now that he’s successful again, he’s become his old arrogant self. We were happier when he was on the skids.”

  There was a grain of truth to it, but just a grain. The reality was that their relationship was impossible by definition. They were competitors as well as lovers. And now the only glue that held them together was loosening: Ava confided to friends that Frank could no longer satisfy her sexual
ly.

  “Almost since their marriage, the Ava Gardner–Frank Sinatra situation has been what the military experts call ‘fluid,’ ” Dorothy Kilgallen wrote on September 30.

  So anyone who writes a newsnote about them does so in the full knowledge that it may be one hundred per cent wrong by the time the paper is on the stands.

  However, the latest bulletin from their chums has them apart again. As evidence, the pals point to the fact that Frank dined alone at the Villanova and later turned up at the Marciano-LaStarza fight without his glamorous bride. True, they say she might not like fights (especially after all the ones she’s had in her own private life) but what has she got against spaghetti?

  It wasn’t the meals she disliked; it was his choice of dining companions. At Joe E. Lewis’s Copacabana opening, Frank sat ringside with a group including Frank Costello and a comely young thing who reportedly found Sinatra “devastating.” Ava read the report, and blew up. Ava’s old ally, the quiet but effective MGM publicity chief, Howard Strickling, got wind of the umpteenth domestic disturbance, and gently reminded her that the studio was still paying her sizable salary. Could she and Strickling figure out a way, just for a moment, to divert the public’s attention from her marriage and redirect it to Mogambo? It would be nice if Ava could attend the premiere with her husband; it would also be nice if they managed to look like a happy couple.

  Somehow they brought it off. On October 1, at Radio City, an Associated Press photographer got a shot of the pair standing close together and grinning real grins. “Together again,” the caption read. “The situation may change greatly before press time, but Frank Sinatra and his actress wife, Ava Gardner, were together Thursday night and here’s a picture to prove it.”

  The next morning, the papers were full of rave reviews for her performance as Honey Bear Kelly. But when a reporter phoned and read her some of the notices, she told him, “Don’t believe a word of it—I don’t.”

  She might as well have been talking about her marriage.

  That night, she and Frank took a TWA Constellation to Los Angeles—she had an L.A. premiere for Mogambo; he was booked for a week at the Sands—and, somewhere over Nebraska, they reached an accommodation. A reporter called one of Strickling’s minions (the studio employed a publicity staff of fifty) and wondered aloud about the dissonance between the cozy images and the continuing reports of marital unrest. “They’re together—and that’s the main thing,” the MGM rep said.

  Ava did her best to defend the united front. “If Frankie goes to New York to do ‘Waterfront’ for Elia Kazan, I’ll accompany him,” she told a columnist. “Meanwhile, we are sort of up in the air. We don’t have a house or even a car.”

  It was all a ruse. The moment the press wasn’t looking, they put on their sunglasses and went their separate ways—Frank to 20th Century Fox to discuss Pink Tights, Ava to Culver City to see what fresh outrage Metro had in mind for her. But it seemed there was a live possibility outside the studio: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Herman’s younger brother and currently the hottest writer-director in Hollywood (he’d won Oscars in both categories in 1950 and 1951, for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve), had written a script called The Barefoot Contessa, and would be shooting it in Rome in January. Mankiewicz would also be producing. He had already signed Humphrey Bogart, and he wanted Ava, badly. He was bargaining with the studio chairman, Nicholas Schenck, in Metro’s New York office, for her services.

  Ava sat up and took notice. Bogart … Rome … a barefoot contessa … She didn’t know what the hell the movie was about, but it sounded just right for her. She decided she wanted it.

  Meanwhile, an odd item appeared in Jimmie Fidler’s column:

  Two intimates of Frank Sinatra are the source of my information that the singer is becoming daily more upset over the constant bickering between himself and his wife, Ava Gardner. They don’t think Sinatra will put up with it much longer, because (they swear to this) Frank is a changed man since his career went on the zoom and he wants to settle down to a quiet, secure future … One of the two mused into my willing ear: “Wouldn’t it be ironic if Sinatra, now apparently desirous of a peaceful life, should return to the person with whom he had it, his ex-wife?”

  Most likely the leak was an attempted warning, on Frank’s part, to Ava; but it only steeled her resolve to get out of town—without Frank. On October 5, she officially asked MGM for a temporary release from her contract in order to do The Barefoot Contessa.

  And Frank went on the radio. He didn’t want to do another television series—it was too hard, and the screen was too small. His future, he felt, would be about making records and movies. In the meantime, though, he could keep his profile high, and his wallet full, with comparatively little effort. On October 6, at Radio City West on Sunset and Vine, Sinatra taped the first episode of a detective-themed new series titled, a little too poignantly, Rocky Fortune.

  Frank played the title character, “a footloose and fancy-free young man”—out of work, in other words—who got a different job assignment every week from the Gridley Employment Agency. Over the show’s twenty-five-week run, Rocky would labor as a process server, museum tour guide, cabbie, bodyguard (to a professional football player—the magic of radio!), truck driver, and social director for a Catskills resort, among other things.

  On the premier episode, he took script in hand and read into the mike: “Hi, I don’t know what it is about me and employment—we start out together but sooner or later, usually sooner, we reach the fork in the road. You take last week: the employment agency sent me out on a job as an oyster shucker, but someone tried to serve me up on a half shell, with a real crazy cocktail sauce—blood.”

  It was the radio equivalent of a B movie—unapologetically cheesy, though perhaps there should have been some apologies. Among the writers who produced this claptrap were Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts, both of whom would go on to win Emmy Awards for dramatic television—but Sinatra really should have known better. Still, he imparted a certain tongue-in-cheek verve to the enterprise, and he collected that paycheck.

  Of all the numerous characters who’d been buttering Frank up in the last two months, the most insistent was a movie producer named Sam Spiegel. Spiegel was an operator straight out of a Saul Bellow novel: heavy jawed, prow nosed, and pinkie ringed, he had an indefinable Eastern European accent, a looming, slightly menacing stare, and a murky past, complete with at least one deportation and jail time for kiting checks. “He was always surrounded with beautiful women, whom he graciously dispatched to his friends, or whomever he wanted to sell something to,” recalled George Jacobs. “He seemed like a joke. Yet he was the real deal.”

  Spiegel began his producing career in Berlin and fled Germany upon the rise of the Nazis. His path to America was circuitous, and likely illegal: when he finally made it to Hollywood in the late 1930s, he adopted the alias S. P. Eagle in an attempt to throw off the bloodhounds. Over the next decade he bootstrapped himself into a Hollywood career, forming important alliances with two equally colorful characters, Orson Welles and John Huston. In 1951, Spiegel produced The African Queen, with Huston directing and Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in the starring roles: Bogart won an Oscar for Best Actor.

  Sam Spiegel began pursuing Sinatra relentlessly. According to Spiegel, the role of the longshoreman and ex-prizefighter Terry Malloy in Budd Schulberg’s script for On the Waterfront had practically been written for Frank. The film was even going to be shot in Hoboken: it was perfect. “For Chrissakes, you are Hoboken!” the producer told Sinatra.

  But in Hollywood’s eyes, Frank was still not a star. He had given one terrific performance, but in the cold-eyed view of the movie business he might still be a flash in the pan. He had dazzled in an ensemble, but could he actually carry a dramatic picture? Was Sam Spiegel, gambler though he was, willing to make that bet?

  In fact, with Sinatra, Spiegel was hedging his bets.

  The actor Spiegel really wanted to play Terry Malloy wa
s Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando could carry a dramatic picture; Marlon Brando was It. Not yet thirty—eight years younger than Sinatra—Brando had already redefined the art of movie acting. When he was on a screen, even just scratching himself, you couldn’t take your eyes off him. He had already been nominated for two Academy Awards, once as the oaf Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and then—utterly transforming himself—as the titular Mexican revolutionary in Viva Zapata! He had transformed himself again and again—into Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, into a motorcycle hood in The Wild One.

  Marlon Brando could do anything, especially put asses in movie seats. But Brando didn’t want to join the cast of On the Waterfront, because both Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg had named names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  For months, the actor refused even to read Schulberg’s script, yet Spiegel, even as he wooed Sinatra, kept after Brando. “Politics has nothing to do with this,” the producer told him. “It’s about your talent, it’s about your career.”

  Finally, Brando read the script, and saw Spiegel’s point. It was an extremely powerful story, a metaphor for important themes of the era: political corruption, the perils of silence. None of the roles the actor had played so far embodied an inner torment anything like that which Budd Schulberg had written into Terry Malloy. As with Maggio, there was a Christlike quality to Malloy. It was another story about a common man facing down brute authority, and it would have been right up Sinatra’s alley.

  Elia Kazan almost agreed. “Frank Sinatra would have been wonderful, but Marlon was more vulnerable,” the director said. “He had this great range of violent emotions to draw from. He had more schism, more pain, and so much shame—the actor who played Terry had to have a lot of shame.”