by James Kaplan
Walter Chiari, 28-year-old comedian known as the Danny Kaye of Italy, is the reason why Ava Gardner and Frankie Sinatra have not kissed and made up, according to the talk in Rome film circles today.
Ava and Chiari have been seen together frequently, both before and since Frankie flew here for four days last month in a fruitless attempt at reconciliation.
One Italian newspaper today named Ava as the fourth corner of a quadrangle, saying that Chiari had split with Lucia Bosé, Miss Italy of 1947, because of Miss Gardner.
It was all gossip, of course, but it was hard to ignore. And the quadrangle image, while picturesque, omitted a fifth leg, which complicated the romantic geometry considerably: the bullfighter Dominguín.1
Frank did a week at the Beachcomber, relaxed for a few days in the Florida Keys, then Chester flew him up to New York to try to put a smile on his face. While there, he had a brief but memorable encounter, as noted by Winchell on February 26: “Frank Sinatra and Artie Shaw met in Lindy’s revolving door the other 2 a.m. Both took a coolish 5-second take and then walked away.”
Frank kept busy. There was work and there was after work—paid company, chance encounters, old flames. The work made him happy, but it still left a lot of hours in the day. Winning the Oscar, he sometimes thought (knowing the thought was childish), would solve everything, would bring him work and wealth and maybe bring Ava back too.
At the same time, he felt pessimistic, superstitious. The other nominees—Eddie Albert and Robert Strauss and Jack Palance and Brandon De Wilde—were actors. What was he? (One thing he knew he wasn’t, in an era when academy members voted only within their own categories, was popular among other performers. Albert and Palance were very popular.) Frank told Bob Thomas of the Associated Press that he probably wouldn’t even be in Los Angeles for the Oscars. “I’m a saloon singer,” he said plaintively. “I gotta go where the work is.”
But remarkably, his wandering wife seemed discontent, too. In a lengthy syndicated interview at the end of the month, Laura Lee of the North American Newspaper Alliance sat down with Ava in Rome and found her in somber, regretful spirits. “What does Ava Gardner want most in the world? A baby,” Lee wrote.
She didn’t have to think twice before answering. The thing she has wanted most in life for a long time is a couple of babies and a normal, happy marriage.
What stands in the way?
Miss Gardner swallows, bows her head and shakes it ever so slightly, as if to say, “Who knows?” …“Some day” is all she ventures by way of reply—“It must be some day.”
If she is putting on an act, Hollywood’s No. 1 box-office star is a better actress even than her many fans believe.
“Marriage for two people in the field of entertainment is a very difficult thing,” Ava concedes. “Bogie …, who has been married to four actresses, and I were discussing this just this morning.”
What they were discussing, no doubt, was the fact that the fourth and final actress Bogart had married, who had flown seven thousand miles to join him in Rome, was missing her couple of babies, badly, longing to fly back to them—and never forgetting the movie career she’d put in abeyance to be their mother.
“There isn’t a single thing about this lousy business I like,” Ava told Lee.
I hate acting and hate not having a private life. You aren’t allowed any privacy in this business.
I haven’t got a home. I haven’t got a chauffeur or a car or even a mink coat [!]. I work for only one reason. The same reason everyone works, because I need the money and I can make more this way than any other I know of …
I could walk out of making pictures tomorrow and never have a moment’s regret.
Lauren Bacall carried a coconut cake from Frank to Ava when she went to Rome to visit her husband, Humphrey Bogart, on the set of The Barefoot Contessa. Ava ignored the cake. Bacall and Sinatra later formed a close friendship. (photo credit 39.2)
“A friend of Ava’s,” Lee wrote, “says she talks about Frankie constantly, but confesses that they ‘Can’t live together and can’t live apart.’ What the trouble is neither of them is willing to admit in public—if either really knows.”
40
Frank escorts Frank Jr. and Little Nancy to the Academy Awards at the Pantages Theatre, Hollywood, March 25, 1954. (photo credit 40.1)
Young at Heart” had entered the Billboard chart on February 13; two weeks later, it climbed to the Top 10. Songs for Young Lovers was also selling. Alan Livingston was ecstatic: time to start another album. At the end of February, Sinatra flew back to Los Angeles; on March 1, he went back to meet Nelson Riddle in the Capitol studios.
Frank recorded three numbers that Monday night: Johnny Mercer and Rube Bloom’s “Day In, Day Out,” Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg’s “Last Night When We Were Young,” and a Sammy Cahn–Jule Styne title theme for an upcoming movie, “Three Coins in the Fountain.” That insipid film, starring Louis Jourdan and Jean Peters, would premiere in June; Sinatra’s singing over the title credits was the best part of it. Neither of the other two songs would be heard for a while, though. “Last Night When We Were Young” landed on Frank’s In the Wee Small Hours album in 1955, but “Day In, Day Out” didn’t officially resurface until 1991, when it appeared as a bonus track on a CD reissue of 1960’s Nice ’n’ Easy.
The lengthy obscurity of one of Sinatra’s greatest recordings is something of a mystery. He had recorded the song, with an Axel Stordahl arrangement, on his first Capitol recording date the previous April. But the Stordahl version was problematic. On the one hand, there was Frank’s vocal, which was sensational: tender, strong, and ardent. On the other, Axel’s arrangement, to put a fine point on it, was corny, old-fashioned, and soporific, from the chimes-of-midnight pizzicato intro to the soupy wash of strings and harp glissandi that seem to want to recast this towering love song as the theme to a B movie. Alan Livingston’s sharp young ears would have heard every bit of this, making his quest to link Sinatra and Riddle all the more urgent.
More important, though, Frank was eager to get the song right.
So he and Riddle made this magnificent recording, which languished in the Capitol vault for decades—in all likelihood, as the archivist Ed O’Brien has suggested, because Frank’s concepts for each of his albums were so specific that there was simply no place to put “Day In, Day Out” until it resurfaced as an asterisk in the singer’s seventy-sixth year. It was an astounding omission, but we are the beneficiaries of the correction, able to hear singer and arranger already at the apex of their powers. In the thirty-two-year-old Riddle’s hands, “Day In, Day Out” became a hymn to passion, unashamedly romantic and forthrightly sexual. It is real drama rather than melodrama. And the arrangement’s richness is greatly enhanced by the presence of a seventeen-piece string section, as contrasted to a mere nine for the Stordahl session.
In Riddle’s hands, the fiddles pulse in waves, lilting and halting, with all the teasing hesitancy and onward rush of first love; his flutes and harps are shimmering moon glow rather than schmaltz. The great Mercer lyric, at first all daydreams and possibility, rises to a peak of ardor when the lovers meet and kiss (“an ocean’s roar, a thousand drums”), and this is when Riddle finally brings on all the horns and timpani … but that’s not the end. The music and the singing grow gentle again—
Can there be any doubt
When there it is, day in—day out
—before fading to a close. Riddle would later describe his methodology. “In working out arrangements for Frank,” he said,
I suppose I stuck to two main rules. First, find the peak of the song and build the whole arrangement to that peak, pacing it as he paces himself vocally. Second, when he’s moving, get the hell out of the way. When he’s doing nothing, move in fast and establish something. After all, what arranger in the world would try to fight against Sinatra’s voice? Give the singer room to breathe. When the singer rests, then there’s a chance to write a fill that might be heard.
Most of
our best numbers were in what I call the tempo of the heartbeat. That’s the tempo that strikes people easiest because, without their knowing it, they are moving to that pace all their waking hours. Music to me is sex—it’s all tied up somehow, and the rhythm of sex is the heartbeat. I usually try to avoid scoring a song with a climax at the end. Better to build about two-thirds of the way through, and then fade to a surprise ending. More subtle. I don’t really like to finish by blowing and beating in top gear.
This is precisely the methodology of “Day In, Day Out.” The heartbeat trips and quickens toward the climax, then eases back to a serene afterglow.
Sinatra was crazy about this arrangement, and his singing shows it. Here he is not only ardent and tender, as he was on the Stordahl record, but passionate. His emotional and sexual engagement with every syllable of the lyric, every note of the song, every bar of the arrangement, never wavers. This is not just a display of great singing but also a great work of art, rich with autobiographical meaning, shot through with longing and loss.
Infinitely restless, Frank flew to Palm Springs with Chester for fun and games, then, impatiently, flew back to Los Angeles. “Just for the record,” Parsons sniffed possessively, two weeks to the day before the Oscars, “Frank Sinatra is here in town. He came in a few days ago from Palm Springs. He’ll be on Bing Crosby’s radio show, so the New York and Rome trips are canceled.”
Rome: the world simply refused to stop believing—in much the same way the world couldn’t stop believing in Santa Claus—that Frank and Ava would eventually get back together. But in the absence of hard news, writers were also coming up with their own material. Ava’s new studio publicist, Dave Hanna, was probably responsible for the fanciful item Leonard Lyons used to lead his March 12 column—the subject, the famous coconut cake. “Ava was sure that a diamond ring, bracelet or necklace was inside the cake,” Lyons wrote. “After all, a husband who is as carefree about money as Sinatra is wouldn’t send an ordinary cake as a way of having a beautiful wife keep him in mind, 7,000 miles away.
“She therefore ate it all herself, chewing each bite carefully, in search of a hidden gem. ‘I finished the whole cake,’ she said, ‘and all I found was that I couldn’t get into my costume the next day.’ ”
Meanwhile, the real Frank and Ava behind the cartoonish images kept grabbing whatever pleasures they could, trying to keep the sadness at bay. Frank’s method, as always, was ceaseless motion. Van Heusen kept the revels going, the plane warmed up. Just three days after she’d claimed Sinatra was staying put, Louella had to eat her words. “Frank Sinatra’s excuse for missing the Look and Photoplay Magazine awards: ‘I have business in New York’ and the thought that Frankie’s MOST important business is to attend all events furthering his career,” she harrumphed, incoherent with indignation.
So there really had been a New York trip—was he on his way someplace else? Rome, perhaps? “Frank Sinatra off to Italy to escort Ava to the Academy Award doings—as though Ava couldn’t find her way back to Hollywood,” wrote Jimmie Fidler, who’d heard it from someone who’d heard it from someone else.
But it wasn’t Rome; it was just New York. And it wasn’t even business; it was just to keep moving.
Westbrook Pegler had laid off Frank for quite a while, not out of any merciful tendencies, but mainly because the Sinatra of the mid-1950s had fallen beneath the notice of the subversive-hunting columnist. For one thing, since Frank’s Mafia scandals of the late 1940s, he had kept his contacts with the wiseguys as quiet as possible—not least because Ava hated the hoods even more than Pegler did. For another, Frank, with plenty to distract him, was no longer the liberal firebrand he had been in the 1940s. And in any case, the political climate of 1953 and 1954 was extremely unfriendly to liberalism. There was a Republican majority in Congress; Eisenhower was in the White House. It was one thing to rally for causes at Madison Square Garden when FDR was president; it was quite another to wear one’s political heart on one’s sleeve when the Hollywood blacklist was at its raging height. Even Bogart, who’d courageously gone to Washington to face down the House Un-American Activities Committee, felt compelled to distance himself from the Hollywood Ten.
In mid-March, though, Pegler had a halfhearted last whack at Frank. The occasion was the arrival at San Quentin of Jimmy Tarantino, the New Jersey lowlife and co-founder (with Hank Sanicola) of the short-lived scandal sheet Hollywood Nite Life. Under Tarantino’s guidance, Hollywood Nite Life had been nothing more than a vehicle for shaking down film-colony denizens with sexual and pharmaceutical idiosyncrasies: Frank had gone to lengths to distance himself, and to make sure Sanicola distanced himself, from the whole business. Tarantino had kept up his extortionate ways, had been nabbed and convicted, and now Pegler, who’d gotten mileage from the subject back in the day, was dredging up the past: “Frank Sinatra, an intimate friend of Tarantino …”; “Sinatra’s participation in an orgy of several days and nights in a de luxe hotel in Havana with Lucky Luciano …”; “Willie Moretti … Sinatra’s original backer …”
It was a reminder to the Hearst-reading public that Frank had once been down-and-out and a little bit dirty. (Why Pegler didn’t dig into Sinatra’s recent investment in the Sands is a mystery.) The public didn’t care. The public wanted to know about Frank and Ava and the Academy Awards. Pegler was growing more shrill and irrelevant by the week; even Joe McCarthy was running out of gas. America was in the mood to forgive Frank, and Frank had his eye on the brass ring.
He went to prizefights and harness races and jazz clubs, and the whores came to him. New York in the early spring of 1954 was a cavalcade of pleasures, and Van Heusen and Sanicola were working overtime to keep Frank away from the telephone, maybe even coax a smile from him now and then. They were finally beginning to get some results. His smile grew broader; his pals smiled back. Five nights in a row, he ate with them at La Scala on West Fifty-fourth Street, Frank and Hank and Jimmy and the music publisher Jackie Gale, plus whatever hangers-on happened to be hanging on. And five nights in a row, they all told Frank that he was going to take the Oscar. Every night they closed the joint: late nights with cigarettes and anisette and gorgeous broads and loud laughter. Frank would never let anyone else go near the check.
Then, very early in the morning of March 24, it was time to leave. Chester’s plane was parked at Teterboro; the sun would be rising in an hour or two. As Frank and Hank and Jimmy left the restaurant, someone at the table called out: “Bring back that Oscar!”
Frank turned around to look at whoever it was, sitting there staring at him like he was God. He nodded. “I’m gettin’ it,” he said quietly.
He drove straight from Van Nuys Airport to 320 North Carolwood, for an Italian dinner. It was cool and rainy in Los Angeles, but the house was warm and smelled wonderful; after the kids jumped on him and he kissed Nancy on the cheek, Frank put La Bohème on the hi-fiand, just for a moment, with tomato sauce in his nostrils and Puccini in his ears, thought of another household long ago. He sat in the den—his den—and put his feet up and sipped Jack Daniel’s and listened to the splendid music; Nancy came in and sat down, smoothing her skirt decorously, and they talked for a bit, for all the world like an old married couple, about how the kids were doing. Nancy Sandra, in the eighth grade, was loving school and had a ton of friends—male and female—but while Frankie was getting decent marks in fourth grade, he never said anything. He played with his planes and trains and cars and kept to himself. And little Tina’s first-grade teacher said that she was daydreaming instead of paying attention (it would turn out that she had astigmatism).
When they sat down at the table, though, all four of them were smiling at him mysteriously.
He looked around the table—Tina giggled—and raised an eyebrow. Nancy ordered them all to eat before the food got cold.
They ate. Family chitchat, about school, about the coyotes they sometimes heard howling in the hills at night. Frank grilled his older daughter about boys; Frankie watched his father as if he
were trying to memorize something. The maid cleared the table and put coffee cups at Nancy’s and Frank’s places. Frank’s attention was distracted for a second; when he turned back, there was a small white box tied with blue ribbon sitting next to his cup.
He looked around the table at them.
It was a small gold medal on a thin chain, with Saint Genesius of Rome, the patron saint of actors, on one side and on the reverse a little Oscar statuette in bas-relief. “To Daddy—all our love from here to eternity,” the inscription read.
Tears started to his eyes.
Frank looked at Big Nancy, for it had been her doing, of course: she was smiling that damn Mona Lisa smile of hers. He thanked her.
She just kept smiling.
The kids shouted for him to put it on.
He hung the chain around his neck and slid the medal under his shirt collar. He patted it twice as he looked at his family.
Then he went home alone.
The next day he awoke with a headache. It was still raining; the sky was the color of slate. George brought him the Times and the Examiner and yesterday afternoon’s Herald-Express and made him coffee. Frank opened the papers and looked for his name. Louella had called late last night; she must have something. There he was in Winchell: “After being exiled too long, F. Sinatra rejoined the jukebox royalty. His balladandy, ‘Young at Heart,’ is among the Top Ten.” Good. A headline caught his eye: NEWCOMER IS HOT FAVORITE FOR ANNUAL SCREEN AWARD. Good. But then, under Aline Mosby’s byline, the piece, datelined Hollywood, March 24, began: “Audrey Hepburn, a newcomer to movies who says she’s flat-chested and homely, is the hot favorite to reign as 1953’s best actress at tomorrow night’s 26th annual academy awards.”