by Kitty Kelley
“We used to talk a lot between scenes and he always talked about ‘class.’ It seemed to be his favorite word. He said that one of the classiest things he’d ever seen in his life was Gene Tierney walking into a Broadway theater one night wearing a white mink jacket. Frank went on and on about how she looked and how she carried herself. He was like a little kid talking about the queen. ‘That’s class,’ he said. ‘Real class.’ It was sort of touching the way he described the scene as if it was almost unachievable for him. He also talked about Ava [Gardner] the same way, as if a woman like that was totally unobtainable for a man like him.”
While Frank fantasized about Ava Gardner, Nancy clung fiercely to her reconciled marriage. She and Frank had tried for a new start by buying a $250,000 house—with a cobbled courtyard, swimming pool, and gardens—on Garolwood Avenue in Holmby Hills. They also designed a $150,000 air-conditioned house in Palm Springs with a swimming pool shaped like a grand piano. On June 20, 1948, they had their third child, Christina, who was a present for Father’s Day.
Now that Nancy was firmly entrenched in Hollywood, she wanted nothing more to do with Frank’s relatives from Hoboken, especially his Uncle Babe, who had been arrested several times for usury and loan-sharking. Now she was informed that Frank’s cousin, Junior, was en route to California with his wife, Antoinette, and their four young children, including Frank’s godchild, Salvatore.
“My husband worked for Frank until January of 1944,” recalled Antoinette Sinatra, “when he returned home and got a job in the shipyards. Then he got a call from Hank Sanicola a few years later, and so we came to California and left everything behind in Hoboken. Hank put us up in a tiny, cramped trailer in a dirty pet cemetery in Tarzana. It was just awful, and I cried for days. Finally, I went to see Frank, who was doing Your Hit Parade for Lucky Strike. I started crying again, and he put his arm around me and said, ‘What’s wrong?’ I told him, and he said he would take care of everything.
“He instructed Bobby Burns to get us out of the pet cemetery and take us up to the Sunset Plaza. Then he asked us to come to his house to see Nancy and the kids and have dinner. So Bobby drove us out to their house, but when Nancy saw us coming, she decided to be out. Little Nancy came to the door and said, ‘My mother said to tell you she’s not here.’
“I couldn’t believe that an Italian girl could treat family this way, especially after everything I’d done for her. When she lived in Hasbrouck Heights, I used to run all her errands, go to the Italian market for her, pick up her groceries, and take her phone calls in the middle of the night when she’d be calling Junior to find out where Frank was and who he was with and when he’d be home. Now she’d gotten real fancy-pants and was acting like a louse to us just because we was from Hoboken. When I finally saw her a few days later, she offered us money to go back home. She said she didn’t want us around and that she’d pay for us to go back where we belonged. We stayed, and my husband later went to Frank to borrow money for a down payment on a house, but Nancy found out about it and wouldn’t let him loan us the money. So he gave us five hundred dollars to buy a trailer in North Hollywood Park instead. I knew they were having marriage problems, but they always had those problems, so I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
Frank paid little attention to his wife. He showered her with gifts as if to salve his conscience and buy a little peace, but, ever restless, he continued seeking something else away from home, and not always with discretion.
One night late in the fall of 1948, he banged on Mel Tormé’s door looking for Candy Toxton, a beautiful blond model he had known for some time. Toxton and Tormé had recently become engaged and were celebrating his birthday with a large group of friends.
“The party was in full swing when there was a knock on the door,” recalled Tormé. “It was Frank with a magnum of champagne wrapped with a ribbon. I think there were two guys with him—Jimmy Van Heusen and someone else. I was astonished to see him. He had not been invited, and he was not too gracious. He handed me the champagne and said, ‘Here ya go, Mel. Happy Birthday.’ Then he charged in and started looking for my fiancée. He had been calling Candy and had not been able to get her on the phone because we were going together. Apparently, he had a big case on her. He even went upstairs looking for her. Finally, I went to him and said, ‘Look, Frank, I don’t know why you’re here, but Candy and I are committed. We’re spoken for, so to speak, and I’d be very grateful if you’d stop running all over the house looking for her.’ We were young macho guys then, acting like two bulls locking horns over the heifer. It was pretty silly.”
Frank and his male friends made these nocturnal rounds like a street-corner gang cruising the neighborhood looking for excitement and adventure. One night he found it alone with Ava Gardner in the desert and had to call Jack Keller at three o’clock in the morning to rescue him. The press agent was sound asleep when the phone rang. As he recalled the conversation, Frank said:
“Jack, we’re in trouble.”
“How can I be in trouble when all night I have just been lying here in bed?”
“This is no time for jokes, Jack. I’m in jail. Out here in the desert. Indio, California.”
Frank told Jack that he and Ava had just “shot up the town.”
“With what?” screamed Keller.
“Oh, you know them two thirty-eights I got the permits for? I keep them in the Cadillac now because I might get held up, traveling with all this jewelry on me and all. Well, tonight me and the kid here, we got a little loaded, see, and we drove down here from Palm Springs and we thought we’d have a little fun and we shot up a few streetlights and store windows with the thirty-eights, that’s all.”
“Oh, my God,” said Jack. “Did you hit anybody?”
“Well, there was this one guy, we creased him a little bit across the stomach. But it’s nothing. Just a scratch.”
“Have you been booked at the police station? Do the newspapers know anything about it?”
“No, the chief here is a good guy. He knows who I am and all, and he ain’t doing nothing until you get down here. You better make it fast, Jack.”
Keller hung up and arranged to charter a plane in Burbank. He woke up a friend who was the resident manager of the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel and asked how much money he had in the safe. The man said he had thirty thousand dollars.
“I can’t tell you why, but I need it all,” said Keller. “I’ll give it back to you first thing in the morning.”
With thirty thousand dollars in cash, the press agent got on the chartered plane, arrived in Indio, and headed for the police station. While Frank and Ava slept in the squad room, Jack sat down with the chief, put his briefcase full of money on the desk, and said: “Okay, Chief, let’s get down to business. How much to keep this whole thing quiet?”
According to Keller, the chief figured it was worth ten thousand dollars—two thousand for the officers who had made the arrest, two thousand to repair the damage to city property, one thousand to get rid of the hospital records on the man who had been hit, and five thousand for the chief himself. Keller counted out five one-thousand-dollar bills and fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. Then he asked for the names and home addresses of all the storekeepers whose places were shot up and of the man who was hit. The chief obliged.
Between seven and nine A.M. the press agent visited all the storekeepers at their homes and offered to pay them on the spot if they would give him an estimate of their damages. All readily agreed. The man whose stomach had been creased with the bullet was more difficult. Although he did not know the name of his assailant, he felt that if he went to court, he might get a sizable judgment. He showed Jack where the bullet had gone through the front of his jacket, barely cutting the skin. He said he wasn’t hurt very much, but it certainly scared him.
“I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to help you get over your fright,” said Keller. The man grabbed the money.
At ten A.M., reasonably sure that the shooting spree would nev
er get into the newspapers, Jack put Ava and Frank into the chartered plane and took off with them for Los Angeles. He dropped Ava at her apartment and delivered Frank, cold sober, to his wife and children. Then he returned the thirty thousand dollars to his friend at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel and called George Evans in New York.
The telephone calls went back and forth between coasts for days, with George screaming at Frank to stop seeing Ava Gardner, and Frank screaming back at him to mind his own business and slamming the phone down. But it was Keller, the original messenger of the bad news, who took the brunt of Frank’s anger.
Of all George Evans’s clients, Frank was still the biggest. Flexing his muscle, he demanded that George get rid of Keller and replace him on the West Coast. As much as George loved Frank, he refused to toss aside his friend and business partner.
“I can tell you that the soul-searching that went into that decision involved many hours of walking up and down Broadway late at night,” said George Evans’s oldest son, Phil. “My dad’s decision not to fire Jack was based on the fact that no amount of success or reflected glory from Frank was worth selling your soul for.… My father kind of looked on Frank as a sort of son and a creation of his at the same time. He was a hero-builder and in a sense a worshipper as well. He didn’t like to admit that anything would tarnish. He covered up a lot … but the drain on him during those years left some of us in the family with a sour taste … the price was very great in terms of stress, anxiety, and pressure. I’d say there were no more than two or three consecutive nights when there wasn’t a phone call of some kind—Nancy crying, or Frank in a jam, or Lana, or Ava, or somebody. Dad would get home at one or two in the morning, and then at three or four the phone would ring from California. …”
The long distance yelling between George Evans and his client accelerated until Frank, in frenzied anger, fired his press agent of nine years—and all because of Ava Gardner, the woman whose green, yellow-flecked eyes seemed to radiate a light brighter than the sun itself.
11
Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on Christmas Eve, 1922, in North Carolina, near Smithfield, in Grabtown, a squalid tobacco-farming community too tiny and unimportant to be marked on the map. Ava was the youngest of seven children of sharecropper Jonas Bailey Gardner, a lean, hard-drinking Catholic farmer, and his wife, Mary Elizabeth, a Scottish Baptist.
Even as a child, Ava was extraordinarily beautiful. Her almond-shaped eyes, high, full cheekbones, sensual mouth, long chestnut hair, and lissome body made her the prettiest girl in her high school class. Despite her beauty, she had few boyfriends because of the stern restrictions of her Bible-thumping mother.
At eighteen, Ava made her first trip out of North Carolina. She went to New York City to visit her oldest sister, Beatrice (Bappie), who was married to a photographer, Larry Tarr. Captivated by her beauty, Tarr took pictures of Ava and put one of them in his studio window, where it was seen by Barney Duhan, a young man who worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Wanting a date with the model in the photograph, Duhan called Larry Tarr’s studio, introduced himself as “Duhan from MGM,” and asked if the model would contact his office as soon as possible. Bappie told him that Ava had returned to North Carolina. “But if you like, I can send for her,” she said eagerly.
“No, no,” said Duhan. “This is just routine. But send me the pictures of her anyway and I’ll show them to Marvin Schenck, who’s in charge of talent.”
Tarr delivered twelve portraits of Ava to Metro’s New York office that afternoon but heard nothing. On Ava’s next visit to New York, Tarr called the studio to say that she was back in town. He spoke to Ben Jacobson, an MGM talent scout, who knew nothing of Duhan’s ploy to get a date, but asked to see a photograph. So Larry took new pictures of Ava and again delivered them to Metro.
Jacobson was so taken with what he saw that he requested that the eighteen-year-old beauty be delivered to MGM’s New York office the next day for a screen test. Ava arrived with a southern accent so thick it sounded as if she were speaking in a foreign language.
“Ahuhm Ahvuh Gahdnah,” she said, drawing out her vowels until each one seemed to consist of several syllables.
The New York producer filming her turned off the audio and sent a silent print to California so they could at least see what she looked like before they heard her speak. Louis B. Mayer was bewitched and sent for her at once.
On August 23, 1941, Ava arrived in Hollywood. She was tested again, this time with sound.
“What do you do down there in Smithfield, North Carolina?” she was asked.
“Ahuh jes’ wen’ rown peekin’ bogs oaf tabaccah plains,” she said.
It took the producer several minutes to realize that she had said, “I just went around picking bugs off tobacco plants.”
“She can’t act, she can’t talk, but she’s a terrific piece of merchandise,” said George Sidney, the MGM producer in charge of selecting new talent for the studio.
Metro signed Ava to a seven-year contract and turned her over to the studio voice coach, Lillian Burns, whose elocution lessons over the next few years purged the broad southern drawl. Still, Ava appeared only as an extra in walk-ons and supporting roles until 1945, when the studio began grooming her to be a movie queen.
By the time she came into Frank Sinatra’s life, she was no longer a gawky innocent from the South. She had been seasoned by marriages to Mickey Rooney (1942) and bandleader Artie Shaw (1945), each of which lasted less than a year. She said the only tangible asset she received from either divorce was two years of analysis financed by Artie Shaw, which left her more confused than ever. “I don’t want to read any more books on neurosis,” she said. “Artie fed me that crap, and I’m so damned mixed up as a result, I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Artie was a monster with great intellectual pretensions,” said Jo-Carroll Silvers. “He just destroyed her, as he did many other beautiful women. As a result, I think Ava, who was Artie’s fourth wife, spent the rest of her life trying to get back at men. She was sexually uninhibited, wild, all kinds of goodies and quick. You couldn’t get ahold of her. She was gone and off with somebody else before you knew where you were. She was cruel that way, but so was Frank.”
With her full lips and alluring eyes, Ava Gardner radiated accessibility, sending off signals of sweet and succulent sex, a rare commodity in a repressed era. She seemed to offer the promise of erotic nights and untrammeled sex. Hers was not the soft, round cornucopia of sex of Marilyn Monroe. This lithe beauty had no little-girl overtones, no extravagant padding. Although lean and spare, she was all woman—sensuous, ripe, seasoned. Ava was the mystery woman from out of town who would be loved for a night and whose name would never be learned. And Frank had been mesmerized from the first time he ever saw her.
“I still remember when she made the cover of some magazine,” recalled Nick Sevano. “Frank looked at it and said, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’ It was during the Dorsey days, and I wasn’t about to remind him that he was already married.”
Frank took an apartment in the Sunset Towers, where Axel Stordahl and Sammy Cahn also lived. “We’d yell back and forth to one another,” said Sammy, “and guess who was living down below? If you looked down from Frank’s terrace, you’d see, across the street, a series of little houses, one of them owned by Tom Kelly, a noted interior decorator; the occupant of that house was Ava Gardner. Just for mischief, Frank and I would stick our heads out the window and yell her name.”
Ava never answered. She had met Frank at MGM and was not impressed. According to her friend, Ruth Rosenthal (Mrs. Milton Berle): “Ava disliked Frank intensely. She kept saying that she found him conceited, arrogant, and overpowering. They had instant hostility. I guess you could say this instant hostility was a precursor of a sudden romantic interest.”
By the time the couple met again and spent a drunken evening together shooting up the streets of Indio, two combustibles had ignited, throwing off sparks that would singe everyone close
to them. Frank was as much illusion and fantasy as the Great Gatsby, and Ava was as infantile and intoxicating as Daisy. Yet both belonged more to the aggressive world of Ernest Hemingway than to the sensitive realm of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Frank shared the Hemingway creed of machismo and the exaggerated sense of maleness, while Ava personified the sexual abandon of Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Both espoused the Hemingway creed that aficion (passion) justified the expenditure of the self in public. Their tumultuous life together seemed to celebrate the “fiesta of life”—Hemingway’s phrase for those “who give each day the quality of a festival and who when they have passed and taken the nourishment they need, leave everything dead.”
Each must have seen a mirror image in the other, for the similarities between Ava and Frank were astounding. Both were sleek and catlike despite gargantuan appetites. Both were insecure about their lack of education; Frank had had only forty-seven days of high school before he was expelled, and Ava, although a high school graduate with one year of business school, still felt intellectually inadequate. Before marrying Artie Shaw, the only book she’d ever read was Gone with the Wind.
“You don’t know what it’s like to know you’re uneducated,” she said, “to be afraid to talk to people because you’re afraid that even the questions you ask will be stupid.”
Both Ava and Frank smoked cigarettes, drank hard liquor, cursed profanely, and worshiped F.D.R. Both loved blood sports; his was boxing, hers bullfighting.
Each rose to the top of show business. Frank did it with a voice of bedroom honey, Ava with alabaster beauty.
Both were nocturnal animals who thrived on partying well into the morning. Ava, who devoured movie magazines, told a reporter in 1948: “Deep down, I’m pretty superficial.” In Frank, she found her temperamental double. Both of them seemed to crave action, excitement, and adventure—to be constantly in motion. Each seemed to have a savage dark side filled with a violent temper, mercurial moods, and raw jealousies.