His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  “I’m possessive and jealous, and so is Frank,” said Ava, trying to explain their cataclysmic fights. “He has a temper that bursts into flames, while my temper burns inside for hours. He never finished an argument. He’d just get up and walk away, leaving me frustrated and furious.”

  Their jealousies were intense and their retaliations were swift, sometimes cruel. One night at a club opening, Ava thought that Frank was singing to Marilyn Maxwell and stormed out. Then Frank discovered that Howard Hughes, one of Ava’s previous lovers, was having him followed.

  “We had one of our worst fights over that,” recalled Ava many years later. “I had a rather valuable gold bracelet that Howard had given me. I got so mad during the argument that in order to prove to Frank that Howard meant nothing to me, I grabbed this bracelet and hurled it out of the window of the Hampshire House. I never got it back. I hope some lucky girl picked it up and sold it for what it was worth, which was quite a lot.”

  There was one striking difference between them: Ava was frighteningly insecure. Even after she became an international star, she remained full of misgivings. “You know I can’t act worth a shit,” she’d say when complimented on a performance. Frank, on the other hand, possessed confidence bordering on arrogance. Firmly believing that he was the best there was, he refused to be intimidated by competition. “I can sing that son of a bitch off the stage any day of the week,” he’d say about his rivals.

  Despite his own married status, Frank became so smitten with Ava that he didn’t want her to see anyone else. But Ava, angry that he was taking so long to get a divorce, taunted him with other men, especially wiry Italian men. In desperation Frank turned to his good friend, Mickey Cohen, who had become the West Coast Mafia boss after the murder of Bugsy Siegel.

  “He really had hot nuts for Ava Gardner,” recalled Cohen years later. “There was a lot of heat, and my house in Brentwood was being watched around the clock. At the time, Sinatra calls and says, ‘I got to see you on something important.’ I says, ‘Ya know ya don’t want to come out here now, Frank. They got a twenty-four-hour detail on me.’

  “But he insisted it was that important. So I said okay. Frank comes over to the house and says to me, ‘Lookit, I want you to do me this favor. I want you to tell your guy, Johnny Stompanato, to stop seeing Ava Gardner.’

  “So my answer was, ‘Ya mean to tell me ya came all the way out here where they are recording everybody’s name and number that comes near this house? This is what ya call important? I don’t mix in with no guys and their broads, Frank. Why don’t ya go on home to Nancy where you belong? You ought to go back to your wife and kids.’ I talked to him like a friend. I mean, this is what a friend would say. Besides, I had troubles of my own.”

  Because of Frank’s wife and three young children, his affair with Ava was conducted secretly at first. The public scandal this would have raised in 1948 could have caused MGM to drop Ava under the standard “morals clause” in her contract, which stipulated:

  The artist agrees to conduct herself with due regard to public conventions and morals and agrees that she will not do or commit any act or thing that will degrade her in society, or bring her into public hatred, contempt, scorn, or ridicule, that will tend to shock, insult, or offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency, or prejudice the producer (MGM) or the motion picture industry in general.

  While “the Ava business,” as Frank’s friends referred to his furtive romance, was hidden from the public in the beginning, it was known to their friends who helped them meet on a regular basis during 1948 and 1949.

  “Bobby and I had a house on the beach, and so Frank and Ava would be there all the time,” recalled Betty Burns, the wife of Frank’s manager. “We would be sitting in the living room and hear them upstairs in the bedroom quarreling and arguing. Ava would scream at Frank, and he would slam the door and storm downstairs. Minutes later, we’d smell a very sweet fragrance coming from the stairs. Ava had decided she wasn’t mad anymore, and so she sprayed the stairwell with her perfume. Frank would smell it and race back up to the bedroom. Then it would be hours before he’d come back down.”

  With George Evans out as his publicist, there was no one to try to stop Frank’s reckless romance. Nor was there anyone to contend with the press, which was now beginning to criticize his singing and question his appeal.

  In 1949, there were no Sinatra discs among the best-selling records and most played on jukeboxes, prompting Lee Mortimer to gloat, “The Swoon is real gone (and not in jive talk).” He noted that the only Sinatra record in a list of the fifty most requested of disc jockeys was number forty-nine, suggesting that the bobby-soxers had “merely grown up and grown out of Sinatra” and that the swooning hysteria had just been “an unhealthy wartime phenomenon.”

  The Downbeat poll pushed Frank out of the top spots for the first time since 1943, elevating Billy Eckstine to first place and Frankie Laine to second while Bing Crosby and Mel Tormé tied for third. Frank could only manage fifth spot. This had not happened since he had become famous. He was not among the singers in a “Best Discs of the Year,” 1949 compilation.

  “To Frank Sinatra, I award a new crop of bobby-soxers,” wrote Sheilah Graham. “The old screamers are now in their sedate twenties. And without hullabaloo, Frank’s voice doesn’t seem quite so potent. Am I right?”

  Frank continued recording with Columbia Records, but the critics weren’t enthusiastic. In March 1949, Downbeat said of a group of his sides recorded with Phil Moore: “They don’t quite get the intimate between-you-and-me feel that was attempted, and Frankie hits a few off-pitch ones to boot.”

  That same month his movie Take Me Out to the Ball Game was released to a tepid review from Bosley Crowther in The New York Times: “Don’t be surprised if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.” Time magazine was similarly unimpressed: “It involves Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in a whirl of songs and dances that are easy to forget.”

  In May, Frank was dropped from Your Hit Parade; in August, Downbeat panned his new album, Frankly Sentimental: “Expertly done but Sinatra could never have become a name on this.… For all his talent, it very seldom comes to life.” By December, the reviews were disheartening. “ ‘Lost in the Stars’ seems pitched too low for Sinatra—he has trouble making the notes of ‘dim’ and ‘him,’ nor is he able to make the rather complex lyric hang together. On the simple ‘Old Master Painter,’ he fares better. A hit song … though Sinatra’s is not the best record.” By the time On the Town was released in December 1949, MGM had changed the billing, making Gene Kelly first and Frank second.

  Having heard that his days at MGM were numbered, Frank had tried to get himself lent to Columbia Pictures for the part of Nick “Pretty Boy” Romano in Knock on Any Door. After reading the Willard Motley novel, Frank identified with Nick, the young slum kid on trial for murder. He approached Anita Colby, the former model who was working as an executive assistant to David Selznick.

  “He asked me to call David to give him the role,” she recalled. “He said that he was perfect for the part because he had grown up on the tough streets of New Jersey. I said that the part needed a younger man. Frank was thirty-four at the time, but he said, ‘I look younger,’ and he did, too. He said, ‘That’s my life. Everybody in my class either went to the electric chair or was hung. If I hadn’t had a voice, I’d have been right along with the rest of them.’ I talked to Selznick about Frank for the role, but David felt that he was just too old. The part went to John Derek instead.”

  As concerned as Frank was about his career, he was also passionately, wildly, and defiantly in love with Ava Gardner. In December 1949, he took her to New York with him while he did his NBC radio show, Light Up Time, with opera star Dorothy Kirsten. He wanted to introduce Ava to his parents.

  Although Frank was still married, Dolly Sinatra no longer felt any loyalty toward her daughter-in-law. She accused Nancy of putting on Hollywood airs and thought Nancy was the reason Dol
ly did not see as much of Frank and her grandchildren as she wanted.

  Frank and Ava stayed in Manie Sacks’s suite at the Hampshire House, and they went to the premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes accompanied by another couple to camouflage their being together in public. Four days later, Jack Entratter, the manager of the Copa, gave Frank a thirty-fourth birthday party, to which he brought Ava. The next month, when Nancy refused to give him a divorce, he walked out on her.

  “Frank has left home, but he’s done it before and I suppose he’ll do it again,” Nancy told the press. “I’m not calling it any kind of a marital breakup. He will come home. I’m not even calling it a separation. I’ve got something that is much too precious and fine to give up. It’s unfortunate that Frank is who he is. If he wasn’t a famous singer, known to all the world, we could have a quarrel just like any other normal married couple and no one would think anything of it.”

  Willie Moretti, Frank’s padrone in Hasbrouck Heights, was shocked to read the news. While his Mafia sensibilities condoned murder, prostitution, and extortion, he prided himself on being a good family man, albeit one who suffered from syphillis. He revered his mother and respected his wife and children, holding the home as sanctified; he expected the same of Frank. He telegraphed him immediately, saying: “I am very much surprised what I have been reading in the newspapers between you and your darling wife. Remember you have a decent wife and children. You should be very happy. Regards to all. Willie Moore.”

  This was a separation that George Evans was not around to reconcile. He had to watch the personal and professional demise of his bobby-sox idol from afar. Discussing the matter with Earl Wilson one night at the Copacabana, he said: “I make a prediction. Frank is through. A year from now, you won’t hear anything about him. He’ll be dead professionally. I’ve been around the country, looking and listening. They’re not going to see his pictures. They’re not buying his records. They don’t care for Frank Sinatra anymore. You know how much I talked to him about the girls. The public knows about the trouble with Nancy now, and the other dames, and it doesn’t like him anymore.”

  “I can’t believe that,” said Earl Wilson.

  “In a year, he’ll be through,” said the discarded press agent.

  Temporarily free of Nancy, Frank publicly flaunted his love for Ava Gardner. Against everyone’s advice, he insisted that she accompany him to Houston, where he had accepted a two-week engagement to open the new Shamrock Hotel. “This was a major mistake,” he admitted later, “but I was so in love, I didn’t care how bad it looked having her there while I was still married.”

  Following studio practice, Ava requested permission to leave Los Angeles. She had no film commitments pending, so MGM had no valid reason to deny it, but, fearing adverse publicity, the studio said no. She, too, refused to listen.

  “Neither Metro nor the newspapers nor anyone else is going to run my life,” she told her sister Bappie, who drove her to the airport.

  That night, George Evans got into a loud argument with a reporter while defending Frank and his illicit romance. The next morning, Thursday, January 26, 1950, the forty-eight-year-old press agent dropped dead of a heart attack. Frank was in El Paso with Jimmy Van Heusen, en route to Houston, when he got the news. He wired the Shamrock that he would be delayed because of the funeral and immediately returned to New York.

  “For Frank, the sudden death of George Evans was an emotional shock that defies words,” said Jimmy Van Heusen.

  “George was the only one who would stand up and slug it out with Frank,” said Budd Granoff, who had joined the Evans agency in 1948, and who became Frank’s press agent after Evans died. “Everyone else would fall away. If Frank wanted something and George thought it was wrong, he would just stand up and tell him off. Everyone else more or less capitulated quickly.… The night before George died, he had been worked up about the Ava Gardner business. ‘He’s making a terrible, terrible mistake, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ he said. He cared so much for Frank, like he was a son or something.”

  Ever since Frank’s first appearance at the Paramount in January 1943, George had been his mentor, guiding his career toward success. He had provided the strong father figure that Frank had never had, combining the unbridled drive of Dolly Sinatra with the gentleness of Marty.

  “George and Jack Keller covered for Frank so many times,” recalled one of Jack Keller’s relatives. “Finally, it got to a point where they’d meet the press and say to reporters, ‘Okay, we know what a son of a bitch he is and this is what he’s done, but here is what you’re going to print.’ Then George or Jack would give them a story and that’s what got printed. Both those guys spent their lives covering for Frank.”

  Emotionally committed to Frank’s best interests, George had always been there to protect him from the consequences of his sexual indiscretions, his Mafia associations, his arrogance, and his temper tantrums. He had even managed to keep Frank’s marriage intact by breaking up every extramarital affair before it took hold to threaten Nancy and the children. He had failed only once—when he underestimated Frank’s passion for Ava Gardner—and that failure caused the first and final rupture between the two men.

  After George Evans’s funeral, Frank flew to Houston, where Ava was waiting. They went to dinner with Jimmy Van Heusen at Vincent Sorrento’s restaurant as guests of Mayor Oscar Holcombe. They were spotted by Edward Schisser, a photographer from the Houston Post, who approached them to get a picture. Schisser said that Frank threw down his napkin, reared back in his chair, and was ready to smash the man’s camera. Ava screamed and hid her face in the folds of her mink coat. The owner, Tony Vallone, rushed over, and the photographer left without his picture. But the story appeared in the next day’s paper and was picked up by the wire services, Finally making public the secret romance of the last eighteen months.

  Nancy was so humiliated by reading about her husband and Ava Gardner that when Frank admitted everything, she hired a lawyer and locked him out of the house. On Valentine’s Day, 1950, she announced their separation. “Unfortunately, my married life with Frank has become most unhappy and almost unbearable,” she said. “We have therefore separated. I have requested my attorney to attempt to work out a property settlement, but I do not contemplate divorce proceedings in the foreseeable future.”

  The press reaction was swift and harsh: Frank was depicted as a heel for treating his wife so shabbily, and Ava was labeled a “home wrecker.” These pronouncements came easily in an era that revered tradition and repressed references to sex. This was a time of tightly held morals, when the Catholic Church forbade divorce and remarriage under pain of excommunication. The Hays Office, Hollywood’s moral arbiter, demanded that movies show married couples wearing pajamas and sleeping in single beds. The word virgin was not mentioned on screen. The mores of the day condemned illicit romance, and Frank and Ava created such a public scandal with their love affair that they became front-page news. The Sisters of Mary and Joseph asked the students at St. Paul the Apostle School in Los Angeles to pray for Nancy, a poor woman whose husband wanted to divorce her.

  Yet, when Frank returned to New York in March to open at the Copa, Ava went with him, ostensibly on her way to Europe to film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. They both stayed at the Hampshire House again, prompting a sensational headline in the Journal-American: “Stars Staying at Same Hotel.” Letters poured in vilifying Ava for her role in the break-up of Frank’s marriage. Public sentiment was such that Frank felt compelled to deny the obvious.

  “The fact that Ava and I have had a few dates means nothing,” he said. “My marriage was already broken up long before Ava and I became interested enough in each other to have dates. I am separated from my wife and I don’t intend to sit at home alone. I always stay at the Hampshire House, and Ava has always stayed there too.”

  Ava was so angry about the criticism that she threatened to skip Frank’s Copa opening and leave early for Europe. “Since Frank is still of
ficially married, it would be in the worst possible taste to discuss any future plans,” she said. “One thing I’m sure of is that Frank’s plans to leave Nancy came into his life long before I ever did.”

  Nervous about his first nightclub appearance in five years, Frank called Sammy Cahn and begged him to write some material for his three-week engagement. Although Frank had refused to speak to Sammy for over a year—“We had had a real falling out,” recalled Cahn. “Someone told Sinatra that at a dinner party at my house his name was, as I believe they say, taken in vain. He thought I should have slapped the offending person’s face.”—Sammy obliged by providing him with a take-off on Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” and “The Cry of the Wild Goose,” complete with coonskin cap, whip, and duck horn. Then Frank pleaded with Cahn to go to New York for his opening night. So Sammy took the Twentieth Century Limited and was there on March 28, 1950, along with Frank’s parents, Phil Silvers, Manie Sacks, and two Mafiosi, Joe Fischetti and Willie Moretti.

  Opening night, Frank was so distraught that he needed a doctor to give him a mild sedative. Before he walked onstage he was shaking, pale, and sweating. His voice had been wavering for weeks, his nerves were on edge, and he was frightened. The daily calls from Little Nancy asking when he was coming home reduced him to tears. Big Nancy sent him a good-luck telegram. Ava stayed in his dressing room until the last minute trying to soothe him, then took her place in the audience to cheer him wildly. He sang and danced and joked while launching an attack on the press that would become a standard part of his nightclub performances.

  “My voice was so low the other night singing ‘Ol’ Man River’ that I got down in the dirt, and who do you think I found throwing mud down there? Two Hollywood commentators! They got a great racket. All day long they lie in the sun, and when the sun goes down, they lie some more!”

  The mobsters sitting ringside with Frank Costello, the Mafia owner of the Copa, roared their approval and clapped heartily, as did the rest of the nightclub audience. The reviews were mixed. “Today he may have less voice than ever before, but he has a compensating quality that considerably makes up for his vocal void,” said Variety. “That would be salesmanship.”