His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  “Whether temporarily or otherwise, the music that used to hypnotize the bobby-soxers—whatever happened to them anyway, thank goodness?—is gone from the throat,” said the Herald-Tribune. “Vocally, there isn’t quite the same old black magic there used to be when Mr. Sinatra wrenched ‘Night and Day’ from his sapling frame and thousands swooned.… He relies on what vocal tones are operating effectively.… He uses carefully made musical arrangements during which the orchestra does the heavy work at crucial points.”

  At a late supper hosted by Manie Sacks, Ava, still fuming about the snickers she had heard during his singing of “Nancy with the Laughing Face,” confronted Frank. “Did you have to sing that fucking song? It made me feel like a real fool.”

  “It’s been a good-luck song for years,” he said. “I sing it in almost every big show. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Well, don’t expect me to sit out there and get laughed at every night,” she said. “Either the song goes or I go.”

  Frank dropped the song, and for the next ten nights Ava attended every show. On the eleventh night, she went to Artie Shaw’s apartment for a party that she and Frank had fought bitterly about. She had gone to see Shaw perform at Bop City and then had talked to him at length about her problems with Frank, how jealous and possessive he was, how bored she was sitting around with Joe Fischetti, Frank Costello, and the rest of “the boys.” So Artie had invited them both to dinner with some of his New York “intellectual” friends, but Frank had refused to go and threatened Ava if she went without him.

  “That was a horrendous evening,” recalled Artie Shaw many years later. “Frank hated me because I was with Ava. I don’t know if hate was the word … he never sang for me; he wanted to but I told him that I didn’t use boy singers. The only one I ever used was Tony Pastor, who kind of made fun of the lyrics.… There’s a lot of vindictiveness in Frank, a lot of hatred there … but he can be shamed. He was shamed once by me. I saw it. He was shamed into becoming for about maybe five minutes a semi-human.”

  The shaming had occurred in New York when Frank had warned the bandleader to stop seeing Ava. Artie was not frightened.

  “Are you as tough as you sound?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” snarled Frank.

  “Then why do you need him?” said Artie, pointing to the massive bodyguard hovering over Frank.

  Frank did not reply, but he now vented his rage on Ava.

  An hour after she arrived at Shaw’s apartment for the party, he called her. “Well, I just called to say good-bye,” he said.

  “Where are you going, Frank? Why can’t I come too?”

  “Not where I’m going, baby,” he said.

  Then came the sound of a pistol shot, a pause, and then another shot.

  Ava dropped the phone and went screaming from the party in a panic, Artie and his friends accompanying her as she rushed to the Hampshire House and to Frank’s suite on the eighth floor.

  The producer, David O. Selznick, who was staying on the same floor, had heard the shots and called the front desk. “I think the son of a bitch shot himself,” he said. The clerk telephoned the police.

  Columbia Records chief Manie Sacks, who had a permanent suite down the hall, had also been startled by the shots. He ran into Frank’s suite with Selznick and saw that Frank had simply shot his pistol into the mattress twice. Knowing that the police would be there quickly, he and Selznick grabbed the mattress with the two holes and carried it to Manie’s suite, then rushed Manie’s mattress back to Frank’s bed. By the time the police arrived to search Frank’s suite, there was no trace of bullets or bullet holes.

  Breathlessly, Ava recounted her story to the police, but Frank, sitting up in bed in his pajamas, denied firing any shots.

  “You’re dreaming,” he said. “You’re crazy.”

  He said that he had called Ava to say good night and then gone directly to bed. The next thing he knew, the door had been battered down by firemen and his suite was full of people.

  “I was staying there at the time,” said actor Tom Drake. “Everyone in the hotel was talking about Ava and Frank and their love affair, and now this! The corridor was full of police, firemen; you never saw anything like it.”

  “He shot the bullets through the mattress to scare her,” said Artie Shaw. “Just did it to scare her. What a dumb, stupid thing to do.”

  MGM insisted that Ava leave at once for Spain to start work on Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. She had postponed the trip three times to remain in New York with Frank, but the studio could no longer afford the adverse publicity resulting from the volatile romance.

  Months before, Metro had decided to terminate Frank’s contract one year before its expiration, and studio lawyers, who had been negotiating terms with Sinatra’s lawyers, agreed to pay him eighty-five thousand dollars in compensation. Before the check could be written, Nancy’s lawyer, Greg Bautzer, hit the studio with a restraining order that forbade release of the money to Frank until Nancy’s separate maintenance suit was settled.

  On April 27, 1950, after prolonged discussions between MGM’s publicity department and MCA, Frank’s agency, a joint statement was released announcing Frank’s departure. “As a free-lance artist, he is now free to accept unlimited, important personal appearance, radio, and television offers that have been made to him,” said the deceptive release.

  Unfortunately, there were few such offers because MCA agents were no longer knocking themselves out to get Frank bookings. His relationships with David “Sonny” Werblin in MCA’s New York office and with Lew Wasserman in Hollywood had deteriorated because of his belligerent attitude.

  “In those days, Sinatra had a temper, and when everybody didn’t do what he wanted, he got upset,” said the MCA agent who booked theaters. “As a result he’d say different things, ‘screw you,’ whatever. Sonny Werblin got blasted a lot and so did I. I was very close to Frank at one time, but he gave me a real bad time—real bad—and all I ever did was work for him and get him sensational deals. Frank wanted to be the top guy, and I mean the top. He wanted everybody to bow down to him, to kowtow, and not everybody would do it. So he vented his fury.

  “Then Frank went to Jules Stein [chairman of the board of MCA] for a loan. Jules wouldn’t give it to him, and that tore it for Frank. He didn’t mince any words about it either. He was very unhappy and let everybody know about it. That started his big beef with Jules.”

  Frank needed money. With all that he had made, he had been financially reckless. When he had signed the contract on his Palm Springs home at the close of October 1948, he had demanded that it be ready for a New Year’s Eve party. When the architect had explained that such speed would require triple shifts at exorbitant cost, he had answered, “Build it!” Now, with no movie contract and no bookings, he turned to his lawyer, Henry Jaffe, to make the deals that MCA had handled so expertly in the past. But it was hard for Jaffe to book an MCA client that MCA no longer supported. Justice Department documents show what happened when the lawyer went to NBC to discuss a weekly program for Frank for thirty-five hundred dollars a week to keep him in “eating money”:

  “Jaffe was sitting in the NBC executive’s office and they were discussing the fifteen-minute show. While the executive was considering the possibility of using Sinatra on the show, he phoned Sonny Werblin of MCA and turned the intercom on so that Jaffe could hear the conversation between him and Werblin. Werblin, of course, did not know that Jaffe was sitting in the office hearing the entire conversation. When the executive suggested the possibility of using Sinatra on the show, Werblin attacked Sinatra vigorously, saying that he was no good, that he would not draw flies, and that the executive ought to drop the idea.

  “After he hung up, the NBC executive turned to Jaffe and said, ‘How can I hire Sinatra to do a show for me when his own agent thinks he is dead?’ Jaffe was incensed. He went straight to George Heller of AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and complained about MCA’s double cross of Sina
tra. Heller caught fire, and within a couple of days he had induced AFTRA to pass a resolution that MCA no longer be recognized as a talent agent for any of AFTRA’s members. In effect, MCA was out of business for at least a day.

  Werblin and Wasserman were panic-stricken. Werblin called Jaffe and said, ‘Kid, what are you doing to us? Why are you cutting our throat?’ After Jaffe had made clear why he was taking the position, Werblin went to work and got MCA to cancel an indebtedness of some thirty thousand dollars that Sinatra owed to MCA for living expenses. …”

  But there were no movie offers, and there were not many requests for personal appearances either. Frank still had his Lucky Strike radio show, Light Up Time, and through Joe Fischetti he was booked into the Chez Paree in Chicago. He also had another opening at the Copacabana, but the future looked bleak. He talked to Ava in Spain every day but could not promise her a wedding because Nancy, who had been “temporarily” awarded all property, a Cadillac, custody of the children, and most of Frank’s available cash, remained convinced that he would come back home eventually and refused to give him a divorce.

  “She has no plans for divorce,” said her lawyer. “The separate maintenance suit is just her way of making Frank save his money. She’ll put it all away as a nest egg. Then when nobody else wants him, she’ll take him back, and they’ll have something to live on.”

  Ava, impatient with the delays, retaliated with her co-star, Mario Cabre, a Spanish bullfighter, whose proclamations of love soon became international news, driving Frank into jealous frenzies.

  “The understatement of the year would be to say that he was difficult,” said Skitch Henderson, who was working as Frank’s accompanist and conductor at the Copa. “Frank, you know, has always respected sidemen, so when the band played badly, he’d get hacked at me instead of them. He was bugged, too, because he couldn’t get a hit record while a harmonica group had a million-copy seller in ‘Peg o’ My Heart.’ One night, when the band was especially horrible, it all boiled over, and he turned to me and muttered very sarcastically, ‘If I’d tried a little harder, maybe I could have gotten the Harmonicats to back me.’ It cut me deeper than anything that has ever been said to me.”

  Frank’s voice faltered, forcing him to cancel five days of his Copa booking. On the sixth day, he crawled out of bed only because he knew that Lee Mortimer had bet Jack Entratter one hundred dollars that he would never complete the engagement. That night, April 26, 1950, during the third show, he started to sing but no sound came forth. He had been struck by hysterical aphonia, an affliction that strangles the vocal cords.

  “It was tragic and terrifying,” said Skitch Henderson. “He opened his mouth to sing after the band introduction, and nothing came out. Not a sound. I thought for a fleeting moment that the unexpected pantomime was a joke. But then he caught my eye. I guess the color drained out of my face as I saw the panic in his. It became so quiet, so intensely quiet in the club—they were like watching a man walk off a cliff. His face chalk-white, Frank gasped something that sounded like ‘good night’ into the mike and raced off the floor, leaving the audience stunned.”

  The Copa announced the next day that Frank had suffered a submucosal hemorrhage of the throat and was ordered by his doctor to take a two-week vacation. He canceled the remaining two days of his engagement and headed straight for Ava in Tossa Del Mar on the Mediterranean coast with a ten-thousand-dollar emerald necklace. The press followed en masse.

  “I have to keep my mouth shut,” said Frank to reporters in New York. “Yes, I’ll probably see Ava, but we’ll be as well chaperoned as at a high school dance.”

  “Even if he has to hire sixteen duennas,” said Jimmy Van Heusen, his traveling companion.

  Upon his arrival in Spain, Frank was again besieged by reporters asking if he knew Mario Cabre. “I don’t know him, but I have heard of him,” said Frank, declining to elaborate.

  That afternoon, the toreador declared his adoration of Ava to the Associated Press. “She is the woman I love with all the strength in my soul. I believe this love and sympathy are both reciprocal and mutual.”

  At a dinner Ava gave for Frank that night, he threatened her about the bullfighter. “If I hear that Spanish runt has been hanging around you again, I’ll kill him and you!” he said.

  “Be reasonable, Frank,” she said. “We’re in a fucking movie together, and he’s supposed to be my lover—how can he avoid being near me? Besides, I haven’t raised hell about Marilyn Maxwell, have I?”

  “That’s different. We’re old friends and you know it.”

  “Well, Mario and I are new friends.”

  After five days of torrential rains, the bullfighter’s public declarations of love, and continual queries from reporters who kept a twenty-four-hour vigil on the couple, Frank decided that the trip to Spain to see Ava had been a catastrophe.

  “We know now that because of all this publicity it was a mistake for me to come here,” he said. He left the next day for Paris, then flew to London, where British reporters were waiting at the airport. Stamping his foot on the runway, Frank lambasted the Spanish press for concocting a love triangle involving him and Ava and the bullfighter. “It’s a lie, a vicious lie, and not a word of it is true. Why should Ava be the butt of this sort of vicious gossip? Ava was given a very bad shock by this business. She has come off very badly—it’s a great shame. She’s a wonderful person, and she’s done nothing to deserve this kind of treatment.”

  Frank flew to New York, where he was again besieged by reporters hungry to know about Ava’s bullfighter. “No, I didn’t run away from him,” he snapped, “and, no, he didn’t cramp my style. They’re working in a picture together, and that’s all there is to it. Why should I be worried?”

  By the time he arrived in Los Angeles to see Nancy and the children, the press was waiting for him at the airport. “When I got to Spain, I figured somebody would say something about romance,” he said. “I’m not that naive. But I hadn’t counted on that bullfighter. He was an added starter they ran in at the last minute. I never did meet him. I assume that what he said was just a publicity stunt.”

  Loathe to open new wounds, Frank and Nancy made an effort to be cordial and kind to each other, especially when dealing with the children, whom Frank was visiting as often as he could. Through their attorneys, though, they fought over money and wrangled about a property settlement of their community holdings, which totaled $750,000. That included their homes in Holmby Hills and Palm Springs, an office building Frank owned in Los Angeles, and the home he had bought for his parents in Hoboken, New Jersey. By June 1950, all they could agree to was conveying ownership of the Hoboken home to Dolly and Marty Sinatra. After rancorous negotiations, they both signed over their shares in the Hudson Street house, but beyond this they failed to agree on anything.

  Nancy clung to every delaying tactic she could in hopes of outlasting Ava Gardner and bringing Frank back home. “What can she do for him in bed that I can’t do?” she asked plaintively.

  “She’s miserable about all his gallivanting, but she’s still very much in love with him,” said her lawyer Gregson Bautzer, who was making Frank’s life miserable.

  “I’m the one responsible for that,” said singer Kitty Kallen. “I’m the one who got Greg as Nancy’s attorney. She was my best friend, and I was staying with her at the time while I was appearing at the Mocambo. Frank definitely wanted a divorce, and Nancy didn’t know any attorneys. So I called Greg, and he got her such fantastic terms throughout the negotiations that when Frank found out I was the one who brought in Greg, that did it! I was on his list. He kept me from doing Jackie Gleason’s television show and I didn’t work Vegas for a long time. In fact, I didn’t work for almost five years because of Frank’s anger at me over that business. He didn’t speak to me again for ten years, and then it was only because I was a friend of someone closely associated with the [Kennedy] White House.”

  Frank had agreed to pay Nancy $2,750 a month in temporary support. Late
r, he wanted so much to be free that he signed an agreement to pay her one-third of his gross income up to $150,000, and ten percent of the gross above that figure until her death or remarriage, with the payments never to fall below one thousand dollars a month. In addition, Nancy kept the Holmby Hills home, stock in the Sinatra Music Corporation, their 1950 gray Cadillac, and custody of the children. Frank kept the Palm Springs house, a 1949 Cadillac convertible, and all his musical compositions and records.

  Without his salary from MGM, his financial resources plummeted. He had occasional club dates, but his record royalties were dwindling. He received six thousand dollars a month from Columbia Records, although the company was no longer selling ten million Sinatra records a year, as it had in 1946. His mentor, Manie Sacks, had gone to Capitol recently, leaving him under the direction of Mitch Miller, who nurtured such singers as Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, Jimmy Boyd, Jerry Vale, Patti Page, Tony Bennett, and Rosemary Clooney. With Manie Sacks gone, Frank was just another singer—a balladeer whose slow, sad songs were no longer selling.

  “It was pathetic,” recalled Harold Chapman, a Columbia Records engineer. “Sinatra would open his mouth and nothing would come out but a croak. Usually, when a singer is in bad shape, we can help him by extending his notes with an echo chamber. But Sinatra was one of the meanest men we ever worked for, so we engineers and musicians just sat on our hands and let him go down.”

  Frank was so financially strapped by the monthly payments to Nancy that he borrowed $200,000 from Columbia to pay his back taxes after MCA refused to lend him the money. From January 1 to June 30, 1951, he earned $328,050, of which Nancy claimed $67,805. When he paid her only a part of that amount, her lawyers quickly moved against his office building at 177 South Robertson Boulevard, where he was living, and forced him to sell.