His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  On the Saturday night before the wedding, Frank and Ava invited Pamela and James Mason to a dinner celebration at The Colony in New York City. Later, they went to a Sugar Hill nightclub, where Ava soon decided that Frank was paying too much attention to a pretty woman sitting nearby. “It looks like I’m through with him,” she said to Mrs. Mason. “I can’t even trust him on the eve of our wedding.”

  Blinded by jealousy, she screamed at Frank and he at her. With a melodramatic flourish she yanked off her six-carat diamond engagement ring and threw it across the room. “Let’s just call off this fucking wedding,” she said, flouncing out of the club.

  Frank ran after her, but Ava had already disappeared to the nightspots of Harlem. By the time he got back to the Hampshire House, where they were staying, she had moved out. Frank started drinking and called Manie Sacks. “The wedding’s off,” he said, “and what was to have been a celebration is a shambles.” Sacks was now in the uncomfortable position of having to call Ike Levy. When talking to reporters later, Levy was exasperated.

  “Make no mistake about it,” he said. “There will positively be no marriage here today! They’re like this war in Korea. They’re always battling and getting nowhere.”

  It took the intercession of Axel Stordahl, James Mason, and Ava’s sister, Bappie, but by Monday afternoon Frank and Ava had made up. That night, they went to Hoboken for one of Dolly Sinatra’s famous Italian dinners.

  “I don’t even know the names of some of the things we had—chicken like you’ve never tasted in your life, some wonderful little meat things rolled in dough, and just about every Italian goody you can imagine,” said Ava.

  With the wedding on again, the secrecy was tightened, but reporters soon found out, by asking the city’s top caterer, that it was to take place in Philadelphia on Wednesday evening, November seventh. This time it was Manie Sacks’s brother, Lester, who volunteered his home for the event. That Wednesday, reporters in New York City waited outside the Hampshire House until Ava came out with Axel Stordahl, Frank’s best man, and got into a waiting limousine. A few minutes later, Frank came out with Axel’s wife, June Hutton, Ava’s matron of honor.

  “No questions, no questions,” he said, brushing by the newsmen and putting his hand over the lens of a Movietone television camera just as the cameraman began filming the departure. The wedding party, which included Ben Barton, Frank’s music publishing partner, and Dick Jones, an ex-Dorsey arranger, left for Philadelphia, where it was raining. When the limousine pulled up in front of Lester Sachs’s fieldstone home, Frank saw the reporters standing in the drizzle.

  “How did those creeps know where we were?” he yelled. “I don’t want no circus here. I’ll knock the first guy who attempts to get inside on his ass—and I mean it!”

  Ava ran into the house, pulling Frank behind her. They were given a written request from photographers for pictures and a little cooperation. Frank ran back outside, shouting, “Okay, who sent the note? Which one?” He pointed from one photographer to the other. “Did you? Did you? You’re not going to get any pictures. You’ll get shots from the commercial photographer [Irving Haberman from CBS] when he gets around to it.”

  “I’ll take my own pictures,” said the note-sender.

  “I’ll betcha five hundred dollars you don’t,” yelled Frank. “If you do, I’ll knock you flat on your ass.”

  An hour later, the twenty-nine-year-old bride walked down the steps on the arm of Manie Sacks. She wore a cocktail-length mauve and gray gown with a strapless top of pink taffeta.

  “I was so nervous and excited,” she said. “When Manie and I started down the stairs, he slipped, and we slid about three stairs before we regained our footing. But we did make it down the rest of the way, and as soon as I saw Frank standing there, I wasn’t nervous anymore. He looked wonderful in his blue suit and gray tie and so composed. But he told me later he had the biggest lump in his throat. And all of a sudden I was in front of Judge Sloane.”

  They exchanged thin platinum rings, and seconds after the magistrate pronounced them man and wife, the thirty-six-year-old groom kissed his bride. Turning to the twenty assembled guests, he broke into a big smile. “Well,” he said. “We finally made it. We finally made it.”

  Ava raced across the room and threw her arms around her new mother-in-law. Dolly promptly burst into tears and patted Ava’s arm affectionately. She had favored the marriage from the very beginning. “I love that little girl,” Dolly said. “She’s brought my Frankie back to me.”

  Staunchly defending Frank and Ava, Dolly said, “I’d like to tell those hypocrites who send me letters without signing their names that say ‘Aren’t you ashamed, Mrs. Sinatra, aren’t you ashamed that your boy divorced his wife and left three children just so he could marry that actress?’ I’d like to tell them that Frank loves his three children as much as he loves anything else in the world—that I, his mother, am proud that he married a wonderful girl like his Ava.”

  Ava was the one and only woman in Frank’s life Dolly truly loved, for Ava immediately became “famiglia” (family)—the beloved “figlia” (daughter-in-law). Dolly had tried to maintain cordial relations with Big Nancy because she wanted to see her grandchildren, but she gave her heart to Ava and quickly forgave her for not being Italian or Catholic. After all, Ava was an international beauty, of exotic plumage, not a drab little peahen like Nancy. Since the premiere of Show Boat, Ava had become one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and as such was the only woman good enough to marry Dolly’s son, especially at this point in his life. With Ava beside him, he could scale the heights again. Dolly knew that Ava was already doing her part to help revive his movie career.

  Besides, Frank was going to sing the following month for Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth in London’s Coliseum. To Dolly, Ava was the kind of woman a man could proudly introduce to royalty; Nancy was better left at home cooking and taking care of children. Years later, when Frank first performed before the British Queen, he said he was so excited that he called Dolly in Hoboken. “Guess who your son was with tonight?” he shouted. “The Queen of England!” His mother was unimpressed. “Lucky Queen,” she said.

  Ava enjoyed Frank’s tough, profane, funny mother, and the two women spent many hours together shopping and drinking and laughing. The barefoot girl from Grabtown and the Hoboken midwife had a lot in common. Both were Christmas babies. Ava’s birthday was December 24 and Dolly’s December 25. Both were ardent Democrats and uninhibited. “They both cursed in Technicolor,” said a friend of the family. Both adored Frankie and believed that he was the best singer in the world. Dolly was even known to smash a chair over the head of anyone who disagreed. Unlike the first Mrs. Frank Sinatra, Ava was not ashamed to visit Hoboken and walk down its blue-collar streets so her mother-in-law could show her off to all the star-struck neighbors and merchants.

  “This marriage is blessed with good luck,” said Dolly, an inveterate gambler. “You got married at the seventh hour on the seventh day of the eleventh month. Seven, seven, eleven. You can’t miss.”

  Frank agreed with his mother. “We’re over all our crises now,” he said. “We have nothing to worry about anymore.”

  Ecstatic after the wedding ceremony, Ava went upstairs to change into her brown Christian Dior going-away outfit, her brown alligator shoes and purse, and the sapphire-blue mink stole that Frank had given her as a wedding present. He was already wearing the gold locket she had given him with a St. Christopher medal on one side, a St. Francis medal on the other, and her picture inside. They were going to honeymoon in Cuba for three days at the Hotel Nacional, which was owned in part by the crime syndicate.

  When the bride came downstairs, Manie Sacks took her aside for a few seconds. “Look after him, Ava,” he said. “He’s had some hard knocks and he’s very fragile. It isn’t going to be easy living with a man whose career is in a slump.”

  “I’ll do anything to make him happy,” said Ava.

  “Then,” said Ma
nie, “help him get back his self-confidence.”

  13

  Both Frank and Ava came from families in which the mother was the dominant force and the father was sweet, passive, and ineffectual. What Ava did not know and Frank could not articulate was the importance of his not being emasculated the way his quiet little father had been. Marty Sinatra, racked by asthma all his life, rarely talked when Dolly was around. As much as Frank loved his father, he must have seen him as lacking a measure of masculinity for always yielding to his overpowering wife.

  During his twelve years with Nancy, Frank had been in a traditional marriage: he was the breadwinner, she was the homemaker. There had never been any question about who was in charge. Now he was starting a totally different relationship: his career would be secondary to his wife’s, and he would have to fight to assert his command. In a sense, he had married a surrogate Dolly, for Ava was almost as tough and independent as his mother. Although she suffered from deep insecurity (“Ava feared she could not really hold a man,” said Hank Sanicola), she appeared so aggressive and combative at times that Jimmy Van Heusen soon called her “The Man.” Having to pay Nancy $150,000 a year plus a percentage of his earnings made Frank financially dependent on Ava. It was her salary from MGM that paid most of their bills. She was the one with the flourishing career, and when the studio sent her to Africa to make Mogambo, Frank, who had nothing else to do, went along and carried her bags like a faithful courtier.

  “Ava loved Frank, but not the way he loved her,” said Hank Sanicola. “Twice he went chasing her to Africa, wasting his own career.… He needs a great deal of love. He wants it twenty-four hours a day. He must have people around—Frank is that kind of guy.”

  Ava never understood Frank’s need to surround himself with an entourage, most of whom were Italian men like himself. Together, they comprised a modern version of the storefront club of the Italian neighborhoods they had grown up in. Their fathers and uncles went to those clubs to play cards and get away from their wives. Being with other men gave Frank an audience and helped to reinforce his sense of masculinity, but Ava hated to have Frank’s men hanging around all the time, and this irritated him. He was accustomed to the good Italian wife who simply went into the kitchen and started cooking spaghetti for everyone when he brought the whole band home with him.

  “The problems were never in the bedroom,” said Ava. “We were always great in bed. The trouble usually started on the way to the bidet.” A friend of Ava’s explained: “There was a strong physical attraction on both sides, but they couldn’t get together on the other things that are necessary in a relationship. Neither gave an inch, though I must say Frank worked harder on the marriage than she did. She’s a very selfish girl.”

  “The trouble with Ava is that her whole concept of life comes from magazine illustrations,” said another friend. “She used to come tripping down in the morning, put on a frilly apron, and prepare a five-course breakfast. Then she’d call Frank. He’d come down unshaven and hung over from the night before. He’d growl ‘All I want is juice’—and more than likely she’d throw the juice at him.”

  By the time Frank married Ava, he had little work to do. Although he was still represented by MCA, the agency was no longer helping him. In fact, MCA agents were telling reporters that they had “to wait in line” to collect their commissions.

  The dispute over commissions went back many years to the time Frank was singing on radio in a package show that he had put together himself. He was paid fifteen thousand dollars a week for the show, but when MCA demanded a ten percent commission on the gross, as was the practice, he balked. Frank felt that he had done all the work of getting the show, so he should not have to pay a full commission, and agreed to pay only a commission on his net earnings from the show. Because he was such an important client, MCA agreed. But now the agency was saying he still owed them forty thousand dollars in commissions from that show and implied that a client who was such a deadbeat should be dropped.

  Frank laughed when he first heard the rumor. “How can you fire an entertainer who earned $693,000 last year?” he asked. The answer was extraordinary—a public notice in the trade papers declaring that Music Corporation of America no longer represented Frank Sinatra.

  “Can you imagine being fired by an agency that never had to sell you?” said Frank. He despised MCA president Lew Wasserman so heartily for cutting him loose that he didn’t speak to him for ten years. Wasserman remained unconcerned. MCA was the most powerful agency in the world, and a client like Sinatra, who was so hostile to the press, was a liability.

  Without an agency, Frank turned to friends like Manie Sacks for help. And he appealed to Bob Weitman to book him into the Paramount for the opening of Meet Danny Wilson in March 1952. The Paramount had been the scene of his greatest box office triumphs, where thousands of bobby-soxers filled the theater and then ran up and down the aisles screaming his name and hurling themselves into the orchestra pit just to get closer to him. Five years later, he could not even fill the balcony.

  The day after his opening the headline in the New York World Telegram and Sun said it all: GONE ON FRANKIE IN ’42; GONE IN ’52. The accompanying article was an open letter to the singer from Muriel Fischer. “I saw you last night. But I didn’t get ‘that old feeling’ … I sat in the balcony. And Í felt kind of lonely. It was so empty. The usher said there were 750 seats in the second balcony—and 749 were unfilled.… Later I stood outside the stage entrance. About a dozen people were waiting around. Three girls were saying ‘Frankie’ soft and swoonlike. I asked, ‘How do you like Frankie?’ They said, ‘Frankie Laine, he’s wonderful.’ I heard a girl sighing, ‘I’m mad about him,’ so I asked her who. ‘Johnnie Ray,’ she cried. All of a sudden, Mr. Sinatra, I felt sort of old!”

  Frank played the Chez Paree in Chicago, a nightclub with seating capacity for 1,200, and brought in only 150 patrons. Columbia Records refused to renew his contract, and his fan clubs disbanded. His engagement at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles was embarrassing, especially for some of his friends who didn’t want to be seen attending. Sammy Cahn cringed when Frank gave him credit from the stage for some special material he’d written. “Believe me,” said Cahn, “I could have done without it.”

  Although no one wanted to write stories about Frank anymore, he kept his publicity firm on a monthly retainer, but complained because he wasn’t getting press coverage. Press agent Budd Granoff offered to reduce his fee, but pride kept Frank from paying a lesser rate than the other stars Granoff was handling.

  “He was paying us four hundred dollars a week, and he felt it was too much money because he wasn’t working and didn’t have any money,” said Granoff. “So I went to see him and said, ‘Frank, you don’t want to see anybody, you don’t want to do any interviews, you’re not doing anything, so why don’t we cut the thing in half for the time being?’ He got very angry. Referring to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, he said, ‘How much is the skinny Jew-boy and the dumb Wop paying you?’ I said four hundred dollars. He said, ‘What is the fat boy paying you,’ meaning Mario Lanza. I said four hundred dollars. He was very angry, very hurt. ‘You don’t change the fee,’ he said. ‘I change the fee, and I’ll pay you four hundred dollars.’ ”

  If Frank’s career was sputtering, Ava’s was soaring. She had been chosen to plant her hands and feet in wet cement in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a Hollywood honor accorded only the biggest stars, and one that Frank would not receive for another thirteen years. Later, MGM offered her a new ten-year contract for twelve pictures at $100,000 per picture. True to her word, she insisted that Metro hire Frank as her leading man for one of those movies. After the box office failure of Meet Danny Wilson, Universal had refused to renew his option for a second film despite his pleas, but he kept telling Ava that all he needed was one good role to put him over the top again. Dedicated to helping him in any way she could, Ava refused to sign her new contract until the studio lawyers added a clause entitled Servic
es of Frank Sinatra, which stated:

  (a)Should we buy the rights to and produce a photoplay based on “St. Louis Woman,” we agree that she will be assigned to do this picture and we further agree that we will employ Frank Sinatra to appear in the photoplay.

  (b)Should we not acquire the rights to “St. Louis Woman” or produce a photoplay based on this property, then we agree that at some time prior to the expiration of her contract, we will do a picture with her in which Frank Sinatra will also appear.

  The next contractual battle was over inserting a pregnancy clause that would protect her from penalties should she be unable to work because of pregnancy. She had already announced that she and Frank wanted to have a baby. Actually, he wanted several. “I would like a dozen kids,” he said.

  Ava was convinced that most of Frank’s misery was due to his rancorous press relations. She begged him to stop slugging reporters and cursing photographers, saying that he needed them to become a star again. But the last thing Frank wanted was to entrust his fate to the press.

  “The newspapers—they broke up my home,” he said. “They broke up my family. They ruined my life.”

  Shortly after his violent clash with reporters at the wedding, one of his publicists, Mack Miller, had conferred with him for three hours.

  “Miller told Frank that if he didn’t stop fighting with the press, he’d have to give him up,” said a friend. “Miller said he wasn’t worth what Frank was paying him if this kind of thing continued. Ava backed Miller up. She’s no yes-woman.”

  Months later, Ava turned to Manie Sacks and together they convinced Frank that he no longer had any choice but to make amends with the press. The apologia was written by Irving Fein under Frank’s name in a two-part series for the Hearst papers entitled “Frankly Speaking” in which Frank appeared to go down on his knees with his head bowed.

  “The press generally has been wonderful to me, and I know that without their help I never could have become famous or earned more money than I ever believed existed when I was a slum kid in Hoboken,” he wrote. “My only excuse for being abrupt and curt … is that I was nervous and distraught from the events of the past year.”