His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  The camaraderie among the cast and crew of From Here to Eternity made the wrap party memorable. “We gave a party for the cast when it was over,” said Joan Cohn Harvey, “and I still remember Frank sitting there telling everyone that in sixteen more hours he would be with Ava. ‘She’s the most beautiful woman in the world. You know that, don’t you?’ he’d say. ‘Yes, Frank, we all know how beautiful Ava is,’ I’d say. ‘She’s not just one of the most beautiful women in the world; she’s the most beautiful,’ he’d insist. He thought that he was married to the most exquisite creature on the face of the earth, and he was desperately in love with her. It was kind of sad because all the rest of us knew that the marriage was held together by mere threads at that point.”

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  Frank acted as though once reunited with Ava they would live happily ever after. He phoned her in London, where she was to begin filming Knights of the Round Table for MGM, to say that he would be joining her in a few days. He wanted her to accompany him on singing engagements throughout Europe. He was in fine voice and looking forward to the trip. He promised her that it would be a second honeymoon for them and she accepted gleefully, once again defying the studio to take an unauthorized leave for three weeks to be with her husband.

  Unfortunately, the second honeymoon turned out to be a disaster. They missed their London-to-Milan plane because their car broke down on the way to the London airport. Although they arrived with seven minutes to spare, and the British European Airways jet was still warming its engines, airport officials refused to let them board. Frank was enraged.

  “I’ll never fly BEA again,” he yelled.

  “I’d rather swim the channel,” said Ava.

  Frank checked other airlines to find one that would get them anywhere near Milan. The only service available was a BEA flight to Rome, which they took grudgingly. Waiting for them to deplane was an Italian photographer, and Frank berated him severely. Police were summoned to hold the photographer until Frank and Ava had left.

  In Naples, Frank was greeted by a half-filled house, and the audience booed him off the stage because Ava was not with him. During intermission, the theater manager refused to pay him, and Frank refused to resume singing. Impatient at being kept waiting, the audience booed and stamped and shouted. They were on the verge of rioting. The police were summoned, and the chief of Naples riot control visited Frank backstage accompanied by a platoon of fifteen policemen. They persuaded him to return to the stage.

  “Ma vedere che passa,” Frank told his audience. (“Take it easy.”) “Ma vedere che passa.”

  When he ended the show after an hour and a half, the audience refused to leave the theater. They had paid $7.40 to hear Frank sing, double what they would pay to hear their operatic idol, Beniamino Gigli, and they expected a three-hour concert. They began screaming, “Ruberia! Ruberia!” (“Robbery!”) Again police were summoned, this time to evacuate the theater.

  In Copenhagen, Denmark, Frank couldn’t fill half the house. In Malmö, Sweden, where he was performing in an outdoor park, it started to rain and became so cold that he said he would get sick if he continued, and therefore cut short his appearance by twenty minutes. He refused to stage a press conference and snubbed newsmen and photographers. The next day, a Scandinavian newspaper ran a cartoon showing a stage set with a mike, a slouch-hatted bodyguard with a tommy gun, a muffler, and a medicine stand, with the caption: “All is ready for Frank Sinatra’s appearance.” This was accompanied by an editorial stating, “Mr. Sinatra, Go Home!”

  Frank canceled the rest of his tour and returned to London with Ava, where they fought so bitterly that they were almost evicted from their apartment.

  Ava had three weeks’ work to do on her film and asked Frank to stay with her so that they could return to New York together, but he refused, saying he had to leave immediately to rehearse for his engagement at Bill Miller’s Riviera in Englewood, New Jersey. “I have a career, too, you know,” he said.

  Ava was so angry that she refused to notify him of her arrival in the U.S. a week later; he read of it in a newspaper. He was furious when he learned that she had gone to the Hampshire House, when she knew he was staying at the Waldorf Towers. Neither would telephone the other, but both talked freely to reporters.

  “I saw a picture of Ava at the airport and that’s the first inkling I had that she was in town,” Frank said. “I don’t understand it. We’d had no trouble. I can’t make a statement because I don’t know what she is planning. It’s a crying shame, because everything was going so well with us. Something may work out, but I don’t know.”

  Ava refused to be specific, but she indicated that perhaps marriage was too hard for her. “You start with love, or what you think is love, and then comes the work,” she said. “I guess you have to be mature and grown up to know how to work at it. But I was the youngest of seven kids and was always treated like the baby, and I liked it, and played the baby. Now I’m having a helluva time growing up.”

  Dolly Sinatra was distressed by what was happening to her son. She called Ava at her hotel to find out what was wrong. “She said to please come right over,” Dolly said. “She kissed me, and after a few minutes she began to cry. She had been tired, she said, when the plane came in, and when she didn’t see Frank, she felt bad. Then she found out he was in Atlantic City with me and said, ‘Mama, I don’t know how to explain this, but I know how little you get to see him. I thought for once you’re together, just the two of you, and I didn’t want to spoil it.’ ”

  Determined to bring them back together, Dolly invited Ava to dinner the next night. Then she called Frank. “I know he can be a little stubborn sometimes, and I decided to do this my way. I called him up and told him I was going to make a nice Italian meal the next night, Monday, and would he come over between shows.

  “So he says to me, ‘Who’s gonna be there?’ And I says, ‘Never mind; you just come.’ Ava got there first, at about six-thirty. Frank got there at seven. He walked in and I think he almost expected to see Ava there. He looked happy. They both did. But they were just standing there, not saying anything.

  “This is where mothers come in. ‘Hey,’ I said to both of them. ‘Come into the kitchen and see what I’m making for you tonight.’ They both followed me in, and we walked to the stove, and I took the big spoon I use for stirring the gravy, and I made them both taste it. Then they both began to laugh and talk and before you knew it they were hugging each other, and then they grabbed me and the three of us stood there just hugging and laughing, and I think we all felt like crying a little bit too.”

  That night, Ava went back to the Hampshire House while Frank left to perform at the Riviera. “Stay up and wait for me, baby,” he said. But after his last show, he went to Lindy’s with the boys and did not show up until four A.M., which infuriated Ava.

  “Isn’t it kind of late to be coming home?” she asked.

  Frank bristled. “Don’t cut the corners too close on me, baby,” he said. “This is the way my life is going to be from now on.”

  Ava related this incident to friends as evidence that the lovable Frankie she had married was now an overbearing, inconsiderate boor.

  “When he was down and out, he was so sweet,” she said, “but when he got back to the top again, it was hell. Now that he’s got successful again, he’s become his old arrogant self. We were happier when he was on the skids.”

  Frank argued that Ava had “a thing” amounting to aberrant jealousy. He said she constantly suspected he was involved in other romances, all of which he denied.

  “If it took seventy-five years to get a divorce, there wouldn’t be any other woman for me,” he said. His friends had advised him to give her up, saying Ava was too complex and full of problems for him. “Sure, it’s easy for somebody to say give her up—when they’re not in love with her.”

  Dolly’s “reconciliation” lasted only a few weeks, until Frank left for Las Vegas to appear at the Sands Hotel. Ava refused to fly to his opening becaus
e he hadn’t called her. “Why should I go?” she said. “I’ve heard nothing from him since he left.”

  The night he left, she attended the premiere of Mogambo in Los Angeles wearing what the newspapers described as “a so-low-cut pastel satin gown, skin-tight from bustline to hemline and embroidered all over with beads, sequins, and paillettes. Skirt was slit to the knee in front. A long stole of white fox set off her short, short hair-do.” The next day, Ava went to Palm Springs while Frank poured his heart out to Louella Parsons in Las Vegas.

  “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I love her,” he said.

  “You should be telling that to Ava, not to me,” said Louella. “Why in heaven’s name don’t you telephone her and tell her how you feel? I know she’s carrying a torch for you a mile high.”

  “No, Ava doesn’t love me anymore. If she did, she’d be here where she belongs—with me. Instead, she’s in Palm Springs having a wonderful time.”

  “C’mon, Frankie. Why don’t you telephone?”

  “No, Ava’s wrong this time. I’ve been wrong other times, but this time it’s all her fault. She’ll have to call me.”

  “Why ‘wrong’?” asked Louella.

  “She doesn’t understand that I’ve got a career to worry about too,” he said. “Why, Louella, she didn’t even come to my opening here! Why would she do a thing like that to me? That’s only part of it. Ever since our marriage, I’ve been at her beck and call. No matter where she’s been, I’ve flown to her regardless of the fact that I also had some important engagements. But I was willing to neglect them for her.… She saw my mother. My mother said to her, ‘All this fighting is no good. Why don’t you telephone Frank?’ ”

  Instead, Ava called her lawyer, Neil McCarthy, after seeing a photograph of Frank in the newspapers dressed as a clown at a Halloween party he threw at the Sands. Two gorgeous show girls flanked him. Ava told her lawyer that she wanted a divorce.

  “Frank doesn’t love me. He would rather go out with some other girl, almost any other girl,” she said.

  McCarthy advised her not to rush into the divorce court without first talking to her husband. He set up a meeting between them, and Frank flew to Los Angeles, but he canceled the meeting at the last minute. He resented being brought to heel by Ava and her lawyer for faults that he felt existed only in her imagination, so he flew back to Las Vegas.

  On October 29, 1953, MGM announced that the marriage was over: “Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra stated today that having reluctantly exhausted every effort to reconcile their differences, they could find no mutual basis on which to continue their marriage. Both expressed deep regret and great respect for each other. Their separation is final and Miss Gardner will seek a divorce.” That night, a New York disc jockey played a Sinatra record, which he introduced as “Ava Gardner’s newest release.”

  Ava announced that she was leaving for Rome to make The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart. She said she was in no hurry to file for divorce but nonchalantly dismissed the possibility of a reconciliation. She invented and reinvented her marriage for reporters and ranged from sexually ridiculing Frank as “Mr. Sin-Nada” (nothing) to proclaiming him “the man I’ll always love.”

  Frank was devastated and made no pretense about it. When reporters asked him about the break-up, he said, “I guess it’s over if that’s what she says. It’s very sad … it’s tragic. I feel very badly about it.”

  One friend suggested that he call Ava, and said she was as miserable as Frank was. “Then why is she going to Rome to make a picture?” Frank asked. “How are we going to make up if she’s going to be so far away?” He never made the call.

  A few nights later, the newspapers reported that Ava was seen dining quietly with Peter Lawford at Frascati’s in Los Angeles. Knowing that Peter and Ava had dated years before, Frank flew into a rage and called Lawford, threatening him.

  “Oh, God, he was furious with me for going out with Ava,” said Peter Lawford many years later. “He screamed, ‘Do you want your legs broken, you fucking asshole? Well, you’re going to get them broken if I ever hear you’re out with Ava again. So help me, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me?’ Then he slammed the phone down. I was panicked. I mean I was really scared. Frank’s a violent guy and he’s good friends with too many guys who’d rather kill you than say hello. I didn’t want to die, so I called Jimmy Van Heusen and said, ‘Please tell him nothing happened. Please.’ Jimmy said not to worry. That Frank would get over it. He knew we’d been friends since 1945. Well, Frank got over it all right, but it took him six years!”

  Out of his mind with grief over Ava, Frank flew to New York en route to a nightclub engagement at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. He wandered around Manhattan like one of the damned, filled with remorse and self-pity, unable to focus on anything but his terrible personal loss. He began frightening friends by telephoning in a gloomy voice, “Please see that the children are taken care of,” and hanging up.

  On November 18, 1953, Jimmy Van Heusen, who had an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, found Frank on the floor of the elevator with his wrists slashed. Van Heusen immediately called a doctor and rushed Frank to Mt. Sinai Hospital, but not before paying the man at the front desk of his building fifty dollars to keep quiet about the incident.

  The people in charge of Frank’s booking at the Chase Hotel had no idea of what had happened, but they grew more concerned by the minute when he failed to show up for rehearsal.

  “We were frantic,” said the booking agent, “and we started calling all over. We called the Sands in Las Vegas; we called his home in Los Angeles; we called Palm Springs and New York, but no one could find him. Finally someone decided to call Morris Schenker, a lawyer in St. Louis who has ties to everyone, to see whether he could find out something. He called us back minutes later and said Frank would not be coming because he’d just slashed his wrists.”

  Frank’s closest friend, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen, had lived through the traumas of the Ava Gardner courtship and the tumultuous marriage. Affable and easygoing, he had never crossed Frank, no matter how deplorable Frank’s behavior. He had harbored him in Palm Springs every time Frank stormed out of the house after a fight with Ava, and had spent those nights helping Frank drink his misery away.

  When Van Heusen’s apartment in New York had been the scene of one of the worst rows between Ava and Frank, with both of them cursing and screaming and breaking furniture, Jimmy had laughed it off. But having recently suffered what he thought was a heart attack, Van Heusen was now trying to protect his health. The sight of his bloodied friend was more than he could take. So he finally stood up to Sinatra and told him he would end their friendship forever unless Frank promised to seek psychiatric care.

  Frank agreed, and upon his return to Los Angeles he began seeing Dr. Ralph H. “Romy” Greenson, who was Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist and the brother-in-law of Milton “Mickey” Rudin, who had become Frank’s attorney when he signed with William Morris.

  Frank remained in Mt. Sinai while his representatives fielded questions from the press. His agent said that Frank was “not seriously ill”; his doctor said he was suffering from “complete physical exhaustion, severe loss of weight, and a tremendous amount of emotional strain.” The slashed wrists were dismissed as “an accident with a broken glass,” and Frank signed himself out two days later, saying he felt “just fine.” However, the William Morris agency was concerned about his state of mind and assigned George E. Wood to stay with him constantly, to do his bidding, to soothe and calm him and keep him from harming himself.

  “George was supposed to keep Frank from slashing his wrists again,” said Abe Lastfogel, the agency president. “He was perfect for Frank because he knew all the gangsters—Meyer Lansky, Vincent ‘Jimmy Blue Eyes’ Alo, Frank Costello—all of them!”

  Wood was an agency vice-president making twenty-five thousand dollars a year, plus bonuses and an unlimited expense account. Despite his importance, George became a virtual baby-sitter for Frank, and ne
ver left his side. “When Frank ate, I ate,” he said. “When he slept, I slept. When he felt like walking, I walked with him. When he took a haircut, I took a haircut. I loved the guy.”

  The heartbreak Frank suffered over Ava seeped into his music, giving new poignancy to lyrics of loss and loneliness. The songs he sang in the clubs expressed the brooding melancholy he was feeling at the time. Charged with more power and emotion than ever before, his voice resonated with deep pain and turbulent longing as he sang “I’m a Fool to Want You,” making each word seem like a cry of anguish for being so ensnared by Ava.

  Like the blues singers of old, Frank poured out his feelings, making his soulful ballads sound like anthems of remorse. He laid himself bare during this period, and his plaintive voice touched the hearts of listeners, who could almost feel the pain of this heartbroken man. “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me,” “My One and Only Love,” “It’s a Blue World,” and “There Will Never Be Another You” sprang from his agony and grief. His intonation imparted a deeper, more personal meaning to Harold Aden’s and Ira Gershwin’s:

  The night is bitter,

  The stars have lost their glitter.

  The winds get colder.

  And suddenly you’re older.

  And all because of a gal that got away.

  Generations of men sitting in bars drinking and brooding about their own broken romances and sexual betrayals identified with this macho man who was brought to his knees by lost love. They heard him introduce songs about men who have been done wrong by women, saying, “Shake hands with the vice-president of the club,” and they understood and commiserated. In a few years, he would give these same men musical aphrodisiacs with which they could seduce their women, but right now his was a soul in abject misery, and his music reflected it.

  “It was Ava who did that, who taught him how to sing a torch song,” said Nelson Riddle. “That’s how he learned. She was the greatest love of his life, and he lost her.”