Finally, Ava got off the boat. “Later we laughed our heads off at the adventure,” Rene Jordan recalled, “but the episode we were about to face was far more disturbing.”
Everyone piled into a new convertible that Frank had rented, and they drove back to the Cal-Neva cabin. Then, later that night, during what had been a pleasant dinner with Hank, Paula, and Rene, Ava and Frank had yet another acrimonious exchange. Ava had drunkenly confessed that she and bullfighter Mario Cabré really did have an affair back in Spain. An argument grew from there about the definition of commitment, and that’s when Frank’s wife came up. “If you ever treat me the way you’ve treated Nancy,” Ava said, “I’ll kill you.” She then went after Frank with a vengeance, detailing how he had left Nancy for another woman and had abandoned his own children in the process. Frank said that the fact that she could sit before him and make those sorts of declarations let him know that she was nothing but “a whore.” He spit out the word. “Because no woman of class would ever say these things to me,” he added.
“So you’re calling me a whore now?” Ava asked, upset.
“Hey, what can I tell you, sister?” Frank said. “You the one who slept with a greaseball [Frank’s name for Cabré]. And how many times have I told you, don’t ever mention Nancy’s name to me,” he added angrily. “How many times?”
The argument continued back at the house. At one point, Ava became very upset, opened a patio door, and took off running into the dark of night. “Wait, Miss G.,” exclaimed Rene, who followed her. Ava wouldn’t stop running, though, stumbling through the woods barefoot all the way down to the rocky shore. Finally, Rene reached her and managed to grab her by the waist before they both ended up in the lake. Upset and exhausted, Ava sank to her knees in the sand and started sobbing, with her maid doing what she could to comfort her. At that time, no one knew for certain how Ava’s psychological pathology impacted her behavior, but it certainly seemed like she was given to the same kinds of mood swings as Frank.
“I have to tell you something, Rene,” Ava said. “Frank wants me to loan him some money.” How much? “Nineteen thousand dollars!” (Roughly $175,000 in today’s equivalent.) Rene asked if Ava had that much money to spare. No, she didn’t, she said, but maybe she could get it from her agent, Charles Feldman. Apparently, according to what he told Ava, Frank needed to give the money to Nancy, or she was going to take the Palm Springs house. “And he loves that place so much, I can’t let that happen,” Ava said. Discussion about whether or not—and how—he would ever be able to pay back the loan had been part of the most recent fight at the house. (Ava eventually did loan the money to Frank.) “Let’s go home,” Rene told Ava. “Yes, let’s go home,” Ava agreed, wiping the tears from her eyes.
By “home,” Rene had meant their cabin at Cal-Neva, but Ava had a different idea—she wanted to go back to Los Angeles. The two made their way back through the woods to the cabin, collected Rags, got into the convertible Frank had rented, and took off in the middle of the night, headed toward California. They didn’t even say goodbye to anyone. Driving at about a hundred miles per hour down the highway with the top down, it was as if Ava was determined to kill herself, her maid, and her dog. ‘ ‘Slow down, Miss G.,” Rene yelled out. “Please!” Instead, Ava just picked up speed, all the while muttering about Frank and how it was over between them.
The sun was rising by the time Ava and Rene got back to her home in Los Angeles on Nichols Canyon Drive. They were there for maybe about fifteen minutes when the telephone rang. Rene picked it up. It was Hank Sanicola, frantic. “Frank took an overdose of sleeping pills,” he told her. “The doctor is here. He doesn’t think he’ll make it. You two had better get back up here.” Alarmed, Rene put Ava on the line. “Yes, of course,” Ava said dispassionately. “We’ll be there soon.”
Apparently, when Frank realized that Ava had departed without saying goodbye, he popped a bunch of sleeping pills into his mouth and washed them down with liquor. When Frank’s new valet, George Jacobs, found him a few hours later, he summoned physician Dr. John Wesley Field to tend to him. “Mr. S. was definitely out of it,” Jacobs would recall. “If I hadn’t gotten to him in time, I’m pretty sure he’d have been a goner.”
Remembering what had occurred in New York with Frank’s simulated suicide attempt, Ava was reluctant to run to Frank’s side. Still, she and Rene caught a plane—her maid convinced her not to try to drive back—and returned to Lake Tahoe. A couple hours later, when Ava got to Frank’s room, she found him lying on the bed, the doctor taking his pulse. “Oh, Ava,” Frank said weakly. “I thought you had left.”
“I could have killed him,” Ava told Rene when she came out of the room. “He’s the only one who had any sleep. You can be sure he counted how many sleeping pills he took. Hank’s had no sleep, the doctor’s had no sleep, you and I have had no sleep . . . there he is rested and fine with a good appetite. I could have kicked the crap out of him. I could have killed him. Instead I forgave him in about twenty-five seconds.”
A few weeks later while in New York, Frank stayed, as he usually did, at the apartment of his close friend Manie Sacks. One evening he went out alone and, of course, had too much to drink. Afterward, he walked back to Sacks’s apartment and—as he would later remember—poured himself yet another drink. He put a cigarette in his mouth, went into the bathroom for some sleeping pills, and shuffled absentmindedly into the kitchen. He popped a few of the pills and chased them down with booze. Then, turning on the gas oven, he bent over one of the burners to light the cigarette that dangled from his mouth. While in that position, he couldn’t help but smell the gas as it seeped from the stove. He inhaled deeply. He must have decided in that split second that death was what he wanted, because he turned the gas up all the way. Then he ignited the other burners. As the noxious fumes coursed from the oven, he just pulled up a chair and sat in front of it. He inhaled deeply. He drifted off.
The next thing he knew, he was being jostled back to life by a frantic Manie Sacks. Had Manie arrived just a few minutes later, it would have been too late. This was no phony suicide attempt; this time, Sinatra really wanted to die.
“Damn you, Frank,” Manie said, clenching his teeth. “How could you do this? What about your kids?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Frank mumbled as he came out of his stupor. “That was stupid. That was real stupid.”
He was ashamed of what he’d done. He promised Manie he would never try anything like that again. He even agreed to start seeing a psychiatrist, though, as he put it, “I know what the guy’s gonna say. I know what’s wrong. So why pay someone to tell me what I already know?”
“Today, they would have him on medication,” his son, Frank Jr., once said. “But back then, you were pretty much on your own to medicate as you will. People got help, of course, but it wasn’t as prevalent, or even as accepted, as it is today.”
“I only heard about this thing years after the fact,” Sammy Davis would recall. “Me and Frank were having a drink at one of the bars in the Sands in 1967 when he told me about it.”
“I can’t believe I did that shit,” Frank told Sammy, according to Sammy’s later recollection of the conversation. It was all about Ava, Frank admitted. He said it was a feeling he had that he was in love with a woman who didn’t love him in return, and this dilemma drove him to want to end his life. “He said he could see it in her eyes: She pitied him more than she loved him,” Sammy recalled. “She thought he was weak and troubled and so he acted that way. He kept thinking things would change, he said. He kept hoping she would be the woman for him because the idea that maybe she wasn’t was too much to bear, especially considering all he had given up for her.”
“It was a dark enough time to lead him to deep despair,” Nancy Sinatra Sr. would observe, “even to contemplate and approach the edge of suicide. It was impossible to know whether it was the loss of this love [Ava] or the loss of all the love and luck and work that his life had known before this very ‘d
own’ hour; or what complex of motives moved him to the brink. Others may speculate on what could cause any human being to consider ending his life. We have to respect the eternal privacy, which means we can never know. Later, he would counsel me not to despair, that despair can lead to terrible things.”
A couple weeks after the suicide attempt in New York, Frank was at his Palm Springs compound with Ava and Jimmy Van Heusen. He was still in a very dark mood. One night after an argument between Frank and Ava that Van Heusen had unsuccessfully attempted to referee, the three dispersed to different rooms to cool off. Frank went to the master bedroom. About a half hour later, Ava showed up in the doorway and saw Frank sitting on the edge of the bed, a gun pointed to his temple. Unwisely, she jumped at him to take the gun. The two of them tumbled off the bed and onto the floor. There was a tussle. The gun went off.
“Oh my God,” Ava recalled to Rene Jordan. “It reacted like a snake . . . Bang! The bullet went ricocheting around the stone fireplace and whizzed out again, making a two-inch hole in a solid wood door.” Jimmy Van Heusen came running down the hall after hearing the shot to make sure they were both still alive. He found them sobbing on the floor in each other’s arms.
Frank certainly had his reasons for being with Ava. He thought of her as his only hope. But now Ava finally had a reason for staying: She was scared of what he would do to himself if she left.
* * *
After Frank’s six-week residency in Nevada was completed, he was able to officially file for divorce there, which he did on September 19, 1950. Nancy’s attorney informed him that the property settlement on which they had earlier agreed was no longer valid because Frank was about $50,000 behind in his payments. Nancy obtained a levy against an office building he owned in Beverly Hills in order to collect the payments due her. But it was out of Nancy’s hands by this point. She was trying not to bear a grudge, but at the same time she wanted to protect herself and her children, and so she told her attorneys to do whatever they had to do, and to leave her out of it. Her family suggested that maybe now she would be able to find someone who would treat her well. She was only thirty-three and still quite beautiful. However, she insisted that she couldn’t imagine beginning a new life with someone else. “And who wants a woman with three kids?” she asked hopelessly. Besides, she still loved Frank, she admitted, despite everything that had occurred between them.
By this time, Frank was exhausted by the legal process and told his new attorneys to give Nancy whatever she wanted. He couldn’t fight her any longer, and the bottom line for him was that he was finally getting out of a marriage that hadn’t worked for him for many years. He’d be free to be with Ava. Therefore, he signed an agreement to pay Nancy all of the money he owed and more, if she would just, once and for all, allow the divorce to be finalized. Nancy agreed.
Ava Comes to Dinner
The Sinatra divorce was finally granted on October 31, 1951, in Santa Monica while Frank and Ava were in New York. “Regretfully, I am putting aside religious and personal considerations and agreeing to give Frank the freedom he has so earnestly requested,” said Nancy in a statement. “This is what Frank wants . . .”
Nancy would receive one-third of Frank’s gross income on the first $150,000; 10 percent of the next $150,000; and a smaller percentage thereafter (but never less than $1,000 a month for the rest of her life). She was also awarded custody of the couple’s three children, the home in Holmby Hills, part interest in the Sinatra Music Corporation, furnishings, furs, jewelry, and a 1950 Cadillac. Frank kept the home in Palm Springs, his 1949 Cadillac convertible, 1947 four-wheel-drive Jeep, bank accounts, oil interests in Austin County, Texas, and all rights to and royalties for his musical compositions and recordings. The couple agreed to sign over to Frank’s parents the Hoboken home he had bought for them.
“She took her pound of flesh from him and then some,” Ava bitterly observed of Nancy’s settlement with Frank.
A day later, Frank and Ava obtained a marriage license.
“Whatcha gonna get each other for a wedding present?” one reporter asked the couple during one of the public outings where, as always, they were descended upon by the media. “Boxing gloves?” Even Ava had to laugh at that one. “Will it be a white wedding dress, Miss Gardner?” a photographer asked sarcastically. At that, her smile froze. Frank shoved the photographer as hard as he could. As the lensman fell backward and hit the pavement, the couple raced away, got into a limousine, and sped off into the night.
The next few days were blissful. When it worked, Frank’s relationship with Ava was fueled with passion and excitement. He could lose himself in her, almost completely disappear from his unhinged world, deep into the cocoon of their relationship. As he would later explain it, “When it was good between us, it was so good that nothing else mattered. It was like it was just us two, me and Ava, in the world, and that was all I needed. Just the two of us. I felt like I could do anything if she was at my side.”
A couple of days later, Frank took Ava to his parents’ home to celebrate the upcoming wedding. “Hey, where’s the bar?” Ava wanted to know as soon as she and Frank walked through the door. “I need a drink.”
“We got no bar,” Marty said icily. “But I’ll get you a drink. Just hold your horses.” Meanwhile, Dolly greeted her warmly, almost as if she was her daughter. It was clear that she was crazy about her.
When Marty rose to get Ava her drink, Frank noticed his jacket on the chair. He walked over and took a couple hundred-dollar bills—“C-notes,” as he called them—from his money clip, stuck them in his pop’s jacket, and then winked at Ava. “So he can be a big shot with his friends at the bar,” Frank whispered.
“I don’t even know the names of some of the things we ate that night,” Ava later said of the Italian feast that Dolly had prepared. “Chicken like you’ve never tasted in your life, some wonderful little meat thing rolled in dough, and just about every Italian goody you can imagine.”
One of Frank’s cousins said, “We sat around the table eating cannolis and having coffee and the after-dinner drink, Frangelico. Everyone was having a good time, laughing and clapping, smoking at the table, which you would probably not see much of today. The booze was flowing; we were in good spirits. Framed pictures of Frank with different celebrities were hanging on the wall, all of them crooked. Dolly in her sleeveless, blue-and-white polka-dotted muumuu. Frank and Marty in their white T-shirt and dress slacks. Typical evening at Dolly’s and Marty’s.”
According to the source, Frank and Marty began talking about Frank’s first wife, Nancy. “You know, Pop, I feel badly about how it ended with Big Nancy,” Frank said. (He used the nickname sometimes used in the family to distinguish her from her daughter, “Little Nancy.”) “I hope she’s okay. I don’t know what else I coulda done.”
“Guilt is the only thing that keeps us human,” Marty told his son. “Animals, they don’t feel guilt. So it’s good that you feel guilty, kid,” he continued. “It just means you’re human, Frankie,” he concluded. “It’s good.”
Frank and Ava Marry
Frank and Ava were to be married on November 7, 1951, at the home of Manie Sacks’s brother, Lester, in West Mount Airy, an upscale neighborhood of Philadelphia. However, the night before the wedding, a handwritten letter was delivered to Ava from a woman who claimed to be a prostitute with whom Frank was having an affair. She provided details that to Ava seemed convincing. The alleged affair had been going on for months, the writer said, and right under Ava’s nose. Ava had been a fool, asserted the woman, for ever having believed in Frank Sinatra. “God! I almost threw up,” Ava recalled later. “I did know one thing—in the face of this evidence, there was going to be no marriage tomorrow. There was going to be no marriage, ever!”
She called off the wedding and hurled her engagement ring—a six-carat emerald stone in platinum with pear-shaped diamonds—out the window of the Hampshire House, where the couple was staying in New York. (It was never found.)
&nbs
p; Frank swore that the writer was lying. He couldn’t believe that after all they’d been through together, Ava would take as gospel the word of an anonymous accuser. Ava’s sister Bappie talked to her throughout the night to convince her that she really should not place so much importance on an anonymous letter. In the end, Ava relented. “By this time, it seemed to me that the marriage was doomed even before they got within walking distance of the altar,” said Rene Jordan.
It had snowed hard in the Midwest the previous day. By Wednesday, November 7, 1951, the storm had reached Philadelphia in the form of a cold, driving rain. Small-craft warnings were being posted all along the East Coast.
Adrienne Ellis, Lester Sacks’s daughter, who was sixteen at the time, would recall, “Our house looked beautiful. The silver was polished and shining. There were flowers everywhere. But my mother sent me to the florist to buy even more. I hadn’t said a word, but the florist said, ‘We know Sinatra is getting married at your house.’ ”
Indeed, it wasn’t long before a crowd of reporters and photographers huddled miserably outside in the rain. Frank and Ava arrived from New York in a rented chauffeured Cadillac. Frank’s first reaction upon seeing the contingent of reporters was to lash out at them: “How did you creeps know we were here? I don’t want a circus. I’ll knock any guy on his can who tries to get in.”
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