Frank: The Voice (106 page)

In truth, it had only been one wrist—his left. Van Heusen had paid his doorman $50 to get a cab fast and keep his mouth shut, then paid the cabbie $20 to run every red light on the way up to Mount Sinai Hospital. More money passed hands, and with great haste Frank was attended to and checked into a suite under his own name. The cover story was to be that he was exhausted. This was true enough. His weight was down to 118 pounds from 132, and he hadn’t really slept for weeks. Though no official announcement had been made yet, the flowers and telegrams started arriving in great quantities the next morning.

After a drugged sleep, Sinatra awoke alert and agitated. He had to get out of there
now
, he kept repeating. Around his bed, his doctors, along with Van Heusen, Sacks, Styne, and Cahn (forgetting their feud), tried to reason with him. He was in no shape to move, let alone leave. Why not just put his feet up for a few days?

He had to get to California. Had to see her.

She was leaving him, he knew it. He’d tried to leave her, the only
way he knew, but maybe he just didn’t have the guts. Now he was pinning everything on looking her in the eye, holding her hand, and begging her to stay. He finally reached her on the phone—she’d returned to L.A. to go to the opera and see friends.

Oh Jesus, Francis.

She sounded both solicitous and slightly exasperated, but her voice was balm to his soul. He imagined her standing at his bedside, imagined the dimpled chin and lush lips and green eyes looking down at him.

His voice was weak. He was okay, but he had to see her right away.

She told him to just stay put until he was healthy. She wasn’t going anywhere.

But he knew her: she probably had her bags packed already.

“
Sinatra’s father says he went to Mt. Sinai hosp for a checkup,” wrote Winchell, the All-Powerful. “But the rumors had it he tried to End It All.”

Whenever Frank Sinatra taxed his patience to the utmost, Jimmy Van Heusen had to remind himself that this, after all, was Sinatra. A man who put his pants on one leg at a time, picked his nose, and told stupid jokes, but … Sinatra. As a songwriter of brilliance but not genius, Van Heusen was in an ideal position to understand what genius really was, and he recognized that Frank surely possessed it. It didn’t excuse his excesses—only God could do that—but it began to explain them. Jimmy might bad-mouth Frank behind his back (and he meant it when he did), he might hate him at times and even fear him, yet he also loved him, as much as he could love anybody. And when the little bastard sang, Chester got more goose bumps than anyone else.

“
I would rather write songs than do anything else—even fly,” Van Heusen once told an interviewer. And he loved flying. He loved fucking, too, but the sublime pleasure of songwriting trumped all other joys—and made them possible. He had written some good songs for
Sinatra, and he hoped to write more. Staying as close as possible to Frank, Chester sensed, might just accelerate that process.

But Jimmy Van Heusen had another notable quality: he was a hypochondriac of the first order. He kept a Merck manual at his bedside, he injected himself with vitamins and painkillers, he had surgical procedures for ailments real and imagined. He was terrified of illness and death, and earlier that year, close to his fortieth birthday, he’d had what he’d felt might be a heart attack. The doctors weren’t sure, but he was. Terrifyingly, over these last taxing weeks with Sinatra, Jimmy had begun to feel chest pains again.

Accordingly, while Frank got dressed in the hospital room, shooting his cuffs to cover the bandages (the doctor had just walked out, shaking his head, after warning Sinatra that he was leaving Against Medical Advice), Van Heusen looked his friend in the eye and told him he had to have a word with him.

The songwriter had already gone over in his mind what he wanted to say. If it meant the end of the friendship, so be it. But he’d come to the end of his rope. The two men looked at each other in the mirror as Frank looped his tie. And Jimmy, his voice serious, told Frank that he had to see a headshrinker when he got back to Los Angeles. He couldn’t take this anymore.

Sinatra smiled a little. Why not?

Worried about their newly successful client’s fragility, William Morris assigned Sinatra a shadow, in the person of the New York agent George E. Wood, a dapper, slightly shifty-eyed fellow who prided himself on his wide acquaintanceship among organized criminals of the top rank—many of whom functioned as a kind of show-business directorate. Wood relished the assignment. “
When Frank ate, I ate; when he slept, I slept,” the agent recalled. “When he felt like walking, I walked with him. When he took a haircut, I took a haircut. I loved the guy.”

Wood bribed a TWA gate agent at La Guardia to let him walk his
charge through a hangar so Frank could get on his L.A.-bound flight unmolested by the pack of reporters. He rode cross-country with him, watching him as he slept a drugged sleep, now and then glancing at the bandage on his left wrist. And Wood did his best to fend off the reporters who met the plane at Los Angeles International the next morning. It wasn’t easy. The whole country was tuned in to what looked like the final act in the Frank-and-Ava saga.

RUMOR MILL IS MUM ON FRANKIE’S ROCKY ROMANCE, read a November 21 headline, punning lightly on the name of his radio show. “Whether skinny, harried Frank Sinatra would win back luscious Ava Gardner today prepared to be a matter known only to the principals,” began the wire-service story, datelined Hollywood.

They’d made a plan to have dinner that night, at Bappie’s place—Ava’s big sister was now living with her husband, Charlie, in the Nichols Canyon cottage. Ava had insisted on a neutral location, with Bappie and Charlie present, so that Frank couldn’t misconstrue the occasion.

She met him at the door, kissing him on the cheek and immediately noticing his bandaged wrist.

He deflected her concern, instantly sensing that vulnerability wouldn’t play this time. It was nothing—a stupid accident. How was she?

Warm but cool at the same time, and nervous. He saw her hand shaking slightly as she held her cigarette. Frank was all charm, especially with Bappie, who’d once considered him an oily little dago (she didn’t have much patience for Negroes or Jews, either) but now felt considerable warmth toward her brother-in-law.

It was too late, all of it. Ava had written him off. Not, of course, just for the one infidelity he’d boasted about, but for the hundreds he would never mention. Years later she would say, “
I was happier married to Frank than ever before in my entire life. He was the most charming man I’d ever met—nothing but charm. Maybe, if I’d been willing to share him with other women we could have been happy.”

She smiled at him now with a kind of relief: she’d worried before he came that she might not be able to resist him, that something would trigger her old susceptibilities. Nothing did. He looked like shit—that helped. Nor was she in the mood to mother him. She tapped her cigarette, she drank her drink, she looked at him and smiled, and all the while she was thinking of Rome, and Luis Miguel.

He saw it. He was endlessly intuitive—he could pick up a vibe from a room-service waiter or the second reporter from the left (though he didn’t like the world to know what he knew), and he was, if anything, over-attuned to the love of his life. Early he had learned to watch Dolly closely, closely, to try to figure out whether she was going to hug him or hit him; early he’d learned to watch Ava closely, to see whether she was going to love him or leave him.

She was leaving him.

Her bags might as well have been sitting by the front door.

“
F. Sinatra will spend Thanksgiving with Nancy and their tots,” Winchell wrote the next morning.

Meanwhile, Ava came up with her own way to spend the holiday. “
Ava Gardner on Thanksgiving morning boards the plane from Los Angeles to Rome, obviously in the hope of catching reporters and cameramen more interested in a turkey drumstick than in the Sinatras,” Dorothy Manners wrote in her column. “One thing came out of her ‘talks’ with Frank—or at least one talk—they haven’t seen each other since. She will not file for divorce (if she does at all) until she returns to this country in the spring.”

The photographers caught up with her at Idlewild as she was about to board her Rome-bound connecting flight. She was standing on the aluminum steps in her big sunglasses, grinning in the November sun, holding a manila envelope containing a
Barefoot Contessa
script (she hadn’t gotten around to reading it just yet) in her right hand and, with her left, waving to the cameras, showing the whole world that she was no longer wearing her wedding ring.

That night Frank was back at the El Capitan Theatre, once again guest starring on
The Colgate Comedy Hour
, along with Eddie Fisher, no less. The host, Eddie Cantor, brought Fisher out first, to croon a medley of his hits (including “I’m Walking Behind You,” the number that had aced out Frank’s version in the charts); Fisher then invited Cantor to appear on
his
TV show—the one with Axel Stordahl leading the band. A little later, as the great Harold Arlen himself suggestively tinkled the opening bars of “One for My Baby,” Old Banjo Eyes said, “
You know, Harold, there’s one fella that sings your songs better than anyone else. Lately, he’s become a dramatic actor—pretty good, too.”

And out came Frank, to big
From Here to Eternity
applause, looking painfully thin in his tux. But if, as he walked onstage, he felt any hangover from the last ten terrible days, he lost it the instant he flared his nostrils and went into his own, all-Arlen medley: “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” and Mercer and Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic.” This was, quite simply, a master class in American popular song, and Fisher, the perpetrator of “Oh, My Papa”—who was always deferential to Sinatra’s infinitely greater gift—stood openmouthed in the wings. Frank was in magnificent voice, and his passion
(“
ev’ry time your lips meet mine, darling, down and down I go; round and round I go”) was palpably, almost embarrassingly, real, blazing out sun-like from the little black-and-white screen.

Watching the old, scratchy kinescope and taking note of the way he seemed to favor his left arm, holding it slightly awkwardly at times, one can’t help but wonder: Was he still wearing the bandages? Was that long tux-shirt cuff taped to prevent his accidentally revealing them?