Frank: The Voice (47 page)

MGM production memo for Wednesday, September 4, 1946:

Phil Silvers played the Copa dinner show solo on Thursday the fifth. He told jokes, made fun of the waiters, sang a few songs; the clink of tableware and the buzz of conversation were louder than the laughs. A waiter dropped a tray in the middle of a song. Silvers exited to polite applause. He sat in his dressing room, his bald dome still glistening with flop sweat. Like many comics, he was a gloomy, fearful man. This was what it came down to, he thought. You blew off the gig and got banned, or you just plain blew it and didn’t get asked back.

Then there was a bustle outside, and the door popped open. It was Frank, grinning like a cat with a mouthful of canaries.

They sprang into action for the 10:00 p.m. show. Sinatra sat, as unobtrusively as possible, at a ringside table. Silvers marched out, reenergized, to the first few bars of “Fine and Dandy” and beamed at the audience.

“
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the world-famous Copacabana,” he said. “And speaking of famous—turn on the house lights a minute, will ya? If there’s anybody here tonight who’s famous, I want to introduce them.”

Up came the lights, the crowd clamoring at the sight of Sinatra. Silvers stared at the singer without comment. “Okay, turn down the lights,” the comic said.

Full of confidence, he started his routine. Then he touched his tie and Frank rose and joined him. The place went nuts, the audience jumping to its feet. Silvers and Sinatra did the USO routine all over again: singing lessons for Frank, Phil pinching Sinatra’s cheek, even a sharp slap or two when the stupid pupil just couldn’t get it right.

The crowd ate it up. They stood again when Sinatra sat back down without bowing, yielding the floor to Silvers. At the end, Phil beckoned him back, and they took their bows together. Then the comic administered a killer.

“May I take a bow for Rags?” he said.

The place went dead quiet. Even Podell teared up. Sinatra stared at the floor. Fortunately, a
Variety
reporter was there to witness the
whole thing.
SINATRA’S STOOGERY FOR PHIL SILVERS NY NITERY PREEM AN INSPIRED EVENT, the headline read the next morning. The accompanying story said, “That appreciative gesture by Sinatra understandably sets him in a niche all his own in the big, sentimental heart of show business.”

The reaction of the sentimental but businesslike Louis B. Mayer is unrecorded.

On Tuesday the tenth, Sinatra was back in L.A., wrung out by the trip. Whorf was doing his best to shoot the movie around him, but at a certain point the director could do nothing without his star. It turned out Whorf would have to wait a while longer. The studio’s production memo for that day reads:

A couple of days later even the production memos were beginning to sound exasperated:

On the twenty-third, a Monday, Sinatra could barely pull himself out of bed:

It wasn’t just that he was ambivalent about filmmaking: there was trouble at home. The ever-present low-level hostilities between Frank and Nancy had escalated into open warfare. It didn’t matter how much he tried to justify that nightclub picture of him and Lana—yes, they worked on the same lot; yes, Mayer liked his valuable properties to be seen together, et cetera, et cetera. But there was no getting around that giddy look on his face, his tight clasp of her hand. They looked like two honeymooners. In apparent acknowledgment of her guilt, Turner had curtailed her friendly visits to Nancy.

Nancy had other complaints. Frank had just bought Dolly and Marty a new house in Weehawken for $22,000. Out of pocket, cash, and without consulting Nancy, who tried hard to control the family purse strings. Furious, Nancy opened her doors, wide, to her own family. At any given hour of the day, three generations of Barbatos were present, nieces and nephews draped all over the place; aunts, uncles, and cousins chatting in the kitchen. Frank, who had done his best to look as though he lived there, now no longer saw the need. He and his wife weren’t speaking: What was the point?

On Saturday night, October 5, he went to a party hosted by Sonja Henie: Lana was there. She and Frank danced together “
many times,” a subsequent newspaper account reported. He failed to go home that night.

The next day he phoned Nancy and told her he wanted a separation. A divorce? she asked.

He wanted his freedom, he told her. He didn’t want a divorce. He was going to find an apartment. She slammed down the phone.

A half hour later, having done her best to compose herself, she called Evans at home. Evans’s wife answered, then handed the telephone to her husband. The moment Nancy heard George’s voice, she broke down sobbing.

As soon as he understood that the inevitable had finally happened, the publicist went into crisis mode. He could sit on the story for a little while, but just a little while. If he didn’t shape the narrative, it would spill out raw or exaggerated into public. First, however, Evans attempted a desperation play: he called Frank and tried to talk some sense into him.

Frank, of course, wasn’t having any. He had made up his mind.

So the press would have to be informed. The timing couldn’t have been worse: the papers would be all over the story first thing Monday morning. Evans phoned the gatekeepers, Lolly Parsons and Hedda Hopper, and read them both the same script. “
It’s just a family squabble,” he said. “The case of a Hollywood career, plus a man-and-wife fight. There’s no talk of divorce. I think they’ll make up in a few days. Frankie has a few days off so he’s gone to a desert resort for a little privacy. This is the first public battle they’ve ever had, and I don’t think it’s serious. He will be back in three days to work on his current movie.”

MGM production memo for Monday, October 7:

The desert resort was Palm Springs.

For centuries desert was all it was, home to the Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla Indian tribe, a scattering of adobe buildings on the edge of the southern Mojave, in a bone-dry, sun-shattered valley surrounded by dead stony mountains. The springs themselves were hot—as though more heat were needed in the godforsaken place—and the palms around them not plentiful, but the waters were reputed to have healing properties. Crazy white people trickled out from the city looking
for relief from their big-city ailments, and then the movie people began to come.

It was an ideal retreat from Hollywood: just 120 miles away, but in those days of two-lane blacktop, the drive took at least three hours. Tijuana was fun for whoring and horse racing; the Springs was for lying low, for basking like a lizard on a rock in the healing desert sun. Tan was good in those days. The big hotels, the Desert Inn and El Mirador, opened not long after World War I; the little resorts, with names like Wonder Palms and Lone Palm, cropped up in the 1920s and 1930s: clusters of Mission-style bungalows around crystalline blue pools, in the shade of the signature trees. Labor was cheap. People wouldn’t bother you, the staffs were discreet, agents and publicists and columnists and spouses were far away, at the other end of a long-distance phone line.

Jimmy Van Heusen discovered the Springs in 1940, when he flew his shiny-skinned Luscombe-Silvaire to Los Angeles to go to work at Paramount, writing songs with Johnny Burke for Bing Crosby. Crossing the southwest desert as he entered California, he decided he’d better fuel up for his final approach—he wasn’t quite sure where the Van Nuys airport was. He touched down at a primitive airstrip in the midst of the sand.

In the late summer of 1940 the Palm Springs airport was nothing but a couple of adobe huts and a few fuel drums, and the incredible heat shimmered off the tarmac, yet the minute Van Heusen stepped out of his plane, he was happy. He had suffered all his life from sinus trouble; suddenly he could really breathe. He fell in love with the desert and told all his friends, including Sinatra.

The place grew fashionable, as a secret shared among the rich and well-known. Fancy restaurants were a necessity, so a few opened up: the Palm House, the Doll House, Trav Rogers’s Mink and Manure Club. You could get a superb steak for $2.50 or a lobster flown in on ice from Maine for $3. Then came the nightclubs. Even when you were lying low, entertainment was required. The first, and for a long time
the best, was called Chi Chi. Dining, dancing, and big-time entertainment in the Starlite Room.

Frank thought the Springs was the perfect place to hide out: Lana had a little place down there. But Frank craved action and company, and so they went to Chi Chi.

During one fox-trot, Frank felt a tap on the shoulder. He turned and saw Howard Hughes, recently recovered from a near-fatal plane crash, dancing with his date, Ava Gardner, soon to divorce Artie Shaw. Sinatra and Hughes, who knew of each other only through their celebrity, nodded politely; Lana and Ava squealed and hugged. Until very recently Gardner had been a B player at Metro, best known for having been married to Mickey Rooney and Shaw. But in August, she’d finally had a breakthrough role, starring opposite Burt Lancaster in an adaptation of a Hemingway story called
The Killers
. The part put Ava on the map, and led to a friendship with Lana, who was nothing if not status conscious.

The two had much in common (besides very brief marriages to Artie Shaw), including hardscrabble backgrounds and fathers who’d died young. And an earthy sense of humor. They liked to drink cocktails and giggle together. Ava liked sex a good deal, as young ladies then, even young ladies who acted in the movies, were not supposed to. Lana, on the other hand, was a materialist. She quickly turned clinical while under the influence, comparing her lovers’ respective endowments with the cold eye of a practiced anatomist.

Much information was conveyed in the mischievous glances the two actresses now exchanged.

Smiling obliviously, Hughes suggested to Sinatra that the two couples change partners. Lana’s look suggested that Ava would be getting the better part of the bargain. Then Ava found herself in Frank’s arms. The band struck up “Dancing in the Dark.”

She had been drinking steadily over the course of the night—Hughes bored her—and she was in a saucy mood. Liquor, and success, and the desert emboldened her: she was considerably less demure than the young woman Frank had encountered before.

She looked straight into his eyes: she didn’t usually dance with married men. He liked the challenge, and he liked the way she felt in his arms. In her heels she was as tall as he, maybe slightly taller, lean but curvy, fleshy in just the right places.

Except when she was married to them? The plural was pointed.

She smiled, sideways—with one plural pronoun he’d won the exchange—and put her head on his shoulder.

How about that, he thought.

Then the song was over, and she was back in Hughes’s arms.

Frank and Lana were seen together, as they wanted to be. It was inevitable, a game of cat and mouse. He and Lana Turner had gone to Palm Springs and danced at Chi Chi, among other celebrities, and their presence had been duly noted and reported. Evans read about them within hours. As did Louis B. Mayer.

On Wednesday night, Frank was back in Hollywood to do his radio show, and Mayer was with him, to present Sinatra with an award from
Modern Screen
magazine as the Most Popular Star of 1946—along with a $10,000 bronze bust of the singer by the sculptor Jo Davidson. Before the mikes went on, however, the fatherly hand came down heavily on his shoulder.

Mayer glared at him. What was all this?

Frank shrugged. It was just a personal matter.

Mayer had to disagree. Where he and Lana were concerned, it was very much a professional matter. He must have Frank’s word that he would sort this out quickly.

Frank nodded.

Then the mikes went on.

“
Let me welcome you to the MGM family,” Mayer told him. He didn’t have to emphasize the last word.