Frank: The Voice (65 page)

The same issue of
Billboard
that announced George Evans’s death bore the news that Manie Sacks was leaving Columbia Records for RCA. Victor had been pursuing Sacks for months, and given the cataclysmic changes at Columbia—Dinah Shore and Mitchell Ayres both gone to the rival label; Buddy Clark dead;
²
Sinatra a walking shadow—Sacks must have felt the timing was right. He was forty-seven years old, getting on, and RCA, in red-hot competition with Columbia, was offering real money.

Sacks would have no official replacement as manager of popular repertoire at Columbia, but in February the label brought in a new head for its pop-singles division: Mitch Miller.

George was gone, Manie was gone, but business was business: Frank rescheduled the Shamrock gig for the first week of February. On the sixth, he and Van Heusen flew from New York to Houston—and unbeknownst to Frank, Ava, in Hollywood, decided impulsively to go meet him. Following MGM protocol, she put in a request to the studio to make the trip. Mayer sent down the word: no. She went anyway. Gardner biographer Lee Server wrote:

After the show, the mayor of Houston, Oscar Holcombe, took Frank, Ava, Van Heusen, and several others to dinner at an Italian restaurant, Vincent’s Sorrento. It wasn’t a spontaneous decision: Holcombe’s office had made a reservation—and the restaurant’s owner,
delighted at the prospect of such spectacular glamour descending on his establishment, had tipped off the
Houston Post
, which dispatched a photographer. The next morning the wires reported:

George Evans, freshly laid in his grave, was already spinning in it.

It was the first in what would be a lifelong series of such conflagrations with the press, and in a very real way the subtraction of Evans (and even the departure of Manie) made it all possible. The requisite accelerants were present: the interrupted meal; Sinatra’s powerful but scarcely admitted guilt (he would later call going out publicly with Ava “
a major mistake,” then said, “But I was so in love I didn’t care”); his generally battered self-esteem. And then there was (again relevantly) the casual, barely understood ethnic insensitivity of the times: an Italian-American
should
be photographed eating spaghetti, the same way an African-American, in 1950, would be photographed eating watermelon. Sinatra didn’t like it a bit, nor should he have.

But far more damaging than the flare-up itself was the national publicity. For Nancy Sinatra, who had held a scrap of hope that her husband might come to his senses and return to his home, this was her
final humiliation. That afternoon she called a hardware store and had the locks changed at 320 North Carolwood.

Their eleventh wedding anniversary had been two days earlier.

The affair, previously just whispered about (though in Hollywood it was the worst-kept secret in town), was officially public. Reading about it over his morning coffee, moving his lips as he read, Frank’s champion and old Hasbrouck Heights neighbor Willie Moretti shook his head, frowning. Never one to keep his opinion to himself (and now, in the grips of secondary syphilis, more disinhibited than ever), Moretti phoned Western Union and, in his high, hoarse voice, dictated a telegram: “
I am very much surprised what I have been reading in the newspapers between you and your darling wife,” he said. “Remember you have a decent wife and children. You should be very happy. Regards to all. Willie Moore.”

Still. Now Frank could—God help him—do precisely as he pleased.

On February 10, Sheilah Graham wrote: “
Ava Gardner’s current travels with Frank Sinatra include a stop-over in San Francisco. Ava is telling her friends that she wants to get married. She did not say to whom.”

The day after Valentine’s Day, Hedda Hopper’s piece ran in the
Los Angeles Times:

The next day, as Gardner wrote in her autobiography,

Louella Parsons had apparently heard the good Sisters’ plea. She wrote:

And hate mail was only the beginning of Ava’s problems. Soon Dorothy Kilgallen was reporting in her column that, as if Ava weren’t in enough trouble with the country at large, her “
romantic episode with Frank Sinatra has put her in the MGM doghouse. She has been warned to avoid further ‘entanglements.’ ”

Earlier that month, in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy held up a piece of paper and said, “
I have here in my hand a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

The effect of the so-called Wheeling speech on a country already in the throes of Communist paranoia was electric. McCarthy, heretofore a marginal and intensely unpopular legislator, instantly shot to prominence.

Frank Sinatra, suspected by many of having Communist sympathies and now a certified moral reprobate, was ripe for the pillory. As was Ava. Erskine Johnson’s March 10 column noted: “
Ava Gardner’s lines as a husband-snatching hussy in
East Side, West Side
drew snickers at a preview.”

There was a satisfying symmetry in the equally squalid Ingrid Bergman affair. On March 15, another senator from the heartland, Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, mysteriously decided that the Bergman and Rossellini affair was the nation’s business. On the Senate floor he called Ingrid Bergman an “
apostle of degradation” and declared that
the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, of which he was chairman, would begin hearings on “the serious moral questions raised by movieland’s lurid headlines.”

Bergman or Sinatra? Newspapers could hardly decide which scandal to run with on any given day. The March 17 edition of the Lebanon, Pennsylvania,
Daily News
carried a page-one story headlined HUSBAND WILL FIGHT BERGMAN IN COURT and, inside, a United Press dispatch that read as if it had been written by Lee Mortimer himself: