Frank: The Voice (69 page)

But her biggest admirer was the bullfighter: the rumors were true, kind of. His name was Mario Cabré, he was thirty-five years old, and he was a second-rate torero but a first-rate self-promoter. He was playing a bullfighter in the film, one of Ava’s suitors, and so he figured, why should fact not mirror fiction? He was instantly bewitched by her, but also saw her as his ticket out of Palookaville. To complicate matters, the MGM unit publicists were eager to promote a romance in order to distract the world from the grand opera of Gardner and Sinatra.

And then there was Ava herself, incessantly complicated. In her autobiography she is at great pains to dismiss Cabré as a mere nuisance:

It must be remembered, however, that Gardner dictated her memoir (to not one but three successive ghostwriters) toward the end of her life, when she was sick and the beneficiary of numerous gestures of goodwill, including money, from Frank Sinatra. In the spring of 1950, by the testimony of her colleagues on
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
, it was a different story: she was initially resistant, but then not so resistant, to the charms of the handsome torero. At first he was just a very good-looking Spaniard. But when he fought that bull, “
it just got into her blood right away,” recalled the set dresser John Hawkesworth. “The excitement and the color and the drama of the thing, she loved it.”

Sinatra’s arrival, on the other hand—he landed in Barcelona on May 11—was an unwelcome surprise. Maybe he wanted to test her. If so, he found the true Ava: When he arrived in Tossa de Mar, she was off someplace with Cabré, and the crew had to distract Frank with a poker game until she could be found. Then she waltzed in, all smiles and wreathed in that perfume, and all his questions—Where had she been? What had she been doing?—evaporated.

“
Oh, what a lovely surprise!” Ava exclaimed, at the sight of him. “Darling! How great!”

The next few days were a combination of melodrama and low comedy. Upon hearing of Sinatra’s arrival, the torero swore that he would kill the singer. Director Lewin had the good sense to take Cabré at his word and have him sent to a remote location to prepare for his bullfighting scenes. In the meantime, off went Sinatra and Gardner, with the Spanish press in hot pursuit. It rained; shooting was halted. The lovers spent the day in her villa; the reporters camped outside. Inside,
Frank and Ava were at each other like wasps in a bottle, fighting about the bullfighter (she denied everything). Then they made up.

The sun came out. Shooting resumed. The sun hurt Sinatra’s eyes. As Chester sat by solicitously, Frank sulked and drank champagne and out of sheer boredom tossed a few bones to the reporters. (“
Of course, I knew what people would say when I flew here. I am not a youth anymore,” he said, sounding oddly Spanish. “I expected this curiosity.”)

“Don’t you have anything else to say, Frank?” a reporter asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Bing Crosby is the best singer in the world.”

On Sunday, the lovers and Van Heusen went out tuna fishing. The sea sparkled; the Americans laughed and drank more champagne and caught a couple of big fish. The reporters were far away.

On Monday she had to go back to work. The reporters were clustering again. One of them handed Sinatra an American newspaper carrying a story about Nancy. She had spent Mother’s Day without Frank for the first time ever, the report read. She had received gifts from the children, but nothing from her husband, who had spent the weekend in Spain with Ava Gardner. The story mentioned the diamond-and-emerald necklace.

“
They can’t make this one of those things,” Frank growled. He denied the existence of the necklace. “We have been chaperoned every minute we have been together,” he said. He was referring, in all seriousness, to Van Heusen. “We know now that because of this publicity, it was a mistake for me to have come here,” he said, and announced he was leaving twenty-four hours early.

There was another tearful parting, then he and Van Heusen flew to Paris to console themselves with whores.

Earl Wilson tracked Frank down at the Café Lido, a lively nightclub featuring bare-breasted chorus girls. Frank shouted over the phone—partly because he had to, due to the faint transatlantic connection, but mostly because he was upset:

The trip to Spain had been a fiasco. He wasn’t working (while Ava was): he hadn’t sung in a month. On the way home—and where exactly was home? in his office on South Robertson?—squadrons of reporters met him at every stop along the way, in London and in New York and finally in Los Angeles, all asking the same stupid questions: Was Ava in love with the bullfighter? Was Frank running away from the bullfighter? And by the way, were Frank and Ava planning to get married?

He stopped at his office just long enough to shower and change clothes, then drove out to Holmby Hills bearing gifts: dolls and toys
from Paris for the kids, a gold charm bracelet for Nancy, engraved: “
Eiffel Tower and stuff.” Not so romantic. It wasn’t meant to be. What note was he supposed to strike? She gave him a look that would have broken his heart if he’d had the courage to hold her gaze.

Instead of an apology, he tried for a molecule of levity, at his own expense: he wished her happy Mother’s Day.

She just stared at him. He averted his eyes again.

He had gone over in the early evening so the kids would still be awake, wanting to see them but also knowing that his wife wouldn’t make a scene in front of them. He was disappointed to find Tina, the baby (she was about to turn two), asleep.

He offered to come back in the morning.

She considered it. Then nodded.

Sinatra and Bob Hope. Hope gave Frank a guest spot on his TV show—Sinatra’s first television appearance—soon after his voice came back, when no one else wanted to employ him.
(photo credit 25.2)

He returned the next morning—two visits in twenty-four hours! Little Nancy, thinking this might mean Daddy was home for good, ran and jumped into his arms; Frankie hung back and stared. Tina clung to her mother’s leg. Frank picked the baby up with his other arm, held both his girls at once. The little one didn’t seem quite sure who he was. In the years to come she would have no memory of this visit, nor of many others.

That night he flew back to New York with Bob Hope, who, miraculously enough, had given him a job.

The Frank Sinatra Show
. “Bad pacing, bad scripting, bad tempo, poor camera work and an overall jerky presentation,”
Variety
said. The broadcast limped along from late 1950 to early 1952, often sponsorless, until CBS pulled the plug.
(photo credit 26.1)

S
inatra’s savior at this juncture was his hardworking lawyer Henry Jaffe, who—since MCA was sitting on its hands where Frank was concerned—had been pestering Hope’s people for months to hire his client for the comedian’s new television variety show. TV was new and scary territory for Bob Hope, but he had to try: his NBC radio show, a mainstay of his career since 1937, was rapidly losing listeners to Crosby, Jack Benny, and Arthur Godfrey. Accordingly, when General
Motors offered Hope a five-show contract (at $150,000) for a television broadcast to be sponsored by Frigidaire, Ski Nose jumped at it.

The medium was barely out of its infancy: programmers were making it up as they went along. Sid Caesar’s frenetic, wildly inventive
Your Show of Shows
, which had premiered on NBC in February, was doing brilliantly. Bob Hope’s
Star Spangled Revue
(the title was the frightened era’s equivalent of a flag lapel pin) debuted on NBC on Easter Sunday, and did not fare as well. Hope, who had to share the stage with refrigerators, seemed to think it sufficient to put on a vaudeville show in front of the camera. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Dinah Shore played along gamely, but the music-hall pacing, in the given context of early TV—live and uncut—was less than galvanizing, and reviews were less than ecstatic. The second show had to be better.

Hope’s choice of guests for that broadcast was interesting. Beatrice Lillie, an old pal from his London music-hall days, was funny and eccentric; Peggy Lee was ascendant, and sexy; but the best you could say about Frank Sinatra (besides the fact that until a couple of months earlier he could sing) was that he certainly was in the papers a lot.

One place Frank had never been, though, was in front of a TV camera. Acknowledging the fact, Hope introduced him a little nervously: “
It takes real courage to get your feet wet in television. I’m really glad this chap decided to take the plunge. I’m thrilled to introduce Mr. Frank Sinatra.”

Yet if Bob Hope was tentative, his first guest was anything but. “
Sinatra, astoundingly thin, balletic in his movements, and dazzling with his smile, showed no nerves about appearing on the tube,” writes Peggy Lee’s biographer Peter Richmond. “He nailed ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ with a suggestion of cockiness that was in equal parts annoying and appealing. His absolute composure, performing live in front of an audience whose size he couldn’t begin to guess at, made it instantly obvious that he would have no problem climbing back to the top.”