Frank: The Voice (71 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
Her trunks are in the garage, but the shades are drawn and telegrams are piling up unopened on the doorstep.
She’s cut off her private telephone. And she’s cancelled the messenger service that used to take her calls.
Reports have her hiding away in a tiny cottage in Laguna beach … staying with friends … dining with Sinatra in a secluded beach café … and staging a roaring battle with him at Charley Foy’s nightclub in San Fernando valley.
She wasn’t in Laguna Beach, or staying with friends. In fact, Frank had quietly rented a house on the beach in Pacific Palisades, and she had moved in with him. For the briefest of moments, they had eluded the press.
But not their problems. As soon as Frank and Ava set up housekeeping, he began having his children over on weekends. She didn’t like it, and said so. Often. In front of the kids or not; she didn’t give a good goddamn. The one true piece of the wire-service report was that roaring battle at Charley Foy’s.
Over Labor Day weekend Frank returned to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, where he had sung as a fresh-faced young pup with Harry James
and His Music Makers. He could still draw a crowd, but this time what the people wanted to hear was “Goodnight Irene.” “
I don’t think Frank liked it too much, but it was a big hit for him,” Johnny Blowers recalled. “I used to think to myself, How in the world did Mitch ever get him to do this? But anyway, he did it and it was big. It went over.”
Later, though, doing a radio interview with a local disc jockey, Ben Heller (who’d played guitar with Harry James way back when), Sinatra tried pushing the “jazz things” he’d recorded with George Siravo in April: “
Bright, with good jump tempos, both to listen to as a vocal and to dance to.” Heller, though, wanted to know what was
new
.
“We’ve got a new one now that is moving pretty good called, if you’ll excuse the expression, ‘Goodnight Irene,’ ” Frank said.
“Hey, that’s a nice tune,” said Heller.
“You wanna bet?” Frank replied.
After a beat, he realized he might have gone too far, even for him. “Nah, it’s pretty good,” he added.
“You should sing a lot of songs like that,” Heller told him.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Sinatra said.
Life was getting more and more peculiar for Frank Sinatra. Later that week he dispatched an intermediary to the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with an extremely unusual offer. An FBI memo reveals:
DATE: SEPTEMBER 7, 1950
TO: MR. TOLSON
FROM: J. P. MOHR
SUBJECT: FRANK SINATRA
___________ [name deleted] called at my office today after having endeavored to arrange an appointment to see the Director. I explained to ____________ that the Director was
extremely busy, that he was fully committed and would be unable to see him. stated that he had been requested by Frank Sinatra to contact the Director with … a proposition that Sinatra had in mind. ___________ said he was a friend of Sinatra, that he considered him to be a sincere individual and that he has known him for six years. ___________ described Sinatra as a “Dago who came up the hard way” and said he is a conscientious fellow who is very desirous of doing something for his country. ___________ stated that Sinatra feels he can do some good for his country under the direction of the FBI.
___________ stated that Sinatra is sensitive about the allegations which have been made concerning his subversive activities and also his draft status during the last war. Sinatra feels that the publicity which he has received has identified him with subversive elements and that such subversive elements are not sure of his position and Sinatra consequently feels that he can be of help as a result by going anywhere the Bureau desires and contacting any of the people from whom he might be able to obtain information. Sinatra feels as a result of his publicity he can operate without suspicion …
___________ stated that Sinatra’s principal contacts are in the entertainment field in Hollywood and New York City. ___________ further advised that he didn’t know whether Sinatra has any current information with respect to subversives. He said that Sinatra understands that if he worked for the Bureau in connection with such activities it might reflect on his status and his standing in the entertainment field but he is willing to do anything even if it affects his livelihood and costs him his job.
___________ said that Sinatra is willing to go “the whole way.”
… I told ___________ that I wasn’t aware of Sinatra’s
activities other than what I had read in the papers. I told him further that I wasn’t aware of Sinatra’s possibilities and that that was something we would have to analyze and determine. I further told ___________ that we would not ask Sinatra or any other individual to engage in any activities that would reflect on the individual and that any action taken by the individual would have to be a voluntary decision on his part. ___________ was also informed that I was not aware of the fact that Sinatra could be of use to us but that I would call to the Director’s attention ___________ ’s visit to me and that we would consider Sinatra’s request and that if he could be utilized we would communicate with him.
On the bottom of the letter is a handwritten notation by Tolson: “We want nothing to do with him. C.”
Then one by Hoover: “I agree. H.”
1
What had possessed him? The Communist witch hunts were in full swing; guilt by association was guilt presumed. Sinatra knew the FBI was sniffing around him—in June he’d requested permission to go abroad to entertain U.S. troops, but had been denied a security clearance because of “subversive activities”: namely his mid-1940s idealism, reconsidered in the hard light of 1950. The bureau was even watching his Manhattan dentist, Dr. Abraham Weinstein. In a typical screed that May, Westbrook Pegler managed to lump Sinatra, George Raft, Leo Durocher, Frank Costello, “
the Hollywood–Los Angeles underworld,” and President Truman’s supposedly lax Department of Justice into one subversive-smelling ball.
However hopeful Frank may have been about his upcoming TV show, he was scared: his career had sprung a leak. “
Sinatra’s decline,” Pegler wrote, “has been just a matter of fair wear and tear … plus the natural waning of a hopped-up reputation.” Many others were saying
the same. Was he really “willing to do anything” for the FBI, “even if it affect[ed] his livelihood and [cost] him his job”? His job was on the line in any case.
Ava blew through town on her way back to California to prepare for her new movie,
Show Boat
. Frank was starting his CBS television and radio shows, and was looking for a Manhattan apartment. In the meantime, he was once again borrowing Manie’s suite at the Hampshire House. A temporary—very temporary—love nest. Work was about to separate the lovebirds again, and the tension, as always, was erotic. But Ava wanted to get married, and while Frank told her he wanted that too, she could sense his ambivalence. When she called him on it, he’d shake his head. He didn’t know if Nancy would ever give him a divorce. It was the Church—she was just a better Catholic than he was.
Ava, her biographer Lee Server writes, “
heard the whispered scuttlebutt from others: ‘She thinks she can wait you out, you two will blow over and she’ll have him back one day. That’s all she wants.’ ” Server continues:
To Ava, it was an infuriating irony: There they were, wanting to do the right thing and get married, and there was this woman using her religion as an excuse to keep them “living in sin” … The affair and the scandal had provoked the first serious rift in her relationship with Bappie, who disliked Sinatra and believed he was harming her career. “You hang on to him, Ava,” Bappie told her, “and he’s going to ruin you like he’s ruined himself.”
So there was more fighting, more makeup sex; they stayed in and they went out. Going out was always important. On Wednesday night, September 27, the two of them attended the Joe Louis–Ezzard Charles fight at Yankee Stadium: the news photographers snapped them sitting
cozily close, Sinatra with his thinning hair and love-struck grin, Ava with a fur coat, thick red lipstick, and a cigarette between her fingers. Charles outpointed the former champ Louis in fifteen rounds to become the world heavyweight champion.
The next day, Nancy Sinatra outpointed Frank in Santa Monica Superior Court, winning her separate-maintenance suit and custody of their three children. The
Los Angeles Times
ran a large photograph of her above the photo of Frank and Ava at the prizefight, and she won this contest, too, hands down, looking every inch the wronged woman in her demure checked suit, white blouse with Peter Pan collar, and brown leather gloves. Her chin is held high, her hair attractively (and no doubt freshly) coiffed in soft waves, her expression neither triumphant nor stricken but distant and philosophical. To glance back and forth between the pictures of her and Ava—who looks frankly vulgar—is to wonder what the hell Frank was thinking about.
Nancy (who had lived in Hollywood long enough to know the value of images) surely had all of it in mind when she dressed for her court appearance.
She dabbed away “
a tear or so,” the
Times
reported, as Judge Orlando H. Rhodes awarded her “the Holmby Hills home, its furnishings and effects, a 1950 Cadillac, 34 shares of stock in the Sinatra Music Corp. and one-third of Sinatra’s annual gross earnings on the first $150,000 and 10% of the next $150,000.” For his part, Frank got a 1949 Cadillac, a jeep, the Palm Springs house, rights to some oil property in Texas, and “any phonograph records or radio transcriptions he may desire.” He was also given “all money in bank accounts”—not much at that point.
At the hearing, the
Times
account continued,
Mrs. Sinatra testified that on numerous occasions her husband would go to Palm Springs for week ends without her and that he would “stay away for days at a time.”
On other occasions, she said, when they were alone or had
company he would go into another room, ignoring her and the guests.
Accompanying this particular testimony were tears edging down her cheeks. She dabbed them with a dainty handkerchief.
Summing up, she said her husband’s conduct “made me terribly nervous and upset and humiliated me.”
Mrs. Sinatra’s sister, Miss Julie Barbato, was her corroborating witness.
She testified that she knew from her own knowledge that Sinatra embarrassed his wife by staying away from home and by rudely refusing to assist in the entertainment of guests.