Frank: The Voice (78 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
Everyone laughed. Frank turned serious. He didn’t like to brag, but this joint was paying him twenty-five grand for two weeks, which wasn’t too shabby, plus he had another engagement in Vegas after that, and his television show—Saturday evenings from eight to nine on
CBS—would start its second season in October. Frank guessed he had a couple of nickels to rub together.
Someone piped up: Was he going to marry Miss Gardner?
Frank looked at his fingernails. “I presume I will.”
Another voice called out. What about all that trouble down in Mexico?
Sinatra shook his head. “
Grossly exaggerated,” he said. “I got sore because I got some pretty rough handling from a couple of guys. They were the exception to the rule, though, for the press has done a lot for me.”
Frank gave a small, sincere smile. Butter wouldn’t have melted in his mouth.
Ten days later Ava flew up to Reno. Continuing the charm offensive, Frank escorted her into another roomful of reporters, grinning like the cat that ate the canary. For reasons of his own, he had spent the last week and a half growing a sparse mustache. He would try facial hair from time to time over the years. It was not a good look for him.
But his skin was tan, his eyes were the blue of the high-desert sky, and he and the press were still romancing each other. He didn’t even flinch when somebody asked if he knew what Nancy’s plans were.
“
I honestly don’t know what she’ll do,” Sinatra said. He looked meltingly at Ava. “But I think you can safely say that Miss Gardner and I will be married.”
Over dinner one night—they were relaxing at the Cal Neva Lodge, on the glorious shore of Lake Tahoe—he asked her to tell him about the bullfighter. Had they done it? She artfully changed the subject, smiling brightly; he smiled back at her, then asked again over coffee. She gave him a cross look and asked him why he was trying to fuck everything up. They fought; they made up. Later, they lay together quietly in the
bedroom of his cabin: with the wind swishing through the pines, it seemed they could hear the earth turning. And he asked her again.
She got up on one elbow and looked down at him, her hair falling over one eye. Didn’t they have better things to discuss than this?
It was no big deal, he swore; he just wanted to know.
She shook a cigarette out of the pack on the nightstand and lit it. She smoked for a minute, saying nothing.
“Ava, honey,” Frank said. “
It doesn’t really matter to me. We’ve all fallen into the wrong bed at one time or another. Just tell me the truth and we’ll forget all about it.”
She thought for a moment. She tapped the cigarette on the ashtray, though she didn’t need to.
All right, she said, since he wouldn’t leave it alone. Once. One mindless night. She’d been drunk—she didn’t really even remember it.
Once, Frank repeated, dully.
The next day Sanicola rented them a gleaming new Chris-Craft so Frank and Ava could go for a picnic cruise on the lake. Hank came along to steer the boat; Ava’s maid, Reenie, brought sandwiches and champagne. It was perfect early-September weather, crisp and sparkling, a light wind blowing across the steel blue water. Frank and Ava sat on the back deck drinking champagne while Hank drove. The big engine thrummed as Sanicola steered into a quiet inlet. Ava lifted her face to the sun, her eyes closed.
“
I suppose you wish you were out here with Howard Hughes,” Frank suddenly said.
Reenie cleared her throat and slowly shook her head.
“Why the fuck should I wish I were out here with Howard Hughes?” Ava said.
“I bet he’s got a bigger boat than this, doesn’t he? That guy’s got enough bucks to buy ten boats the size of this one.”
Up on the bridge, Sanicola looked back at them.
“I don’t care if he owns the fucking
Queen Mary
,” Ava said. “I’m not sorry I’m not with him. So shut up.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up.”
Sanicola looked pleadingly at Reenie. She shrugged.
“Then don’t tell me I’m thinking about Howard Hughes when I’m not thinking about Howard Hughes.”
“I’ll t——” Frank stopped in mid-utterance as the boat jerked and shuddered to a halt with a terrible grinding noise. They all were nearly knocked out of their seats. The boat had struck a large, mostly submerged rock in shallow water about a hundred feet out from the shore. They were already beginning to list to starboard.
The water was only around four feet deep. Hank helped Reenie climb down the ladder, then descended himself. They both splashed toward shore. Frank was next. Ava stayed put.
“Get off that fucking boat while there’s still time, you fucking fool,” Frank called from the water.
“Go fuck yourself,” she said. “I’m staying here.”
And there she sat, sipping champagne.
“
It was about that time that I discovered that this fancy boat was stocked with a monstrous amount of toilet paper,” Ava recalled.
Why in the name of God the owners had decided to store so much on one boat I’ll never know. But all the champagne I’d drunk convinced me that this wealth must be shared with the world. So I unwrapped roll after roll and floated them all off in the general direction of Frank. His rage was now off the charts, and he screamed a variety of curses in my direction that even I found impressive, but nothing he said deterred me from my appointed rounds.
Eventually, the boat began to sink in earnest, and I carefully joined Frank on the shore, carrying with me, with perfect survivor’s instincts, the last bottle of champagne and two glasses. We managed to get the bottle open and sat down to regard the scene. What was a little rumpus between lovers, anyway? We clinked glasses, laughed and made up.
This is breezy and funny, a memoir written to amuse when the reality cannot have been so amusing. Both Frank and Ava had become serious drinkers by this point: in his case, he needed more and more alcohol to blur his worsening career and family problems; Ava just liked to drink. During the recent shoot of
Lone Star
, a dog of a Western that Metro had forced her to make, she had been loaded much of the time. And when the two of them were together, alcohol was as apt to loosen their tongues as their libidos. “
Just a few nights later, when we both had drunk so much, Frank made an offhanded remark that hurt me so deeply that I didn’t stop to argue or shout back, I just left,” Ava wrote.
I ran out into the darkness, my bare feet heading toward the lake … Then I heard someone running behind me, trying to catch up. It was Reenie.
I stopped and we both sat there in the darkness … Finally, Reenie said in a quiet, resigned voice, “Come on, Miss G., knock it off. Why don’t we just go home.”
So they did. It was dawn when they reached Pacific Palisades. They walked into the house to find the phone ringing. It was Hank Sanicola, and he sounded desperate.
“
Oh my God, Ava—hurry back!” he said. “Frank’s taken an overdose!”
She hurried back.
A car had rushed us to the L.A. airport. A car had rushed us from the Nevada airport to the house at Lake Tahoe. Hank Sanicola met me at the door. He looked as tired out and worn as I felt. I had difficulty speaking.
“How is he?” I said.
“He’s okay,” said Hank.
I thought, Thank God! I ran through into the bedroom. I looked down at Frank and he turned his sad blue eyes to look at me.
“I thought you’d gone,” he said weakly.
I wanted to punch him, I really did. I wanted to punch him as much as I’d ever wanted to punch anybody. Frank had tricked both Reenie and me back to his bedside.
The difference with this suicide attempt was that this time the authorities were involved. Sanicola had called a doctor, and though he had tried to divert suspicion by identifying the patient as himself, the doctor had been obliged to file a police report. By Labor Day weekend, the newspapers had a juicy new Sinatra story.
Frank and Ava sat down, hand in hand, to meet the press once more.
“
I did not try to commit suicide,” Frank said. “I just had a bellyache. What will you guys think of next to write about me?”
“So what really happened, Frank?” a reporter called.
Sinatra looked around the room, making a visible effort to hold his temper. “
Tuesday night, Miss Gardner, my manager Hank Sanicola and Mrs. Sanicola dined at the Christmas Tree Inn on Lake Tahoe,” he said. “Ava was returning to Hollywood that night. We came back to the Lake and I didn’t feel so good. So I took two sleeping pills. Miss Gardner left … I guess I wasn’t thinking because I am very allergic to sleeping pills. Also, I had drunk two or three brandies. I broke out in a rash. The pills felt kind of stuck in my chest. I got worried and called a friend who runs the steak house here. He sent a doctor who gave me a glass of warm water with salt in it. It made me throw up and I was all right. That’s all there was to it—honest.”
Honest.
Nevada Route 91, the Arrowhead Highway, was a two-lane blacktop snaking southwest across a vast expanse of sand, mesquite, and sage. The road didn’t look much less desolate in Las Vegas than it did anywhere else in the Silver State, even along the four-mile stretch known optimistically as Las Vegas Boulevard or, more popularly, the Strip.
Sand blew across the macadam; scorpions scuttled among the desert weeds. In the early 1940s, the first casino-hotels began to pop up in this unpromising landscape: El Rancho Vegas opened in 1941; the Hotel Last Frontier debuted the following year. The Flamingo came to its problematic completion in 1946; the Thunderbird opened in 1948; and the fifth gambling resort on the Strip, opening in 1950, was the Desert Inn.
The DI was the brainchild of one Wilbur Clark, a onetime San Diego bellhop and Reno craps dealer who, much like the Flamingo’s Billy Wilkerson, found himself strapped mid-project for the cash necessary to bring his dream to fruition. As with Wilkerson, the Mob—this time in the person of the Cleveland syndicate boss Moe Dalitz—stepped into the breach. Dalitz’s good friends at the Teamsters Union’s Central States Pension Fund provided the cash—unbeknownst to most of the teamsters. The Cleveland gangster, who had run gambling operations throughout Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Michigan, had western ambitions. Unlike Bugsy Siegel, however, the businesslike Dalitz chose not to muscle out the casino’s originator but to retain him as an agreeable front man. “Wilbur Clark,” after all, had a more congenial ring to it than “Moe Dalitz” out in these parts. And so Dalitz, a big-nosed, six-foot tough Jew, graciously allowed the place to be christened Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn. Clark’s name, in mock-signature script, adorned the giant electric sign, with its Joshua-tree-cactus logo.
The groundbreaking architect Wayne McAllister had designed the place to a 1950s-modern fare-thee-well, with pink stucco walls, fieldstone pilasters, jutting roofs, and, around back, the first kidney-shaped pool in town. The inn’s crowning glory was a three-story, glass-cupolaed structure, the tallest in Vegas in 1951, built to look like an airport control tower. Behind the picture windows, the Skyroom lounge, with little lights faired into the ceiling to simulate desert stars, offered dining, dancing, and an unobstructed vista of the Las Vegas valley in all its sand-and-sagebrush splendor. The entertainment might have been Hollywood, but the clientele was strictly string tie: southwestern oilmen,
cattle ranchers, and their ladies. Even if the DI’s 450-seat Painted Desert Room could draw some top acts, nobody mistook it for the Copa.