Frank: The Voice (81 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
He slammed the door and returned to the party, summoning back his smile.
After a while Ava went upstairs and changed into a brown Christian Dior travel suit and the mink stole Frank had given her as a wedding
present. When she came back down, Manie took her aside, peering at her with his dark emotional eyes.
“
Look after him, Ava. He’s had some hard knocks and he’s very fragile. It isn’t going to be easy living with a man whose career is in a slump.”
“I’ll do anything to make him happy,” Ava said.
“Then help him get back his self-confidence,” Manie told her.
This time they went out the back door. Before the newsmen out front knew what was happening, the couple ran to a waiting car and sped to the airport, where they boarded a chartered twin-engine Beechcraft—a fantastic extravagance; Frank’s idea, naturally—which would take them to Miami, where they planned to stay for a night before going on to honeymoon at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. As Ava stepped onto the plane, she realized that in the flurry of escape she had left the suitcases containing her honeymoon trousseau at Lester Sacks’s house. “
All I had with me was my handbag!” she recalled.
Well, there was no point in having a fit; it would rejoin me sometime or other. But hell, I didn’t even have the beautiful little nightie I’d saved for our wedding night. I didn’t have a bathing suit. I didn’t have anything to go to the beach in—nothing! So I slept in Frank’s pajamas, at least the top half of them, and the next day we walked along the empty beach, me in the bottom half of my travel suit and Frank’s jacket.
To throw reporters off the trail, they had chosen an out-of-the-way hotel, the Green Heron, on the beach in the Sunny Isles district north of town. “
It was a chilly day for the beach resort and a brisk wind dotted the ocean with whitecaps,” wrote the early Sinatra biographer Arnold Shaw. “As they strolled along the deserted beach in the afternoon, a lone photographer shot one of the most appealing pictures ever made of them. Their backs to the camera, they walk barefoot, hand-in-hand. Frank’s trousers are rolled up above his thin ankles. And Ava is wearing Frank’s jacket over an old blouse and sports skirt.”
It is an appealing picture, and an iconic one, but Ava Gardner had a different view of the moment. “
Naturally a photographer was lying in wait and snapped a shot of us, barefoot, holding hands,” she remembered.
I’ve always thought it was a sad little photograph, a sad little commentary on our lives then. We were simply two young people so much in love, and the world wouldn’t leave us alone for a second. It seemed that everyone and everything was against us, and all we asked for was a bit of peace and privacy.
Just two kids in love … not exactly. Publicity was not something that could be turned on and off like a spigot. Ava seems to be setting up the argument that the world came between them, but what possessed him to book their honeymoon at the Nacional, the site of his Mafia disgrace? It only fed the stories in the press.
From the beginning, there was a third party in the marriage: the fourth estate.
In Ava’s autobiography, she recalls their Havana sojourn as idyllic. “
We drank a lot of Cuba libres and went out to the nightclubs and the gambling joints,” she writes.
Fortunately, most of the paparazzi seemed to have other things to do, so we were pretty much left alone. I don’t even know if I would have noticed if we weren’t; I was finally on my honeymoon with the man I loved. On one of our last nights, I climbed up on one of the hotel’s high archways, convincing Frank that I was going to throw myself off. But I was just being mischievous, swinging along on rum and Coke with no intention of ending it all. I was having far too much fun.
Yet in a taped interview that didn’t make it into the book, she remembered things a little differently. “
Frank and I didn’t start very good,” Ava said.
We went to Havana, in Cuba, and had a fight the first night.
Who knows what we fought about? … I remember standing up, pissed drunk, on the balcony of the hotel, on the edge. Standing there, balancing. Frank was afraid to go near me. He thought I was going to jump … God, I was crazy!
Back in New York there was further unpleasantness with the press the moment they stepped off the plane.
Where were the couple staying?
Frank scowled. None of their damn business.
Ava grinned and shook her head. The reporters followed the couple to the curb, where a black Cadillac stood waiting. Couldn’t Frank give them
anything
?
He’d give them something. He gestured with his fist as he opened the car door for Ava. Then he got in the backseat and slammed the door in their faces.
SNARLING FRANK, GIGGLING AVA BACK, the
Daily News
headline ran, over an unflattering photo of the newlyweds (unflattering, mostly, of him: it was hard for her to take a bad picture).
His surliness was getting old, fast. As another tabloid headline around the same time put it, pointedly:
WHAT A BORE IS FRANKIE.
“
Frank Sinatra evidently craves privacy,” the Hearst columnist George Sokolsky wrote.
When these theatrical folk are on the make, they curry favor and seek notices and hire publicity men to spread interesting and exciting tales about them, true or untrue. Then they try the gag of seeking privacy, which some believe is of human interest. If it is privacy that Frank Sinatra wants he should be kept out of the public eye permanently. Perhaps the day might come when he would like to be remembered.
Soon enough, though, the press would have another tidbit to play with: Frank had had the very sizable bill for the chartered Beechcraft,
along with the tab for the rest of the honeymoon, sent to Ava’s financial manager in Los Angeles. Nancy had cleaned him out.
Not only was Frank without bookings, but the press was knocking his new records.
Down Beat
wrote: “
By every ordinary standard, ‘London by Night’ and ‘April in Paris’ are poorly sung. Frank sounds tired, bored, and in poor voice, to boot.”
Sinatra is slightly rough around the edges in those recordings, which had been made the previous fall, but in truth the writers were just kicking him when he was down. He was an easy target in the autumn of 1951.
And he fired back, laying the blame squarely on Mitch Miller. While playing the Desert Inn in September, Frank had gone into another one of his diatribes about the generally downward trend in popular song, singling out Rosemary Clooney’s recently released Columbia single, “
Come On-a My House.” It was a zany, fast-moving novelty number with a goofily lecherous lyric by, of all people, William Saroyan (“Come on-a my house, my house/I’m gonna give-a you candy”), set to, of all things, a hard-swinging harpsichord obbligato that presaged rock ’n’ roll. Miller had been proudly responsible for the whole concept, and the record—which Clooney made under protest—sold like hotcakes.
4
Frank had nothing bad to say about Clooney. He reserved his venom for Mitch. Word got back and Miller exploded. In November,
Billboard
noted a “long smoldering feud” between the singer and the producer, continuing: “
Chief beef hinges on Sinatra claim that he isn’t getting a fair shake on song material.” The report quoted Frank as saying he was in talks with RCA and Capitol Records.
In fact, this was sheer invention on his part, a ploy to try to stir up some action where there was none at all. Manie Sacks had already informed Frank, with great regret, that he couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for him at Victor. And as for Capitol (the only West Coast–based label), it was doing just fine with Nat “King” Cole, Dean Martin, and Peggy Lee. Who needed Sinatra?
On the November 13 broadcast of
The Frank Sinatra Show
the guests were Jack Benny and ten-year-old violinist Charles Castleman. Benny’s presence helped Sinatra to garner a good review for a change. “
Kidding each other’s known idiosyncrasies for laughs,”
Variety
wrote, Jack and Frank “sparked the show into one of the better ones [Sinatra has] done this season.”
But it was faint praise: the show was sinking fast, and everyone involved knew it. When the host requested that the broadcast be relocated to Los Angeles, CBS agreed, perhaps feeling that a change of venue might slap some life into the enterprise.
Frank’s return to Hollywood didn’t stir up much excitement—his only real currency in that toughest of company towns was as the husband (“
Mr. Gardner,” the latest mean joke had it) of its hottest female star. As far as the movies were concerned, he was all but DOA: a two-picture deal with Universal, at a pathetically low fee, was the closest thing to unemployment.
Meanwhile, the newlyweds made a nod at nesting at Twin Palms. “
We’re going to redecorate Frank’s home,” Ava gushed. “I’m going to learn to make all of Frank’s favorite dishes. Mama Sinatra has promised to send the recipes. Oh, it’s all so thrilling and wonderful! And Mrs. Sinatra—you know, I’m not used to my new name and it takes a second before it clicks—Mrs. Frank Sinatra is the happiest girl in the world!”
And she was, sometimes. Then, in December, Frank and Ava flew to London, where Frank was to give a charity command performance before Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. While he was rehearsing—and yelling at his British horn section for playing too loud during the tender passages—a burglar climbed up to the Sinatras’ third-floor suite at the Hotel Washington and stole $17,000 worth of jewelry, including the diamond-and-emerald necklace Frank had taken to Ava in Spain. As if that weren’t trouble enough, after Ava reconsidered her plan to sing a duet with Frank (stage fright), the press reported they’d quarreled about it. Sinatra, furious at everything and everybody, gave
a lackluster performance. The newspapers reported yawns among the star-studded audience.
Soon after Frank and Ava relocated to Hollywood, they sat down with Sinatra’s new West Coast press agent, Mack Millar, to figure out how to rehabilitate the singer’s image.
Millar, an old Hollywood hand, looked his client in the eye and gave him the bad news: Frank was going to have to end his feud with the press and woo the newspapers. Aggressively. Millar told his client that a writer at the
New York Post
, Fern Marja, was writing a six-part series on him. Why not call her and use that fabled charm and that fabled voice of his and woo the pants off of her? Sorry, Ava.