Frank: The Voice (85 page)

“
Ava had a reckless look about her,” Nancy junior wrote, remembering her first rapt impressions, as a twelve-year-old, of her father’s new wife:

This was what MGM was attempting to deal with. It was the quicksilver essence of stardom, all the more potent for its ambivalence.
²
As for the studio’s lack of interest in her career, to a certain extent it was simply repaying her in kind. She had turned down work, disobeyed directives, been generally careless. And the movies were a tough business. In theory, MGM had every interest in furthering her career, but in those studio days, as now, good parts came along when they came along, and actors kept working if they wanted to keep getting paid. Metro had given her
Show Boat—
then it had given her
Lone Star
. With nothing else lying around, the studio had loaned her to Fox. What else was new? Bette Davis, whom Ava idolized, followed
All About Eve
with
 … Payment on Demand
. An actor
worked
. And just then, Ava wasn’t working.

Frank was—barely. At the Chez Paree, which could seat 1,200, one night he drew 150 customers. At the Desert Inn, he sang to half-full houses of wildcatters and cattle ranchers, and suffered from Vegas Throat. Ava flew up on the weekends, and complained the whole time.

But then, as she’d predicted, Metro came crawling back. In truth, her agent Benton Cole saved her bacon, reasoning with Eddie Mannix: She was a big star. Metro was a big studio. They needed each other. For its part, the studio agreed to halt the suspension and reinstate her salary, effective immediately—she would even get back what she’d been
docked. Furthermore, it was contract time, so MGM offered her a new seven-year, multipicture deal, with compensation graduating from $90,000 to $130,000 a film.

Her agent was happy. Ava wasn’t.

She wanted (or Frank wanted) a clause written into her contract stipulating that she and her husband could work together. The project they had in mind was an adaptation of a 1946 musical called
St. Louis Woman
, with a book co-written by Countee Cullen, music by Harold Arlen, and lyrics by Johnny Mercer. The show had been a middling success on Broadway, but it had a great pedigree, and MGM wasn’t averse to it per se.

What it was averse to was Frank Sinatra.

The studio lawyers stroked their chins for a minute, and came back with a codicil titled “
Services of Frank Sinatra”—or, as it came to be known around Metro, the Frank Sinatra Clause. It read:

The clause wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. It didn’t oblige MGM to make
St. Louis Woman
, and as for hiring Sinatra somewhere down the line, well—seven years was a long time.

But the addition satisfied Ava, and, even more important at that sensitive moment, it satisfied Frank. She signed.

In return, Metro sent her to hell.

She was to report to work immediately on
Ride, Vaquero!
yet another dog of a Western, to be shot largely on location in Kanab, Utah, in the
hottest part of the summer. It was the foothills of the Rockies, a hundred dusty miles from civilization of any kind: “
the asshole of creation,” recalled her co-star Howard Keel. “Beautiful territory, but we were out there for about, oh, Christ, a month, and there was nothing there and nothing to do there. Nothing.”

Nothing, that is, except drink and fuck. Ava did a lot of the former and some of the latter with the stuntmen, and a little of both with the director, John Farrow, a cold-eyed drunk who came on to her so relentlessly that she finally gave in out of sheer boredom, hating herself for it afterward and hating Farrow, too, who was even mean to the horses.
³

When Sinatra wasn’t being ignored, he was being attacked. His old nemesis Lee Mortimer still wasn’t through with him. The columnist went at Frank hard in 1952 with an
American Mercury
piece called “Frank Sinatra Confidential/Gangsters in the Night Clubs” that pinned Mafia control of show business squarely on the singer’s skinny shoulders. Mortimer extended the theme in a book called
U.S.A. Confidential
, which he co-authored with his uncle and
Daily Mirror
boss, Jack Lait.

In a time of ringing public piety, a season when Dwight Eisenhower was making common cause with Joseph McCarthy to further his presidential campaign, Sinatra decided to wax confessional. He hired a publicist named Irving Fein (whose main client was Jack Benny) to ghostwrite a long apologia—and to place the piece with Hearst. The two-part article, titled “
Frankly Speaking,” ran under Sinatra’s name in two July issues of
American Weekly
, the syndicate’s Sunday supplement. Fein’s version of Frank was lavishly contrite. “Most of my troubles with the press were my own fault,” the piece began. It then tried to milk sympathy by playing up Frank’s supposedly rough childhood in those purported Hoboken slums. His poor parents, Fein wrote, “needed whatever money I could bring into the house”—thus young Frankie had had to resort to “hooking candy from the corner store, then
little things from the five-and-dime, then change from cash registers, and finally, we were up to stealing bicycles.”

It was an odd foundation on which to lay his denial of any associations with organized crime.

And then there was the failure of his marriage to Nancy, for which he knew America blamed him. Yet in fact, the Frank of the article pointed out, he had been not blameworthy but heroic. Having realized a year into his first marriage that he had mistaken friendship for love, he’d strived, out of family mindedness, to make it work anyway. Should he have been less public about his pursuit of Ava? He should have—but when you’re so in love (Fein wrote), it’s hard to think about things like that. Besides, he insisted, he and Ava had never dated until after his separation from Nancy.

Any reader who bought all that would love the windup. “
Well, there it is,” Fein-as-Frank wrote, inflated with phony piety. “That’s my side of the story, and I must say I feel better for having gotten it off my chest. I know that I never meaningly hurt anyone, and for any wrongs I may have done through emotional acts or spur-of-the-moment decisions, I humbly apologize.”

“
That should have told you right there that Frank didn’t write that thing,” his former gofer Nick Sevano said years later. “He’s never apologized to anyone in his life.”

Decades afterward, the memory of the piece still stung. “
When I recently asked Dad whether he wrote it,” his daughter Nancy wrote in 1995, “he said succinctly, ‘It’s C-R-A-P. They made the whole thing up.’ ”

Yes, and he paid them to do it.

Landing in El Paso en route to Mexico City, August 1951. They oscillated constantly between hot intimacy and cold distance. And the press ate it up.
(photo credit 31.1)

I
t would be a very busy fall. “
Ava Gardner, upon finishing ‘Vaquero,’ goes directly to New York for the opening of ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro’ Sept. 17,” Hedda Hopper wrote from Hollywood, soon after Labor Day.

Ava was going to shoot
Mogambo
, a remake of the 1932 Clark Gable–Jean Harlow sizzler
Red Dust. Mogambo
would be a considerable step up from
Ride, Vaquero!—
Gable would be starring again (and the newcomer Grace Kelly co-starring), and the great John Ford, as opposed to the considerably less than great John Farrow, would be directing. Ava was excited. “
After all,” she recalled, “I still remembered sneaking into the theater balcony in Smithfield, Virginia in 1932 and swooning as my hero Clark Gable tried to decide between Jean Harlow and Mary Astor in
Red Dust
.”

As for Frank, his new agent, Abe Lastfogel of William Morris, was making the best of the hand he’d been dealt. The first gig was at Bill Miller’s (formerly Ben Marden’s) Riviera,
¹
in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the place that had helped launch Eddie Fisher. (Sinatra might have gotten in with a little help from the wiseguys who ran the club’s clandestine casino, Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo and Longy Zwillman.) Frank opened there on Friday the fifth. The reviews were good, if a little backhanded. “
Whatever Sinatra ever had for the bobbysoxers, he now has for the café mob,”
Variety
wrote, going on to commend him “for self-assurance and a knowing way with a crowd, whatever the misadventures of his personal life and career.”

Ava flew in on Wednesday the tenth. That night, before the first show in Fort Lee, she accompanied him to the Firemen’s Ball at the Union Club in Hoboken.

It was a favor for Marty Sinatra, and it was a disaster for Frank. Maybe his confidence was down; maybe, after his recent run of bad luck, the local crowd smelled blood. Their boy had made good and gotten too big for his britches, then the world had cut him down to size;
now it was Hoboken’s turn. “
He sang onstage that night and hit some clinkers, and so people booed him and threw fruit and stuff, kidding around,” recalled his boyhood friend Tony “Mac” Macagnano. “Oh, did he get mad.”

And when Sinatra got mad, he stayed mad. On his way out of the club, he told a cop he knew, “
I’ll never come back and do another thing for the people of Hoboken as long as I live.” He would be as good as his word, not returning to the Square Mile City for decades. Once, flying over his hometown years later, he spat at the plane window.