Frank: The Voice (86 page)

The premiere of
Snows of Kilimanjaro
was September 17 at the Rivoli. Ava’s nephew Billy Grimes, a North Carolina college student in town to visit his famous aunt, remembered: “
There were twenty thousand people there. Police barricades were up, and spotlights and flashbulbs were everywhere. There were at least fifty Pinkerton guards trying to control the crowd.”

The fuss was all for Ava. (Sammy Davis Jr., who was in town at the same time, recalled spotting Sinatra walking in Times Square one afternoon, alone and unrecognized.) After the movie, Frank proceeded to the Thirtieth Street studio for his final Columbia recording session. Mitch Miller was present to seal the fade-out. Percy Faith, rather than Stordahl, conducted the orchestra. The one and only song Sinatra would wax that night, written by a twenty-three-year-old wunderkind named Cy Coleman, was a perfect valedictory to both the label and Miller. It was called “Why Try to Change Me Now.” Frank sang it exquisitely:

After the musicians faded to silence, Miller turned on the studio intercom.

“
That’s it, Frank,” he said, in a flat voice.

And that was it. Sinatra’s association with Columbia was over. He was now officially adrift, on a cold, dark sea.

Billy Grimes, who had gone to the opera after the
Kilimanjaro
premiere, had come afterward to the recording session at Frank’s invitation. When it was over, they rode back to the Hampshire House in silence. Ava met them at the door.

“
Well! What whorehouse have you two been to?” she said.

“Whorehouse?” Billy said. “I’ve been to an opera house!”

“That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard!” Ava told him.

Earl Wilson stopped by the Hampshire House the next day to interview the couple. “
Breakfast with the Sinatras is … well … sort of different,” he wrote.

Lollipops and silk pajamas aside, there was a lot of psychodrama packed into this little meeting.
Maybe in Africa … He’s going with me
.
He’s going to do some theaters around Nairobi
. (Really?)
God, I look sick, don’t I?

Their volatility was at its peak. “
The battles between Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra are getting louder and longer,” Erskine Johnson had noted in a recent column. Now things were about to blow.

That night she accompanied him to the Riviera and, in the packed house, spotted a head of blond hair glowing softly at ringside: Marilyn Maxwell. As Frank softly sang

his lower lip gave that patented quiver. Ava looked at her husband, who at that moment was singing in Miss Maxwell’s general direction. It was all she needed.

She stood up in the middle of the song.
Fuck this shit
. She stomped toward the exit.

She went back to the Hampshire House, took off her platinum wedding ring, scrawled a bitter note on hotel stationery, sealed the note and the ring in an envelope, and left the envelope on the bed. Then she packed her bags and caught the early-morning flight to Los Angeles.

The hotel bill would be sent to her.

Billy Grimes recalled many years later that when he left New York to return to North Carolina, Sinatra asked him if he needed cab fare. Billy, who had $40 in his pocket—decent money in that year—told Frank that he was fine. But then Frank, who, as Billy and the rest of the world knew, was “
nearly broke and unsure of his future,” pressed a $100 bill into his hand.

Sinatra badly needed the next booking Lastfogel had secured for him, a week at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis—and badly wanted to break the date. He was climbing the walls with anxiety: once more Ava wouldn’t take his calls, wouldn’t even talk to Sanicola. Lastfogel insisted Sinatra go to St. Louis: candidly speaking, his career was
teetering. In the meantime, Hank had to ply his boss, who was by turns agitated and despondent, with uppers to get him started in the morning, downers to try to give him some rest at night. Frank would sometimes sit on the edge of the bed, talking in a monotone about the futility of life. Hank was keeping careful track of the .38, making sure it was unloaded at all times, the bullets inaccessible.

Somewhere during the trip from New York to St. Louis, Ava’s wedding ring vanished. Frank had a duplicate made, at no small expense (the money advanced by William Morris against his next paycheck), and sent by overnight courier to the Chase Hotel.

On October 7, the wire services quoted Earl Wilson as saying Frank and Ava were desperately trying to avert “
a crackup of their marriage.”

“
We’re having oral battles and I’m trying to fix it all up,” Sinatra told the columnist. When Wilson phoned Ava, she blamed the marital problems on “conflict in commitments requiring separation for weeks at a time.”

The conflict in commitments had nothing to do with it. Ava could easily have gone to St. Louis for a week. Instead, she was back in Hollywood, doing the few things she had to do to prepare for
Mogambo
, but mostly going to parties, like Marion Davies’s giant soiree for Johnnie Ray, where Fernando Lamas looked deeply into her green eyes and she didn’t mind a bit …

Sinatra had been continuing his telegram barrage of the
From Here to Eternity
principals, but now that he was back in town, he decided to pursue the matter directly. He phoned Harry Cohn and invited him out to lunch.

It was important. Cohn wouldn’t be sorry.

Cohn, a petty tyrant who until World War II kept an autographed picture of Benito Mussolini on his desk (like the Italian dictator he had a firm jaw, a bald pate, and bulging emotional eyes), had started
Columbia Pictures in the 1920s on a shoestring (and a Mob loan) and built it into a major studio. He was proud of his friendships with gangsters, proud of his reputation as a tough character. His actors jumped when he yelled; the riding crop he wielded to emphasize his points got their attention. He loved money, he loved the ladies, he loved horse racing, and he loved making movies. Cohn had first met Sinatra when Frank was still big and Columbia still smacked of Poverty Row. Even as late as 1949, Frank had been in a position to do Cohn a favor: at the studio chief’s request, Sinatra had arranged for a minor Columbia comedy,
Miss Grant Takes Richmond
, to premiere at the Capitol, where the singer was making a personal appearance. The picture did good business on the strength of Frank’s box office.

Now Columbia was one of the Big Five and Sinatra was on the skids. Tough luck. What could the singer possibly have to talk about that would be of interest? The studio chief accepted the invitation out of nostalgia and mild curiosity.

Once the waiter had taken their menus, Sinatra hunched down and fixed Cohn with those searchlight blue eyes. “
Harry, I want to play Maggio.”

Cohn shook his head in exasperation. This was what was so important? He had read the first telegram, thrown the rest away. “
You must be out of your fuckin’ mind,” he told Frank. “This is an actor’s part, not a crooner’s.”

“Harry, you’ve known me for a long time. This part was written about a guy like me. I’m an actor, Harry. Give me a chance to act.”

Cohn buttered a roll and munched on it, staring out the window.

Desperate to get Cohn’s attention back, Frank went to the one subject he knew would grab him. “
About the money—” he began.

“Who’s talking money?” Cohn said. “But what about the money?”

“I’ve been getting a hundred fifty thousand a picture—”

“You
used
to get a hundred fifty thousand a picture.”

“I’ll do it for expenses,” Sinatra said. “You cover my expenses, you got your Maggio.”

“What are we talking about?”

“A grand a week. Seven-fifty. Come on, Harry—that’s nothin’.”

“You want it that much, Frank?”

“I told you, it was written for me. It
is
me.”

“Well, we’ll see, Frank. We’ll see. Let me think it over.”

Frank sat up straight, eyes wide. “You’re not turning me down, then?”

“I was, but let’s see, let’s see. It’s a pretty crazy idea.”

“You won’t regret this, Harry.”

In the afterglow of the lunch he went to Ava on bended knee, with flowers, and gifts he couldn’t afford, and they made up as they always did, and remembered.

Joan Cohn was staring at Ava Gardner’s feet. Ava, who loved to go barefoot, and removed her shoes at every possible opportunity, was resting her legs on the coffee table in the living room of Harry Cohn’s house, and Joan Cohn couldn’t get over how small and beautifully formed the actress’s feet were. Harry Cohn’s second wife had been a model before they met; she had a clinical eye for beauty, and was therefore all the more able to appreciate exactly how astounding a creature Ava Gardner was.

It was a slightly surreal moment. Joan Cohn had the flu. She had been lying in bed feeling mildly hallucinatory when Ava Gardner had phoned and asked if she could come over and speak to her about a matter of great importance. Now Harry Cohn’s wife was sitting in her living room in her dressing gown looking at Ava’s beautiful feet and wondering why the actress had called. She prayed it wasn’t something about Harry. She knew about her husband’s habits; they had been married for over ten years, and her hope now after three children, one of whom had died in infancy, was that he would keep his affairs minor and private.

She asked Ava if she would like something to drink. Ava asked for vodka.

“
God, Ava,” Joan Cohn said, when the maid had brought the vodka, “you’re going to ruin your skin.”

“What the hell,” Ava said, and took a long pull from the glass.

The two women looked at each other, the studio chief’s wife aware that Ava seemed on edge. Finally, the actress lit a cigarette and said, “Joan, I’ve come to ask you a big favor.”

Ava seemed to gather her courage.

“
I want you to get Harry to give Frank the Maggio role in
From Here to Eternity
,” she finally said.

Joan Cohn lit a cigarette herself. She stared at Ava, who continued in a nervous rush of words. “He wants that part more than anything in the world, and he’s got to have it, otherwise I’m afraid he’ll kill himself. Please, promise me that you’ll help. Just get him a test. Please, Joan. Just a test.”

Harry Cohn’s wife blinked at the spectacle of this haughtily gorgeous woman, this major star, pleading with her, almost stammering. Harry had mentioned Sinatra’s telegrams, had told her about the lunch where Frank begged Cohn to let him work for nothing. It had touched the studio chief in a strange way, but, he admitted to his wife, it had also made him feel a certain contempt for the singer. That, Cohn had told his wife, was all Sinatra was: a fucking crooner. What possessed this schmuck to think he could do anything on a movie screen besides sing and dance and smile? The balls on him!

Still, Cohn’s wife told him about the visit, and Harry Cohn found himself intrigued by the notion of Ava Gardner as a supplicant. He conceived an idea. The studio chief and his wife had a tenant living in the guesthouse on their property, a painter named Paul Clemens. Clemens, a former WPA artist, had moved to California in the late 1930s and now made a good living doing portraits of movie stars. He was an amusing fellow, tall and bespectacled and distracted-looking, slightly cynical but good company, and it pleased Cohn to feel he was supporting the arts by housing him. Cohn, who prided himself on knowing everything about everybody in Hollywood, knew that Clemens and Ava were pals—he’d painted her picture, probably gotten a lay out of the
deal. And so one morning on his way to work, Harry tapped on his tenant’s door and suggested—as landlord to tenant—that the artist invite his pal Miss Gardner over to the Cohns’ for dinner sometime.