Frank: The Voice (88 page)

Soon, according to Ava, Frank had seized her by the waist and was trying to toss her out too, while she clung for dear life to a doorknob. In the meantime, the forty-nine-year-old Bappie—conceivably with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other—was attempting to make peace between the two. “
For God’s sake, kids, will you please knock it off?” she said. “This is
disgraceful
!”

At last somebody, either Frank or the neighbors, or both, called the police, who arrived, in the form of the genial former football star August “Gus” Kettmann—Palm Springs PD chief and, according to Ava, a friend of Frank’s. Kettmann looked at the mess, looked at Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra’s flushed faces, looked at the mess again. He pushed his hat back and scratched his head. There had been a lot of noise but no criminal activity, and the whole episode had taken place on private property. He could book the couple for disturbing the peace, but what would be the point? He told everyone to simmer down and left.

Naturally, word got out. Word always got out.

Two days later the
Los Angeles Times
put the story, what they had of it, right on page one, under the headline
NOT CONFIRMED, and the subhead “Sinatra-Ava Boudoir Row Story Buzzes.”

At that point it was all sizzle and no steak. The
Times
quoted Chief Kettmann as saying he knew nothing about anything. “I was off duty and there’s nothing on the record about a disturbance,” he claimed, not very convincingly.

The reporter then tried to goad the chief into more of a response by citing “Palm Springs rumors”: namely, “that Sinatra ordered his beautiful film actress wife out of their desert mansion.”

“Well,” harrumphed Kettmann, “after all, if John Smith and his
wife had a fight at their house I wouldn’t feel privileged to tell you of any discussion that went on in their bedroom between Mr. and Mrs. Smith and our officers. I know nothing about it.”

Kettmann may not have been telling the press much, but according to Earl Wilson “
the Palm Springs police were talking”—their tongues perhaps loosened by some folding money. It was the peak of a big presidential election season—a tight race between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight D. Eisenhower—but the Frank and Ava Show was vying for America’s attention. In the October 21
Fresno Bee
, at the top of a page filled with headlines like NIXON SAYS ADLAI HAS RING IN NOSE, BARKLEY PREDICTS SWEEP IN SOUTH, STEVENSON OPENS LAST BIG WHISTLE STOP CAMPAIGN, and MRS. FDR PICKS ADLAI AS HER CHOICE IN RACE, there appeared the following news flash:

When Wilson phoned Van Heusen and asked to speak to Sinatra, Chester said, “
Frank’s in the bathroom throwing up.”

In the absence of hard information, rumors sprouted and flourished. Soon the kinds of salacious tales that Ava and Lana had been bandying over vodkas in the living room of Twin Palms were flashing around Hollywood: Ava had walked in on Lana and Frank having sex. Frank had walked in on Lana and Ava having sex. A more elaborate version even found its way into a subsequent FBI report on Sinatra: Frank had walked in on Lana and Ava having a three way with another man. Why not throw in poor Bappie too?

The fact was, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner were a permanently unstable compound, and no amount of sexual intercourse, no matter
how spectacular, was sufficient to keep them bonded. Or as Ava later confided to the singer Bricktop: “
The problems were never in bed. The problems would start on the way to the bidet.”

Then they were back together again. Fittingly, since they belonged to the public, the reconciliation proceeded largely through public channels. Phase one was brokered by their hovering chronicler Earl Wilson, who leaned on Frank to admit how miserable he was, then ran a column in the
New York Post
headlined
FRANKIE READY TO SURRENDER; WANTS AVA BACK, ANY TERMS. After friends and colleagues alerted her to the piece, she let it be known that she would accept her husband’s call.

He called.

After the obligatory private phase two, phase three took place onstage at the Hollywood Palladium in front of four thousand people, at a rally for Adlai Stevenson on October 27. Then as now, many of the stars came out for the Democrats, Frank and Ava prominent among them. The couple had been slated to appear together for weeks, but of course in the wake of the previous weekend’s events no one had any idea if they would actually show up.

Then Ava walked out onto center stage, wearing a black-satin strapless dress and a mink jacket, and smiled dazzlingly into the spotlight. The audience, filled with her peers, smiled back at her, knowing a great show when it saw one. She stepped to the microphone and waited for the applause to fade. “
I can’t do anything myself,” Ava said, “but I can introduce a wonderful, wonderful man. I’m a great fan of his myself. Ladies and gentlemen, my husband, Frank Sinatra!”

The roar that followed was more about them than about him and he knew it, but he smiled anyway as he stepped into the spotlight and put his arm around his wife’s shoulder. Frank looked like hell. He wore a big ADLAI button on the lapel of his dark suit, and as he stood with Ava, he spoke a few words about the candidate they both admired, but
he might as well have been moving his lips soundlessly for all the audience cared. Here was a couple whose magnetism trumped that of all Hollywood couples before or since.

Then Frank was kissing Ava, she was waving and stepping out of the spotlight, and the band struck up and he sang—first hard and swingingly, on “The Birth of the Blues”; then soft and feelingly, on “The House I Live In”—and the hushed crowd remembered, for a few minutes, just how great he had been.

She stood in the wings staring at him as he sang, head over heels all over again. He was just fucking magic, she thought. The reporters gathered backstage kept tossing questions at her as she watched and listened, but Ava just gazed at Frank, smiling.

Some guy from a Chicago paper, greasy hair and thick glasses, tried to cut through the clutter. “
Hey, Ava—come on!” he called. “What do you see in this guy? He’s just a hundred-and-nineteen-pound has-been!”

Not even blinking, she said, “Well, I’ll tell you—nineteen pounds is cock.”

The reporter stood frozen, his mouth open, his pencil poised over his notebook amid heavy masculine laughter. Ava smiled serenely and kept watching the audience held spellbound by the memory of Sinatra.

Frank and Ava and Bappie landed at Idlewild and found the usual wall of reporters, hoping for a fight, a cross word—anything. Seeing the couple apparently happy, the men of the press did their best to get something going.

“
So, Frank—are they going to try and find you a role in
Mogambo
?”

He gave the guy a look. “Yeah, I’m gonna play a native, in blackface.”

Another reporter: “What’ll Frank be doing while you’re making the movie, Ava?”

“Oh, he’ll do his act in some African nightclubs.”

“Who’s opening for him, Tarzan?” a guy in the back called out.

After braving it as best they could, they had sandwiches and a few drinks, then got on another plane for Winston-Salem. This was Frank’s end of the bargain, or the first half of it at any rate: they had spent plenty of time with his family; now it was time for him to meet hers. It was her first trip back home in three years.

He was not in a good frame of mind. A month had gone by since his lunch with Cohn: no word. Frank now knew Columbia was testing other actors, real actors, for the role of Maggio. He had sent more telegrams signed with the character’s name, trying to be cute, trying not to show how desperate he felt. Silence. Ava, of course, had mentioned nothing of her meeting with Harry’s wife: she understood her husband’s complex Italian pride. She looked at him, worried; she tried to keep his spirits up. The best he could manage was gallows humor. Most of the time he was uncharacteristically silent. He read and reread his rumpled copy of
Eternity
.

This was his life for now. They would go to North Carolina, then they would go to Africa, where she would work and he would sit. Just before Thanksgiving he would fly back to do two weeks at the French Casino, a club in the Paramount Hotel on Forty-sixth Street, at ten grand a week. It would have been half-decent money if Frank were actually getting any of it. (By comparison, Martin and Lewis, who were all over television, radio, the movies, theaters, and clubs, were then earning a guaranteed ten thousand
a night
for live performance.) It wasn’t much of a booking, but it was a booking. He had no television or radio show, no movie deal, no record label, no concerts, no nothing. Lastfogel was working on all of it for him, making heroic efforts. “
Sinatra smelled like a loser in those days,” the agent would say years later.

So, reeking of failure, Frank went to Winston-Salem. There, at least, he was
Frank Sinatra
. There, the locals blushed and tripped over themselves at the mere sight of him—or rather, him and Ava. He and his wife and Bappie went to Ava’s sister Myra’s house: a little house, filled with relatives and the smells of delicious cooking. It all took Frank back to Hasbrouck Heights: the smells were different, the
voices were different, but the mixed tides of love and claustrophobia were much the same.

Ava gleamed and glittered, too big and bright for the small rooms, her gorgeousness burnished by her success and the proud love of her family. Frank did his best. Myra’s husband, Bronnie Pearce, ran a laundry in Winston-Salem, with a pick-up-and-drop-off diaper service. Frank’s interest in the laundry business was limited … But they were good people, the Pearces and the Grimeses and the Creeches and the Gardners, so he made an effort, answering every question no matter how dumb, making conversation while he held a plate heaped with country food, glancing out at the gray trees and wondering when he could escape.

“
Frank was very nice—a little quiet and shy,” Billy Grimes’s sister Mary Edna remembered many years later. A stray moment stayed with her: seeing Sinatra in the living room, sitting on the piano stool and talking with her ten-year-old brother about his clarinet lessons at school. “I heard him tell Michael how he’d learned to play the flute when he was young,” she said. She was struck by Frank’s serious respectfulness with the boy.

He was also depressed. Under the circumstances, one day in North Carolina was about all he could stand. He told Ava he had to get back to Manhattan; he was desperate to recharge his batteries. She wasn’t happy, but she understood. She told him she needed another day with her family. Things were cool between them now: she was rising, rising, like a runaway balloon, and there was nothing Frank could do to stop her. Nor anything she could do to stop him—Ava went to see him off at the airport. Reporters were present, of course: they groaned with disappointment when Frank gave her a farewell peck on the cheek. Once more with feeling, please, for the cameras … And then he was dashing across the tarmac, turning for a second to say one more thing to his wife as he ran to the plane. The men of the press listened carefully, pencils poised.