Frank: The Voice (91 page)

They were gorgeous. “How much?”

“Twenty-two thousand.”

Frank exhaled and looked out the window, his eyes suddenly moist.

“
Frank, give the earrings to Ava.”

“Billy, I can’t afford these.”

Ruser put them in a box and pushed it across the counter. “You pay me when you have it.”

Then he bought Christmas presents for the kids and Nancy—he would be far away at Christmas. Frank borrowed a couple of grand
from Van Heusen, who was swimming in dough, still cranking out movie songs for Crosby. He and Chester made plans for later, a couple of girls, one black and one white …

He drove over to Holmby Hills. Nancy was holding the fort with the money he sent her, though the big house was still on the market. She simply didn’t need all that space, and she could bank a nice sum if she sized down.

She was practical. But Frank was also surprised to see, when she opened the front door, just how good she looked—as though, without him, she would have withered up and blown away, grown old overnight. She was wearing his pearls, and the smell of something delicious cooking in the kitchen somehow added to her allure. Ava couldn’t—wouldn’t—boil water … He kissed his ex-wife. On the mouth. She kissed back just a tiny bit, as if she’d momentarily forgotten everything—but then she was tapping him on the chest. Asking him what he was doing.

Then Nancy junior was there, in a sweater and blue jeans and saddle shoes. He noticed the little swellings underneath the sweater.

Tina, four, edged up under her mother’s arm, staring up at him; behind them, eight-year-old Frankie sat silently on the steps, his hair combed neatly, a scab from a playground accident on his forehead, his dark eyes suspicious.

Frank picked up the bags he’d brought. Christmas was early this year!

Nancy Sandra cheered. Her little sister smiled shyly; the boy raised his eyebrows. Frank’s ex-wife gave him a knowing look, but seemed pleased anyway.

He asked if he could come in. She nodded.

Her dignity was indestructible; she had begun to make a life without him. She cultivated the gossip columnists, many of them women; they naturally took her side. Hedda Hopper wrote in early November:

Romances were hinted at, but her most steadfast companion outside the Barbato circle seemed to be the similarly single Barbara “Missy” Stanwyck. Mostly, though, the former Mrs. Sinatra took great care to stay busy. The columnist Edith Gwynn wrote (on the very day of Ava’s abortion): “
Spent a pleasant evening at Nancy Sinatra’s where a dozen or so dined on fancy Italian dishes the gal herself cooked up, and looked at some movies later. Nancy is proud of her three kids—and well she might be. They’re dolls—and talented like crazy!”

Frank opened at the French Casino on Wednesday night, November 26, and though it wasn’t the Copa, the house was full and he was in good voice—and good spirits, even when a heckler called out, “
Where’s your wife?”

“Where’s
your
wife?” Frank shot back.

After the show, he strolled over to his favorite Manhattan restaurant, Patsy’s, on West Fifty-sixth Street, for a late dinner. It was a cozy Italian joint run by the Scognamillo family, unpretentious and fiercely loyal to Sinatra. “
At the end of the meal,” the
New York Times
reported in 2003, “Sinatra asked the owner what he was serving for Thanksgiving, which was the next day. Aware that Sinatra had not seen the ‘closed for Thanksgiving’ sign on the door, the elder Mr. Scognamillo replied, ‘Whatever you like.’ After Sinatra left, the owner took down the sign and announced to the staff: ‘Tomorrow we are open. Everyone, please come, and bring your family. I don’t want Mr. Sinatra to eat alone.’ ”

That night Frank went straight back to work at the Casino. Between songs he schmoozed the audience, turning his ordeal at customs
into an amusing anecdote (“
A funny thing happened to me on the way here from Africa …”) and even essaying a couple of slightly nervous
Mogambo
jokes. On Gable’s marksmanship: “
Is he good! In one week, he shot six natives!” And on Ava: “
It’s pretty lonesome here without my wife. After all, you know the dangers she’ll face making a movie in Africa—lions, tigers, crocodiles; Clark Gable …”

Gable wasn’t the danger. In early December, Ava returned to the
Mogambo
camp and, as always, managed to stir up some action right away. When she wanted to go out into the bush and get up close to some wild animals, the handsome white hunter Bunny Allen was happy to oblige her. They soon found themselves in the midst of a herd of elephants, where Ava, suddenly startled by a fire-hose-like splashing very close at hand, grabbed Allen’s arm. “
It’s all right,” the hunter whispered coolly. “Elephant’s just gone to the bathroom.” Ava’s loud laughter sent the herd thundering off—but there she was, still holding on to Bunny …

It wasn’t a grand affair, just a couple of nights, then sweet, dry-eyed good-byes. They were alike, the two of them: good-looking and easily bored.

“
Ava couldn’t be alone,” the production coordinator Eva Monley said. “That was, I think, why she had so many affairs. She’d say, ‘Hey, come on, have a drink with me, I’m bored all by myself,’ and she’d bring back a prop man or whoever [to her tent].”

Back in New York, the French Casino was asking Frank to extend his stay, but, Earl Wilson wrote, “
he has a prior commitment—Ava.” On Friday the twelfth, his thirty-seventh birthday (not his thirty-fifth, as he still led the world to believe, and as Wilson dutifully reported), he “
was given a birthday cake by lady fans … [who] squealed just like they did at the Riobamba almost 10 years ago.”

Ten years … The girls were ladies now, and Frankie was verging on middle age. Many of the ladies were still willing to go to bed with
him—and a few did—but road romance wasn’t the same as it had once been.

He really did miss his wife.

Frank arrived back on location the following week, bearing gifts for Ava’s big birthday, from himself and her family. Some accounts say he brought a diamond ring and a mink, the latter of which seems unlikely in darkest Africa, but then Sinatra and sensible gift giving never did go together. Ava is said to have made a scornful remark about who really paid for the gifts—but what of Billy Ruser’s layaway earrings? Reports are inconsistent. Ava insists it was a charmed period. “
Frank came back to Africa in time for Christmas—and my thirtieth birthday—full of enthusiasm and joy,” she recalled.

But Frank wouldn’t know for weeks if he had clinched the
Eternity
role: Cohn was still horse-trading with Eli Wallach’s people, and Frank was on pins and needles, which wouldn’t have made him delightful company. “
Then came the death wait,” he told Hedda Hopper in 1954, of his return to the
Mogambo
shoot.

Drinking rarely made things all right where Frank and Ava were concerned. Given his tendency to prettify the past, his stark language (“thought I’d collapse … I gave up”) is striking. Then sometime while he was waiting to hear from Columbia, the alcohol loosened Ava’s tongue, and she told him about the abortion. The revelation could only have been devastating to him.

Frank’s first thought would have been the terrible memory of
Nancy’s abortion. His second would have been the big family he had proclaimed he and Ava would have. His Italian procreative pride had finally collided with his wife’s skittishness about childbearing—not to mention her own physical and professional pride.

The two of them had much in common, but too much of it was negative. And in each, the capacity for intimacy was stunted. The story Ava told on herself about her fury at Frank for interrupting her in her bath, and her general shyness about appearing naked in front of her husbands, clashes tellingly with all the accounts about her fascination with prostitution and anonymous sex, the dalliances with propmen, the naked parading in front of native bearers on
Mogambo
. If she could see a man as an inferior, her own shaky self-worth wasn’t challenged. She was drawn to strong men but ultimately threatened by them.

For his part, Frank had briefly known, and quickly fled, the confinements of conventional marriage. Jersey City, Hasbrouck Heights—he could still remember that tight feeling in his chest … Nancy had ruled those small households and, during the couple’s tenure in them, ruled him as well. And the big households in Toluca Lake and Holmby Hills cohered around Nancy, not him. He was gone.

He would keep returning for the rest of his life, would be an inveterate dropper-in. He would always be wedded to Nancy; she knew him as no one else did. He craved this intimacy as he craved all intimacy, but with Nancy, as with almost everyone else, the rules were the same: he must be able to leave the second he got bored. And he was too intelligent not to realize that almost nobody in the world defined intimacy his way. The one exception was Ava, who played by the same rules he did. Which made it impossible for them to stay together. The contradictions would torment him till the end of his days.

“
Fred Zinnemann … has gone to New York to test stage players for ‘From Here to Eternity,’ ” Hedda Hopper wrote in her syndicated column on December 3, 1952.

“
Frank’s still in there pitching for the magic [
sic
] role in ‘From Here to Eternity’; and I think he’s just right for the part,” the columnist noted a week later.