Frank: The Voice (99 page)

It sounded romantic and glamorous: Frank had told Ava it could be their second honeymoon, but the tour was also desperately practical. Working for over two months on
From Here to Eternity
for a sum total variously reported as $10,000, $8,000, or $5,000 (he didn’t get a dime for the weeks of preparation and rehearsal) had put him in deeper hock than ever. His first Capitol single, “I’m Walking Behind You,” with “Lean Baby” on the flip side, had come out on April 27; a week later it had reached the nether regions of the
Billboard
chart—but troublingly, RCA Victor had released Eddie Fisher’s version of “Walking” just a few days after Sinatra’s, and by the time Frank left the country, Fisher’s record was already starting to pull ahead.

Lacking a radio or television show, domestic bookings, or any record royalties from Capitol, Sinatra was trying to drum up whatever cash he could. That spring, quietly, he had put his beloved Palm Springs house on the market. A wealthy widow, one Mrs. George Machris, scooped it up at a fire-sale price of $85,000—just a bit more than half of what it had cost Frank. The proceeds went straight to Nancy, who was still hanging on in the Holmby Hills house. The place was too big, too expensive to maintain, she worried; she and the children really should move someplace smaller (but this didn’t happen until Nancy junior and Frankie left home, years later).

In the meantime, Nancy entertained regularly, giving her best impression of a merry divorcée. On slow news days, the columns liked linking her to one suitor or another. “
Nancy Sinatra’s steadfast date is Tom Drake … Barbara Stanwyck’s is George Nader,” wrote Winchell. In fact, it was Stanwyck—whose marriage to Robert Taylor had been broken up by Ava Gardner—who was Nancy’s steadfast companion. “Sob sisters,” the two women sometimes liked to joke, clinking their cocktail glasses. The truth was that finding another man was the last thing on Nancy’s mind. Between the children, the church, the Barbatos, and her various causes, she had more than enough to occupy
her. According to Frank’s longtime valet, George Jacobs, “
There was no way she would ever get remarried, or even go on a date.” Nancy had her own explanation for this. “When you’ve been married to Frank Sinatra …,” she liked to say in later years.
You stay married to him
. She even kept some of her wandering ex-husband’s clothes in the closet and welcomed, in a complicated way, his periodic visits.
¹

At Heathrow, Ava fondled her husband’s cheek, amazed all over again at his face. She was amazed, too, at how much she wanted him. She hadn’t been especially good over the long weeks since she’d last seen him, but then, she hadn’t been too bad, either. They stayed in each other’s arms in the back of the big car that took them to her flat in Regent’s Park; they stayed in bed for three days, until it was time to leave for Italy. And then, since the dreadful piece of trash in which she was currently acting wasn’t in need of her services for a couple of weeks (Metro had tried but failed to argue her into taking horseback-riding lessons so she could more convincingly portray Guinevere), she and Frank—along with many pieces of luggage—got back in the car and headed for Heathrow.

The car blew a tire on the way to the airport (Frank gritted his teeth and drummed his fingers while the liveried chauffeur, apologizing constantly, put on the spare). When they finally arrived, their plane was taxiing out to the runway. A BEA gate agent patiently explained, as the couple goggled at him in disbelief, that Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra were simply too late.

Frank’s face was dangerously flushed. “Too
late
?”

Ava looked over the top of her sunglasses. “
What
?”

The agent explained that the next flight to Milan wasn’t leaving until tomorrow, but there was a flight to Rome leaving very shortly, if the lady and gentleman were willing to alter their plans.

Frank stared at the mild-mannered young man until he had to look away. Then he put his hands to his mouth; his big voice echoed through the waiting room. “This is the last time I’ll ever fly BEA!” he called.

“
I’d rather swim the Channel!” Ava shouted.

They and their seventeen bags got on the flight to Rome.

The term “paparazzo” wouldn’t exist until Federico Fellini gave the name to a character in
La Dolce Vita
years later, but Rome was Rome, and the photographers were all over the famous couple as they walked across the tarmac. One in particular wouldn’t let up, kept demanding Frank and Ava kiss for the camera. Just like that, Frank hauled off and socked the guy in the face. The photographer shook it off and went straight back at Frank. The carabinieri swiftly intervened. But the tone of the tour had been set.

The concert halls were only part full. England would always have a soft spot for him after the war, but his appeal hadn’t completely translated to the rest of Europe. Ava Gardner, though, was another matter. Ava was a goddess, her dark beauty making perfect sense to Continental tastes, and Europe couldn’t get enough of her. At the next stop, Naples, the promoter put Ava’s name right on the bill with Frank’s. This, of course, was a terrible mistake. Frank Sinatra had no intention of sharing the stage with anyone else, even his wife, and Ava had no intention of stepping out on a stage with Frank. She’d come close to trying that just once, for charity in London, and wisely changed her mind.

But when Sinatra got up onstage for a matinee in Naples without that gorgeous wife of his, the spotlight picked her out in the crowd, who booed and whistled and threw seat cushions. They had paid up to 3,000 to 4,500 lire each—the equivalent of $5 to $7, a fortune in postwar Italy—to see this goddess. They chanted her name—“
Ah-va! Ah-va! Ah-va!
”—and Frank stomped off the stage. Ava fled.

The crowd threatened to riot. The carabinieri cleared the theater. For the evening show the house was half-full. Ava had stayed at the hotel. Sinatra sang one number, looked at the empty seats, then shook his head and walked off once more. The audience began to stamp the floor. After much fevered back-and-forth between Frank, the promoter, and the chief of the Naples riot police, who had fifteen officers waiting in the hall, Sinatra understood he had two choices: he could go on
with the evening show and collect two-thirds of his $2,400 fee ($800 had been slotted for Ava), or he could walk and get nothing. He went on with the show.

The worse Frank felt, the worse he sang. The concerts didn’t improve. Naturally, he hadn’t been able to afford to fly a full complement of musicians over from the States, so he’d brought Bill Miller along as an accompanist and musical director. They hired pickup bands for each leg of the tour, but the quality varied from fair to poor. Sometimes Frank thought bitterly, longingly, of Studio C at Capitol on the night of April 30. The combination of Sinatra, a Dutch band called the Skyliners, and an English conductor named Harold Collins was a disaster in Scandinavia. “
Sinatra has been a flop in Denmark and Sweden,” said the
New Musical Express
, the English counterpart of
Billboard
. On May 31 the Associated Press wrote that Frank had drawn boos during two concerts in southern Sweden. “
Agence France Presse reported that Sinatra received an unenthusiastic reception from small audiences in Malmoe and Helsingborg,” the dispatch continued.

Frank was looking for the exit. From performing, from Ava, from everything. Then he pulled the plug.

Ava was due back in England on June 7 to start shooting
Knights of the Round Table
, at $17,500 a week. Frank’s wallet was all but empty. It didn’t improve matters between them.

On May 16, precisely as the Naples audience was stamping, booing, and yelling for Ava, “I’m Walking Behind You” hit number 7 on the
Billboard
chart. It was Frank’s first hit since “The Birth of the Blues” had charted at number 19 the previous November—his longest drought in ten years. The problem was that Eddie Fisher’s version of “I’m Walking Behind You” was number 1.

It was not to be a great year for Sinatra sales. Paradoxically, “Walking” would be Frank’s biggest hit for 1953, though Alan Livingston knew in his bones that the Stordahl-arranged song represented the singer’s past, not his future. But even the present looked iffy. When “I’ve Got the World on a String” hit the charts on the Fourth of July, it was only at number 14, and it stayed there for just two weeks.
²
Nineteen fifty-three was a year for Fisher and Perry Como (who had two number-one hits) and Patti Page, with her monster Columbia hit “Doggie in the Window,” conducted and arranged—complete with barking—by Mitch Miller.

In many ways it seemed as though 1953 might not be Sinatra’s year at all. He had little to show but bruises for his Continental tour. He could dimly remember having thrown heart and soul into
From Here to Eternity;
but back in England (where Ava had rented a big flat in St. John’s Wood), in the days when overseas really was overseas, he’d only heard second-and thirdhand about the excited rumors—about both the film and his performance—flying around Hollywood. He was cast
up on foreign shores, with little to back up his confidence, least of all his wife’s esteem. “
We came back to London under a terrible cloud,” Ava recalled. In truth, she was sick of him. In a photograph of the two of them at a prizefight in early June, their bodies aren’t quite touching. (At one point, during a lull in the action, Frank called out, “Why don’t ya fight, ya bums, ya!” Ava rolled her eyes.)

Still, his manager had been able at the last minute to throw together a tour of Great Britain: from June till early August, Sinatra would scramble from London to Bristol back to London up to Birmingham and back to London, then up to Glasgow and Dundee and Edinburgh and Ayr, then down to Leicester and Manchester and Blackpool and Liverpool, then back to London. Ava, busy playing Guinevere (and perhaps also busy with her co-star and old flame, Robert Taylor), would not accompany him.