Ava then played the field. Howard Hughes, crazed and obsessive even then, had a thing about big breasts and recently divorced women— “wet decks,” he called them—and Ava fit the bill. Ava insisted she never shared his bed, though some believe otherwise. The tycoon, however, was to pursue and spy on her for years to come.
As a youngster in North Carolina, Ava had jitterbugged to the music of Artie Shaw. After war service in the navy, and with hearing problems threatening his career as a musician, Shaw was by his own description now “in a state of dysfunction.” At thirty-four he had already gone through four wives—there would eventually be eight—and he was deep into psychoanalysis. Ava thought Shaw “the first intelligent, intellectual male I had ever met.” He told her she was “the most perfect woman.” They married in 1945, partly to counter the negative publicity generated when it became known they were living together. Once married, Shaw determined to “improve” his perfect woman.
He told Ava to read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, introduced her to a psychiatrist, and hired a Russian grand master to teach her chess. In company, when she spoke up, he told her to shut up. Soon the couple were quarreling constantly, and stopped having sex. They divorced after less than a year. She was twenty-three.
By the late 1940s she had begun to have success as an actress. There were affairs with the singer Mel Tormé, the actors Howard Duff, Robert Taylor, and Robert Mitchum, according to one of his biographers. Tormé’s account of his relationship with Ava describes four of her characteristics: her “glorious beauty,” her being tipsy, her crudity—she responded to a stranger’s well-meaning compliment with “Do you suck?”—and the burst of rage that ended the affair. Duff recalled Ava’s inability to relax, mood changes “so fast nobody could keep up with her,” the “terrible, terrible quarrels. . . . She could be very violent”— and the drinking.
The British writer Peter Evans, who worked with Gardner on a planned memoir in the 1980s, was driven to distraction by Ava’s attempts to “revise her own history, including her own taped interviews with me, to make herself look good. The changes she made, out of a yearning for ‘respectability,’ distorted her story.” The unredacted tapes, however, offer real insights.
“I started to drink seriously when I was with Artie,” Ava told Evans. “He’d have a lot of intelligent people around, his so-called intelligent bunch, and I was made to feel a fool. I got drunk because I was insecure.” According to Rooney, Ava had demonstrated “a tremendous capacity for liquor” even when she was with him. By the mid-1940s, acquaintances began to notice the actress drinking champagne “like Coca-Cola” and mixing Scotch and beer. Howard Duff remembered her getting him to make an infernal cocktail. “I got the blender and mixed it—vodka, gin, Scotch, brandy, you name it . . . whammo . . . we were ‘out’ on the carpet.”
Ava liked to talk of “how much we drank and still carried on. We were never late for work, we always did our job.” So “desperately insecure” was she, publicist Ann Straus recalled, that before one theater appearance “she drank several straight bourbons, and even then I had to push her on the stage with the flat of my hand.”
She “could change when she drank,” said Mearene “Reenie” Jordan, the faithful maid and companion who joined her in the late 1940s, and that contributed to Ava’s violent outbursts. “When I lose my temper, honey,” Ava acknowledged, “you can’t find it anyplace.” Rooney recalled how she had once “taken a kitchen knife to every piece of furniture in the house.” She is said to have knocked out Howard Hughes with a blow from an ornamental vase. “The quality of rage,” Rooney said, “has always been a part of Ava.”
Ava could talk and behave like a puritan, or the opposite. She was fascinated by prostitution, so much so that on four well-documented occasions she asked to be taken on guided tours of brothels. “I think fucking’s a great sport,” she told one writer. “It’s all the fucking talk you have to listen to from the man before.”
“I want to be married and have children,” she had said early in the Rooney relationship. Once wed, though, she told him she never wanted to get pregnant. She claimed she wanted a baby by Artie Shaw, yet still used contraception. “I don’t think I genuinely in my heart wanted a baby at all,” she told Peter Evans. “Maybe I was playing a part—to make it perfect, the ‘perfect wife.’ Who the hell knows?”
Ava did get pregnant during the affair with Howard Duff, but had an abortion. According to a woman friend, she went to a quack doctor who “operated on her without an anesthetic, so she would understand the magnitude of what she was doing. He botched the job, not completely removing the fetus. . . . The event so traumatized her that she never fully recovered from the shock.”
This was the woman on whom Frank Sinatra became fixated in 1949.
FRANK, TOO, WAS HITTING the bottle. Arriving uninvited and drunk, he caused a scene at a party to mark Mel Tormé’s engagement to Candy Toxton, a young actress. When the bride-to-be fled to a bedroom, he harangued her through the locked door. A friend hustled him out of the house as he was about to start a fight with Tormé. Weeks later, at another party, he hit someone over the head with a bottle.
It was at this time, in early 1949, that Frank began his headlong pursuit of Ava Gardner. As she drove to MGM to sit for the studio’s group photograph, Ava was overtaken by a speeding car. The pursuing car slowed down, overtook hers again, slowed again, and then, as the driver doffed his hat, raced on ahead. Frank had gotten her attention.
Ava had long known that he was “a terrible flirt.” Years earlier, when she was married to Rooney, Frank had come over to their table at the Hollywood Palladium and joked that he wished he had found her first. He “had eyes for her,” too, while she was married to Artie Shaw. Frank had gotten her, like Marilyn Maxwell, to don an “S” for Swooners shirt and act as a bat girl for his softball team.
In 1946, when Ava was out dancing with Howard Hughes and Lana Turner with Frank, the couples had exchanged partners. Later, she had moved into a house overlooked by the Sunset Towers, where Frank and Sammy Cahn had apartments. “Just for mischief,” Cahn recalled, “Frank and I would stick our heads out the window and yell her name.” She heard “their boozy voices shouting, ‘Ava, can you hear me, Ava? Ava Gardner, we know you’re down there. Hello, Ava! Hello!’ ” She claimed she found it less than charming, and she told a friend she thought Frank “conceited, arrogant, overpowering.” Even so, there came an evening when they got together and “drank quite a bit.” And at some point after that there was another date, one she remembered as special, when “we drank, we talked, and fell in love.”
Early in the romance, there came a moment of madness that set the tone for what was to come. One night, according to George Evans’s aide Jack Keller, the couple got themselves arrested in a town near Palm Springs. Frank called for help at 3:00 A.M. “I’m in jail,” he told Keller. “We thought we’d have a little fun and we shot up a few street lights and store windows with the .38’s, that’s all. . . . There was this one guy, we creased him a little bit across the stomach. But it’s nothing. Just a scratch.”
Keller said he chartered a plane, flew in with a stack of money to pay for the damage, buy the silence of the police and everyone else involved, and get Frank and Ava back to Los Angeles. Miraculously, the story was kept out of the newspapers.
On a more sober evening, in Hollywood, Frank told Ava his marriage was effectively over. In late 1949, at the house she had rented in unfashionable, wooded Nichols Canyon, she took him to bed. “We became lovers forever—eternally,” she recalled late in life. “Big words. . . . But I truly felt that no matter what happened we would always be in love.”
AT THIRTY-FOUR, he was a falling star. At twenty-seven, she was on her way to stardom. Both were outspoken liberals. With Artie Shaw, she had socialized with people some considered reds, even visited the Soviet consulate. She, like Frank, had spoken out on a broadcast protesting the abuses of the House Un-American Activities Committee. She enthused about jaz
z and socialized with African-American musicians. They had much in common.
Friends and former lovers tried to pry them apart. Lana Turner told Ava that Frank would never leave his wife. Marilyn Maxwell told Frank to “watch it, watch your step.” George Evans warned that both their careers were at risk. MGM, he feared, might invoke the morals clause in their contracts.
After months of subterfuge, the couple began to push the limits of propriety. They attended a Broadway premiere together, though with another couple. Ava turned up at Frank’s birthday party in New York in December 1949, then joined him when he appeared in Houston, Texas. A photographer there tried to take their picture, Frank threatened him, and the story made news. In California, Nancy at last lost patience.
The day Frank got back from Texas, Valentine’s Day, Nancy had her attorney announce that she was seeking a legal separation and property settlement. “My married life,” she added, “has become most unhappy and almost unbearable.”
Although only nine, daughter Nancy could see that her mother was “terribly hurt.” Once, accidentally, she came upon press photographs her mother had hidden away: Frank with Marilyn, Frank with Lana, Frank with Ava.
Frank, too, was increasingly troubled. “The battle I had with myself began to take its toll,” he recalled. “I found myself needing pills to sleep, pills to get started in the morning and pills to relax during the day.” In New York in March, on the first night of a five-week run at the Copacabana, Frank needed a sedative just to get on stage. It was not only the breakup of his family that was bringing him low. All was not well with Ava.
Both of them were insecure, consumed with jealousy. “If he looked across the room in a restaurant,” Mearene Jordan has said, “she would swear, ‘Reenie, I saw him, he was winking at a girl. . . . I saw him give her the look.’ And the fight would be on.” Frank worried obsessively about Howard Hughes, who kept calling Ava, and about the fact that she remained in touch with Artie Shaw.
One night, after one of their quarrels, Ava stomped back to the suite they shared at the Hampshire House and phoned Shaw. She left her address book open to the page bearing his name, where Frank was bound to see it. Shaw, who was living in New York with a new girlfriend, recalled what happened.
“She called at 2:00 A.M. and said she had been with Sinatra and the Fischetti boys. One of the guys had thrown a glass of whiskey in the face of one of her girlfriends, and she had to get away. She said she wanted to see me. I explained that I wasn’t alone. But she came anyway, dressed to the nines and saying she wanted to ask me some questions. I asked my girlfriend to go back to bed so Ava and I could talk.”
Ava disliked the mobsters around Frank and the way they behaved. What she wanted to talk about now, though, was sex. “When you and I were in bed together,” she asked Shaw, “was it okay?” Shaw said the physical side of their marriage had been fine. “Then,” according to Shaw, “she heaved a sigh of relief and said, ‘Well, then there’s nothing wrong with me?’ I said, ‘No, of course not. What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘Well, with Frank it’s like being in bed with a woman. He’s so gentle. It’s as though he thinks I’ll break, as though I’m a piece of Dresden china and he’s gonna hurt me.’
“I said I always thought Frank was a stud, and she said, ‘No. . . . I just wanted to know that it’s not my fault.’ We talked for a while and the phone rang. I picked up the phone—it was now about 3:00 A.M.—and it was Sinatra. He said, ‘Is Ava there?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ but Ava was going, ‘Oh my God!’ and making strange signs. I said, ‘I don’t think she wants to talk to you. I can’t take her by the scruff of the neck and drag her to the phone if she doesn’t want to.’ He went on yabbering and eventually I just hung up the phone.
“Ava left, but fifteen minutes later the doorbell rang. We had one of those speaker things for the door, and it was Sinatra. Now he said he wanted to talk to me. I asked if he was alone and he said yes, so I pressed the button. But he wasn’t alone. He came upstairs with a heavyweight fellow. I sat on the couch and Frank stood over me tapping his chest, talking all truculent. I said, ‘Frank, are you half as tough as you sound?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’m that tough.’
“The other guy, the heavyweight, was standing there doing everything but toss the silver dollar, like a George Raft scene. So I said, ‘Then what do you need him for?’ Frank looked at the guy and snapped his fingers, and the guy left. Like a big mastiff. . . . I said, ‘Frank, what’s the matter with you? It’s four o’clock in the morning and for chrissakes I want to sleep.’ In the end he got up and left, a little sheepfaced, a little tail-between-the-legs.”
Ava, meanwhile, was back at the Hampshire House, in bed but not asleep. A few nights earlier, worried, she had confided to Kirk Douglas—a fellow guest—that Frank had a gun. Now, with dawn not far off, the phone rang. It was Frank, back from visiting Shaw and calling from a room at the other end of the suite. “I’ll never forget his voice,” she remembered. “He said, ‘I can’t stand it any longer. I’m going to kill myself—now!’ There was this huge bang in my ear, and I knew it was a revolver shot.
“I threw the phone down and raced across the living room and into Frank’s room. . . . And there was a body lying on the bed. Oh, God, was he dead? I threw myself on it saying, ‘Frank, Frank . . .’ And the face, with a rather pale little smile, turned toward me, and the voice said, ‘Oh, hello.’ ”
Frank had fired his gun into the mattress.
A FEW MONTHS EARLIER, George Evans had made a prediction about Frank: “A year from now you won’t hear anything about him. He’ll be dead professionally. . . . They’re not going to see his pictures. They’re not buying his records. . . . The public knows about the trouble with Nancy, and the other dames, and it doesn’t like him anymore.” Now Evans was gone, dead of a heart attack, and his prophecy seemed to be coming true.
In April 1950, MGM announced that Frank and the studio had decided on a “friendly parting of the ways.” In fact, Frank had been fired. Louis B. Mayer had been patient with Frank’s past box office failures and had put up with his lack of discipline on the set, but the last straw was an ill-judged Sinatra joke about Mayer’s personal life. When he heard about that, the studio boss told Frank to get out and stay out.
Frank had also fallen out with his powerful agent, Music Corporation of America. “He wanted to be the top guy,” an MCA executive said. “He wanted everybody to bow down to him, to kowtow, and not everybody would do it.” David “Sonny” Werblin, the agent handling Frank in New York, told an NBC executive that his client “was no good, would not draw flies.” Suddenly Frank had no major bookings.
He was run-down, meanwhile, and drinking and smoking too much. “Every single night,” Ava recalled, “we would have three or four martinis, big ones in big champagne glasses, then wine with dinner, then go to a nightclub and start drinking Scotch or bourbon. I don’t know how we did it.” Frank was no longer working very well. As he sang to sparse audiences at the Copacabana, his voice sounded slurred.
Then, in the early hours of May 2, Frank reached for a high note while singing “Bali Ha’i,” the theme song from South Pacific. He had noticed specks of blood in his mouth for several days, but had done nothing about it. “Like an idiot,” he remembered, “I hadn’t even gone to the doctor. . . . I went for a note and nothing came out . . . nothing, just dust. . . . Finally I turned to the audience and whispered into the microphone ‘Goodnight,’ and walked off the floor.”
The doctors told Frank he had suffered a hemorrhage of the vocal cords and was not to speak, let alone sing, for several weeks. “I carried a pad and pencil around to write with,” he said years later. “After the fortieth day I started to talk again, very quietly, then to do a few vocal exercises.”
Frank was not telling the truth. Within ten days, and flouting medical advice, he had headed off to Europe in pursuit of Ava. She was in Spain making Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, a movie in which she played a rich expatriate beauty romanced by a matador. A celebrated
real-life bullfighter, thirty-five-year-old Mario Cabré, handsome, elegant, and charming, played the matador. Ava was spending much of her off-screen time with him, and the papers were saying he had declared his love for her. Eager to minimize her involvement with Frank, a married man, the movie’s publicists played up the idea that Ava had a budding romance. From New York, Frank had been bombarding Ava with anxious phone calls. Too often, she was not there when he called.
Now, flying into Barcelona on a three-day visit, he brought Ava an emerald necklace and a barrage of accusations. She denied the Cabré stories and countered with some gibes of her own. In New York, she knew, Frank had been seen with an old flame, Marilyn Maxwell.
On his way home to the States, Frank told a journalist that Cabré meant nothing to Ava. “Nothing!” he shouted over the phone. “Don’t you understand?” In Spain, however, Ava was now making a public show of affection for the bullfighter. When that made the newspapers, people began to mock Frank. “The Ava thing was well known, and also the fact that he was having problems with his voice,” said the guitarist Tony Mottola. “I remember being at the races with him, and some hoarse voice called out from the crowd, ‘Where’s Ava, Frank?’ ”
In September a weeping Nancy went into Superior Court to describe the miseries of marriage to Frank Sinatra. She made it clear she wanted only a separation, not a divorce. The judge awarded her custody of the children, the family home, a third of her husband’s future income up to $150,000 a year—with increments when he earned more—for life. Frank got to keep the house in Palm Springs and “any phonograph records he may desire.”
If Ava was straying, so was Frank. Rosemary Clooney described how he seduced her sister Betty at a New York nightclub. He flirted, flashed a “slow, vaguely dangerous” smile, then walked to the bandstand and gave an impromptu performance of “I’ll Never Smile Again.” Rosemary reminded her sister that Frank was “crazy about Ava Gardner.” She was ignored. “When we left the club,” she remembered, “we all got into a taxi. Then they dropped me off.”
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