by James Kaplan
Everybody certainly kept quiet. Whatever happened that night in the desert, no one ever talked, and the dead tell no tales—unless they happen to leave a taped oral history.
“A lot of silly stories have been written about what happened to us in Palm Springs, but the truth is both more and less exciting,” Ava Gardner wrote in her autobiography, which, while entertainingly blunt in its language, is unfortunately euphemistic when it comes to her many exploits.
We drank, we laughed, we talked, and we fell in love. Frank gave me a lift back to our rented house. We did not kiss or make dates, but we knew, and I think it must have frightened both of us. I went in to wake Bappie up, which didn’t appeal to her much, but I had to tell someone how much I liked Frank Sinatra. I just wasn’t prepared to say that what I really meant by like was love.
Perhaps Frank and Ava really were as chaste as junior-prom sweethearts that night. Yet Keller’s story, while too good to be true, is too irresistibly crazy not to be. Sinatra certainly carried guns—once Lee Mortimer dropped his assault charges, the suspended pistol permit was reinstated—and he certainly drank heavily, as did Ava. There are copious records of wild, booze-fueled behavior on the part of Sinatra and Gardner once they became a bona fide couple. Why should the night they fell in love not have set the pattern?
Frank fell as fast as she did. In a blinding flash, all his self-discontent—a combustible amalgam of artistic failure and disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes—alchemized into the most powerful feeling he had ever known. He was deeply in love with Ava Gardner. He phoned her, dead sober, when he got back to town, and asked her out.
We met for dinner at a quiet place [Ava wrote], and we didn’t do much drinking. This time I did ask him about Nancy. He said he’d left her physically, emotionally, and geographically years before, and there was no way he was going back. The kids, however, were something else; he was committed to them forever. I was to learn that that kind of deep loyalty—not faithfulness, but loyalty—was a critical part of his nature.
We didn’t say much more. Love is a wordless communion between two people. That night we went back to that little yellow house in Nichols Canyon and made love. And oh, God, it was magic. We became lovers forever—eternally. Big words, I know. But I truly felt that no matter what happened we would always be in love. And God almighty, things did happen.
Not surprisingly, Frank’s fabled confidence was starting to crack. That autumn, vocal problems cropped up for the first time. In October, when Sinatra made a guest appearance on the bandleader Spike Jones’s Spotlight Revue, Jones, famous for cutting up, asked him seriously, “How you feeling tonight, Frank? Is your voice all right?”
Frank tried to make a joke out of it. “Well, I think so—lemme see,” he said. He blew a pitch pipe and let out a big off-key bellow, much to the audience’s amusement. “I am majestically in voice!” he crowed—and then, ominously, as the orchestra played the intro to “Everybody Loves Somebody,”3 coughed. He then proceeded, on live national radio, to blow the first note of the song.
In November, three days after The Kissing Bandit opened to universal groans, mostly about its star (“Mr. Sinatra’s performance … is not in that vein of skipping humor which more talented comics traverse,” Bosley Crowther wrote, less unkindly than most), Frank started work on It’s Only Money at RKO. It seemed curious, and somehow ominous, that the studio’s new chief, Howard Hughes, whose anti-Communist witch hunts had purged more than half of RKO’s workforce, had decided to hire Sinatra. Remembering the time in Palm Springs when Ava had come to Chi Chi with Hughes, Frank wondered if the studio head simply wanted to humiliate him by sticking him in this silly piece of crap.
Since Frank could behave badly among movie collaborators he respected, it’s easy to imagine how he conducted himself on a quickie comedy (the shooting schedule was just three weeks) at the off-brand studio he thought he’d outgrown, alongside the remote and distrustful Groucho Marx and the menacingly protuberant Jane Russell (whom the delighted boob man Hughes had discovered a few years earlier—not working at his dentist’s office, as the myth has it, but through his casting department). “Frank and my father did not get along at all,” Groucho’s son, Arthur, recalled. “Sinatra always showed up on the set like a real star, like two hours late, and my father would be fuming because he already knew his lines, which Sinatra usually did not know. So they weren’t too compatible and the movie wasn’t too good either.”
Yet Frank got along swimmingly with Jane Russell, who, like him, was not especially happy to be working on It’s Only Money. “It was nothing,” she said. “It was not a very good picture. Frank and I certainly knew it.” And he was a perfect gentleman with Russell. “Frank was always very polite and very sweet,” she remembered. “There was no funny business at all.”
For good reason. “Ava was sitting up in the sound booth most of the time while we made the picture,” Russell said. “She certainly was a character. A raving character.”
It’s Only Money—such a stinker that RKO wouldn’t release it until 1951 under the hokily lecherous new title Double Dynamite—was the least of Frank’s problems. His life was coming unmoored. His recording career was dead in the water; his one performing outlet, besides the occasional radio guest spot, was the reliably lousy Your Hit Parade. In December, a headline in the industry journal Modern Television & Radio read, IS SINATRA FINISHED? Around that time Frank told Manie Sacks, according to Nancy junior, that “so many things were going wrong that he felt like he was washed up. Sacks replied that life is cyclical, and that he was too talented not to bounce back. ‘In a few years,’ he said, ‘you’ll be on top again.’ ”
In the meantime, though, he had fallen off the mountain. Down Beat’s end-of-the-year poll for Best Male Singer, which Sinatra had easily topped since 1943, found him in the number-four spot, beneath Billy Eckstine, the leather-lunged Frankie Laine (“Mule Train”), and Bob—not Bing—Crosby.
Frank was still making big money—MGM paid him $325,833 that year—but as always, he spent it faster than it came in. Taxes were for chumps. The IRS respectfully disagreed. In her year-end wrap-up for Silver Screen, the columnist Sheilah Graham estimated that Sinatra had made $11 million in the last six years, yet he “not only can’t save anything but … is behind with his income tax.”
Frank’s solution was to buy a new house.
Holmby Hills, just north of Sunset and to the east of Beverly Glen, was a pricey enclave whose denizens included Loretta Young, Walt Disney, and Humphrey Bogart. Three-twenty North Carolwood Drive was a sprawling redbrick Mediterranean on three acres. There was no lake, but the summer heat didn’t settle in the way it did in the Valley, and the drive to MGM was just fifteen minutes instead of forty-five. The house cost a fortune—a quarter of a million in 1948 dollars—but then, that’s what movie stars had to pay for a house in those days.
Why the Sinatras moved just then is something of a mystery. They had paid a huge sum for the Palm Springs place not a year before, and Frank’s career was on the downswing. What’s more, he was in love. But as always, no matter his circumstances, he liked to have the best of everything. Still, however nice the new digs, the uprooting must have been difficult. Nancy junior, eight at the time of the move, writes that her father bought 320 North Carolwood “to be nearer his work so that he could spend more time at home.” This sounds more hopeful than realistic. A photograph from the period shows Sinatra sitting in an armchair holding baby Tina as his adoring family surrounds him: Big Nancy at one shoulder; Little Nancy at the other, gazing at her sister; little Frank is resting his elbow on Dad’s knee. Frank himself is directing a ghastly fake smile at his young son (maybe the needy Frankie was already starting to get on his nerves). He looks as if he can’t wait to get the hell out of there.
Tina, always more clear-eyed than her sister about her father’s character, has a different take on the move to Holmby Hills: it was, she writes, a move “up in the world.” This rings truer. If Frank couldn’t act w
ith Bogart, at least he could live across the street from him.
Yet he was restless and discontent. He was recording again, but not well. The yearlong layoff during the AFM strike, in combination with the weekly travesty of Your Hit Parade, had eroded not just his artistic confidence but his relationship with Axel Stordahl. The two men weren’t making magic anymore; they were just making music, much of it not very good. The week before Christmas, in his first post-strike recording with Sibelius, the all too appropriately titled “Comme Ci Comme Ça,” Sinatra’s voice seems utterly without conviction:
And this was what he was leaving. The Sinatras at home, 1948. (photo credit 22.2)
It seems my friends have been complaining,
They say that I’ve been acting rude.
At this moment, unfortunately, the lyrics—filled with petulant world-weariness, the ennui that sets in when a grand passion is absent—fit him like a glove.
“It wasn’t a very happy Christmas in 1948,” Big Nancy recalled, “but it was the cutest card I’d ever seen.” Cute, yes: the card was a cheery cartoon of a Christmas tree, with photos of the family members printed inside globe ornaments. Little Nancy and Frankie each occupied one of the upper globes; underneath, Big Nancy and baby Tina cuddled cozily inside one ornament, and Frank—all alone—grinned from another.
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Jimmy Van Heusen with Ava and Frank, early 1950s. (photo credit 23.1)
Look at him! Who you got waitin’ for ya in New York? Ava Gardner?
—Jules Munshin, as Ozzie, to Gene Kelly’s character, Gabey, in On the Town
It hadn’t been a very happy Christmas thanks to Frank’s extreme emotional distance—an air of distraction that drifted in more and more often, like a fog bank, at which point he would simply walk out of the house to God knew where. Nancy finally admitted to herself that whatever he promised, whatever he bought her, he was never going to change. Out in the world, Sheilah and Hedda and Louella were stepping up the drumbeat about his affairs. Years later, Nancy junior wrote:
One day while I was playing dress-up in Mom’s dressing room, I climbed up on a chair to get a shoe box off a shelf and knocked to the floor a stack of magazines that Mom had hidden in her closet. I sat down in the midst of the pile. They were movie magazines like Photoplay and Modern Screen, and they were filled with pictures of Dad and … Mom and Frankie and Baby Tina and me. There were also pictures of Dad with other ladies. I remember Marilyn Maxwell and Lana Turner. I was devastated.
For a long time Frank’s wife had shielded herself from the extent of his infidelities, but more and more she realized, with a sorrowful but hardened resignation, that just about everything she’d heard or imagined was true. He came and went as he pleased and did exactly what he wanted, with whomever he wanted. Nancy tried to busy herself with fixing up 320 North Carolwood, but there were times when she couldn’t take it anymore. At those times she would phone George Evans and complain; Evans would listen sympathetically and tell her he’d talk to Frank. And he did talk to Frank, for all the good it did.
At a January engagement party for Mel Tormé and the Columbia starlet Candy Toxton, Frank and Jimmy Van Heusen showed up uninvited (and in Frank’s case, loaded). Sinatra was carrying a magnum of champagne wrapped in ribbon. “Here ya go, Mel. Happy Birthday,” he said, handing the bottle to the younger singer—whose birthday had been in September—and calling loudly for the bride-to-be, on whom he apparently had a crush. “The moment Candy saw him walk in,” Tormé recalled, “she rushed up the stairs to my bedroom and locked herself in.” Tormé ran up the stairs,
on the heels of Sinatra, who announced that he wanted to “wash up.” He went into my bathroom, tried the door to my bedroom, found it locked, and began to bang on the door. Invited or not, he was a guest in my home, so I tried to reason with him …
He tossed an expletive at me and continued to pound on the door. I heard Candy, inside my bedroom, say, in a small, rather sad voice, “Go away, Frank, please.” Van Heusen, a true gent, shamefacedly came up the stairs and pried Frank away from the bedroom door.
“Come on, Frank. Let’s go,” he pleaded.
“No,” Sinatra said sullenly. “Wanna see Candy.”
I gritted my teeth. I could now hear Candy crying in the bedroom. “Frank, I think you’d better get out of here,” I said.
Van Heusen tugged at his arm. “Yeah, he’s right, pal. Let’s go.” Frank hesitated at the top of the stairs and gave me one hard look. Buddy Rich told me that Sinatra was able to handle himself pretty well, and I sure as hell did not want to tangle with him.
Frank stormed out of the house.
When he was drunk, which was more and more often these days, he was a law unto himself. Evans saw it happening and despaired, then he too grew resigned. Around this time, Earl Wilson ran into the publicist at the Copacabana:
I found [him] in a grave mood. “I make a prediction,” Evans said across the table in the lounge. “Frank is through. A year from now you won’t hear anything about him.”
“Come on,” I protested to the man who’d done more than anybody to make him famous.
“He’ll be dead professionally,” Evans said. “I’ve been around the country, looking and listening. They’re not going to see his pictures. They’re not buying his records. They don’t care for Frank Sinatra anymore!”
“But you’re the fellow that’s supposed to whet up that yearning for him, aren’t you?” I asked.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Evans said. “You know how much I’ve talked to him about the girls. The public knows about the trouble with Nancy, and the other dames, and it doesn’t like him anymore.”
“I can’t believe that,” I said.
“In a year,” Evans reiterated, “he’ll be through.”
In January, MGM celebrated its Silver Jubilee by gathering fifty-seven of its biggest stars, including Lassie, for a historic group photograph. There they sat (except for Lassie, who stood in front), in chairs arranged on bleachers on a soundstage, row on row of them, Tracy and Hepburn and Gable and Astaire and Garland and Durante and Errol Flynn, living proof that the great studio had, if not quite more stars than in the heavens, then at least more than anyone else. Wearing an unflattering light gray suit and looking oddly pallid (and distinctly balding), Sinatra sat at the far right in the second-to-last row, in between Ginger Rogers and Red Skelton (who had broken everyone up when he walked in, calling out, “Okay, kids, the part’s taken, you can go home now”). Ava sat front and center in the second row, between Clark Gable and Judy Garland, strangely sedate in her blue suit and pearls and bright red lipstick. Her hands, clutching a pair of red gloves, lay demurely folded in her lap.
Appearances—as was always the case where the movies were concerned—were deceiving. As was the distance that separated Ava and Frank in the bleachers.
When she drove onto the studio lot that day, Gardner recalled, “a car sped past me, swung in front, and slowed down so much I had to pass it myself. The car overtook me again and repeated the process. Having done this about three times, the car finally pulled alongside me, the grinning driver raised his hat and sped away to the same photo session. That was Frank. He could even flirt in a car.”
The first weeks of February saw an escalating series of transcontinental shouting matches between Sinatra and George Evans, who was increasingly exasperated with his most famous client. Evans, who had eyes and ears everywhere, knew about Ava. And by early 1949, the publicist was at his wits’ end. When Frank wasn’t yelling at him over the phone, Nancy was. She wanted George to do the impossible: Make him change. Bring him back.
Evans had worked wonders before, but in Ava Gardner he saw real trouble. He was sure she didn’t care whose life she destroyed, whose home she wrecked. Evans had gotten a whiff of her heedlessness. “Do you suck?” she liked to ask strangers, when shaking hands for the first time. Lana Turner had been a different story: At least she cared about her career. There was leverage. Gardner cared about nothing except
having a good time. She was that most dangerous of creatures, a gorgeous nihilist.
Frank, for his part, had made up his mind about her years before when he saw her on the cover of a movie magazine. “I’m going to marry that girl,” he remarked to a friend—forgetting, for the moment, that he already was married. Now when Evans told him, over and over, that he couldn’t have her, that she was bad news, that she would drag him and his career down, Sinatra reacted much as he had when Manie Sacks had informed him that he had to pay for his own arrangements—with complete outrage and absolute assurance.
Despite Jack Keller’s heroic efforts on Sinatra’s behalf, Frank demanded that Evans fire his West Coast counterpart. The main problem was that while Keller was an energetic publicist, he lacked subservience. Jerry Lewis, who employed Keller for many years, laughed when he recalled the press agent’s insolence: “I’d say, ‘How come you didn’t get my name in the paper this week?’ And Jack would say, ‘I kept it out, you putz.’ ” Keller’s first reaction when Sinatra phoned from Indio at 3:00 a.m. to say “We’re in trouble” had been: “How can I be in trouble when all night I’ve just been lying here in bed?”
Yet Evans steadfastly resisted firing Keller, who was really just the whipping boy: Frank’s real beef was with George Evans. At the end of February, Sinatra finally called it quits with the man who, in many ways, had made him Sinatra.
In March, Take Me Out to the Ball Game came out, to tepid reviews. “Don’t be surprised,” Crowther wrote, “if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.” The movies were providing diminishing returns for Sinatra, but with not much else going on in his career, he needed that MGM paycheck. At the end of the month he got back into a sailor suit and began shooting On the Town, with Gene Kelly, who was co-directing the film with Stanley Donen. For the first time on one of his movies with Sinatra, Kelly would get first billing. Not only were Frank’s fortunes falling, but he was thirty-three, not so young in those days. The thinness that had once seemed so cute was now something more like gauntness: with age and trouble, his face was growing harder. “He just didn’t seem comfortable with his looks,” said Betty Garrett, who co-starred with him on both Ball Game and On the Town. MGM cosmeticians had to do extensive work on him every morning, augmenting his hairline, filling in his facial scars, even padding the posterior of his sailor pants to give a more pleasing contour to Sinatra’s totally flat fanny.
