by James Kaplan
Bobby and I had a house on the beach, and so Frank and Ava would be there all the time. We would be sitting in the living room and hear them upstairs in the bedroom quarreling and arguing. Ava would scream at Frank and he would slam the door and storm downstairs. Minutes later we’d smell a very sweet fragrance coming from the stairs. Ava had decided she wasn’t mad anymore, and so she sprayed the stairwell with her perfume. Frank would smell it and race back up to the bedroom. Then it would be hours before he’d come back down.
It’s like something out of Wild Kingdom.
“She was like a Svengali to him,” Skitch Henderson said. “She was an enigma. A mysterious presence. You didn’t quite know how she had done it to him, and I’m not sure I wanted to know. She was ruthless with him. And it used to affect his mood a great deal. It could be horrible to be with him then. Her acid tongue and her ability to just put you away. If ever I knew a tiger, or a panther … I’m trying to think of an animal that would describe her … To be honest—I didn’t let anyone on to this—but I did what I could to stay out of her way. I was scared to death of her.”
She was a pisser. She scared the shit outta me. Never knew what she’d hate that I’d do. Frank must have found the similarity to the first woman in his life unspeakably exciting. Some part of him was still that little boy, not knowing if he’d get a hug or a rap with the nightstick.
For all Ava’s autobiographical professions of eternal love, she had trouble with intimacy. When she got it—and she’d got plenty since she’d first arrived in Hollywood—she didn’t feel she was worthy of it. And so when a man fell in love with her, she reciprocated for a little while, then she began to torment him.
Jealousy was their emotional ammunition. They both understood it. Frank could trigger it in her literally with the blink of an eye, so conditioned was he to scanning any crowded restaurant or nightclub or party and possessing any beauty he saw.
His suspicions about Ava were better founded. She had it all worked out: if he wouldn’t leave his wife, she told him, she was free to do whatever she wanted. She toyed with her old flame Howard Duff, who was desperate for her. She teased Howard Hughes, who continued to have her followed. She stepped out with a minor gangster named Johnny Stompanato (who would meet his sad end, years later, at the hands of Lana Turner’s daughter). She had a little fling with her co-star in My Forbidden Past, Robert Mitchum. He went back to his wife, whose secret was: she always took him back.
The infidelities—if you could call them that—diverted her momentarily and had their desired effect on Sinatra, stoking his passions. And she had to hand it to him: his fury made the anger of her other lovers pale in comparison. As did his wandering eye. They screamed at each other, they chased each other from room to room, breaking things, and then, their bodies still abuzz with anger, they had the most amazing makeup sex that (they were quite sure) anyone had ever had.
Set against all this, what were the demands of marital duty and family life? Background noise. This was a passion that not only scorched everything in its path but demanded absolute and constant attention. When Frank went to New York City in early December for the premiere of On the Town, Ava went too. Strikingly, Manie Sacks, cool and correct toward Sinatra just three months before, let the lovebirds stay in his suite at the Hampshire House: maybe he was feeling guilty. Big changes were afoot in his professional life, changes that would affect Frank profoundly.
On December 8, Frank and Ava attended the Broadway premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: book by Joseph Fields and Anita Loos, songs (including the suddenly all too appropriate “Bye Bye Baby”) by Leo Robin and Jule Styne. The pair, with the protective coloration of another couple (Manie and a date), tried their best to blend in with the first-night crowd at the Ziegfeld Theatre. Inside, Sinatra and Gardner laughed and held hands as they listened to the newcomer Carol Channing cooing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Afterward, along with Manie and his lady friend, they ducked into a car and disappeared. The photographers and gossip columnists waiting outside the Ziegfeld (New York had a half-dozen daily papers, only one of which, the Times, refused to stoop to scandalmongering) shook their heads and stared at each other. Was this what it looked like? Remarkably, the papers held off. For the time being. The next morning, in the “Celebs About Town” section of his column, Walter Winchell, after taking note of “Quentin Reynolds and Heywood Broun’s widder having a lobby confab at the Algonquin,” mentioned “Ava Gardner Period.”
It was as if the columnist were biting his tongue, waiting to see what developed.
Nancy Sinatra, wired in as she was to the Hollywood gossip network, already knew. In fact, she had known about Ava for months: almost since the beginning. What was most hurtful to her was the fact that soon everyone else would know, too. That was the hardest thing about being married to Frank Sinatra—whatever he did, everybody seemed to find out about it pretty quickly.
This time Nancy made her decision: the comedy of endless breaches, hollow promises, and public reconciliations was over. She loved Frank, but finally, whether she admitted it to herself or not, she hated him, too. He was ultimately impossible. Her faith told her that Frank Sinatra was her cross to bear, forever, whether they were together or apart. Her faith also didn’t allow divorce. But from here on they would no longer live as husband and wife. It was as simple as that: she had her pride, and her children, to consider.
Dolly Sinatra, who met Ava at the On the Town movie premiere, was delighted. She had never liked Nancy much to begin with, and over the last half-dozen years Frank’s wife, with her new teeth and her new gowns and her abiding sense of holier-than-thou, had earned her outright enmity. This Ava Gardner, though, was something else. Three nights later at the Copa, at the thirty-fourth-birthday party the nightclub manager Jack Entratter threw for Frank, the two women got to talk for a few minutes. And Dolly loved every bit of it. Ava drank and swore like a sailor, and Dolly Sinatra could keep right up with her. At the same time—this was the amazing thing—the girl was just stupefyingly beautiful. In Dolly’s travels around Hudson County, she had run across plenty of dirty girls with dirty mouths, yet with the pretty ones, and especially the beauties, butter mostly wouldn’t melt. But this one! Dolly, like everyone else in the Copa, couldn’t take her eyes off her. And Ava wore her gorgeousness so lightly, smoked her cigarettes so offhandedly, swore so fluently, and laughed so raucously that Dolly fell as hard as her son had. She pinched his skinny cheek and congratulated him on the great fuckin’ girl he’d landed.
Frank smiled at Dolly, too happy to be angry with her (Dolly’s demands for money had stepped up as his bank account dwindled). His every waking hour—there weren’t many sleeping ones—was occupied with thinking of her, seeing her, making love with her, fighting with her, making up with her.
In truth, he was running ragged. In between obsessive bouts with Ava, there were very bad fights with Nancy. Work—what little there was of it—was going badly too. Back in California, on Light Up Time, two days after Christmas, he sailed into an up-tempo, jazz-combo arrangement of Brown, DeSylva, and Henderson’s “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” (“You’re the salt in my stew”) like a ship without a rudder, fast and out of tune and not seeming to care much. Then, in the second chorus, he simply blew the lyric. “You’re the starch in my collar,” he repeated, like a man sleepwalking. “I said that, didn’t I,” he remarked with a laugh, then tossed off the rest of the song, more of a walk-through than a performance.
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Frank arrives at the CBS Playhouse to rehearse for a radio show, mid 1940s. George Evans, in hat, flanks him; Manie Sacks is to the right, in dark coat. (photo credit 24.1)
Finally there was good news. On the Town got splendid reviews and, more important for MGM, did big business. Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s adaptation of their Broadway musical (originally a ballet by Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein called Fancy Free) made for a wonderful picture, a perfect piece of postwar exuberance. The story of three sailors
on leave in the big city sparkled, especially in its spectacular opening sequence, shot in Technicolor-glorious locales around New York. The performances by Kelly, Sinatra, Jules Munshin, Ann Miller, Betty Garrett, and Vera-Ellen were buoyant. But in the end the picture was Gene Kelly’s: Frank was really just along for the ride. Kelly got top billing. He not only co-directed and choreographed; he (along with Donen) had insisted, brilliantly, that they shoot on location in New York instead of on an MGM soundstage.1 It had cost a lot more, but the results were worth it. On the Town set box-office records at Radio City. “Never before has any motion picture grossed as much in one day in any theater anywhere,” exclaimed Motion Picture Daily.
Frank Sinatra wasn’t celebrating. He didn’t like being outshone by Kelly, and he hadn’t gotten to sing any important ballads in the film (he’d especially coveted the beautiful “Lonely Town,” but it had been jettisoned by the studio, along with most of the rest of Leonard Bernstein’s great score, and replaced with chirpier songs by the less than great Roger Edens). But mostly he was tired of putting on a sailor suit. He said so loudly, and Louis B. Mayer had big ears. There was another big problem: Ava Gardner. Mayer’s stars misbehaved all the time, and, LB knew, often with each other, but most of them had the good sense to keep it hidden from the public. These two simply didn’t give a damn. It got under Mayer’s skin. It was a direct challenge to his power, and with the rise of television and the fall of MGM’s profits, power was something that Louis B. Mayer was fretting about constantly.
And so—much given to saber rattling these days—Mayer had warned months earlier that Sinatra’s contract was in jeopardy, as was Ava’s, if the two didn’t stop their carryings-on.
Frank at least had the good sense to take stock of his career at the beginning of 1950, and everything he saw worried him. In the middle of January he flew to New York and, after taking in Lena Horne’s show at the Copacabana, sat down for a 4:00 a.m. cup of coffee with George Evans.
Evans represented both the Copa and Horne, who was making $60,000 a week there. Lena Horne’s career was booming; Sinatra’s, not. He told Evans all about Ava; he laid his cards on the table. There had been many women, but he had never felt this way before. He was going to marry this girl. Evans stared at him through the tortoise-rimmed glasses, speechless for a change. He let Sinatra talk it out. Finally Frank put down his coffee cup, looked Evans in the eye, and said he needed his help.
It was a very tall order, one that both Sinatra and Evans knew only Evans could handle. The publicist extended his hand, and Frank took it.
Nancy had first confronted Frank at Christmas. He denied nothing, but told his wife angrily that she was blowing the whole Ava business out of proportion. When she pursued the matter, he insisted he didn’t want to talk about it—and Nancy, for the sake of Christmas, let it go. She stewed through the holiday, though, and when Frank got back from New York in January (she suspected he had gone for another assignation), she let him have it.
Technically on solid ground—Ava had been in Los Angeles while he visited Evans—Frank defended himself angrily, but Nancy’s anger was white-hot: she opened his closet, grabbed a handful of his sports jackets, opened their bedroom window, and threw them out. By this time the noise had awakened the children and Little Nancy was pounding on the door. Frank’s wife stared at him in fury. Did he see what he was doing to the children? Did he see?
Frank opened the bedroom door, kissed his terrified daughter on the head, and, without looking back, walked out. The next morning, Sanicola and Al Silvani came and—apologizing fervently to Nancy—removed a carload of Frank’s clothing, shoes, and toiletries and took it to his office on South Robertson, where he had spent the night.
To put some money in the bank (so he could send it right out to the IRS), Sinatra was doing live appearances again, for the first time in two years. In December he had surprised himself and his agents by breaking records at the State Theater in Hartford, grossing $18,000 for two nights; now MCA had signed him for a similarly plush gig at a gigantic, brand-new hotel in Houston, the Shamrock. The place had been built by a legendary wildcatter named Glenn McCarthy, the model for the James Dean character in Giant: those were the days when Texas oilmen strode the earth, making big things happen. On Thursday the twenty-sixth, Frank and Van Heusen set out from Van Nuys Airport in Chester’s plane. When they landed to refuel in El Paso, an airport manager in a leather jacket ran out onto the tarmac and handed Frank a piece of paper bearing an urgent message: he must call George Evans’s office in New York at once.
A secretary answered the phone, her voice trembling. Evans was dead. He had stepped out of the shower that morning in his Bronx apartment, said he didn’t feel well, and collapsed of a heart attack. He was forty-eight. The rumor emerged that he had gotten into a loud argument with a reporter the night before, about Sinatra. It was easy to get into arguments about Sinatra, especially when you had to stick up for him relentlessly. Evans had had a long career of it—seven years, not counting their brief separation. But sticking up for Sinatra and Ava Gardner was another matter.
Devastated, Frank let the Shamrock know he was canceling and had Van Heusen fly him to New York for the funeral, even though he loathed funerals. Evans had meant more to Frank than any other man except Manie; he had been a friend and tireless champion, the architect of his career. “I’m quite sure that when Frank learned of his death, the first thought that swept through [his] mind was: ‘Thank God, we made up,’ ” Ed Sullivan wrote in his Little Old New York column, a few days later.
It’s pretty to think so. What feels more plausible is that Frank’s first thought was: My God, I killed him. Sinatra may have been incapable of apology, but guilt was a key part of his makeup. Money was usually the solution. The day after the funeral, Frank sent Evans’s widow the $14,000 that he owed the press agent. In the weeks to come, he would put Evans’s son Philip, who had recently made George a proud grandfather, on the Sinatra payroll for life.
The same issue of Billboard that announced George Evans’s death bore the news that Manie Sacks was leaving Columbia Records for RCA. Victor had been pursuing Sacks for months, and given the cataclysmic changes at Columbia—Dinah Shore and Mitchell Ayres both gone to the rival label; Buddy Clark dead;2 Sinatra a walking shadow—Sacks must have felt the timing was right. He was forty-seven years old, getting on, and RCA, in red-hot competition with Columbia, was offering real money.
Sacks would have no official replacement as manager of popular repertoire at Columbia, but in February the label brought in a new head for its pop-singles division: Mitch Miller.
George was gone, Manie was gone, but business was business: Frank rescheduled the Shamrock gig for the first week of February. On the sixth, he and Van Heusen flew from New York to Houston—and unbeknownst to Frank, Ava, in Hollywood, decided impulsively to go meet him. Following MGM protocol, she put in a request to the studio to make the trip. Mayer sent down the word: no. She went anyway. Gardner biographer Lee Server wrote:
She arrived late for his performance, the house lights down, but even in the dark she caught every eye and provoked a stir of excited whispers across the entire room. When he saw her Sinatra beamed as if he had been hit with a hot red spotlight. If the audience wondered about a possible relationship between the two stars, Sinatra did little to disconnect the dots, compulsively directing each song directly to Ava as if everyone else in the room had gone home.
After the show, the mayor of Houston, Oscar Holcombe, took Frank, Ava, Van Heusen, and several others to dinner at an Italian restaurant, Vincent’s Sorrento. It wasn’t a spontaneous decision: Holcombe’s office had made a reservation—and the restaurant’s owner, delighted at the prospect of such spectacular glamour descending on his establishment, had tipped off the Houston Post, which dispatched a photographer. The next morning the wires reported:
Frank Sinatra squired Siren Ava Gardner to dinner last night and almost got a chance to show off his fancy footwork in the art of fisticuffs … I
n the middle of his spaghetti Houston Press Photographer Eddie Schisser approached the table to ask Sinatra to pose for a quick shot.
“I’d like to take your picture eating spaghetti,” Schisser said.
Unsmilingly, the bantam singer said he wasn’t having his picture taken, with or without spaghetti.
Schisser reminded him that it would “take only 30 seconds,” and Sinatra shoved back his chair, as if about to rise.
Nobody heard exactly what was said, but a few uncomplimentary phrases allegedly were passed by both sides as the management moved in to maintain equilibrium.
Miss Gardner tried to cover her face with her hands.
George Evans, freshly laid in his grave, was already spinning in it.
It was the first in what would be a lifelong series of such conflagrations with the press, and in a very real way the subtraction of Evans (and even the departure of Manie) made it all possible. The requisite accelerants were present: the interrupted meal; Sinatra’s powerful but scarcely admitted guilt (he would later call going out publicly with Ava “a major mistake,” then said, “But I was so in love I didn’t care”); his generally battered self-esteem. And then there was (again relevantly) the casual, barely understood ethnic insensitivity of the times: an Italian-American should be photographed eating spaghetti, the same way an African-American, in 1950, would be photographed eating watermelon. Sinatra didn’t like it a bit, nor should he have.
But far more damaging than the flare-up itself was the national publicity. For Nancy Sinatra, who had held a scrap of hope that her husband might come to his senses and return to his home, this was her final humiliation. That afternoon she called a hardware store and had the locks changed at 320 North Carolwood.
