by James Kaplan
The psychiatrist was titillated to be treating the most famous entertainer in the world. “Of all Greenson’s interests,” wrote Marilyn Monroe’s biographer Donald Spoto, “it was the nature and burden of fame that seems to have most intrigued him and celebrities to whom he was most attracted. This was a recurring theme in his life’s work.” In a paper titled “Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous,” Greenson wrote: “I have found the impatience of the budding star and the fading film stars to be the most difficult with whom I have tried to work.”
All Frank would have wanted to talk about, of course, was Ava, and the doctor would have been very interested—maybe a little too interested for Sinatra’s taste. But there was another subject that Greenson also would certainly have wanted to discuss, behind the closed but not altogether soundproof door of his home study—one that would’ve made Frank quite uncomfortable: namely, the first woman in his life.
As for Marilyn Monroe: December 1953 was the closest she and Frank would ever come to working together. But having ground out a half-dozen pictures for 20th Century Fox over the past couple of years (most recently and unpleasantly, River of No Return and There’s No Business Like Show Business), at what she considered wage-slave pay and always in the formulaic role of the Dumb Blonde, Monroe had decided to dig in her heels on Pink Tights. Her fame was rising; she wanted more money and better roles. She had seen the script, a silly remake of a silly 1943 Betty Grable movie called Coney Island: Monroe would play a turn-of-the-century cabaret singer, and Sinatra, a smooth-talking con man. It was a lark, but the only thing in it for her was the usual pouting and eye widening. To compound the insult, Fox had signed Sinatra for $5,000 a week, more than three times her $1,500 weekly salary as a contract player.
She was due at the studio on December 15 for the commencement of principal photography. She stayed home. So did Frank. But in truth, he was in a hurry to get out of town.
In the meantime, it was Christmas shopping season, sunny and in the seventies in Beverly Hills, and Louella Parsons was gratified to note that Frank had been spotted making the rounds of local shops with thirteen-year-old Nancy Sandra—who, Earl Wilson noted with mild horror, already had beaux.
A few days later, Louella gushed: “It wouldn’t surprise me one mite if Frank Sinatra moved home. He’s there all the time to see the children and they are just crazy about him.”
She was in high officious-biddy mode, lobbying, as always, for uprightness and solid family values amid the swirling Gomorrah of Hollywood. Frank’s kids were lobbying too, fighting hard to hold on to him, since he was around anyway and Christmas was coming.
But the smile on Big Nancy’s face whenever he stopped by reminded him of that chick in the painting by da Vinci.
To try to calm down, he spent some money. He went into Teitelbaum’s on Rodeo Drive and bought a white mink coat to take with him to Rome. Three weeks on Pink Tights would pay for it. He had the furrier stitch the initials AGS into the lining.
Except Ava wasn’t going to be in Rome on Christmas. When he phoned her on Tuesday morning, the twenty-second (having gotten up at eleven—the crack of dawn, for him—to try to catch her before she headed out for cocktails at 8:00 p.m.), Ava informed him, somewhat testily, that she was going to Madrid for the holiday.
He responded just as testily. Who the fuck was in Madrid?
The Grants, if he must know. Frank and Doreen.
A long, pinging, staticky silence; the international operator straining to hear.
Ava finally spoke. She would be back in Rome on Saturday or Sunday.
He protested. But Christmas was Friday. Her birthday the day before.
She really had to get going.
United Press reached her the following morning to ask if she and Frank might be planning a holiday reconciliation.
She wasn’t sure if she would put it that way.
Had she spoken to him?
She had. She proceeded to recount the conversation, in slightly different form. It had been entirely amicable, and she had arranged to cut her visit to Madrid short so she could meet Frank in Rome on Saturday or Sunday.
The reporter was scrawling, fast, in his notebook. So we could still say a holiday reconciliation.
“I’ll be so happy to see him again,” Ava said.
Frank had left Tuesday night, checking the two huge white suitcases that he took everywhere, but carrying the presents—an armful, including the big white Teitelbaum’s box: he didn’t want to risk some baggage handler snatching that. It was an overnight flight from Los Angeles to New York, a three-hour layover, then another ten-hour leg from Idlewild to Heathrow. Another layover, then three hours to Rome. These were the pre-jet days, propellers droning on the big Constellation, bumping along with the weather in the lower stratosphere, four hundred miles an hour tops, even with a tailwind. A lot of time to read, to try to sleep, to smoke and drink and worry. He chewed gum, he stared out the window, he drummed his fingers on the armrest. A lot of time to be impatient.
And to change his mind: he’d bought a ticket to Rome, but he had decided to go to Madrid.
The reporters were waiting at Heathrow.
“I’m going to spend Christmas with my wife,” he said, walking fast toward customs as two redcaps laden with bags did their best to keep up. The pack of newsmen walked with him.
“I never talk about my personal affairs, but yes, my wife is expecting me.”
The cheeky chap from News of the World chased him. Frank chewed his gum and walked straight ahead. A BOAC representative, tall with gray brushed-back hair and a large triangular nose, caught up with him.
“I gotta get to Madrid,” Frank said. “The first flight, even if I have to stand all the way.”
But he was ticketed to Rome, and the flights to Madrid were full.
While the customs people looked through his bags, he paced the terrazzo floor of the hall, back and forth, back and forth, for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. He sent a cable to Ava in Madrid, saying he would be there by evening. He was standing with his hands on his hips, tapping his foot, when the BOAC man finally returned. The flights were full.
Croydon Airport was fifteen miles away.
Chartering a twin-engine plane to Madrid would cost 160 pounds—about $440, a month’s wages for a fairly well-off English office worker. Frank took out a thick wad of bills, pointed at one of the redcaps.
He grabbed a cab to Croydon.
Ava had spent her first couple of weeks in Rome preparing for The Barefoot Contessa: being fitted for costumes, finding an apartment, hiring a maid and an assistant, socializing with Bogart and Mankiewicz, making a splash on the Via Veneto. She even read that script—which, she was surprised to find, she loved. Not only was Mankiewicz a superbly witty writer, but her part was wonderful: she was to play Maria Vargas, an international woman of mystery who goes from dancing in a sleazy Madrid cabaret to marrying one of the richest men in the world. She would get to wear peasant costumes and ball gowns and seduce every man in sight.
The bit about Madrid caught her eye. It was as if Mankiewicz had been reading her mind. Spain was the place she now knew she loved most in the world, and she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the handsome bullfighter Dominguín since she’d met him in January. And so, since shooting wasn’t to start till after the holidays, she made a beeline for the Spanish capital, to soak up some sun while she stayed at the villa of her expat friends Frank and Doreen Grant, but primarily to find Dominguín.
There was an urgency about Ava’s actions over Christmas that year. She was about to turn thirty-one—then a far more advanced age for a woman (and especially a movie star) than now; also, as her biographer has written, she had been without a sexual partner for months. Frank’s cable had come at a most unwelcome moment. “She was,” Lee Server writes, “not a little distressed over Frank’s pursuit, could not trust her resolve in the face of his determination, and so felt a pressing need to affirm a new romantic alliance right the
n, before anyone could do anything to stop it.” She had edged out Dominguín’s beautiful young girlfriend within hours of arriving in town—child’s play—and in short order (“just hours before Sinatra’s arrival,” according to Server) had shacked up with the torero at the Hotel Wellington.
The newspapers always delighted in noting when Frank and Ava failed to meet each other at this or that airport, but her absence when Frank’s chartered plane landed in Madrid on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, her birthday, had nothing to do with pique: she was making love with Dominguín in their hotel suite at the time. The inopportune arrival of a lady’s old beau just as she has taken up with a new one may seem like the stuff of commedia dell’arte or a farce by Feydeau, but the next few days were characterized less by romantic intrigue than by anger and sadness between the two former lovers, combined with the low-grade misery of keeping up appearances.
That night the two sat on the floor in the Grants’ living room, exchanging presents and singing carols, Frank glancing at Ava, Ava avoiding Frank’s glance. Right in the middle of the festivities United Press phoned. Frank gritted his teeth and took the call. “I hope to spend Christmas with my wife the same way millions of people [do] all over the world,” he told the reporter.
Was he going back to Rome with Ava?
He couldn’t say.
Did that mean Frank didn’t know, or he wouldn’t talk about it?
He couldn’t say.
So great was the strain that he came down with a miserable cold the next morning. And she, in her fury at him for descending on her, fell ill, too.
She shouted an obscenity, sneezing and smashing her fist into the pillow. Dominguín didn’t need a translation. And he understood when she explained she would have to go back to Rome with Sinatra. She would make sure he returned to America as soon as possible, then she would call for Luis Miguel to join her.
AVA GARDNER, SINATRA SILENT ON RECONCILIATION, read the December 30 wire-service headline, datelined Rome.
Actress Ava Gardner, in bed with the flu shortly after resuming housekeeping with husband Frank Sinatra, was reported “feeling much better today.”
A doctor said she probably would be able to leave her apartment to keep several appointments later today.
Miss Gardner went to bed yesterday several hours after she and Sinatra arrived in Rome from Madrid. He flew from the United States and followed her to Spain for Christmas, giving rise to reports of a reconciliation.
On arrival here, they went straight to the actress’ luxurious apartment on the fashionable Corso d’Italia, but neither would comment on whether she is abandoning her previously announced plans to get a divorce.
Reached by telephone, Sinatra gave no hint of love or romance. Asked about a reconciliation, he snapped:
“This doesn’t concern anyone but us. This is nobody’s business but our own.”
Twentieth Century Fox was frantically trying to keep Pink Tights alive. Monroe’s and Sinatra’s salaries were being paid week after week, but nothing was happening. Darryl F. Zanuck was struggling to keep the film on track, but both stars were out of town and preoccupied: Marilyn holed up in San Francisco with the man she was about to marry, Joe DiMaggio; Frank in Rome, “trying to work things out” with his wife, as he kept cabling Fox.
With the press camped outside, Frank and Ava spent three days sequestered in her apartment, drinking, talking, shouting (not quite as loudly as they used to), even taking a shot at making up, without much success. She told him apologetically that she still felt like shit—but they both knew her health had nothing to do with it.
Rome, December 29, 1953. Sick, miserable, and about to be a couple no more. (photo credit 38.2)
They threw a New Year’s Eve party—Ava’s idea—at the Via Veneto cabaret run by Cole Porter’s legendary muse Bricktop. Getting out of the apartment was a relief, as was being around other people—even if they barely knew the other guests: Eddie O’Brien and Rossano Brazzi plus some of the crew from her movie, dissolute Roman society nobs and equally dissolute expatriates and a few people from the embassy. Loud music, close quarters, lots of smoke; the usual requests for Frank to sing. He shook his head sadly. Sitting on his lap, Ava tried to cheer him up, amid the forced gaiety and phony sentimentality (1954! who knew what it would bring?). But when she and Frank kissed at the stroke of midnight, the tears running down her cheeks were quite real.
On Monday morning he sneaked off to the airport, leaving by a service entrance to avoid the reporters, and flew back to America alone.
39
Humphrey Bogart and Ava at a cocktail party for their film The Barefoot Contessa, Rome, early 1954. Frank was in Hollywood, 7,000 miles away, still pining for her. (photo credit 39.1)
While Frank was in the air, on Monday, January 4, Capitol released Songs for Young Lovers as a ten-inch LP, containing the eight songs from the November 5 and 6 sessions: “My Funny Valentine,” “The Girl Next Door,” “A Foggy Day,” and “Like Someone in Love” on side one; “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Little Girl Blue,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and “Violets for Your Furs” on side two. It was Frank’s first album since Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra on Columbia over three years earlier.
The cover of Sing and Dance had shown a hatless Frank (with a full head of hair), looking neat and collegiate in a striped necktie and light-colored jacket, smiling amiably against a bouncy pink background, complete with a couple’s dancing feet. The cover of Young Lovers established a new, infinitely moodier Sinatra: against a dark background, the singer, in a dark suit and fedora, stood under a lamppost, a lonely figure with a cigarette, looking meditative while a pair of couples promenaded by. Sinatra and the young lovers were in separate universes—he was their serenader, not their friend.
George Siravo had arranged seven of the eight songs, but Nelson Riddle, the arranger of “Like Someone in Love”—a master at expressing emotional complexity and sexual tension—was poised to carry the baton forward.
Frank was living the reality of that figure on the album cover. Arriving back at his Los Angeles apartment, he found he couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, didn’t feel like singing, and had little to do with his days besides see his headshrinker and do the radio show (“You may have heard it—if you’ve got a car,” he told a television audience, which, like most of America, wasn’t gathering around the radio in the living room anymore). On the movie front, Zanuck had suspended Monroe for noncompliance, and apart from pre-recording a couple of songs for Pink Tights, Frank didn’t have much to do besides collect his paycheck. If he picked up a newspaper, he could read reports that Ava, who’d told him that she wasn’t feeling well enough to see him off at the airport in Rome, had that very afternoon gone to the atelier of the sculptor Assen Peikov to begin posing, “in a chilly studio without much on,” for a statue to be used in The Barefoot Contessa. Oh, and by the way, other reports said that she’d taken up with Shelley Winters’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Vittorio Gassman.
Frank needed company, and fast, so he went to extreme measures: he moved Jule Styne into his apartment. “He literally moved me in,” Styne recalled. Sinatra simply went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the recently divorced composer was renting a bungalow, and had Styne’s belongings packed up and carted over to Beverly Glen.
The affable and energetic Styne was flattered—at first. The odd-couple arrangement would last for eight months in all, but it was a trial from the beginning. Frank thought and talked of little but Ava through the long days and nights. “I come home at night and the apartment is all dark,” Styne remembered.
I yell “Frank!” and he doesn’t answer. I walk into the living room and it’s like a funeral parlor. There are three pictures of Ava in the room and the only lights are three dim ones on the pictures. Sitting in front of them is Frank with a bottle of brandy. I say to him, “Frank, pull yourself together.” And he says, “Go ’way. Leave me alone.” Then all night he paces up and down and says, “I can’t sleep
, I can’t sleep.” At four o’clock in the morning I hear him calling someone on the telephone. It’s his first wife, Nancy. His voice is soft and quiet and I hear him say, “You’re the only one who understands me.” Then he paces up and down some more and maybe he reads, and he doesn’t fall asleep until the sun’s up. Big deal. You can have it.
Frank was in a sleep-deprived daze. Driving his Cadillac convertible through Beverly Hills one afternoon, he crashed into a small English sports car at an intersection. It was a mismatch. The collision threw the other driver, one Mrs. Myrna McClees, out of her vehicle and onto the pavement: she was taken to the hospital unconscious, with a fractured skull and lacerations. Frank swore he had come to a full stop and looked both ways before proceeding. The woman recovered; Frank stumbled on.
His ex-wife, too, felt his pain. “Nancy Sinatra’s pals are worried about the thin, drawn look that’s replaced the bright, happy air sported by the crooner’s ex for the last few years,” Erskine Johnson wrote in his column. “They blame it on Nancy’s involvement, through her kiddies, in Frank’s current mental depression.”
Maybe it also had something to do with those 4:00 a.m. phone calls. She was not only exhausted, but furious: She was propping him up, and for what? So he could make up for the thousandth time with that bimbo?
There had been times when the membrane between his private sorrows and his onstage persona was porous: when his depression undermined his timing, his presence, his voice itself. Lately, though, the stage was more and more a refuge. On January 17 he returned to The Colgate Comedy Hour, singing “Young at Heart” and “The Birth of the Blues” in fine style and bantering easily with the audience about the romantic elopement of Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe—which, unfortunately, had held up the movie Frank was supposed to be starring in with Miss Monroe, over at 20th Century Fox. He made a comically resigned face.
