All of this uneasiness came to a head on April 8, 1947, when Sinatra accosted Mortimer at Ciro’s in Hollywood, called him a “fruit,” and then decked him. As three of Frank’s “hangers-on,” fellows who acted as bodyguards, held down the hapless, skinny reporter, Frank punched away, calling him names and threatening him. “Next time I see you, I’ll kill you, you little degenerate.”
“Okay, I hit him,” Frank admitted to the press later. “I’m sorry that it happened, but I was raised in a tough neighborhood where you had to fight at the drop of a hat, and I couldn’t help myself.” Frank also said the writer had started the fight by calling him a “little dago bastard,” which Mortimer denied.
After the fracas, Mortimer had Frank Sinatra arrested and charged with assault and battery. The charge resulted in Sinatra’s gun permit being revoked. Bail was set at $500. Mortimer later sued for $25,000.
During the investigation of the assault, Frank didn’t come out well. The district attorney’s office concluded that no slur was spoken by Mortimer and that Sinatra had attacked him without provocation. Frank claimed that he had been told by an acquaintance that Mortimer had made the slur, that he actually hadn’t heard it himself. He now believed Mortimer hadn’t called him a dago after all, or so he said. He also stated that there was “probably no reason” for him to have struck the writer. The charges were dropped.
The Mortimer lawsuit was settled on June 4, 1947, the day before it was set to go to trial. Louis B. Mayer had become so annoyed with Sinatra’s histrionics that he insisted Frank settle with Mortimer by giving him $9,000, which he did. The court also ordered him to apologize.
After the Mortimer incident, George Evans did what he had become accustomed to in these sorts of imbroglios: He tried to salvage Sinatra’s image. This time he had Frank apologize to columnist Louella Parsons, saying, “I know I did many things I shouldn’t have, things I’m sorry for.” It was too late, though. As far as the public could tell, not only did Frank socialize with murderers and drug kingpins, but he also beat up defenseless reporters in Hollywood nightclubs because they wrote about it. “Why doesn’t Frankie just hang himself and get it over with?” an exasperated George Evans asked Nancy. “’Cause he’s killing himself anyway.” She couldn’t disagree.
In the spring of 1947, as part of Evans’s campaign to resurrect Frank’s public image, he had his client write “An Open Letter” to his fans, which was written on MGM studio letterhead and published in many magazines and newspapers. The long letter, signed “Gratefully yours, Frank Sinatra,” thanked his fans for supporting him throughout the time that he was “called a Red and the intimate chum of Lucky Luciano. Not a word of that happens to be true,” he wrote. “And thousands of you, in every city and town where these cowardly attacks on my character were published, threatened to quit reading these newspapers unless they played fair with me. Thanks to you the attacks ceased.”
In fact, the “attacks” would continue for years to come . . .
* * *
In May 1947, Frank Sinatra appeared at the Capitol Theatre in New York, where he had had his original success with Major Bowes in 1935. It was at this engagement that he had an epiphany of sorts. For years now, he had been living on the edge of rebellion, in a selfish daze, both personally and professionally. There had been so many incidents involving his volatile temper that people lost track of them. It didn’t matter that he was still making excellent records. His sales were down and his image was all but ruined by bad public relations.
Back in 1945, when Frank played the Paramount Theatre, he was mobbed by so many fans he couldn’t even leave the theater for dinner. “No one’s ever been this hot,” he boasted at the time. “This is gonna last forever.” Now three years had passed, and this time he walked out to a tepid reception from an opening-night crowd at the Capitol. After the show, he found only a few fans waiting for him at the stage door.
“This isn’t good,” a worried Frank told George Evans the next day at a meeting with members of the entourage and his wife, Nancy. “Pay some kids. Get them in here. What’s the matter with you?” he asked George.
“Frankie, let me ask you something,” George said. “You think you can do anything you want to do? Think you can say anything you want to say? Think you can tell everyone to go to hell? Well, right here is where you start paying, buddy boy. ‘Cause I couldn’t pay people to cheer for you right now. So what do you say to that?”
Frank didn’t know what to say. He turned to Nancy.
“Don’t look at me,” Nancy said abruptly. “I don’t know what to tell you, Frank. What do you expect from me?”
Frank just looked at his wife blankly. “Not much, I guess,” he said, his head hanging low. “I guess I got no right to expect much, do I?”
Part Four
THE AVA YEARS
Ava Gardner
By 1947, the dynamic of Frank’s marriage to Nancy was more complex than ever. Though he was increasingly restless, he still loved her in his own way and enjoyed being with her and the children. “Dad made a dramatic turnaround,” Tina Sinatra—who wouldn’t be born until 1948—recalled. “He kept his road trips briefer and threw himself into home life. By day he was absorbed in his children. By night he was courting Mom all over again with dinner and dancing at Ciro’s. He was really trying. He would make this marriage work in spite of himself.” Indeed, the result of Frank’s renewed interest in his marriage was that Nancy became pregnant again. This time, she decided to have the baby. She was “reasonably convinced,” as she would later put it, that Frank was now as devoted to her and the family as was possible for him, given his character and temperament. All she could do was hope for the best.
Despite his renewed efforts to be a good husband and father, Frank was still living a double life. He would spend time with Nancy and the kids in Toluca Lake, but he also leased an apartment at the Sunset Tower in Hollywood, where he and Jimmy Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn, and other buddies could drink into the night and have women available to them. Nancy eventually found out about the apartment but decided not to fight about it. They both knew she wasn’t going to divorce him, so Frank would do whatever he wanted and Nancy had no leverage to stop him. She found solace in her children and in the rest of her family. When Frank was present, she was happy. When he was gone, she was fine. She had learned to suppress that part of herself that longed for a committed partner. People who knew what was going on in her life began to view her as a very sad, albeit brave woman.
When Frank and his friends learned that the glamorous film star Ava Gardner lived in an apartment building across the way from the Sunset Tower, they would drunkenly call from the balcony, “Ava, can you hear us? Ava, we know you’re in there. Come on out, Ava, wherever you are. Join us for a beer.” Eventually she would come to the window and wave, which was pretty much all the encouragement Frank needed.
Ava was an exquisite beauty, the envy of women around the world. When she walked into a room, her green eyes flashing, everyone took notice. Ava exuded a smoldering sensuality that translated into star quality on the screen. In her private life, she was—to use a term that today describes self-involved, temperamental stars—a true diva. She knew how to conduct her professional career (“I like only reflected light on my face and a small spotlight under my chin,” she once told cameraman George Folsey) and her personal life (“I like my men compliant,” she once told good friend Lana Turner). Spoiled, temperamental, and a real challenge to a man’s authority, she was as seductive as any woman Sinatra had ever met. Unlike Lana, though, she wasn’t afraid to relax and be “offstage.” While she was every bit as dramatic and theatrical as Lana in her day-to-day dealings with people, she was down-to-earth when around close friends. She enjoyed kicking off her shoes, getting comfortable on a couch, and being casual.
Frank Sinatra had been captivated by Ava Gardner as far back as the Dorsey days. The two then saw each other throughout the late 1940s at MGM and RKO, and also socially at a few Hollywood nightclubs, l
ike the Mocambo (during the time she was married to Mickey Rooney). But after seeing her posing on the cover of the December 1944 issue of Photoplay (bare-shouldered and wearing an expensive-looking emerald necklace), Frank was smitten. The caption on the cover photo read, “She’s sexsational!”
“Stop drooling, Frankie baby,” a friend said. “You like what you see, don’t you?”
Frank responded, “You bet your ass I do. And you wanna know something? I’m gonna marry that girl.”
In early 1948, Frank “bumped into” Ava in the lobby of the Sunset Tower. He asked her out on a date for drinks and then dinner. Although she knew that Frank was married, she agreed to go out with him because, as she told her maid, Mearene Jordan, “he was handsome, with his thin, boyish face, the bright blue eyes, and this incredible grin. He sure was attractive. Very attractive. What else could I do?” (Mearene Jordan—an African-American woman who is today in her nineties, would be Ava Gardner’s maid for forty-four years. The two were very close, almost as close as sisters. Ava and everyone else called her Rene.)
On their first date, Frank and Ava drank quite a bit, and they immediately began to confide in one another. They’d both worked hard to get where they were. They loved show business, but they resented it too, because of all of the media scrutiny of their personal lives. Even more significantly, they also felt that they always let down the people they loved the most, and were convinced that they were incapable of changing. It was as if they were laying the foundation for something serious, not frivolous. They also had fun, going to a shooting gallery at an amusement park and firing pellets at stuffed animals. At the end of the date, Sinatra took her to an apartment—she said it wasn’t at the Sunset Tower, so apparently he had another secret place. They took off their clothes and almost had sex, but she suddenly vetoed the notion. She quickly got dressed and went home. “I decided I didn’t want to just give it all away on the first date,” she later admitted. “It’s better to keep ’em wanting more.”
During their evening together, though she did open up, Ava didn’t talk much about her small-town background. She said something about being from North Carolina. She mentioned that her father died when she was fifteen. She was the youngest of seven children. “I had to be tough,” was all she wanted to say about her childhood. “I was always a tough son of a bitch.” The last thing she wanted to do was dwell on it, or even talk about it. “Who cares?” she asked Frank when he pressed about her history. Frank felt a strong magnetism toward her. He would later tell friends that he was so drawn to Ava, “it made me feel like she had put something in my drink.”
“What will it take to get you into my bed?” Frank asked her.
She smiled and licked her lips. “Not much,” she said. “Just a little bit more than what you’ve already done. But . . . not much.”
1948–49
Professionally, the last years of the decade would not be good ones for Frank Sinatra, as he continued his downward spiral.
In March 1948, he recorded “It Only Happens When I Dance with You,” and “A Fella with an Umbrella,” two of only ten songs he would record the entire year. March was also the month RKO released The Miracle of the Bells, Frank’s first nonmusical film role. Remembering that his singing rival Bing Crosby had won an Academy Award playing a priest in Going My Way (1944), Frank hoped he would be as fortunate in this film as “Father Paul.” Opposite Fred MacMurray and Lee J. Cobb, he acquitted himself nicely as an understanding man of the cloth and sang one a cappella song in the process, “Ever Homeward.” When it was released, though, the movie received mostly negative reviews.
The frustration was getting to Frank. The only thing to cheer him at this time was the birth ofhis third child, daughter Christina (Tina) at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital on June 20, 1948. The baby was born on Father’s Day, and this was the only time Frank was in town for the birth of any of his children. He drove Nancy to the hospital at two in the morning. “Mom went into labor while she and Dad were playing charades with friends,” Tina recalled, “and when my father returned from the hospital in the predawn hours, he pantomimed my arrival to their anxious guests. I was definitely born into show business.”
“I remember sitting with Dad on our grassy hill by the lake, listening to the radio,” Nancy Sinatra would recall. “The announcer said, ‘Frank Sinatra got a terrific Father’s Day present—a brand-new baby girl.’ We said, ‘Yippee!’ And I’ll never forget the day Dad brought Mom and Christina home. There she was, this tiny stranger, my baby sister, all wrapped up in a yellow blanket. Mom and Dad had a new little girl, Frankie and I had a new partner in crime. Oh boy! But Tina didn’t get to know life the way I had known it. She didn’t get to know Daddy as I knew him. She got a bad deal.”
Indeed, Frank was elated about being a father again, but, true to his nature, it wasn’t an exhilaration that would last very long. It was as if he was happy that day, the day Tina was born, and after that it was business as usual. “He was a man who all his life looked outside for what was missing inside,” is how Tina Sinatra so adeptly put it.
From July 18 to October 24, Frank worked on Take Me Out to the Ball Game for MGM, another musical with Gene Kelly. They played song-and-dance partners who played baseball on a team during the summer. When finally released in March 1949, the movie would fare better at the box office than his previous film, The Kissing Bandit (1948), but it still wasn’t a solid hit.
This film was notable for Esther Williams’s valiant—and successful—attempt to get through a nonswimming role. She said that she was hired for the film because “Judy Garland didn’t show up for rehearsals, so they fired her. I couldn’t believe they would do that to her. Then Junie [June] Allyson, their next choice, got pregnant. So they looked on the MGM list to see who wasn’t working and picked me.”
The late Esther Williams once recalled, “There was the little kid in Frank where he loved to stay out and party, and the producers were going to fire him because he was always late to the set. But I understood Frank. He was just living his life. At that time in Hollywood, you could be on time, you could even get there at five o’clock in the morning—like Barbara Stanwyck always did—and then sit down and talk to the crew. But you gotta figure that anyone who did that sort of thing was a really lonely person, and that sure wasn’t Frank. He was such a natural actor and so well prepared, what difference did it make if he came in at noon?
“When I was introduced to him, my knees went weak,” she remembered. “The way he sang was so, so real to me and so different from others. He didn’t just sing a song; he owned it. Talent is attractive, very compelling. When he sang to me in the movie, I felt like his biggest fan in that moment. Here he was, singing to me! What a wonderful moment for my memory book.”
Despite Take Me Out to the Ball Game, by the end of the year Frank would confide to friends that he felt all but washed up. His records weren’t selling, his movies weren’t box-office draws, and his concert appearances weren’t selling out. This sort of career reversal was due in part to his scandalous personal life, which had begun to garner more attention than his work.
Sammy Davis Jr. recalled that late in 1948 he saw thirty-two-year-old Frank in New York. “Frank was walking down Broadway with no hat on and his collar up, and not a soul was paying attention to him,” said Sammy. “This was the man who, only a few years before, had tied up traffic all over Times Square. Now the same man was walking down the same street, and nobody gave a damn.”
Unfortunately, things would continue going downhill through 1949. When Frank learned that Down Beat had listed him as the number five male singer, he was devastated. It was the first time he’d not been in the top three spots since the late 1930s. The songs he released that year, such as “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Bali Ha’i,” were poorly received by both the public and critics.
Still, he somehow managed to maintain the opulent lifestyle he and his family enjoyed, purchasing a three-acre estate for $250,000 at 320 Carolwood Drive in Holmby Hil
ls during the summer of that year. Of the property, which featured a pool, a badminton court, and a citrus orchard, Frank Sinatra Jr. once recalled, “Our home on Carolwood Drive was the most wonderful of estates, situated on beautiful grounds. Nancy and I were by this time school-age. And I can still remember the smiles on my parents’ faces on those mornings when the two of us would burst into their room, usually at the crack of dawn, and jump on their bed to awaken them.” Sinatra truly couldn’t afford the luxurious trappings, though, and the new property just added more pressure to an already stressed life.
The year ended on a somewhat hopeful note with the film On the Town, a fun-filled movie costarring Sinatra, with Gene Kelly (together for the third time). This film—the first musical to be shot entirely on location in New York—was a romantic comedy about what happens when sailors meet girls during shore leave, a simple premise but one that brought forth great performances by Sinatra, Kelly, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller, and Vera-Ellen. This time, Sailor Sinatra dazzled with his dancing, and the film was well received. With music by Leonard Bernstein and Roger Edens, and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, this film was an adaptation of the 1944 Broadway show. (It’s worth noting that the Broadway show was an adaptation of a 1944 ballet by Jerome Robbins called Fancy Free.) Though Bernstein, unhappy because most of the music he had written for the play was not used, in favor of songs by Edens, publicly boycotted the movie, it was still a hit with the public. It went on to win an Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.
Frank was becoming a realist, however. One good film did not a comeback make, and he knew it—especially since MGM had decided to relegate him to second billing under Gene Kelly, who had codirected the movie with Stanley Donen. (Earlier, in 1945, Sinatra had received top billing over Kelly in Anchors Aweigh. In 1949 he would have billing over Kelly again, in Take Me Out to the Ball Game.)
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