Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Lucy then asked Ava if she was prepared to spend the rest of her life with Frank Sinatra. She added that if the relationship was really just all about sex, “it’s not right breaking up a marriage over it.” However, Ava maintained that “Francis” was a “big boy,” and that she most certainly wasn’t forcing him to do anything he didn’t want to. And as for the rest of her life? “Are you crazy?” she asked her friend. “Have you lost your mind? Who can think that far ahead?”

  “Well, then maybe you should think about Nancy and those poor kids,” Lucy said, still pushing.

  “Jesus Christ!” Ava exclaimed. “Why are you trying to make me feel bad? I’m probably doing Nancy Sinatra a favor. She needs to move on, and she should have done so a long time ago. In fact, I bet she’ll thank me one day. I’ll just bet!”

  Frank at the Copa

  In March 1950, Frank Sinatra was booked at the Copacabana in New York City. Ava accompanied him to Manhattan, sharing a suite with him at the Hampshire House. Trying to at least act discreet, Ava and her sister Bappie stayed in one bedroom, Frank in the other. When the popular New York journalist Earl Wilson asked for an interview with Ava to discuss the situation with Frank and Nancy, she begged off, saying that she had the flu. Instead, she issued a written statement: “The main reason I am in New York is because I am on my way to make a picture. The main reason Frankie is here is because he is scheduled to open at the Copacabana. Inasmuch as Frank is officially separated from his wife, I believe I have a right to be seen with him. However, since he is still officially married, I believe it would be in the worst possible taste to discuss future plans. One thing I am sure of is that Frank’s plans to leave Nancy came into his life long before I did.”

  Frank approved of Ava’s statement, and added, “The fact that I have had a few dates with her means nothing. Why shouldn’t I have dates? I’m separated from my wife. I don’t intend to sit home alone.”

  The Copa engagement was pivotal for Sinatra in that it was his first major nightclub appearance in about five years. However, the timing could not have been worse; the stress in his life was showing in his voice. The fact that he was usually up all night, drinking and smoking, only made matters worse. As a result, he sounded husky and hoarse, his range limited. He was on a tight schedule, committed to three shows a night at the Copa and five radio shows a week; recording sessions were also to be squeezed in. Making matters worse, toward the end of the engagement he also agreed to appear at the Capitol Theatre for matinee performances; he needed the work—and the money—so he pretty much never turned anything down. Adding to his burden was the tension he felt about facing a tough New York audience when he wasn’t at his best. To get through it all, he was taking as many sedatives as his doctor would prescribe.

  Jimmy Silvani, who worked as a bodyguard for Sinatra, was backstage on opening night of the Copa engagement. He recalled, “Sinatra practically collapsed before that first show. He kept saying, ‘My career is over. I’m washed up, and now I have to go out and face those people—the same people who aren’t buying my records, who aren’t seeing my movies.’

  “He was taking a lot of pills at this time—pills to get up, pills to relax, pills to go to sleep. Today, I think he would have checked into Betty Ford; that’s how much trouble he was in with the pills.

  “At one point that night before going on, I saw him sitting in front of his dressing room mirror, staring at himself and mumbling, ‘You can do this, Frank. You can do this, pal. Just go on out there and do this.’ He was trying to psych himself up. I felt badly for him. After a few moments, Ava came into the dressing room and joined him.”

  Silvani remembered that Ava stood behind Frank, one hand on his shoulders, the other holding her cocktail. Gazing at their image in the mirror, she announced, “Francis Albert Sinatra, you are the greatest goddamned entertainer who ever walked the face of this earth. I believe in you. I love you. And I salute you.” With that, she raised her glass of champagne to their reflection. “Now, I want you to get on out there, Francis, and prove me right.”

  Encouraged, Frank said, “I’m gonna do it, baby. I’m gonna do it for you.” Then he rose and turned to face her. Smiling at him, she melted into his arms. Frank kissed her passionately.

  After Frank left the dressing room, Jimmy Silvani noticed a telegram lying on the dressing table: “Best of luck on your opening night. Love, Nancy.”

  When Frank Sinatra walked onto the stage that night, March 28, he appeared pale and seemed weak not only vocally but physically. From the beginning, the audience wasn’t enthusiastic and seemed more interested in talking among themselves than in being entertained by him. At one point, he was forced to ask one particularly noisy group, “Am I speaking too loud for you ladies?” Then, after a few more songs fell on deaf ears, he was reduced to pleading. “This is my opening night. C’mon, give me a break.”

  “It was heartbreaking,” Ava would later recall. “They wouldn’t cut him a break. He was trying so hard. New Yorkers! They’re a tough crowd.”

  The reviews of the Copa opening night were critical. A reporter for the Herald Tribune wrote, “Whether temporarily or otherwise, the music that used to hypnotize the bobby-soxers—whatever happened to them anyway?—is gone from the throat. Vocally, there isn’t quite the same old black magic there used to be when Mr. Sinatra wrenched ‘Night and Day’ from his sapling frame and thousands swooned.”

  “When Frank read the reviews, he was angry with those writers,” recalled Ava’s social secretary, Mary LaSalle-Thomas. “Ava told me that Frank called the one reporter from the Herald Tribune and challenged him about his opinion of the show. She was out shopping and when she came back to the suite, she heard Frank hollering at this guy on the telephone. She heard him say something like, ‘You wouldn’t know a good performance if it bit you in the ass. Why do you have to get so personal, anyway? I can take the criticism, but you ruin it by getting so personal.’ ”

  According to LaSalle-Thomas, after some more swearing, Frank slammed the telephone down, pulled the wire out of the wall, and threw the phone across the room. It smashed into a corner and produced a deep hole in the wall. Joining in the fracas, Ava picked up the telephone and hurled it out the window. The two then leaned out the window and watched in horrified enthrallment as the apparatus narrowly missed the head of a passerby below.

  Gunplay

  One night, during the engagement at the Copacabana, Frank and Ava had a quarrel over dinner. As always, they were surrounded by dozens of people. Frank never went anywhere without an entourage—people who worked for him, people who were friends of his . . . friends of friends . . . reporters who had snuck into the inner circle. Some were people he didn’t even know. No matter how much trouble he was having in his career, he was still Frank Sinatra and would be sure to always attract a loud and raucous group of hangers-on. Everyone was always smoking and drinking or coming on to waitresses or getting into fights with one another, all with Frank presiding, an unhappy king lording over a not-so-royal court. On this evening, Ava accused Frank of flirting with a Copa Girl—one of the popular chorus line of dancers who performed before the headline act at the Copacabana. “You have me,” she told him in front of many witnesses, though it was a little difficult to hear her over the din, “so why would you want to screw a Copa Girl?”

  Frank said that he wasn’t involved with a Copa Girl and that in fact the only thing that had happened was that she had flirted with him and he had flirted back. It wasn’t a big deal. But Ava said that she didn’t trust him. That was fine, Frank told her as he tossed back a drink; he said he didn’t trust her either, so they were even. It was a typical Frank-Ava spat, that is until Ava crossed the line. “I don’t know what Nancy even sees in you,” she said. Mentioning Nancy wasn’t a good idea. Frank, according to the witnesses, almost jumped across the table at Ava. It looked like he wanted to strangle her. “Don’t you ever even say her name,” he told her. “That name—Nancy—should never come out of your mouth again,
because if it does, you’re gonna end up with a fat lip.”

  At that, Ava stormed off, going back to Hampshire House. Upon her arrival there, she telephoned her ex-husband, Artie Shaw, who happened to live in New York. The two had remained friends even though their marriage had ended badly. People in her life couldn’t fathom it, actually. He had made her feel so empty-headed and stupid, a brainless pretty face, that she once took an IQ test to see if she was really as dumb as he had insisted! But after taking the test it occurred to her that if a man thinks a woman is foolish or stupid, he lowers his guard and becomes reckless. The woman then has the advantage. That was fine with Ava; she decided she didn’t even need to know the results of the IQ test. She always felt she could manipulate Artie, and seeing him this evening was a bit of a manipulation, a way to make Frank jealous. She easily wrangled an invitation to Artie’s apartment to share a drink with him and his then girlfriend, Ruth Cosgrove (later Mrs. Milton Berle).

  Ava knew Frank thought she still had feelings for Artie and that he didn’t want her socializing with him. Whenever he couldn’t find her, he feared she was with Shaw and promised anyone who would listen that he would “kill the both of ’em, I swear it, if I ever find them together.” Right before Ava walked out the door she left her telephone book open to the page with Artie’s address on it. Upon leaving, she may have thought, “Well, this should make for an interesting night.”

  Ava had only been at Artie’s for about twenty minutes when Frank showed up, accompanied by his friend and manager, Hank Sanicola. “They looked like gangsters out of a B-movie,” Rene Jordan, Ava’s maid, said. She wasn’t present, but Ava told her about it. “Two hoodlums, raincoats and ark trilbies, hands deep in their pockets as if they were clutching revolvers.” Frank swept the room with his eyes and found Ava sitting in a chair with a drink in her hand, looking self-satisfied. Their eyes met. Suddenly seemingly defeated, Frank didn’t “kill the both of ’em,” as he had threatened. Instead, he just walked right out the door without saying a word. Ava went back to her good time. About a half hour later, she departed and caught a taxicab back to the Hampshire House.

  Once back at her hotel, Ava sank into the couch in the living room and, a little drunk and very sleepy, kicked off her heels and began to drift off. Suddenly she was awakened by the shrieking sound of the telephone. It was Frank, calling from the other bedroom in their suite. “I can’t stand it anymore,” he said, sounding quite desperate. “I’m gonna kill myself. Right now.” Then she heard two loud shots.

  Ava screamed, dropped the phone, and ran across the living room and into Frank’s bedroom. Bappie met her there. When the women burst into the room, they saw Frank lying on the floor with his eyes closed, a gun smoking in his hand. “Oh my God.” Ava threw herself onto Frank’s body and began to cry. “My mind sort of exploded in a great wave of panic, terror, and shocked disbelief,” she later recalled. Suddenly, his eyes opened. For a moment, the two lovers stared at one another. He was alive? What in the world was going on here? Actually, Frank appeared stunned, as if he couldn’t believe that the gun had actually gone off.

  “You son of a bitch,” Ava exclaimed. Looking around the room, she noticed a gaping hole in the mattress. Thinking quickly, she picked up the telephone to call Hank Sanicola down the hall. He rushed over and got the mattress and bedding out of the room and replaced it with that from his room. Soon after, the corridor was full of police. When they knocked on Frank’s door, he acted like he didn’t know what they were talking about. “Gunshot? Really? I didn’t hear no gunshot, did you hear a gunshot, Ava? We didn’t hear nothin’.”

  “When the police arrived, Frank was in his robe and his innocence was very convincing,” Ava would later say. “Frank’s denials could have won him an Oscar. I was trembling like jelly inside . . .”

  The next day, Dolly and Marty Sinatra heard about the fracas from a friend of theirs in the Sinatra organization; Dolly actually had a few “spies” on her son’s payroll to keep an eye on things. She tried to reach Frank, but he didn’t want to talk to her to explain. Finally, Ava called to tell her that everything was fine, that it was all a big misunderstanding. Dolly wasn’t buying it. “Are you sure my son is okay?” she asked. Ava said she was certain, and that she would look after “Francis” herself. Dolly and Ava were both smart women; though they may have chosen not to openly discuss it with one another, certainly they could recognize a textbook cry for help from Frank, or at the very least a cry for attention. But what to do about it? Maybe it was because they didn’t have an answer that they chose not to address the issue with one another.

  Brink of Despair

  In March 1950, Ava Gardner left the United States to film the movie Pandora and the Flying Dutchman with James Mason, first in London and then in Spain. By this time, as she later said, she needed a breather from Frank Sinatra and the theatrics of their relationship.

  While in Spain, Ava became infatuated with a dashing Spanish matador turned actor, thirty-four-year-old Mario Cabré, who was playing Juan Montalvo, her bullfighter-lover in the film. Though he had acted in just a few films, he was enormously popular, having made as much a name for himself by escorting beautiful actresses about Spain as for any ability he may have had as an actor. Ava was captivated by his charming personality, Latin good looks, and brashness. “After one of those romantic, star-filled, dance-filled, booze-filled Spanish nights, I woke up to find myself in bed with him,” she would later confess.

  “Well, that was typically Ava,” said Mary LaSalle-Thomas. “She told me that what she had with Mario was no reflection on her feelings for Frank. It had nothing to do with him, in fact.”

  Like Frank, Ava rationalized her dalliances by compartmentalizing them. ‘Ava was very masculine in the way she looked at these things,” said LaSalle-Thomas. “She would say, ‘Men treat women like dirt. Well, I sometimes treat men the same way. So, go ahead, sue me.’ On some level, maybe that’s what Frank liked about her. She was a mirror image of him.”

  Of course, the fling with Mario was not a serious relationship. It was just an uncomplicated but heated little affair with a sexy actor who satisfied her lustful urges. Also, according to her own account of it, Ava hoped that her actions with Mario would make Frank jealous enough to once and for all end his marriage to Nancy and make a commitment to her.

  No slouch in the art of public relations, Mario did what he could to use the affair to generate publicity in the hope of advancing his career. “I am in love with her,” he said of Ava in a prepared statement. “This is pure love. The first time I saw her, I felt something that was not normal . . .” He hastened to add that he was using his Spanish-English dictionary to compose his statement so that it could be understood “by an international audience.”

  Back in the States, reading press accounts that Ava was romancing another man drove Frank to the brink of despair. He couldn’t just pick up and leave New York to go to her and make sure his place in her life was secure. He was still trying to prove himself at the Copacabana and needed all of his resolve just to get through that engagement.

  On April 26, 1950, he had more trouble than usual with his voice. During the dinner show, his voice gave out during “Bali Ha’i.” Afterward, one of his doctors told him to cancel the third show, but he was determined to perform. He would not let his audience down. Plus, he had heard that Lee Mortimer—the Hearst reporter with whom he had a longtime feud—had made a wager that he wouldn’t be able to finish the engagement, which made him all the more resolute.

  The third show went on at 2:30 a.m. As Frank strolled to the microphone, he was impeccably dressed: black tuxedo with satin lapels, a floppy bow tie, shoes so highly shined that the spotlights were reflected in them. But he was also thin, gaunt, and pale. He walked on to light applause, which he acknowledged with that megawatt Sinatra smile.

  The first number was “I Have But One Heart,” which he dedicated to Ava. The audience responded enthusiastically. However, his voice started to falter on the
second song, “It All Depends on You,” and when he reached for a high note, it pretty much left him altogether. He was stunned. No matter what he had done before—the booze, the brawls, the broads—his voice had never failed him so completely.

  He clutched at the microphone. He tried to sing again. This time, he felt a trickle in the corner of his mouth. Thinking it was saliva, he wiped it away with his white handkerchief. It was blood. Later it would be diagnosed as the result of a “submucosal throat hemorrhage.”

  “I was never so panic-stricken in my whole life,” Frank would later recall. “I remember looking at the audience. There was silence—stunning, absolute silence. Finally, I whispered to the audience, ‘Good night,’ and walked off the floor.”

  “I thought for a fleeting moment that it was a joke,” said his conductor, Skitch Henderson. “The color drained out of my face as I saw the panic in Frank’s. It became so quiet, so intensely quiet in the club. Like they were watching a man walk off a cliff.”

  Billy Eckstine took Frank’s place for the rest of that ill-fated Copacabana engagement.

  On May 10, 1950, Frank canceled an engagement at the Chez Paree in Chicago rather than take any more chances with his voice. As it was, the doctors said it could be as long as two months before he would sing again. Therefore, he went to Miami to bask in the sun and try to figure out what his next move should be where Ava and Nancy were concerned. Nancy kept telephoning him to express her concern. However, he refused to take her calls, saying, “If she’s so worried about me, why won’t she give me the divorce?” Every time he would raise his voice, however, his staff members would hover around him and plead with him not to speak. He was supposed to communicate by writing on pads of paper.