Sinatra

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Adrienne Ellis remembered Ava washing her hair just before the ceremony. When she came out of the shower, she just towel-dried it, and that was it. “My mother couldn’t get over that,” Adrienne said, laughing.

  Ava was certainly dazzling on her wedding day. Her dress was designed by Howard Greer, the Paris-trained couturier for such stars as Irene Dunne, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, and Katharine Hepburn. Greer believed in making a woman look sexy; Ava was no exception. The strapless top of her wedding dress was pink taffeta over a high-waisted mauve marquisette cocktail-length skirt. Deferring to modesty, she wore a sheer mauve marquisette bolero edged with the same pink taffeta as the top. Her jewelry consisted of a double-stranded pearl choker and pearl-and-diamond teardrop earrings.

  Ava was so breathtaking, no one could take their eyes off her, certainly not Frank. Wearing a navy suit with a slim light gray tie, a white silk shirt, and a white boutonniere in his left lapel, he waited beside Judge Jose (Joseph) Sloane of the Common Pleas Court of Germantown, who was to perform the ceremony. Ava handed her white orchid spray to her matron of honor, June Hutton, as she approached the judge.

  The ceremony began at 5 p.m. and was brief. The guests included Frank’s parents; Bappie; Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Levy; Hank Sanicola; Frank’s partner Ben Barton; his conductor, Axel Stordahl, and Stordahl’s wife, singer June Hutton; music arranger Dick Jones; and, of course, Manie Sacks, who was now a vice president of RCA. They all watched as the couple exchanged simple, thin platinum bands. Ava, wearing stiletto-heeled shoes, was as tall as Frank. They looked into each other’s eyes the entire time, mechanically repeating their vows, almost absentmindedly putting the slim, unadorned platinum bands on each other’s fingers. So lost were they in the moment that when the judge pronounced them man and wife, they didn’t budge.

  “You may kiss your bride, Mr. Sinatra,” Judge Sloane said.

  It was as though he had not spoken.

  “Mr. Sinatra,” the judge repeated. “Your bride.” He tapped Frank on the shoulder and pointed to Ava. “You may kiss her now.”

  With an embarrassed grin, Frank put his hands on Ava’s shoulders and gently pulled her toward him. His lips brushed hers for an instant.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  “Of course you do,” she said with a smile.

  The party after the ceremony lasted until about nine. Dolly and Marty were very excited to welcome Ava into the family; Marty had accepted that she was what Frank now wanted and had decided to be supportive. As for Dolly, Ava was “famiglia” (family) now, and she would now make public her support. Likely Nancy bristled when she read Dolly’s statement to the press: “I’d like to tell those hypocrites who send me letters without signing their names that say, ‘Aren’t you ashamed, Mrs. Sinatra, that your boy divorced his wife and left three children just so he could marry that actress?’ I’d like to tell them that Frank loves his three children as much as he loves anything else in the world—that I, his mother, am proud that he married a wonderful girl like Ava.”

  After the party, Manie Sacks, who bore a vague resemblance to Frank, was used as a decoy with the press. He and a female guest, heads down with hats on, left in a limousine with everyone saying goodbye and throwing rice at their vehicle. The car took off, and the media followed. Afterward, Frank and Ava departed quietly, headed for a private plane waiting at Wings Field in Ambler. But in her haste, Ava discovered before boarding that she had the wrong suitcase. It held the outfit she had arrived in in the morning, and her wedding dress. “My parents had to jump in a car and drive to Wings in pouring rain to give her the right suitcase,” recalled Steve Sacks, who was eleven at the time.

  * * *

  “Well, we finally did it,” Ava Gardner told Lucy Wellman a couple of days later. She was on the telephone from the Hotel Nacional in Cuba where she and Frank were honeymooning for a couple of days. “Congratulations!” exclaimed her Los Angeles friend. “Are you happy?” Ava answered by saying that Frank was “wonderful,” but that what it took for the two of them to get to this point in their relationship had been “so exhausting.” Her friend noted that Ava’s observations didn’t exactly answer her question: Was she happy? Ava hesitated. “Well,” she began carefully, “let’s just say I’m not unhappy.” Lucy then asked how the honeymoon was going. Ava said all was well, even though “I paid for the whole goddamn thing.” She then told Lucy that Frank’s wedding gift to her had been a sapphire-blue mink cape stole. In turn, she presented him with an expensive gold locket with a Saint Francis medal on one side, a Saint Christopher on the other, and a photograph of her inside. But she also said that the battles between them continued to rage. “We’ve already had fifteen fights—and that’s just today,” she said. “He’s under a lot of pressure. I’m just not the patient, understanding type,” she admitted. “You know that. I mean, I try to be,” she added. “But that’s just not me, is it?”

  “No, it really isn’t,” Lucy agreed.

  Fifteen minutes after she hung up, Ava called her friend back. “Listen,” she said, “I know I can trust you, but don’t ever, ever mention to anyone that I paid for the honeymoon. Frank would kill me. So, you must promise me.”

  “I promise,” her friend vowed. In fact, Lucy Wellman would keep that promise for some forty years.

  Part Five

  DOWNWARD SPIRAL

  His Only Collateral Was a Dream

  The year 1952 saw thirty-six-year-old Frank Sinatra’s professional downward slide continue. Frank’s film Meet Danny Wilson was released on February 8 to mediocre reviews; he returned to the Paramount Theatre in New York on March 26 for an engagement with Frank Fontaine, Buddy Rich, and June Hutton, but the engagement was a box-office disappointment. When he later performed at the Chez Paree in Chicago, only 150 people were in the nightclub, which seated 1,200. Then in June, Frank was dropped by Columbia Records as well as by his talent agency, MCA. It probably didn’t help his ego that as his career stalled, Ava’s continued to flourish. She began work on a new film for 20th Century-Fox, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, just as MGM was about to offer her a ten-year contract for twelve movies at $100,000 per film.

  While logic dictated that Frank’s time was over, he knew that all he needed was another break. But no one was handing Frank Sinatra anything at this time, so if he were to be saved, he’d have to do it himself.

  “I’ve been up and down in my life more than a roller coaster,” Frank would later observe. “At thirty-eight years old, I was a has-been,” he added. “Sitting by a telephone that wouldn’t ring. Wondering what happened to all the friends who grew invisible when the music stopped. Finding out fast how tough it is to borrow money when you’re all washed up. My only collateral was a dream,” he recalled. “A dream to end my nightmare. And what a dream it was. It began when I read an absolutely fascinating book written by a giant, James Jones. More than a book,” he said, “it was a portrait of people I knew, understood, and could feel, and in it I saw myself as clearly as I see myself every morning when I shave. I was Maggio. No matter who said what, I would prove it, no matter how many tests I was asked to make, no matter what the money. I was going to become Maggio if it was the last thing I ever did.”

  Sinatra was referring to the character Private Angelo Maggio in James Jones’s first novel, the bestselling From Here to Eternity, which had been published in 1951. Jones’s book had been critically acclaimed, but it also was considered revolutionary because of its strong criticism of the U.S. Army.

  The novel won the prestigious National Book Award for fiction and was on the top of the bestseller list for months. However, it would prove to be an enormous challenge to write a screenplay based on this work. It is over eight hundred pages long, its language strong and graphic. At a time when all films had to adhere to the Production Code, which oversaw movie morality, it would also be difficult to work around the fact that the two main female characters in the book were a prostitute and a serial adulterer.

  With its b
rutal portrayal of the plight of enlisted men, From Here to Eternity presented the army in an unfavorable light at a time when most Americans did not question their government. In fact, in the 1940s and ’50s it was impossible to produce a military film without help from the Pentagon. Military equipment was too expensive to duplicate; the only way to use authentic government matériel was to cooperate with the government.

  Two studios had considered and turned the book down before Harry Cohn of Columbia Studios bought it in 1951. Screenwriter Daniel Taradash managed to compress the material into a 161-page working script while being true to the novel’s themes. The film’s producer, Buddy Adler, a former lieutenant colonel in the Signal Corps and husband of film star Anita Louise, was assigned to deal with the army’s many objections. By toning down some of the brutality, Adler was able to obtain their cooperation.

  When Sinatra heard that the novel was being made into a film by Columbia, he knew he was perfect for the character of Angelo Maggio, the scrappy Italian-American soldier from the streets of Brooklyn. This part would give him a dramatic break from the musicals in which he’d previously appeared, and he felt strongly that the role would revitalize his career.

  “I know if I can get this part, I can hit a home run,” he told Ava. “I grew up with a hundred Maggios in my neighborhood. I am Maggio.”

  Montgomery Clift had already been cast in the coveted role of army private Prewitt. Joan Crawford would have been the commanding officer’s wife, Karen Holmes, had she not insisted on having her own wardrobe designers. She was replaced by Deborah Kerr, who worked hard with a voice coach to lose her British accent. Other major roles were assigned to Burt Lancaster, as Warden, the first sergeant who manages his company with saintly dedication while having an affair with Kerr’s character, and Donna Reed, as Alma, Prewitt’s girlfriend. (Ernest Borgnine would also appear in the film as the cruel Fatso Judson, the man who kills Maggio. Borgnine was such a fan of Sinatra’s—“my idol, my everything”—that he had named his daughter Nancy after Frank’s wife and daughter.) Still to be cast was Maggio.

  Ava offered to use any influence she might have to persuade Harry Cohn to cast Frank in the film. However, Frank wanted her to stay out of it. If he was to get this part, he told her, it would be on his own and by his own merit. In actuality, though, he had recruited practically everyone he knew who also knew Harry Cohn to bombard Cohn with requests that he consider Sinatra for the part. He also sent telegrams to Cohn and to the film’s director, Fred Zinnemann (High Noon and The Member of the Wedding), signed “Maggio.”

  Ava felt that if her husband had this role, perhaps it would take some strain off their marriage. So she defied Frank’s orders and met with Cohn’s wife, Joan, to see what she could do to secure the role for her husband. “Just have him test Frank,” she asked Joan. “Please. He really needs this role.”

  Ava didn’t know that Frank had already met with Harry Cohn over lunch about the job, and Cohn had made it clear that he was not interested—even when Frank offered to do the role for just $1,000 a week. That was a big reduction in fee, since he had previously been paid as much as $150,000 per film. “You’re out of your mind,” Cohn told Sinatra. As far as Cohn was concerned, Frank was a singer, not an actor. He told Frank that he didn’t think he had ever made a decent movie.

  Meanwhile, Ava continued campaigning for Frank. A friend of hers, Paul Clemens, lived in a guesthouse on the estate of Harry and Joan Cohn. One night, he invited Ava for dinner with the Cohns. Over dinner, Ava started in on Harry Cohn. “You know who’s right for that part of Maggio, don’t you?” she said. “That son of a bitch husband of mine, that’s who. Let me tell you something,” she said, according to Earl Wilson. “If you don’t give him this role, he’ll kill himself.” She wasn’t kidding.

  Eventually, Harry Cohn and Fred Zinnemann began to buckle under so much pressure. Cohn telephoned Sinatra and said he would screen-test him for the role. Meanwhile, he asked Frank to “call off the dogs. And Ava, too.”

  When the film’s producer, Buddy Adler, gave Frank the script for the scenes he was to play, Frank handed it back to him. He already knew the lines. He had memorized them, having read them so many times. This was one screen test he was determined to nail, one role he intended to make his own.

  Mogambo

  As Frank and Ava campaigned for the coveted role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, loose ends of Frank’s recording career were being tied up. On September 17, 1952, he recorded his last side for Columbia Records in New York, “Why Try to Change Me Now?” Composed by Cy Coleman and arranged by Percy Faith, this pensive song was another that spoke to the essence of Frank’s emotions at the time. Ed O’Brien and Robert Wilson said it best in their book Sinatra 101: The 101 Best Recordings and the Stories Behind Them: “Gone was the innocent, naive singer of the previous decade. Burned by love, the singer is able to convey the darkness, the cynicism and aching sadness that would characterize much of his work in the years to come.” Like “I’m a Fool to Want You,” this is another obscure Sinatra song that didn’t mean much to his fans at the time but with the unfolding of the years has been recognized as a gem. (He would record the song again for Capitol in March 1959.)

  Meanwhile, the “Battling Sinatras,” as some members of the press had dubbed them, continued with their tumultuous marriage. The Sinatra-Ava bouts had become by 1952 the stuff of show-business legend. On November 7, they left for Africa, where Ava was scheduled to film Mogambo (a remake of the 1932 film Red Dust, which also starred Clark Gable, but with Jean Harlow).

  Frank wasn’t keen on the idea of his wife going to Africa with Clark Gable, her costar in the film, along with Grace Kelly, but since he had nothing else to do—he still hadn’t heard whether or not he would get the role of Maggio—he decided to accompany her. “He’s going with me,” Ava told the press of her husband. “He’s going to do some theaters around Nairobi.”

  The Sinatras celebrated their first wedding anniversary en route to Africa on a Stratocruiser. In Nairobi, Frank spent his time reading novels while Ava worked. “Frank was her helper,” said Joseph Godfrey, who was employed on the film as a costume assistant to designer Helen Rose. “You had to feel bad for the guy. She was sort of demanding.”

  “Get me a drink, baby, will ya?” Ava would ask when she was done with a scene. “A Manhattan, straight up with a cherry.

  “And rub my back, won’t you?

  “And fetch my script, will ya, sweetie?”

  Frank, his face an expressionless mask, would say, “Sure, why not?”

  Could he sink any lower? He was depressed and low-key. Nearly everyone present noticed that in these moments, he was hardly the tough guy the press had been writing about for so many years. Rather, he seemed quiet, defeated.

  On tough days of shooting, Ava required five different kinds of sherbet—blackberry, raspberry, lime, cherry, and orange—as a special treat, a reward of sorts for getting through the day. She liked them served in pretty oval scoops on a white plate, and with tiny wild strawberries, if possible. “But if you can’t get the strawberries, then I guess I’ll just have to live without them,” she told Frank.

  “Do you know how hard it is to find sherbet in this goddamned jungle?” Frank asked.

  “Oh, I know, Frank,” she said wearily. “Just call someone in London and have it shipped in, then. And see if you can get those dainty little butter cookies too. I just love those.”

  “All right. All right.”

  “He needed a lift,” recalled Bea Lowry, makeup artist Colin Garde’s assistant on the film. “She was spoiled, yes, but I also know she was concerned. She called Harry Cohn from Nairobi. I heard the conversation myself. She was angry with him, and she said, ‘Jesus Christ, you know Frank is right for this part. Please, I am begging you. Give him this role. He can’t take it anymore. I can’t take it anymore.’ I believe he hung up on her, because she slammed the phone down onto the receiver.”

  The weather was sweltering hot, the dayti
me temperature as high as 130 degrees, and Ava was unhappy for most of the shoot. She hated sleeping in a tent with mosquitoes swarming everywhere and ants crawling up her legs; she was sick to her stomach most of the time and felt woefully inadequate as an actress working opposite the legendary Clark Gable. She just wanted the filming to end.

  Ava’s Pregnancies

  It was in Africa that Ava Gardner discovered she was pregnant.

  Previously, in November 1951, Ava had given an interview to Marie Torre of the New York World-Telegram and Sun and expressed her desire to have children. “Maybe we’ll start thinking about a family,” she said. “I love large families. When I was younger, I used to think about how wonderful it would be to have four sons. I’m twenty-eight now. It’s too late for such a large family. So I think I can be happy with two, maybe three, kids.”

  However, as Frank’s wife, she had changed her mind.

  Frank was elated about the baby. Ava, however, was not. Frank suggested that she quit work on the film for the sake of the pregnancy, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. As Ava wrote in her autobiography, “I felt that unless you were prepared to devote practically all your time to your child in its early years, it was unfair to the baby. If a child is unwanted—and somehow they know that—it is handicapped from the time it is born.” Moreover, MGM had a penalty clause in her contract that said that her salary would be cut off if she had a baby. She was the breadwinner in the Sinatra household, she reasoned. Without her income, what would they do?

  There was no way Frank was going to approve of Ava terminating the pregnancy—not after what he’d already gone through with Nancy. “These women cannot keep aborting my children,” he told one of Ava’s trusted attorneys who was present on the set. “What is so wrong with me that they feel that’s their only option?”