Frank: The Voice (105 page)

Ava was still wrangling with MGM over
The Barefoot Contessa
. The studio was demanding an exorbitant fee from Mankiewicz for her services—and proposing stingy terms for her end of the loan-out. She
didn’t give a rat’s ass about the terms. She had just had it with Hollywood, a company town whose business she neither liked nor trusted, and she had had it with Frank. She wired Schenck himself:

Metro, of course, didn’t give a good goddamn about its spoiled star’s happiness, except insofar as it affected business. The right deal was all Schenck cared about. The horse-trading continued.

Frank knew how badly Ava wanted this role. What it really meant as far as he was concerned was that she wanted to return to Europe. Alone. And not just for a visit, but to stay, as long as she could. If she got the job—and she tended to get what she wanted—she would leave at the end of November for an indefinite period: three months of shooting in Rome, and then Spain, probably.

If she didn’t get the job, she told the press, she might go to Spain anyway.

Frank knew who was in Spain, and he felt a kind of rising panic
—the end of November
. Maybe the two of them really were through; maybe she could resist him after all. There were times, at five or six in the morning, when he had to pour another Jack Daniel’s and tell himself he must think of something to keep her here. He couldn’t. He was constantly on edge: when he found out she’d had a drink with Peter Lawford at the Luau on Rodeo Drive (a totally innocent thing—Lawford’s manager and Bappie were also present—but Hedda Hopper blared it as a date in her column the next day), Frank went nuts. He
was not just a cuckold but a public cuckold, and in his own backyard. He phoned Lawford and told him he was a dead man—his exact phrase. He screamed into the phone that he was sending somebody to break the actor’s legs.

Now it was Lawford’s turn to panic. He called his manager, Milt Ebbins—whose idea it had been in the first place to go have that drink with Ava—and begged him to call Sinatra and tell him that he was completely innocent.

Ebbins was glad to call Frank and try to set things straight, but there was a small problem: Frank had left town, and nobody knew where he was.

Hysterical with fear, Lawford begged his manager to find him.

Ebbins found him, but it wasn’t easy. It turned out Van Heusen had flown Sinatra to New York on his plane, and Frank was holed up at Chester’s West Fifty-seventh Street apartment. Jimmy answered the phone, whispering hoarsely, his hand shielding the mouthpiece: “
Yeah, he’s here! Jesus Christ, and he’s driving me crazy! Ava, Ava, Ava! A billion fucking broads in the world, and he’s got to pick the one that can take him or leave him!”

“
Eventually they got Frank onto the phone,” Ebbins recalled.

He’d come to New York to begin yet another radio show for NBC:
To Be Perfectly Frank
, a fifteen-minute, twice-a-week broadcast on
which Sinatra played DJ, spinning the records of other vocalists and singing a number or two of his own, backed by a five-piece combo. The show was a strangely mixed bag, reflecting both Frank’s resurgent fortunes and the declining state of radio. At first a sponsor couldn’t even be found. “
Ten years ago, even five,” wrote the critic Jack O’Brian, “such a show starring such a revivified ‘hot’ personality as ‘The Voice’ would have had 35 musicians, a ‘name’ conductor, a chorus of 16, several announcers and highly-paid guest stars. Now it’s just Frank, five musicians, and recordings.”

He was taping the shows for later broadcast on NBC affiliates, and during the ten days he spent in New York that November, he was in a kind of fever, consuming coffee and pills and cigarettes instead of food, recording episode after episode over the course of long days in the Rockefeller Center studios, stockpiling shows against the trip he knew he had to make to win back his wife.

In the meantime, he was a walking wreck, able at times to simulate his old charming self, but mostly obsessing about her, trying in vain to reach her on the phone (she and Bappie were lying low in another Palm Springs rental). Van Heusen took him out to Toots Shor’s and “21,” where Frank—still wearing his wedding ring, the gossips were interested to note—declined to sing when Chester sat down at the piano. Not in the mood, he said. A pretty blonde sitting nearby, “
Melissa Weston Bigelow of New York and Southampton society,” according to Kilgallen, found his moodiness attractive. After a couple of days it wore thin. When she left, Chester brought in the usual paid company (after an early experience with a pro who bore a slight resemblance to Billie Holiday, Frank had discovered a special fondness for black women), sometimes in twos and threes.

Jimmy Van Heusen indulged his friend as fully as his imagination and resources would allow, but even he, renowned for his heroic energy, was fraying out. He marshaled the usual reinforcements: Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn (though not together, just at the moment: they were having an idiotic feud), Manie Sacks, Ben Barton, Frank Military, Al Silvani.

Not Tami Mauriello, though. The old pug had actually gone and gotten a part—a pretty fair-sized one—in Kazan’s fucking waterfront picture, which was just about to start shooting in Hoboken, where the populace was all agog at the arrival of the movie people with their trucks, lights, and cables. Not to mention the breathlessly awaited appearance of Marlon Brando.

After a few days, Frank stopped going out. He stiffed NBC, failing to appear for the premiere of
Perfectly Frank
, which was to be broadcast live; the network had to do a fast shuffle and throw one of the tapes he’d already stockpiled onto the air. The suits were not pleased—there were grumbles about legal action. Sinatra couldn’t have cared less. He was walking around Jimmy’s apartment in his pajamas, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, gazing into space or out the window or at the flickering gray and white images on TV: Lucy and Ricky jabbering about this or that, to uproarious laughter. Husband-and-wife situation comedies were all the rage that fall, and a number of them featured actual couples—the Arnazes, Ozzie and Harriet, Burns and Allen, the Stu Erwins, Anne Jeffreys and Robert Sterling on
Topper
. When MGM announced the Frank-and-Ava split, some Hollywood wit cracked, “
Well, that washes them up. They’ll never get a TV situation comedy show now!”

On Monday, November 16, Mankiewicz and Schenck signed: Ava was to play the lead in
The Barefoot Contessa
. Mankiewicz would pay MGM $200,000 for her services; of this amount, Metro would pay Ava $60,000 for three months’ work. It was well below her usual rate, but she didn’t give a damn. All the trade papers carried the news. They also carried the news that Elia Kazan had started shooting
On the Waterfront
in Hoboken. Marlon Brando, wearing blue jeans and a red-and-black-checked hunting jacket, had slipped into town, listened attentively as Kazan explained the setup, done a couple hours’ work, then slipped away in a black car. (He’d had it written into his contract that he could leave every afternoon to go see his psychiatrist in Manhattan.)

Across the river in Chester’s place, Frank, still in his pajamas, sat and talked dully on the phone—to his agents, to Hank Sanicola. He had Sanicola read him the trades. Hank said he was sorry, about Ava, about
Waterfront
. Frank didn’t answer.

He was due in St. Louis the next day, to rehearse for a week-before-Thanksgiving gig at the Chase Hotel. His bags still weren’t packed. Chester looked at him. Would he please eat something, for fuck’s sake? He looked like shit.

Frank stared into space. He would try.

Chester told him he had to go out. Could he get Frank anything? Blonde? Redhead? Brown sugar?

Frank didn’t answer—not even a smile. Van Heusen left, exhaling with relief the second he walked out the door. He had had it, and so had the rest of Sinatra’s friends. Frank had committed the worst sin, one of which he’d previously been incapable: he had finally bored them all to tears.

Chester went home at 2:00 a.m. after attending another party at “21.” It had been a gala occasion: he’d played the piano and sung, mostly his own songs, and he’d been a big hit. At forty, Jimmy Van Heusen wasn’t anything like a good-looking man—tall, powerful, gravel voiced, he had a bullish presence enhanced by a thick neck and shaved head (he’d begun the ahead-of-his-time practice when he started losing his hair in his late twenties). “
You would not pick him over Clark Gable any day,” Angie Dickinson recalled. “But his magnetism was irresistible.” He played piano beautifully, wrote gorgeously poignant songs about romance, and, quite straightforwardly if rather unromantically, loved to fuck. Women knew it at once by the look in his eye, the way he ran his fingers down a girl’s arm—playing her like a piano!—and growled, in those W. C. Fields–ian tones, “Bee-yutiful.” He had a fat wallet; he flew his own plane; he never went home alone.

Tonight, though, he did: he had a sick friend to tuck in. Van Heusen
shook his head as he turned the key—and then stared at the spots of blood on the floor. He followed the red trail across the living room, his heart thudding. At the entrance to the kitchen, he saw Frank, his left pajama sleeve soaked deep scarlet, lying semiconscious on the linoleum.

Frantic when their star attraction failed to appear, the bookers at the Chase Hotel phoned everyone: Sinatra’s agents, his lawyer, even Alan Livingston at Capitol Records. No one knew anything. Finally they called Morris Shenker. Shenker was a St. Louis defense attorney with a large and grateful clientele of men whose bona fides might not have stood up to scrutiny by the Kefauver Committee. An enormously powerful figure with ties to Vegas and the East Coast, the lawyer made it his business to know everyone and everything. And with one telephone call, he found out. Quickly and simply, he told the entertainment managers at the Chase Hotel that Sinatra had slit his wrists.