Frank: The Voice (108 page)

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 then, 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.