Frank: The Voice (77 page)

The enmity was inevitable, and mutual. Winters, determined to become a serious actress, was hardworking and insecure. She was scared of him; he was irritable and distracted. When he sent a note suggesting they rehearse together in his dressing room, she saw only one possible interpretation. She fired a self-righteous note back saying they would rehearse, as planned, on the soundstage. It wasn’t that she found him unattractive. “
I too had sat in the orchestra at the Paramount Theater when I was a teenager and screamed every time he opened his mouth,” Winters wrote in her autobiography. “But he was married to Nancy, whom I knew and liked from various charity committees, and there were the children. I was determined to keep my association with Mr. Sinatra as professional as possible. In retrospect, I suspect he wanted the same thing.”

That was in retrospect. In the near term, her rebuff sat less than well with him. They began on a footing of edgy hostility, which made their romantic scenes tricky. When it came to their big duet together
(as the titular nightclub entertainer, Sinatra performed a half-dozen songs in the movie), Winters was so intimidated that she could barely open her mouth. Her nerves seem to have inspired Frank to his only charitable moments of the shoot—he helped her through.

The rest, though, was debacle. As the lawyers hammered out the details of the divorce, Sinatra realized just how complicated winning his freedom was going to be. “
His children were quite young and there were always psychiatrists and priests and his kids visiting him on the set,” Winters recalled.

Halfway through the shoot, Sinatra attended the premiere of
Show Boat
with Ava, all of Hollywood falling at her feet. A few days after that, his radio show
Meet Frank Sinatra
(which he’d been broadcasting from L.A.) came to the end of its sputtering run. Neither of these events could have improved his mood.

He was achingly thin (“
Frank was losing about a pound a week, which made me look heavier in the rushes,” Winters recalled). He was discontent with the cut-rate movie studio and the small change they were paying him. Winters, on the other hand—she already had a career-changing performance in
A Place in the Sun
in the can—was on her way up.

And on the night they shot
Danny Wilson
’s penultimate scene, outdoors at Burbank Airport, the storm finally broke. “
I can’t remember what started our vicious argument,” Winters recalled, “but the mildest
things we called each other were ‘bow-legged bitch of a Brooklyn blonde,’ and ‘skinny, no-talent, stupid Hoboken bastard.’ ”

The production head Leo Spitz pleaded with Winters to feel some empathy. “
Mr. Sinatra is going through a terrible and troubled period of his life and career,” he told her. “He’s going against all his religious training and has periods when he loses his voice, and it terrifies him. And he is not famous as an actor but a singer … That’s no excuse for him behaving so outrageously, but you’re both liberals, and maybe with your ideals of brotherhood you can bring yourself to understand the reasons that are making him behave the way he did.”

Grumbling, Winters returned to the set—to endure Frank’s revenge. They rehearsed the final scene, in which, as Winters’s character lay in a hospital bed, Sinatra was to say to his romantic rival (Alex Nicol), “
I’ll have a cup of coffee and leave you two lovebirds alone.” Once the camera was rolling, however, what Frank said was “I’ll go have a cup of Jack Daniel’s or I’m going to pull that blond broad’s hair out by its black roots.”

Winters hit him over the head with a bedpan, raged off the set, and went home. She stayed there for two days—until she got a tearful phone call from Nancy Sinatra. “
Shelley, if Frank doesn’t get the twenty-five thousand dollars for the picture, the bank might foreclose the mortgage on the house,” Nancy said. “My children are going to be out in the street. Please finish the picture.”

Shelley finished the picture. When
Meet Danny Wilson
wrapped on July 31, all concerned breathed a huge sigh of relief. The film would go on to do just so-so box office. Yet considering the disastrous course of the production, the
New York Times
review is surprisingly positive, calling the film “
pleasantly tune-filled and amiable,” and going on to praise the battling co-stars: “Frank Sinatra is charming, natural and casual as he breezily portrays the cocky Danny Wilson … Miss Winters is equally slick as that desired dame and she neatly adds to the performance in a snappy duet with Sinatra on ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ ”

So much for the artistic benefits of peace and harmony. In truth, Frank was improving as a film actor, if anyone cared to pay attention.

The day after shooting ended on
Meet Danny Wilson
, Sinatra and Ava took off on what was meant to be a secret jaunt to Acapulco. From the beginning, the trip was snakebit: crowds of reporters and photographers turned out to see the pair off at the L.A. airport, taking note of the ungodly number of suitcases they had with them. Was this something more than a quick vacation? You could get a fast divorce in Mexico. You could get married there too.

The photographers clustered on the stairs that were pulled up to the plane, snapping away; the pilot was helpless to start the engines until they were cleared. Sinatra leaned out the door and gave it to them with both barrels: “
GET THE FUCK OFF THE STEPS!”

“You shouldn’t act that way, Frankie,” one of the lensmen piped up. “The press made you what you are!”

“The press didn’t make me, it was my singing! You miserable crumbs!”

Reporters were alerted all down the line. They showed up in swarms at the flight’s layover in El Paso and at the airport in Mexico City. From there, a wire-service story went out:

Their host, a Mexican millionaire named Jorge Pasquel (newspapers liked to call him a “wealthy sportsman”), flew the couple from Mexico City to Acapulco in his converted B-17,
El Fantasma
, and put them up in his palatial digs. Rumors swirled that Sinatra had gotten his quickie divorce and secretly married Ava in Cuernavaca. Officials denied it. Another wire-service dispatch, on August 4, reported the big news that Ava had been snubbed by Hedy Lamarr in Acapulco:

One night just after midnight, Frank and Ava adjourned to a club called the Beachcomber. An American photographer who had stationed himself outside asked if he could snap their picture. Frank told him to fuck himself. The flashbulb went off anyway. A Mexican bodyguard—another contribution from Pasquel—went for the camera, but the photographer held on to it. “
If you don’t give me that camera,” the bodyguard said, “I’ll put a bullet into you.” Somebody called the police,
who listened to Sinatra’s complaint, took the camera, and handed it to Frank, who opened it and yanked out the film, raining a blue torrent of obscenities on the photographer while Ava dabbed at her eyes.

Surely somewhere on the Baja California in 1951 there was a deserted beach town, minus wealthy sportsmen, former movie queens, and Eurotrash, to which Frank and Ava might have managed to spirit themselves for a few days of solitary relaxation. Surely Sinatra with all his resources could have found a way to ditch the paparazzi. But it was the same as with his bachelor jaunts to Palm Springs: he wanted to get away from it all, but not too far away. Solitude, unglamorous surroundings, were anathema. So he went to the usual places, with the usual suspects, and got into the usual situations. With the usual resultant attention. Attention was very important. What was he, who was he, without it? The idea that he could manage it completely, that the press of the world would fall in at his heels like Earl Wilson, was a fond illusion.

Look at me. Leave me alone
. The tension between the couple’s need for publicity (Ava’s was more ambivalent) and their need for privacy was killing the relationship as it was struggling to get started. When the two of them were alone—it was far too seldom—she cried to him about the scenes. She was a tough girl, with a thick skin, and she liked showing off as much as any actress, but she was sensitive too. He tried to console her; in reality there was little he could do. His power was diminishing every minute.

After three less-eventful days (though the United Press had done some digging and discovered that the Mexican bodyguard had a long murder record), Frank and Ava flew back home. “
It was dark when we arrived, but a horde of photographers were gathered anyway, eager to pounce, and flashbulbs were popping as we scrambled into the waiting car,” Ava recalled.

The horde of photographers consisted of about a half-dozen members of the press, but one of them, a cameraman for KTTV, shone a spotlight at the Cadillac. This infuriated Sinatra, who kept screaming,
“
Kill the light! Kill the light!” According to the testimony of a news photographer named William Eccles, Sinatra swerved the car directly toward him and struck him with the fender, screaming, “
Next time I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

Eccles filed a criminal complaint against Sinatra, but withdrew it when he received a letter of apology allegedly written by Frank.

Some good news after he got home put Frank in a better mood: Nancy announced she would permit him to file for a divorce in Nevada, where the complainant had only to satisfy a six-week residency requirement. Broker than ever, Sinatra had his people get him what work they could: two weeks at the Riverside Hotel in Reno, followed by another couple of weeks at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas.

He arrived in Reno on August 9 in fine spirits—and determined not to let any bad press scuttle his plans. Frank smiled at the reporters and said, “
I hope I’m going to get along with you fellows.” Then he shook hands with each, and invited them all to his hotel suite to ask him whatever they wanted. The men glanced at each other in disbelief.

Soon they were cozily swilling free booze and noshing on canapés in Sinatra’s suite at the Riverside. They got out their notebooks.

“Frank,” one of them piped up, “
I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but some people are saying you’re too broke to file for divorce.”

Frank looked at the ceiling, exhaled a plume of smoke, and leaned back in his chair like a man without a care in the world. Outside the picture windows, the snowcapped Sierra Nevada stretched gloriously across the horizon. He grinned at the reporters. Was that what they were saying? Well, the gentlemen of the press would all be getting their bill for the drinks and snacks in a few minutes.