Frank: The Voice (80 page)

The second-season premiere of
The Frank Sinatra Show
, on October 9, co-starred Perry Como, Frankie Laine, and the Andrews Sisters. The reviews were slightly better than they’d been the year before:
Variety
said the show was “
spotty, taking full advantage of its all-star talent lineup to sparkle in some spots and settling down to a slow walk in others.” And the
New York Times
’s Jack Gould allowed that Frank had “
a very real degree of stage presence and a certain likeable charm,” but also sounded an ominous note: “The evening’s honors were captured effortlessly and smoothly by another gentleman, Perry Como.”

Como was a perfect character for 1950s television: attractive, bland, comforting. Who knew who Perry Como really was? Who cared? He seemed to be a solid citizen with a good marriage; he was good-looking, friendly, with a sweet voice and a nice sense of humor about himself.

Sinatra, on the other hand, could sing wonderfully, but that miraculous audience connection he created in person was diminished by the TV camera’s cold eye. Though he could do comedy serviceably, his real skills were elsewhere, and his self-mockery was never entirely convincing: his ego was too palpably gigantic. He was also all too apt to wear his anger on his sleeve, in a not especially funny way.
¹
By 1951, audiences felt they knew all too well who Frank Sinatra was, and they weren’t buying.

Of course Uncle Miltie murdered him in the ratings.

The miracle was that amid all his travails, Sinatra kept doing the show week after week, and actually got somewhat better at it. Berle’s ratings even started to erode slightly.

Still, Frank’s sponsor, never fully committed in the first place,
grew more and more disaffected. The columnists continued to inveigh against Sinatra; priests advised their congregations to avoid buying his records and attending his movies. He was the anti-Crosby.
²

Frank couldn’t bear the thought of losing Twin Palms. He borrowed the twelve grand he owed his lawyers from Ava—though since she didn’t have that kind of cash lying around, she borrowed it from her agent Charlie Feldman. It was a hell of a way to start a marriage, but what else could he do? She smiled sadly and handed him the check. Her dowry. His big grin assured her she’d done the right thing: he was unencumbered at last. He signed a new property settlement, increasing Nancy’s separate maintenance to the tune of one-third of his gross income up to $150,000 a year, plus 10 percent of earnings above that. On October 15, his soon-to-be ex-wife filed for her California divorce.

Two weeks later, Nancy appeared once more in the Santa Monica courthouse, this time to receive her interlocutory decree of divorce. One photographer, presumably a municipal employee, took several shots as she sat in a courtroom.

They are extraordinary images. Wearing a checked suit, white gloves, the triple-strand pearl necklace and pearl earrings Frank had given her, and a small black hat with a face net, Nancy Rose Barbato Sinatra looks radiant. It is a face without mean-spiritedness. In two of the pictures she’s grinning delightedly right at the photographer, but two others, both with eyes averted, are far more arresting. In one Nancy appears lost in thought, and whatever she may be thinking seems of the greatest possible interest. And in the other, smiling slightly and looking up to the left, she looks, quite simply, transcendently beautiful.

Two days later, in a five-minute closed session in a Las Vegas courtroom, Frank was awarded an uncontested divorce. That night he flew east, and on November 2 he and Ava applied for a marriage license in Philadelphia, where they hoped to avoid publicity.

It was all a circus, of course. How could it have been anything
else? The newspapers were watching their every move. When Frank and Ava went to the judge’s chambers to apply for their license, they were accompanied by Manie Sacks and another Philadelphian, CBS co-founder and board member Isaac Levy. Levy, who was enormously wealthy, had a mansion on the Main Line in Germantown. It stood to reason that the wedding was going to be held at his house. And since the couple had applied for their license on Friday the second, and Pennsylvania had a seventy-two-hour waiting period, clearly the date would be Monday the fifth.

Then the pair returned to New York for the weekend, and the wedding nearly fell through. On Saturday they went out for a celebratory dinner at the Colony with the James Masons. Afterward, the two couples went nightclubbing in Harlem, and then Frank and Ava returned to the Hampshire House. In the suite Ava was sharing with Bappie, there was a knock at the door. It was a bellman, with a letter. Ava made him wait while she found fifty cents in her purse.

She opened the envelope and unfolded the sheets inside. The letter was handwritten in a looping feminine scrawl, slightly childish, its forward thrust suggesting urgency. It was full of misspellings. As Ava’s eyes traversed the page, her heart began to thud.

The letter described several trysts the writer claimed to have had with Frank. So far, so bad. But as Ava read on (putting her hand to her chest and sitting in a wing chair without even realizing she was doing so), it came to her that the woman had to be telling the truth. There were details, shameless and horrible details about Frank and his anatomy and his proclivities, that only a lover could know.

Except that this woman wasn’t a lover. She was a pro, cold and precise and crude and impertinent, even going so far as to congratulate Ava on attracting a man of Frank’s prodigious endowment—then pitying her because her husband-to-be needed to pay for sex.

The writer of this letter, Ava realized, wanted to reduce her to nothing.

Like an automaton, she walked over to the window and with some
effort pulled up the heavy sash. The cold November night wind, ripe with the tang of burning trash, swirled in. Bappie stood in the doorway. Her first horrified thought was that her sister was going to jump.

“Ava—” Bappie moved toward her.

But self-destruction was the furthest thing from Ava’s mind. Gritting her teeth, she pulled Frank’s engagement ring—a six-carat emerald set in platinum, flanked with pear-cut diamonds—from her finger and threw it out into dark space.

She turned to her sister, not registering the look of fear on her face. “
The wedding is off,” Ava said. “Finished. Forget it!” She ran to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her. The lock clicked.

“
Now the bedlam began,” Ava recalled.

The diabolical rival Gardner had in mind was none other than Howard Hughes. When the dashing aviation tycoon and movie mogul wasn’t busy crashing experimental aircraft and running RKO into the ground, he was keeping obsessive tabs on a whole harem of real and imagined lady friends, including Jane Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner, the sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Gene
Tierney, Jean Peters, and Ava. For the handsome but strangely sexless Hughes, the chief pleasure of romance seemed to lie in the pursuit, even (if not especially) if the object of his desire had told him in no uncertain terms to beat it. This Ava had done any number of times, but then his lavish gifts would soften her a little, again and again. The cycle continued until Frank came along, but Hughes kept having her watched anyway, waiting for something to give—or trying to make something give.

The singer and the tycoon had infinite contempt for each other. For Sinatra, Hughes was a right-winger and a creep, in all likelihood a pervert of some kind. For Hughes, with his ultraconservative Texas oilman’s mentality, Sinatra was a greaseball pinko, bent on undermining American family values. As for the fact that RKO had a soon-to-be-released Sinatra film in the can—well, the studio head would deal with that shortly.

In the meantime, his attempted sabotage failed. On the rainy morning of Wednesday, November 7, Frank and Ava emerged from the Hampshire House holding hands. “
They were giggly, obviously very much in love and sober,” recalled Earl Wilson.

Just before he got into the car, though, Sinatra barked out, “No questions, no questions!” and clamped his hand over the lens of a Movietone newsreel camera. Then the car door slammed behind him and the flotilla of Cadillacs headed off to what the wedding party fervently
hoped were parts unknown. To throw off the press, the nuptials had been switched to a top-secret new location, in less palatial but still elegant digs—the West Germantown home of Manie’s brother Lester Sacks, a well-to-do garment manufacturer.

The press was waiting for them anyway. Frank stared incredulously as his car rolled up in front of Sacks’s big fieldstone house. He jumped out of the car while it was still rolling. “
How did those creeps know where we were?” he asked nobody in particular as the photographers snapped. It was dusk; a cold drizzle was falling. “I don’t want no circus here!” he called to the press. “I’ll knock the first guy who attempts to get inside on his ass—and I mean it!”

While he sputtered, Ava grabbed his hand and dragged him indoors. But even the company of friends couldn’t cool his rage. “
Frank was so angry, poor baby,” Ava remembered. “He spent the whole time at the window upstairs screaming at the press, ‘You lousy parasites, fuck off!’ at the top of his lungs. He was tempted—we had to hold him—to go out and fight with them. But we finally got him downstairs, got him in front of the preacher.”

It was a very small wedding, just twenty guests in all. Frank had his crew—Sanicola and Ben Barton and Stordahl and Jones and Manie (Van Heusen, who would remain allergic to marriage, except for writing songs about it, until his own at age fifty-six, was conspicuously absent)—but Ava only had Bappie, who was hoping that after Mickey and Artie (she’d attended both those weddings, too) the third time might be the charm.

But the portents weren’t favorable. When Dick Jones sat down at the grand piano in Lester Sacks’s living room and began to play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, he discovered that like so many pianos in prosperous homes, this one hadn’t been tuned in ages. Jones tried a simpler number, “Here Comes the Bride.” It didn’t sound much better. Then, as Manie escorted Ava down the stairs, he tripped and they slipped three steps before regaining their balance.

The bride wore a slinky mauve cocktail dress by Howard Greer
(“
Wonderful designer,” Ava recalled, “but you couldn’t wear a stitch underneath”); the groom, a dark blue suit and a gray silk tie. The ceremony, conducted by the police court judge Joseph Sloane, was brief: the couple spoke their vows, slipped thin platinum rings on each other’s fingers. Then Frank turned to the guests, grinning, and said, “
Well, we finally made it! We finally made it!”

As Stordahl filmed the proceedings with a home-movie camera, the guests toasted the couple with champagne; Ava embraced Dolly, who burst into tears and patted her new daughter-in-law lovingly on the arm, unable for the moment to think of a word to say. Then the bride cut into the seven-tiered cake and, to laughter and applause, messily fed Frank a piece. Dolly came up and pinched her son’s cheek. “
This marriage is blessed with good luck,” she told the couple. “You got married at the seventh hour on the seventh day of the eleventh month. Seven, seven, eleven. You can’t miss.” Marty smiled.

There was a bustle in the foyer. A butler approached Frank and handed him a note—it was a formal request, from the photographers outside in the rain: Could the newlyweds possibly come to the front door for a picture?

Sinatra went to the door and threw it open. “
Who sent this? Who sent this?” he called, pointing to the press corps. “Who? You? You? You’re not getting any pictures, understand? You’ll get shots from our photographer when he gets around to it.”

“My editor wants
my
pictures,” one of them called back.

“I’ll bet you fifty dollars you don’t get a picture,” Sinatra told him, “and another fifty dollars that if you even point your camera at me, I’ll knock you on your ear.”