Frank: The Voice (87 page)

It was a pleasant evening, and Ava got loaded right away. She knew all about Cohn’s reputation as a bully, but wouldn’t have been scared of him in any case. She looked him in the eye. “
You know who’s right for that part of Maggio, don’t you?” she said. “That son of a bitch of a husband of mine.”

Cohn stared at her with that bulldog-terrier face. Christ, she was gorgeous.

“For God’s sake, Harry,” Ava suddenly said. “I’ll give you a free picture if you’ll just test him.”

The studio chief smiled as he looked her up and down. What else, he wondered, might she give him for free?

“
We bumped into Frank and Ava at Frascati’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, and whatever trouble they might have had is evidently over,” Hedda Hopper wrote.

Touring the provinces … it had such an air of noblesse oblige about it. And it was all talk, of course: if Frank was going to tour any provinces, it would be the provinces of Missouri or Pennsylvania, or wherever else he could dig up a gig or two. The humble act that had
gone over so well with Ava was all too real, and the flip side of it was that he felt lousy about himself. All that stuff about staying as close as possible to her in Africa was her idea: that, and a visit to her family in North Carolina, were her price for reconciliation. A family visit he could take; Africa was another matter. In truth, he dreaded the trip—dreaded John Ford with his sharp tongue and his three Academy Awards, even dreaded Gable, the King, with his phony teeth and his easy insouciance (and, perhaps, his assumptions about the leading man’s prerogatives when it came to Ava). What would Frank say to them?

He had heard nothing from Cohn. A day went by, and another day, then a week, and soon Sinatra began to believe that Cohn had just been humoring him. In fact, Columbia was dickering with the stage actor Eli Wallach, whom everybody, Cohn and Zinnemann and Buddy Adler, wanted for Maggio. But Wallach’s agents were being a pain in the ass, insisting that the thespian be paid $20,000 for the role when the studio had budgeted $16,000, tops.

Frank, knowing nothing of all this, was as nervous as a cat. Three nights after Hedda spied him in Frascati’s, he made a guest appearance on Jimmy Durante’s
All-Star Revue—
a bone tossed to him by his old
It Happened in Brooklyn
sidekick. Afterward, Frank and Ava went out to dinner with friends in the Valley, and they got drunk, and Frank said something awful. It was all too predictable. “
By the time we’d gotten home to Pacific Palisades, my mood had taken on an icy, remote, to-hell-with-all-men tinge,” Ava recalled.

How to get your wife’s attention … Thus began a Hollywood operetta that would become the subject of heated fascination for years to come. History swirls with conflicting accounts of the next twenty-four hours, which commenced with Frank slamming doors, jumping into his car, and screeching off into the night, ostensibly in search of Lana Turner, who was indeed in Palm Springs—a fact of which Frank was well aware because she was staying in his goddamn house. Ava had lent her the goddamn house.

Frank’s old flame was hiding out in Twin Palms under the protection of her (and Ava’s) business manager Benton Cole, because Turner’s boyfriend, Fernando Lamas, had recently beaten her up in a jealous rage. Lana, who possessed an infallible trouble-seeking radar when it came to men, had provoked Lamas’s ire by dancing with the movie Tarzan Lex Barker at the very party (Marion Davies’s) at which Lamas had stared deeply into Ava’s eyes …

In fact, Hollywood in the early 1950s was a slick and dark fantasy world in many ways like the climactic house-of-mirrors scene in Orson Welles’s recent
Lady from Shanghai—
self-reflective to the point of disorientation. Lamas, a hotheaded Argentinean who was about to
co-star with Turner in MGM’s
Latin Lovers
, had recently slapped her on-screen in
The Merry Widow—
which, he apparently felt, now gave him license to do the job for real. First, though, he turned his perfect profile to gaze soulfully at Ava precisely as a newspaper photographer snapped the scene—and as Lana sat at his side, looking appropriately humiliated.

All this at a party Marion Davies had thrown for over a thousand guests, including the press, because, said Davies, “
I want to have some fun before I die.”

Benton Cole had come to Lana’s aid before. The previous September, in the wake of marital woes and a couple of box-office flops, Lana had (not unperceptively) declared her career “
a hollow success, a tissue of fantasies on film,” and slit her wrists in the bathroom of her Beverly Hills house. Cole broke down the door and took her to the hospital.

Now, with her career on the upswing but her personal life a familiar shambles,
²
the movie queen Frank Sinatra had once promised to marry was sitting with her manager-protector, smoking and drinking and bruised, in the love nest on Alejo Road as Frank and Ava converged separately on Palm Springs.

Despite his shouted declaration, Frank had absolutely no desire to fuck Lana Turner. He had just been angry. (Not to mention the fact that in her early thirties, she was already starting to look middle-aged.) He had passed over Lana and married Ava for a reason, and it was more than just that the sex was great. Lana Turner was, as witness her long, sad stumble through life, an empty shell of a human being, devoid of intellectual or spiritual resources of any sort. Ava Gardner, on the other hand, was a woman of enormous mettle and variety and spirit, one who would, after Frank, go on to fascinate Hemingway and Robert Graves, and not just because of the beauty of her person.

Frank knew all this (and the sex was great). Ava knew it only intermittently. She wasn’t sure she could act, she wasn’t sure she could think, but she did know she was a physical phenomenon. It was her
one piece of certainty, and she gloried in it and suffered from it like any other star—if not more so, because of the depth of her sensibility. Her perpetual state of insecurity often made her feel that at bottom, nothing was really worth anything. The ground was constantly shifting beneath her feet—and beneath the feet of anyone who stood close to her. It made her at once fascinating and impossible.

Some of this may have occurred to Frank as he drove toward the desert in the pre-sunrise twilight, but what he was mainly thinking about was his own problems. He was feeling extremely sorry for himself, and he just wanted to take solace in the one place that gave him any comfort. And he wanted to be there alone. First, though, he wanted to pay a call on Jimmy Van Heusen—who loved the desert as much as Frank did, and had a place out in Yucca Valley—and talk it all out.

I knew that at one time she felt like she’d been on the verge of marrying Frank, which certainly gave some impetus to my suspicions, but we’d always been good, if not close, friends. And I’d always admired her as a great movie star. I remembered when I first arrived in Hollywood, a starlet green as a spring tobacco leaf. I’d glimpsed Lana on a set one day, and I’d thought, Now, there’s the real thing. She had a canvas-backed chair inscribed with her name and a stool next to it holding her things. What struck me was that among them was a gleaming
gold
cigarette case and a
gold
lighter. Without envy I’d thought, Now that’s what a
real
film star should look like. That’s style.

To say that she was style without substance is perhaps shining too harsh a light on Turner: stardom is a real phenomenon. But the remoteness that combines with physical presence in the peculiar chemical reaction that produces stardom is usually a measure of distance from self. “
Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” Grant once said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.” “
It is true,” Earl Wilson wrote, “that movie stars get to believe their own publicity.” It is actually half-true. Stardom is a seductive idea, easier to believe in if the self doesn’t get muddled up in it. Stars find it easier to believe in other stars’ publicity.
Now, there’s the real thing
. To Ava, Frank’s angry talk had all the power he’d intended: he was, after all, talking about
Lana Turner
.

On the other hand, in the morning light that filtered in around the edges of the heavy drapes, Ava couldn’t help taking note of the tired-looking woman who sat across from her in Frank’s living room—the tired-looking woman with bruises on her face who kept tapping her cigarette on the ashtray as she drank glass after glass of vodka. Ava and Bappie and Ben Cole and Lana had decided to make a regular party of it, getting pie-eyed and telling scandalous Hollywood stories, hooting with laughter.

That was when Frank burst in, furious.

Chester had not been home. And so Sinatra had headed down to his place, seen the cars parked outside, driven around Palm Springs awhile as the sun rose, building up a head of steam. When the light began to hurt his eyes—he loved the blue just before sunrise, hated the full morning light—he went back to Alejo Road, walked up to the front door, and heard the loud laughter inside. In his goddamn house.

At first the sight of them all sitting there having a gay old time rendered him speechless. Then Ava piped up. “
Ah, Frank! I thought you were going to be down here fucking Lana!”

He blinked, looking flustered for a second. “I wouldn’t touch that broad if you paid me,” he said.

Lana jerked upright as if Fernando had slapped her again. It was the truth, and the truth hurt. No one was more sharply aware than she
of the new lines on her face and the puffiness under her eyes, not to mention the contusions on her cheek.

For his part, Frank could only think of his own hurt. “I bet you two broads have really been cutting me up,” he said.

Lana was shaking her head, her eyes brimming at the injustice.

“Frank—” Ava warned.

At this point, accounts diverge. Frank either ordered Ava into the bedroom or commanded everyone to get out of his house. Ben Cole and Lana may have left immediately or somewhat later. In her memoir, Lana recalled that Ava shrugged and went to the bedroom, followed by Frank, and that soon the sounds of a terrific battle, complete with crashing furniture, could be heard. According to Turner, Bappie later brought a “battered” Ava to stay with her and Cole. “
We did what we could to make Ava comfortable,” she recalled.

This has a self-serving sound to it—as though Turner merely wanted a sister in suffering. In her own reminiscences, Ava mentions nothing about a beating, even though her fights with Frank always seemed to devolve into physical mayhem as a prelude to sex. Instead, she claims she gave as good as she got, informing her husband haughtily that it was her house too, and proceeding to pull all her books and phonograph records from the shelves. “
Frank seemed to approve of this idea,” she remembered.