Frank: The Voice (89 page)

“
Goodbye, Dolly,” Frank yelled, over the engine noise. “I’ll call you.”

Arriving in Nairobi as Ava heads to work on
Mogambo
, November 1952.
(photo credit 32.1)

T
hey celebrated their first anniversary on board another plane, this time en route to Nairobi, opening a warmish bottle of champagne and exchanging gifts that she had paid for: a diamond-studded ring from him, a platinum watch from her. “
It was quite an occasion for me,” Ava recalled. “I had been married twice but never for a whole year.”

Clark Gable came to meet their flight at Eastleigh Airport in Nairobi. “Hiya, Clark!” Ava called, when she spotted him. They embraced. Gable growled hello: she looked as ravishing as always. He looked magnificent in his khakis and bush hat. Frank, standing by in his rumpled airplane suit, his tie loosened, his thin hair flying in the breeze, faked a smile. In fact he needn’t have worried. Though Ava and Gable were old drinking buddies from their co-starring stint in the miserable
Lone Star—
and had had the obligatory on-location fling—she’d quickly come to see the gulf between image and reality. “
Clark’s the kind of guy that if you say, ‘Hiya, Clark, how are you?’ he’s stuck for an answer,” she told friends. She loved him like an uncle—and kept sacrosanct the steamy black-and-white memory of his commanding eyes in
Red Dust
.

But while the 1932
Red Dust
had been shot in its entirety on Stage 6 at MGM, the Technicolor 1950s required greater verisimilitude.
Mogambo
would be filmed, as Metro’s ad copy trumpeted, “
on safari in Africa amid authentic scenes of unrivaled savagery and awe-inspiring splendor.” The savagery was a little too real for comfort: the Mau Mau Uprising had recently begun in Kenya, and Kikuyu rebels had killed dozens of whites. “
The movie company had its own thirty-man police force,” Ava remembered, “and when we got to what was then British East Africa, we were under the protection of both the Lancashire Fusiliers and the Queen’s African Rifles … Everyone in the cast was issued a weapon.” There is no record of whether Frank brought his own.

East Africa had never seen a safari quite like this: a cast and crew of almost six hundred, including bearers, guides, chefs, nurses, servants, native extras, and no fewer than eight big-game hunters, chief among them a rakish English expat named Frank “Bunny” Allen. The whole contingent moved from location to location in a convoy of fifty trucks, and, Ava recalled,

Along the Kagera River on the Tanganyika-Uganda border, the stars (twenty-three-year-old Grace Kelly played Gable’s other love interest) lived in Abercrombie & Fitch–like safari splendor: fancy flown-in French food (Sinatra brought a supply of pasta and tomato sauce), fine wines and liquors, even heated water for baths and showers. It might as well have been a penal colony as far as Frank was concerned. The temperatures rose well into the hundreds during the day; dust blew into every crevice. One shower a day didn’t begin to suffice … But mainly, he was a fifth wheel. Ford liked throwing orders at him, with a broad wink to the others: “
Make the spaghetti, Frank.” The malicious old Irishman constantly tested everyone around him for weakness, prodding and needling: one of the first things he told Ava was that he’d really wanted Maureen O’Hara to play her role.

For Frank, all of
Mogambo
boiled down to one object—a camp chair. While Ford took the cast and crew out into the bush every morning to shoot, Frank parked his ass in that damn chair, rereading that goddamn book for the umpteenth time, thinking about all the other actors who were testing for Maggio, and wondering if Harry Cohn was ever going to call him back.

It didn’t make him especially good company. By the time the movie people returned in the evening, he was two or three drinks ahead of them, grumbling into his glass about the dirt and the flies and Columbia Pictures.

Out in the bush at night, there was little to do but drink, and behind thin tent walls there were few secrets. The show people and crew engaged in the usual location mischief—Gable and Kelly had a hot affair; Bunny Allen had quite a few—but Frank and Ava mainly battled. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that she was feeling
lousy. Maybe it was dysentery—a lot of people, including Ford, were sick—but by the time Frank had complained for the thousandth time about his troubles, she had had it. “
Why don’t you just get on with your fucking life?” she screamed at him one night. Many heard her.

Every morning, the company’s DC-3 would bump down in the clearing the crew had bulldozed, bringing supplies and mail from Nairobi. And one morning, a long week after Frank and Ava had arrived, there was a cable for him in the morning mail.

Some say it was from Buddy Adler; some say it came from Bert Allenberg, one of Sinatra’s new agents at William Morris. In any case, the cable was short and to the point: Frank was to report to Culver City to be screen-tested for the role of Maggio.

He read it over and over again. There was no mention of exactly how he was supposed to get to Culver City from the middle of the goddamn jungle, and he didn’t have the price of a ticket.

Frank hated asking Ava for money, but she didn’t hesitate for a second. She had an MGM account: all she had to do to charge airfare was say the word. It was the best she had liked her husband in weeks—because it was the best he had liked himself in weeks. Go knock ’em dead, she told him.

With the New York gig coming up, he might as well stay through, he said. It meant he wouldn’t be back for almost a month.

She agreed with him, the faintest hint of coolness in her voice. He picked it up, but there was no time to investigate.

He threw his things together in record time, kissed her, and clambered aboard the DC-3, strapping himself into a jump seat behind the pilot and waving out the window as the plane started to bump down the runway. Then he was gone.

He left the location on Friday, November 14, took a long overnight flight from Nairobi to London, and arrived the next day. He stayed at the Savoy, and when he departed on Sunday for New York, he left
a brown-paper-wrapped package he’d brought with him in the hotel’s safe-deposit box. Ava had asked him to take the package, containing her diamond earrings and a diamond bracelet, so the Mau Maus wouldn’t get them.

Frank landed at Idlewild on Monday morning. He had handed his declaration sheet to the customs agent and walked blearily through the checkpoint when another agent waved him aside. Suddenly two cops appeared and escorted him to an office. Frank asked what was going on, but nobody said anything. Soon the office was filled with cops and U.S. customs agents. The agents asked if they could open his suitcases, then told him they had the authority to do so whether he agreed or not.

Frank asked once more what the hell was happening. No one answered.

He stomped around a side office for almost two hours, fuming, while the agents inspected his bags minutely. He was going to miss his goddamn flight to Los Angeles. He was going to call a lawyer. He phoned Sol Gelb, who said he would look into it, but that in the meantime Frank should try to be cooperative. Frank phoned Sanicola, who drove out to Idlewild and butted heads with the customs people, who were very polite but very firm. No one would say what was going on. Finally, when it was clear that Frank had indeed missed his flight, customs let him go. Cursing, he got into Hank’s car, rode into the city, checked in at the Regency, and phoned Buddy Adler—who told him that tomorrow would be fine for his screen test.

The next morning he went to Idlewild to catch another flight, and the plane was delayed for three hours by mechanical problems. Frank turned around, went back to the Regency, and opened a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Buddy Adler was understanding. Sanicola said that Sol Gelb had spoken to customs—which informed the lawyer that someone had sent in a crank letter saying that Sinatra was going to smuggle diamonds into the country.

On Wednesday the nineteenth Frank finally made it to Los Angeles.
It was after five when he landed, and Adler’s office said Frank could come in the next day. He spent the evening drinking, rereading the Maggio passages for the thousandth time, and wondering if he had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the role.

Ava had suspected it for a while, and by Tuesday of that week she knew she was pregnant. It was definitely Frank’s (she’d been good for a while), but she didn’t want it. “
I had the strongest feelings about bringing a child into the world,” she would recall years later.

The time would never be right. She was at best ambivalent and at worst terrified; the prospect of motherhood held no charms for her. As the adored and magically splendid baby of the Gardner family,
she
was the world’s child; there was no room in her life for others. (For all Nancy junior’s starry awe about her, Ava wasn’t always particularly friendly to Frank’s children.) And having a baby would change her body, and she knew where her bread was buttered. “
I often felt,” Ava wrote, “that if only I could act, everything about my life and career would have been different. But I was never an actress—none of us kids at Metro were. We were just good to look at.”