Frank wielded the baton with skill. “Here were all these symphony guys with their goatees and their Stradivarius fiddles,” Sacks recalled. “Frank walks in and steps up on a platform just like Koussevitzky, and by the time he’s through the musicians are applauding and grabbing and hugging him. I don’t know how he did it, but he made the most beautiful records you ever heard.”
Frank rejected a first proof of the Wilder record cover because it featured the composer’s name in type smaller than his own. Wilder, he insisted, must have at least equal billing. Frank was to conduct on six subsequent albums, little known now except to aficionados.
“Frank had great inner strength,” said Jo-Carroll Dennison. “It was always, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s go do that.’ Enormous energy and drive. His adrenaline was up all the time. I don’t think he was ever still. He had a frenetic personality in those days.”
Frenzy had begun to take its toll. In early 1946 Frank had to cancel a performance after his doctor ordered “complete rest.” “Hard work and extended play, I mean after hours, never hurt Frank,” George Evans said. “But emotional tension absolutely destroyed him. You could always tell when he was troubled. He came down with a bad throat. Germs were never the trouble—unless there are guilt germs.”
TO THE PUBLIC, Frank and Nancy still seemed the ideal couple, enjoying their children and their good fortune at the house on Toluca Lake. Frank even preached to young people about decorum and restraint. “Boys will go out with the girls they call ‘babes,’ ” he wrote in an article put out under his name. “But when most men marry they look for girls who will be good wives and mothers. Maybe I’m old-fashioned . . . I owe a lot of the things I have done to Nancy’s good orderly mind and to the stabilizing influence she always has been in my life.”
Yet Nancy was increasingly unhappy. “I can remember having Christmas dinner with Frank and his family in the late forties,” the songwriter Jimmy McHugh said, “and we were all feeling sort of sentimental, and Nancy turned to me and said, ‘I’d give anything to be back on the road again with Harry James and making onion sandwiches.’ ”
Frank, on the other hand, was straining at the leash. One rainy night, as he headed out alone to dinner, Nancy called after him: “Don’t forget your galoshes!” That one mundane remark, he told a friend years later, triggered in his mind the thought that the marriage was all but over. Frank had no time now for small domesticities, all too much time for Hollywood glitz, and for other women.
Evans knew about the womanizing. “The relationship between my father and Frank was kind of like father and son,” his son Phil said. “My dad felt responsible. I can’t tell you how many phone calls there were at two or three o’clock in the morning. It could be Frank on the phone, or—as often—Nancy complaining about Frank’s philandering.”
The actress Peggy Maley, whom Frank met about that time, fended him off. “He called and asked for a date,” she remembered, “but I didn’t go out with him. I wasn’t about to become a notch in anyone’s belt. He was promiscuous, had affairs with practically every woman he ever said ‘How d’you do?’ to.”
According to Jo-Carroll Dennison, Frank was a regular visitor at the apartment Jimmy Van Heusen and Axel Stordahl maintained at the Wilshire Towers. “This was where all the men went during the week for their bachelor orgies. Call girls were in and out of there all the time. . . . They had parties with all kinds of women. And Frank was always there.” Friends acting as Frank’s proxies were soon to lease another Los Angeles apartment, a “hideaway” for his exclusive use. The FBI began getting information that Frank was using prostitutes.
He was less than discreet about his nightlife, and the gossip columns began running thinly veiled blind items. “What blazing swoon-crooner has been seen night-clubbing with a different starlet every night?” Or: “Wonder if the wonder boy of hit records tells his wife where he goes after dark?”
When he turned fifty, Frank would tell a writers’ group, “If I had as many love affairs as you have given me credit for, I would be speaking to you now from a jar at the Harvard Medical School.” Yet there is ample evidence that he had a prolific sex life. Shirley Ballard, another actress who met him in Hollywood in the mid-1940s, remembered the “darling, adorable” Frank who took her to bed one night in an apartment overlooking Sunset Strip. “It was like, magic time. I thought, ‘I’m going to be seduced by Frank Sinatra. Can this really be happening?’ I’d taught myself to sing by listening to his records, so I was prepared to hear his own songs lulling me into his arms. No way! He introduced me to classical music that night, put on something called Ports of Call by Jacques Ibert, one of the most outstandingly beautiful pieces of music ever written, just glorious. And up there with him, looking out over the city with, oh-my-God, my idol, was—well—memorable.”
They had an on-and-off affair for two or three years. To Ballard, being with Sinatra was like being “in a parallel universe, in orbit with Frank, swept along by an almost electromagnetic energy.” As to the sex, she remembers “a pretty considerate lover, not selfish, not hit or miss. . . . There were times like, in the dressing room at NBC where he did his radio show, the little quickies. But they were exciting too.”
The romance and the hypnotic quality about Frank were fresh in her mind more than half a century later. “We were in Palm Springs at the Chi Chi [Club]. . . . It was late, way in the back. And Frank tips back in the chair and eyeballs me and sings, ‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’—to me. Those things you do not forget. . . . Those blue eyes. They nailed you. Nailed you when he was introduced to you, when they were seductive, nailed you when they were angry.”
The singer and actress Marilyn Maxwell is most often identified as having been Frank’s lover at the time his marriage began to fail. She went way back with Frank as a colleague, and Nancy may have thought she posed no threat. She had begun her career as Marvel Maxwell—her real name—the daughter of a pianist mother. The press focused on her voluptuous looks—“one of the best sweater fillers in the country,” was a typical label given her by the press—but she had talent as a dancer and singer and took acting seriously. Colleagues liked her for her intelligence, integrity, and zany humor.
She and Frank had met in 1939 in New York, probably at a radio studio, when he was with Harry James and she was a nineteen-year-old singer with another band. Having encouraged Frank to go out on his own, she had begun to concentrate on acting, dropped Marvel in favor of Marilyn, and moved to Hollywood. She was still there four years later, when he settled in California, and was one of the young women he co-opted as bat girls for his Swooners softball team.
Hired to star in Wake Up and Live, a 1944 radio comedy directed by Cecil B. DeMille, Frank insisted that Marilyn play opposite him. Marilyn’s character in the play fell for a singer known as “The Phantom Troubadour,” played by Frank. The same year, in a movie called Lost in a Harem, she performed a song entitled “What Does It Take to Get You?” It contained the line: “I can even get as far as second base with Frank Sinatra.” Fictional flirtation was echoed by private passion. Their affair began in 1943 and continued for three years, in spite of the fact that Marilyn, like Frank, was married for at least part of the time. Nick Sevano got the impression they were “crazy about each other.”
When the Sinatras threw a party on New Year’s Eve 1945, Marilyn showed up wearing a distinctive diamond bracelet—one that Nancy had found by chance days earlier in the glove compartment of one of the family cars. Thinking she had stumbled on a surprise gift for herself, she had left it where it was. Now the bracelet was on another woman’s wrist, and she ordered Marilyn out of the house.
Nancy told her daughters of her humiliation years later. When she confronted Frank, she said, he claimed Marilyn meant nothing to him. Six months later, though, while filming in New York, he made plans to escort her to a title fight at Madison Square Garden. George Evans, who knew the press had learned of the affair, dissuaded him. Instead Frank appeared at ringside with Joe DiMaggio and M
arlene Dietrich.
Frank and Dietrich also had an involvement. Dietrich was forty-four that year, fourteen years Frank’s senior and long since celebrated for her role as the nightclub vamp in The Blue Angel. In the movie she had sung—in those husky, hard-soft tones—“Men cluster to me like moths around a flame.” In real life, twenty-two movies later, they clustered still. By the time she and Frank got together at Madison Square Garden, he had already joined her collection of male trophies, who included Erich Maria Remarque, Maurice Chevalier, Jean Gabin, Jimmy Stewart, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Joseph Kennedy, and John Wayne. During the war, while touring European battle zones, Marlene had entertained soldiers in ways beyond the call of USO duty. There were also female lovers, and even a husband back in Germany—who never divorced her in spite of everything.
Marlene’s diaries and letters, available since her death in 1992, provide an accurate glimpse of her relationship with Frank. One diary entry suggests they knew each other as early as 1942, and they were evidently close two years later. “I am eating tonight with [Clark] Gable—with the purest intentions,” she wrote her daughter in early 1944. “But the choice is difficult—because Sinatra hangs on the phone and he is small and shy. I’ll send you his records.”
Months later, observing wartime censorship in a letter from Italy, Marlene described entertaining in “Frankie’s country.” She mentioned being billeted in the northeastern French city of Nancy, which—again to satisfy the censor—she referred to as “Sinatra’s wife.” The soldiers in her audiences, she recalled, would “swoon and scream, the way bobbysoxers did at Sinatra.” “I know they had a thing going,” Sammy Cahn said of Frank and Marlene. “She would have been difficult to resist. She had powers as a lover that were spoken of behind people’s hands—not least because she was supposedly the champion in the oral sex department.”
One night, playing cards with pals at the Wilshire Towers apartment, Frank announced that Marlene was on her way. Cahn thought that if she arrived at all she would walk out when she saw all the men sitting around. “I was wrong,” he recalled. “The lady walked in, smiled demurely, allowed Sinatra to take her hand and lead her into the bedroom.”
The Dietrich dalliance remained hidden, but in March 1946 Frank featured in coverage of an otherwise obscure New York divorce case. “The day after our marriage,” one Sven Ingildsen said in his complaint, his twenty-year-old bride, Josephine, “left me to see Frank Sinatra alone and stayed out until 5 A.M.” That story, though, was soon forgotten in a flurry of rumors about Lana Turner.
“KEEP BETTY GRABLE, Lamour and Turner,” Frank had sung two years earlier in his first recording of “Nancy,” the song about his infant daughter. At twenty-one Lana was already a national celebrity, a classic example of rags to Hollywood riches. Her father, a gambler and bootlegger, had been murdered when she was nine. Her mother, obliged to work, placed her in a series of foster homes. Then, when her daughter was fifteen, she brought her to Los Angeles. Already strikingly beautiful, Lana was rapidly “discovered” and shopped around the studios by a talent agent. She passed muster as an actress and could dance, but her real assets were very evidently physical. Warner Brothers launched her as their “Sweater Girl.” More than a dozen movies later, at MGM in 1941, she achieved stardom in Ziegfeld Girl, playing alongside Judy Garland and Hedy Lamarr.
By the following year, when she turned twenty-one, Lana had in a matter of months lost her virginity to and been jilted by a Hollywood attorney, had married and divorced the bandleader Artie Shaw, and aborted his child. That summer, after cavorting with innumerable other men, many of them Hollywood “names,” she married a nonentity she had known only a few weeks. He had no job, palled around with mobsters and used a bogus name, and, as she later discovered, was still technically married to someone else. By mid-1943, when she gave birth to a baby daughter, that marriage, too, had collapsed.
“The only thing you’re interested in,” MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer had told her at a meeting in his office, “is . . .” He pointed at his crotch.
In 1992, in her autobiography, Lana claimed she and Sinatra had never had an affair. “The closest things to dates Frank and I enjoyed,” she wrote, “were a few box lunches at MGM.” The original manuscript of the book, however, is said to have included a blow-by-blow account of a tempestuous relationship with Frank. It had been deleted, apparently because Lana did not want to “give him the satisfaction.”
Ava Gardner, whom Lana called her “good friend,” said in an interview for her autobiography that Lana “had a very serious affair with Frank. . . . We met in the ladies’ room during a party and she told me her story. She’d been deeply in love with Frank and, so she thought, Frank with her.”
According to Joe Bushkin, Frank had met Lana in 1940, while he was in Hollywood with the Dorsey band and at a time when she was hooked on music and musicians. At a club in the San Fernando Valley, she had listened enthralled to the singing of Billie Holiday. Dorsey and Buddy Rich, and Frank, were at the marathon party Lana gave the weekend Pearl Harbor was bombed. In the midst of her other entanglements, she found time to date both Dorsey and Rich, and Manie Sacks. Rich broke his heart over her.
Intimacy with Frank probably came later, after six years of occasional contact. They had been photographed together at MGM, appeared together on Frank’s radio show, campaigned together for President Roosevelt. By Lana’s account, she and Nancy had become close. “When [Nancy] came back from Hollywood on a visit,” her Hoboken friend Marian Brush recalled, “she acted real hoity-toity, saying, ‘Oh, we’re very close to Lana’ and ‘We see Lana all the time.’ ” What transpired in 1946, then, must have hurt Nancy all the more.
Frank and Lana began a dalliance that year at the studio, one they scarcely bothered to hide. “They used to smooch in his car parked on the lot,” an MGM executive said. “Kind of funny, considering they both had dressing rooms to go to.” The couple had excuses to be in and out of New York that spring, Lana for her new movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Frank for radio shows and location shooting. There, it seems, they began a full-fledged affair.
Four months later, in October, the troubled Sinatra marriage became national news. George Evans announced that Frank and Nancy had parted. Reached by a columnist, Nancy said Frank wanted “the freedom of separation without divorce.” He had left home and was looking for an apartment. Frank said later that there had been endless squabbling with Nancy “about trivial matters.” In fact he had walked out on his wife just twenty-four hours after “dancing many times” with Lana at a Hollywood party—with the press looking on. Soon he was in Palm Springs, where Lana had a place, and was seen with her there at the Chi Chi Club.
In an era when the fan magazines and Hollywood gossip columnists wielded great power, there was good reason to conceal the truth. One in two Americans, it was said, habitually read the gospel handed down by the reigning queens of the craft, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. Both journalists depended on the stars and the studios, and the stars and the studios depended on the columnists. A few words from Parsons or Hopper could make or destroy an actor or a movie.
To have a movie contract in Hollywood, moreover, was to live in a social corset. MGM’s standard “morals clause” bound performers to live “with due regard to public conventions and morals,” not to “commit any act or thing that will tend to shock, insult or offend the community.” At MGM an actor was required to apply to the studio for permission to get married. Were he or she photographed in a nightclub smoking, the studio would try to ensure that the offending cigarette was airbrushed out. This hypocrisy could be enforced as and when the studio chose.
Parsons, who was close to Louis B. Mayer, had long since used her column to enjoin Lana “to behave herself and not go completely berserk.” MGM bosses, agonizing over The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which she played the adulterous wife, had sought ways to soften the “immoral temptress” nature of the role, to the extent of having her appear on screen wearing virginal w
hite. As for Frank, the studio had cultivated an image of him as a good family man. He and Lana represented a huge financial investment, and it was decided that something had to be done.
That October, MGM troubleshooters descended on Lana and ordered her to start parroting a simple script. “I am not in love with Frank,” she was soon saying dutifully with tears in her eyes, “and he is not in love with me. I have never in my life broken up a home. . . . I just can’t take these accusations.”
While Parsons played up that message, Hedda Hopper castigated Frank in print and warned that he was risking his career. Nancy, she told readers, was a wife so caring that she “refuses to attend any party until she’s sure Frank isn’t going, for fear it might embarrass him.” Hopper even buttonholed Frank at a public function to lecture him on family values. “I warned him that he was public property,” she said, “and that part of that public property was Nancy and his children.”
Seventeen days after leaving home, Frank was back. His reunion with Nancy, in front of friends, customers, and the press at Slapsie Maxie’s, a nightclub on Beverly Boulevard, looked like a publicity gimmick. He and Nancy sat without partners at separate tables, and then owner Max Rosenbloom asked for a song. Frank obliged with “Goin’ Home,” then Frank walked over to his wife. They kissed and danced and departed, smiling radiantly for a photographer waiting at the door. “It’s all over,” Frank told a reporter. “I’m home and let’s forget it.”
It was not all over. Just weeks later in New York, after bringing Nancy east for his opening at the Waldorf, Frank was trysting with Lana again. “I was Frank’s beard when he was seeing her one night,” George Evans’s son Phil remembered. “I remember having to sit around chatting with Lana in one of the lounges while Frank did the show. Then he came back and collected her. I know Lana was his date for the evening.”