FRANK HAD BEEN WALKING a tightrope in 1947, courting massive publicity, preaching family values, and espousing controversial political causes while simultaneously philandering, consorting with notorious criminals, and acting like a thug. By physically assaulting and threatening journalists, Frank was inviting retribution.
Most newspapers in the United States were staunchly conservative then, none more so than those of the Hearst chain, with the enormous clout of some fifty newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and film companies. The elderly founder, William Randolph Hearst, was a political kingmaker who thought Franklin Roosevelt had taken the country the way of the Soviet Union. Hollywood’s “Reds, Pinks, and Punks,” he thought, spread communism.
Frank’s whirl of political activity had already made him a target for Hearst’s writers. His supportive open letter to former vice president Henry Wallace, an ultraliberal presidential prospect, had been published just weeks before the foolishness in Havana. The man who broke that story, Hearst’s Robert Ruark, was soon deriding the news that Frank was to play a priest in his next movie, The Miracle of the Bells, as a gimmick designed to “wipe out the picture of Sinatra, the thug’s chum.” Then came the assault on Mortimer, who was also on the Hearst payroll.
That brief tussle, Time noted, got coverage by the Hearst chain “almost fit for an attempted political assassination.” Frank received a Thomas Jefferson Award for civil rights work just a few days later, but that was lost in the furor.
Mortimer began digging for new dirt, cultivating sources at the Bureau of Narcotics and the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover had already ordered his staff to collate information on Frank, and now ordered a senior aide to brief Mortimer on Frank’s early Mafia backing and the sex charges arrest of a decade earlier. Mortimer passed information on to Hearst’s big gun, Westbrook Pegler, a Pulitzer winner for his exposés of union racketeering. Robert Ruark suggested that he and Pegler “hosstrade” information on Sinatra. Pegler wrote a series of anti-Sinatra columns in the fall of 1947, shining more light on the dark side of Frank’s life and focusing on the mob connection.
Another Hearst writer, Frank Conniff, issued the single most savage rebuke. “Posing as a do-gooder, lending aid and comfort to Communist-front organizations,” he wrote, Frank “openly buddied up to mobsters. . . . No newspaperman would demur if Bing Crosby or Clark Gable or Perry Como occasionally dabbled in transgressions. But be it remembered that these men have never posed as world-changers. . . . The ripe odor of hypocrisy leaks from every pore of Sinatra’s recent career.”
George Evans could not stop the press onslaught. It took a rare penitent overture by Frank to achieve that. Toward the end of 1947, he got in to see Hearst himself. “I don’t know what happened between the two men,” Hedda Hopper wrote later, “but I do know that a few hours later an order went out to the Hearst papers to take the heat off Sinatra.” Hearst’s grandson John, who was present at the encounter, said Frank had been “very contrite.” Shortly afterward, he was received as a houseguest at Hearst Sr.’s castle north of Los Angeles.
Frank’s career had taken some hits. The makers of Old Gold cigarettes, sponsors of one of his radio shows, dropped him, citing bad publicity and falling ratings. In November, in spite of massive promotion, he drew disappointing audiences during a three-week run at the Capitol Theater in New York. Only four Sinatra singles made the top ten that year. Nevertheless, Frank placed second in an ABC poll to nominate the “most popular living person.” Only Bing Crosby was rated more popular. He and Frank ranked ahead of Eleanor Roosevelt, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, and Pope Pius XII.
Frank kept up his frenetic pace, focusing above all on his work in the recording studio. He would usually arrive at the studio mid-evening, when he thought his voice was at its best, work through technical routines, then hum along as the orchestra rehearsed. By the time he said “Let’s try one!” it was clear he was very much in charge. As Sinatra the man became increasingly erratic, Sinatra the musician was more than ever the committed, innovative professional. When in New York, he returned regularly to his old voice coach John Quinlan. Original session recordings from the period, preserved at Columbia, survive as vivid, audible evidence of a craftsman at work. A November 1947 session—it produced “I’m Glad There Is You” and “Body and Soul”—reflects a Sinatra who involved himself with the musicians, coaxed them into the mood he wanted, became irritated when a cornet player blew a vital passage.
Frank worked on his timing and diction, experimented with syllables, strove for perfection. When working, he objected to imperfect pronunciation or grammar. “It drives me crazy,” he once said, to hear “imagination” rendered as “amagination,” “Whom can I turn to?” sung as “Who can I turn to?” Rosemary Clooney, who recorded with him, never forgot Frank’s diction. “It was stunningly clear, no matter what he was singing. . . . He dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s in every word.” The singer Julius La Rosa, who collected Frank’s old red label Columbia records in his teens, thought he knew the purpose of that honing: “He put a period here, a comma there, to heighten the meaning. It came to be known as phrasing. And all he was doing was telling the story as he believed those words should be spoken. But it was revolutionary and it was what made him Sinatra. Nobody did it before. . . . Sinatra was able to turn a thirty-two-bar song into a three-act play.”
Who’s Who in America included Frank in its 1948 edition. He appeared as “SINATRA, Frank, baritone,” a job description more exact than it would have been a few years earlier. “His voice had a higher pitch when he started out,” said guitarist Al Viola, who first heard Frank sing at the Paramount. “Back then, he’d sounded almost like a tenor.” His voice took on “darker hues,” wrote Charles Granata, recording engineer, producer, and Sinatraphile. “He began to inject some pain into the music, as if he were struggling to extract every nuance of emotion from deep within his soul . . . aching, melancholic.”
“The songs that I sing and their lyrics,” Frank once insisted, “are never close to me in my own life, despite what some people think.” On another occasion, though, he acknowledged that he “felt” a lyric because “I’d been there and back. I knew what it was all about.”
October 30, 1947, was declared Sinatra Day in Hoboken. At the initiative of the new mayor, an Italian-American Dolly had helped elect, he was to be presented with the key to the city. He accepted the key—an enormous wooden one “from the Hearts of the Citizens of Hoboken”— at City Hall, and made a speech to a shrieking crowd of thousands. Later, as he rode through the streets on a fire engine driven by his father Marty, some reportedly pelted him with garbage.
Behind the scenes, the Sinatras were squabbling. Dolly, who was forever cadging money from relatives and not paying it back, clashed with her wealthy son about finances. For about two years to come, she and Frank would not speak to each other. Months after the visit, his grandfather Francesco died at the age of ninety-one.
Except for one appearance at a local function, Frank did not make another public visit to Hoboken for almost forty years. Toward the end of a flight to New York once, his aide Lee Solters remembered, he “spit at the window” when someone pointed out that the plane was passing over Hoboken.
“Home” had long since been California, though in 1947 and 1948 Frank was often away. Daughter Nancy and Frank Jr. had fond memories of Toluca Lake—fireworks on the Fourth of July, expeditions in their father’s big Ford convertible, the arrival of the first television set. For the time being, meanwhile, their mother kept up the pretense that all was well.
The marriage, Nancy told an interviewer, was “as traditional and typically American as a cross-stitch sampler. . . . My job is to watch over Frank’s personal needs. . . . It is a wife’s chief function.” She kept his drawers and closets just so—she approved of his obsession about cleanliness and orderliness—kept him supplied with Argyle socks, went along with his whim that the bedroom should never be without a box of chocolates. Being Mrs. Sinatra, Nancy declared, k
ept her “deeply satisfied.”
The Sinatras got away whenever possible to Palm Springs, the lush oasis in the desert a hundred miles from Los Angeles, still more of a village than a resort, that was to be Frank’s principal base in future years. He decided to build a house there, and workmen labored nonstop, even at night under lights, to get the job done. It featured a pool shaped like a grand piano, and a real grand piano was flown in from New York. Frank called the house Twin Palms.
For the children, Palm Springs generated more happy memories— swimming lessons in the pool, bumping around on dirt roads in their father’s jeep. For daughter Nancy, though, there were glimpses of her mother’s unhappiness—like the day Frank sent the family back to Los Angeles earlier than planned. As they drove away, she noticed that her mother was weeping behind her sunglasses.
News that another baby was on the way, in late 1947, helped dispel rumors of continuing marital trouble. A second daughter, Christina— soon shortened to Tina—arrived the following June. The baby was born on Father’s Day, and for the first time Frank was on hand to drive his wife to the hospital. It looked for all the world as though he had mended his ways.
In New York, George Evans had been laboring to rebuild his client’s image, to squelch the gossip about womanizing, smother the stories about mobsters. In spite of the Havana revelations, the FBI learned, Frank was still in regular contact with the Fischetti brothers. It was in these months, too, that Joe Fischetti reportedly spoke of the mob’s “financial interest in Sinatra.” Soon after, Frank’s early patron Willie Moretti admitted to bureau agents that he was “associated with Sinatra.” It had been reported, moreover, that Frank regularly “kicked in” to Moretti.
While none of that became public, Evans was struggling to control a sordid story linking Frank to the California gangster Mickey Cohen, to mob control of boxing, and to a criminal from Moretti’s territory who was operating in Los Angeles. Frank had known the crook in question since his Hoboken days. Moreover, police detectives discovered, Sinatra’s name appeared in Cohen’s address book. Asked about that, Cohen said, “Why, he’s a friend of mine.”
FBI agents received information that Frank was a co-investor in the Stables, a Palm Springs nightclub with financing intertwined with a recent fraud case. Palm Springs itself, a California state crime commission would soon report, was a “favorite rendez-vous of many undesirable individuals from throughout the United States.” Two of the undesirables named had been prominent during the Havana episode. Another was Allen Smiley, who had been sitting at Bugsy Siegel’s side when he was killed. Smiley had an apartment at the Sunset Towers, as did Frank and several friends, and said he knew Frank “quite well.” Asked in 1948 to suggest guests for a mob wedding, he included Frank’s name.
The dallying with the Mafia in Cuba was part of a lasting pattern. Frank’s involvement with criminals was woven into the fabric of his life and career by 1948. “I’ve known these people all my life,” Frank’s daughter Nancy said years later. “I’ve sat with them talking about their families. . . . Then I’d hear their names in the news and I’d say to myself, ‘Oh my God. This one’s under investigation for tax evasion.’ Or, ‘That one’s just been questioned in a murder.’ ”
For a long time, Frank was not seriously hurt by what the public learned of his Mafia involvement. The little that got into the papers may even have added to his mystique. Other factors, though, would bring him to his knees.
ONE MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT, as 1949 began, that Frank was riding high in Hollywood. MGM had paid him more than $300,000—over $2 million today—for his movie work over the past twelve months. That was more than Judy Garland and almost as much as the highest paid star of the day, Warner’s Bette Davis. Yet Frank’s noisy scandals and lack of discipline had pushed the patience of MGM executives to the limits. He had behaved badly, too, when loaned out to RKO for The Miracle of the Bells, the movie in which he played a priest, and for Double Dynamite, a comedy with Jane Russell and Groucho Marx. He had tried to get out of attending the San Francisco premiere of Miracle, and took childish revenge when the producer insisted he show up. At his Fairmont Hotel suite, where he was staying with three associates, he ordered eighty-eight Manhattans (never drunk), took a couple of dozen people out on the town, held an all-night party, then hired a limousine to drive him five hundred miles south to Palm Springs—and charged it all to RKO.
MGM was acutely aware that It Happened in Brooklyn had lost money, that The Kissing Bandit, a Zorro-genre movie Frank would recall as an embarrassment, was a total flop. Miracle, in which—the New York Times thought—Frank looked “frightened speechless,” did poorly. Double Dynamite was not released for three years and for all Jane Russell’s allure—some said the title was an allusion to her thirty-eight-inch bust—was a box office disaster. Hollywood’s investment in Sinatra was not paying off.
The flame of Frank’s success as a singer was also flickering. He had only one top ten single, at number seven, in 1948. For the first time in six years, the Down Beat poll did not rate him one of America’s top three singers. Frank placed fourth, after Billy Eckstine, Frankie Laine, and Bob Crosby, Bing’s brother.
Frank had begun complaining about the music industry. He told an interviewer that current popular songs were “decadent . . . bloodless,” that Tin Pan Alley was turning out “terrible trash.” “We must give people things that move them emotionally,” he said. “We’re not doing it and there’s something wrong someplace.” Whatever was or was not wrong with the industry, though, what may have gone wrong for Frank was that he was losing touch with his audience. His bobbysoxers had grown up.
In December 1948, one show business journal ran the headline “Is Sinatra Finished?” A year earlier, it would have seemed ludicrous. Frank told Manie Sacks that he did feel finished, used up. He turned in on himself, headed off on his own to Palm Springs for days on end, Nancy said, and behaved strangely at home. “When we had guests,” his wife said, “he would often go off by himself and not feel like talking.” Sometimes, one of her sisters recalled, he locked himself in another room to get away from people.
Frank had just turned thirty-three and Nancy was thirty-one. They had a daughter of eight, a son of five, and a new baby. Their tenth wedding anniversary was a month away.
15
Lovers, Eternally
A FEW WEEKS AFTER CHRISTMAS 1948, MGM assembled more than fifty stars for a photograph to mark the studio’s silver jubilee. Frank, unsmiling, in gray suit and matching tie, perched on a high tier near the back. Dead center, elegant in royal blue, in pride of place between Clark Gable and Judy Garland, sat an actress on her way up.
Ava Lavinia Gardner came out of Grabtown, North Carolina, a crossroads in tobacco country so insignificant that it did not appear even on local maps. She was born in 1922, the last of the seven children of a struggling farmer and his wife.
She was a tomboy as a child, climbed trees, went barefoot—as she often would in adult life—and learned early to swear. At the age of eight she was smoking behind the barn with the boys. By her mid-teens, however, she had become a shapely dark-haired beauty who painted her nails and longed for dresses she could not afford.
She acted a little at school, was more at ease with dialogue than were her classmates. She sat enraptured at the movies and told a girlfriend she dreamed of being a movie star. She could sing, and talked of singing with one of the big bands, yet expected to wind up as a secretary and marry a local boy. Then a photographer brother-in-law took pictures of Ava, simple, demure shots, and sent them to an MGM talent scout. Not long after, wearing a $16 dress and borrowed high heels, she was doing a screen test. In 1941, at eighteen and with one of her sisters along as chaperone, she found herself on a train to Hollywood.
Ava became just another actress-in-waiting, attending voice and dance classes, posing for cheesecake pictures, and generally doing as she was told. Her first significant movie role would come only after four years of disciplined tedium, true stardom not u
ntil the end of the decade. Even then she would make no claim to great talent. “I’ve never cared enough about acting to put my whole heart into it,” she told an interviewer. “I was never an actress—none of us kids at Metro were. We were just good to look at.”
Ava’s love life, however, soon made news. She always maintained that she had been strictly brought up, was painfully shy, and long resisted men’s advances. “I played very hard to get,” she said in middle age, “the ‘little Southern belle’ shit. I think that’s better than hopping in the feathers right away and saying ‘Golly I’m mad about you.’ ” Even before leaving for California, though, she had declared her intention of marrying “the biggest movie star in the world.”
She began a courtship with the actor they called “King of the Box Office,” Mickey Rooney, on her very first day at MGM. The former child star, now twenty-one, was the studio’s highest paid performer, its greatest asset. Louis B. Mayer tried to dissuade the couple from marrying. When they insisted, he ensured the wedding took place without fanfare, far from Los Angeles. Ava was just nineteen and had known Rooney for five months. An MGM publicity man stayed near throughout the honeymoon, “damn near,” Ava remembered, even “when you went to bed.”
“Once he gets into your pants,” Mayer had told Ava, “he’ll chase after some other broad.” According to Ava, Rooney fulfilled the prophecy. Within two months, she said, “I found evidence that he’d had somebody in my bed. I don’t know who the hell it was.” Rooney said it was Ava who first caused trouble, by paying too much attention to another young actor. The marriage ended in divorce in 1943, after just over a year.