Yet soon, unsurprisingly, the couple were being seen together again, dining at Frascati’s, arriving hand in hand at a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Draped in satin and mink, Ava introduced Frank as “a wonderful, wonderful man” and he sang for the crowd. They went to North Carolina, to visit Ava’s family, and then on to Africa. Their destination was Kenya, and the movie location in the bush where John Ford was to direct Mogambo. Ava was to play opposite Clark Gable and the young Grace Kelly. Her career was surging at a time when Frank had no work, no prospects, and what in his world passed for no money.
The years of excess, payments to Nancy, and taxes had sucked up his millions. There was “no money, no more glamour,” Ava said. “Nobody wanted to hang around him. He couldn’t lift the bill, take people out, amuse them. There was nobody but me.” Ava had even paid Frank’s airfare to Nairobi.
“ARE YOU MARRIED?” British expatriates used to quip. “Or do you live in Kenya?” The upper-class English men and women who held sway in the then British colony led a sybaritic existence. They worked as little as possible, drank too much, and slept around. It was a country a future generation would see through the lens of movies like White Mischief and Out of Africa.
MGM had decided that Mogambo was going to be a “big picture,” and were mounting the biggest safari in East African history. On the Kagera River, where three African territories met, the company built an encampment to house 175 whites and several hundred black Africans. A thousand more Africans were on call as extras. There were “dining tents,” a hospital tent, an entertainment tent, and—remarkable in 1952—hot and cold running water. Bulldozers had carved out an airstrip.
Africa fascinated and appalled Ava. She raged about the inconveniences, the heat and the flies, and the lions that prowled close by, and she sought refuge in the bottle. Though twenty-three-year-old Grace Kelly would eventually warm to her, she was initially affronted by her co-star’s conduct. “Ava is such a mess,” Kelly wrote a friend, “it’s unbelievable. . . . They are putting up a new tent for her—she didn’t like the old one because it was old—her tent is right next to mine, so I can hear all the screaming and yelling.”
Ava was dismissive of Frank, location manager Eva Monley said, “treated him like some lost brother coming to bother her. She didn’t allow him on the set. I was responsible for allocating accommodation, and Ava would tell me, ‘Get him a separate tent, a long way from mine. Don’t put it near me.’ ”
Frank killed time reading, and often took the daily shuttle flight back to civilization. The writer Alan Frank, then a schoolboy on vacation, remembered spotting him at a hotel at Malindi, on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast. He recognized “the figure at the upright piano that stood at the rear of the Eden Roc’s spacious verandah lounge. . . . He sat loosely, picking out notes with a single finger and smoking. He was unshaven, clearly far from happy.”
In New York, Frank’s new agents at William Morris were trying to get him a part in From Here to Eternity, the Columbia Pictures adaptation of the James Jones novel about brutality and immorality in the United States Army. They thought their client was a natural for the role of Angelo Maggio, the rebellious, boozing little Italian-American hounded by a bullying sergeant.
Frank felt an affinity for Maggio, thought him a character straight out of the neighborhoods he had known as a boy. “I knew a hundred Maggios,” he said, “could have been a Maggio maybe when I was younger. . . . I can act that part better than anybody alive.” Before leaving for Africa he had lobbied hard for the role, had even managed to see studio head Harry Cohn himself. Cohn thought he was a singer, not an actor, and a washed-up one at that. “Who in the fuck,” he told his aide Jonie Taps as Frank departed, “would want to see that skinny asshole in a major movie?”
From Africa, Frank had been bombarding Columbia executives with cables signed “Maggio.” Ava, who had put in a word for him before they left, reached Cohn by phone and pleaded Frank’s cause again. A week after his arrival in Kenya, Frank was summoned home for a screen test.
At the time he left, Ava was pregnant. By some accounts she had suspected it even before leaving home. She had long been telling anyone who would listen how much she wanted to be a mother. “At last I know what I want out of life,” she said after marrying Frank, “to be with my husband always and have children with him.” Frank had talked of their having “a dozen kids.”
Yet now she took a decision that went against everything she had said publicly: “I couldn’t go on with it,” she said in 1989. “We weren’t getting along. We were madly in love, but it was just no time to have a child. So I decided to go to London for an abortion.” At the time and in private, she spoke more brutally. “Ava hated Frank so much by this stage,” Ford’s cameraman Robert Surtees said. “She told my wife, ‘I hated Frankie so much. I wanted that baby to go unborn.’ ”
Ford reminded Ava that abortion was a great sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church and told her she would be hurting Frank terribly. Ava’s mind was made up, however. Without consulting her husband, she traveled to London accompanied by a publicist, Paul Mills, and Surtees’s wife, Maydell, and had the abortion.
Mills told the British press Ava was being treated for “anemia” brought on by a tropical infection. Recovering at the Savoy Hotel, Ava told Look’s William Attwood that the problem was dysentery, brought on by “eating lettuce and drinking tap water.” Attwood ended the interview by asking if she would like to have children, and she replied, “Oh my gosh, yes!” Four years later, she would claim she had suffered a miscarriage. “All of my life I had wanted a baby,” she said, “and the news that I lost him—I’m sure that it was a boy—was the cruelest blow.”
She returned to Africa after the abortion, as did Frank after his screen test. They fought again, and he was depressed by news that six other actors were being considered for the Maggio role. Mogambo crew members thought him a miserable, solitary figure, but he won sympathy when Christmas came around. Frank set up a tree, complete with colored lights, in front of Ava’s tent, and presented her with a mink and a diamond ring bought during his recent trip back to the States. (He had promised to pay for it later.) Ava was unimpressed, and told colleagues the mink had been paid for with her money.
Frank made Christmas night memorable, walking out of the darkness with African singers bearing huge red candles. The Africans chanted in French as he sang “Noel” in English. Most of those listening sat mesmerized, but not Ava. “She was drinking buckets of alcohol,” Eva Monley recalled. “I don’t remember who she was with. Then Sinatra came out and started to sing carols. She jeered at him on and off, ‘Sing louder!’ . . . Then she realized it was too special to laugh. She was stunned into silence.”
In January 1953, at a society party in Nairobi, the couple lost all restraint. “He and Ava Gardner got involved in such a slanging match,” recalled Lee Harragin, the son of Kenya’s then attorney general. “They were shouting and screaming at each other, so much that they had to be literally locked into the host’s study to stop them disturbing the rest of the party.”
Ava did make her husband happy for a while that month. “I got pregnant again,” she said in an interview for her posthumous memoir. “This time Frank did know, and he was delighted. I remember bumping across the African plain with him one day in a jeep, feeling sick as the devil. Right on the spot, for the first and only time in our relationship, Frank decided to sing for me . . . so beautifully, that lovely song ‘When You Awake’ ”:
When you awake the day takes a bow at your door,
When you awake the sun shines like never before
Clouds soaked with rain find it hard to explain to the earth below.
They can’t let it rain, for it would stain such a heavenly show.
You make it so . . .
When Frank flew back to the States to fulfill a singing commitment at a Boston club, Ava flew to London to have another abortion. She again rationalized her action by saying that a wom
an had no right to have a child unless she and her mate had “a sane, solid lifestyle.” Yet she went on saying she wanted a child with Frank, even when their relationship had collapsed beyond repair.
“Pregnancy terrified Ava,” said Mickey Rooney. “I don’t think she knew why . . . the thought of having a baby filled her with nameless, unreasoning dread.” Ava told her friend Spoli Mills decades later that she “thought she’d have been the worst mother in the world.”
There is another possibility, one that would surely have led her to insist absolutely on the further abortion.
WHEN FRANK HAD LEARNED that Ava would be doing Mogambo with Clark Gable, according to Sonny King, he worried that Ava might stray with her leading man. Gable did have an affair during the shoot, but with Grace Kelly. Ava helped Kelly through the little dramas of the affair, and the two women conspired together in matters of the heart and the bedroom. “We stuck together,” she said in one of her last taped interviews, referring to the friendship with Kelly. “We did our naughty-naughties[author’s italics] on the side. And nobody ever knew.” According to Eva Monley, one of Ava’s “naughty-naughties” was with a Mogambo props man and another with Frank “Bunny” Allen, a professional hunter and notorious Lothario.
Allen was an Englishman with Gypsy blood in his veins, the grandson of a carriage-maker to the British royals, who had followed his brothers to colonial Africa. Everyone called him Bunny, the nickname he earned as a boy snaring rabbits near Windsor Castle. By the early 1950s, when it became fashionable for rich Americans to go on safari in Africa, he was celebrated for his knowledge of big game.
Allen had been the partner of Denys Finch-Hatton, the hunter recreated by Robert Redford in the movie Out of Africa, when the future King Edward VIII had come to Kenya to shoot lion and elephant. Allen had had a forearm scarred by a leopard’s claws, a hip gored by a buffalo. The ring finger of his left hand was missing. White society in East Africa buzzed for decades about his innumerable conquests, who included the aviatrix Beryl Markham, Born Free author Joy Adamson, and a mother who came to Allen’s bed to find her daughter already in possession.
Ava ran into Allen continually during the Mogambo shoot. He managed all practical aspects of the project and advised on the wild animal scenes. He was riding in the camera truck one day, just behind Ava and Gable, when three charging rhinos shoved it out of control. Allen coolly shot two of the animals dead, and the third ran away. He was, Ava later said, “the kind of man any girl would trust to lead her into the jungle.” Later, Allen said of Ava only that she had been “a lovely girl. . . . She will be in my mind and in my heart for the rest of my life.”
He never discussed his conquests, but the obituaries that marked his death in 2002 referred to the affair with Ava as fact. “She was running with Bunny Allen,” Eva Monley said. “When you’re running a camp, which is what I was doing, you know who’s going to bed with whom. I went to his tent one day for something. His stepdaughter was there, very upset because she had discovered he was in Ava’s tent and not his own. I’m absolutely certain it happened.”
“It was common knowledge among certain members of the community that Bunny had a ‘walk-out’ with Ava Gardner,” said Lee Harragin. “Bunny was incredibly discreet. But with someone like Ava Gardner it was a little difficult to conceal—when the husband was making such a fuss”—a reference to the Nairobi party at which Ava and Frank had fought.
Harragin, a retired lawyer, said those present thought the fight “was about the love affair with Bunny. We couldn’t think of any other reason why Sinatra should be so frightfully angry. He was a very possessive and jealous man.”
The furor at the party occurred shortly before Ava flew to Europe for her second abortion in the three months of the Mogambo shoot in Africa. “Bunny didn’t know,” said Adrian Blomfield, who researched the London Daily Telegraph’s obituary of Allen, “whether the child was his.” With that doubt in Ava’s mind, too, abortion must have seemed essential.
TWO MONTHS after his screen test for From Here to Eternity, Frank still did not know if he would get the part. So poor had his chances seemed that producer Buddy Adler had not intended even to watch the test. He did see it eventually, at director Fred Zinnemann’s request, and was impressed. Zinnemann and scriptwriter Dan Taradash were interested but not convinced.
“The test was all right but not great,” said Taradash. “We’d tested Eli Wallach, and in terms of acting his test was much better. We’d all settled on Wallach.” Still, they were struck by Frank’s physical appearance. “The scene was one where he was stripped to his shorts and drunk, really wobbly,” Taradash said. “Sinatra looked like a plucked chicken. He looked the part of Maggio, whereas Wallach was a well-built guy, muscular. We all finally agreed he probably could do it.”
Without the acquiescence of Harry Cohn, who held the power at Columbia, it did not matter what anyone else thought. In the end Cohn was coerced into giving the part to Frank (a subject to which we shall return). He gave in grudgingly, on the condition that Frank be paid a minimal fee.
The news reached Frank in Boston, where he was performing at a club called the Latin Quarter. He shared the good news with Pearl Bailey, who was on the bill along with the Duke Ellington band. “He said, ‘Pearl, they’ve offered me a movie called From Here to Eternity,’ ” Ellington’s drummer Louis Bellson recalled. “ ‘They’re paying me $1,000 a week, which is nothing.’ Pearl told him, ‘Take it, and don’t look back.’ ”
The shooting of Eternity began in March 1953, and Frank forged a drunken friendship with Montgomery Clift, the brilliant, doomed alcoholic cast as Maggio’s buddy Prewitt. They worked on their parts together, got plastered together. At their hotel in Hawaii, they tossed beer cans from the window and yelled obscenities in the lobby. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, whose passionate embrace on the beach would soon scandalize and thrill audiences, often had to put Frank and Clift to bed. They drank themselves into oblivion every night, according to Lancaster. “We would get very, very loaded,” said James Jones, who often joined the pair. “We talked about the injustice of life and love, and then Monty and I would listen to Frank talk about Ava Gardner.”
Seemingly ignorant of Ava’s affair with Bunny Allen, Frank was still worrying about his wife and Clark Gable. The Mogambo cast were now in Europe, and he called Ava often. When he was drunk, he still talked of killing himself.
He rushed to Europe as soon as filming ended. Ava joined him on a disastrous singing tour of Italy. An audience in Naples, evidently more interested in seeing Ava Gardner than Frank Sinatra, booed Frank off the stage. In a Milan hotel, the couple’s high-volume fights disturbed other guests. In Rome Frank sat patiently by as Ava shopped for evening gowns. Then he went off on his own to sing in Scandinavia, Belgium, England, and Scotland.
“I remember exactly the moment when I made the decision to seek a divorce,” Ava said in her last interview. “It was the day the phone rang and Frank was on the other end, announcing that he was in bed with another woman. He made it plain that if he was going to be constantly accused of infidelity when he was innocent, there had to come a time when he’d decide he might as well be guilty.”
In early October, Ava was still going on to the press about how she and Frank wanted a child “more than anything else in the world.” At the end of the month, though, MGM announced that she and Frank had “exhausted every resource to reconcile their differences.” They were separating, the statement said, and it was final.
THREE WEEKS LATER in New York, Jimmy Van Heusen returned to his apartment building to find Frank slumped in the elevator bleeding from the left wrist. He paid off the doorman to keep him quiet, got his friend to Mount Sinai Hospital, and put out a statement about an accident with a broken glass.
By November 29, Frank was fit enough to sing on live television. Eddie Fisher, who appeared on the same show, noted the “thin cuts” still visible on his lower arm. It had been Frank’s fourth suicide gesture.
Ava was
now seeing a psychiatrist. The doctor told the journalist Irv Kupcinet that she had been driven by extreme insecurity to press Frank constantly for proof of his love. He had responded, but never enough for her. He, too, was consulting a psychiatrist.
At thirty-eight, Frank was physically drained and spiritually exhausted. According to the Mount Sinai Hospital record, his weight had dropped to 118 pounds. He was starting to lose his hair. “I was busted,” he would say, remembering that low time. “I did lay down for a while and had some large bar bills for about a year. But after that I said, ‘Okay, holiday’s over, Charlie, let’s go back to work.’ ”
17
An Assist from the Boys
FOR ALL HIS VICISSITUDES, the gamble of casting Frank in From Here to Eternity had paid off. The movie had been a hit from the moment it opened in August 1953. Critics who in the past had blasted Frank’s acting now praised his portrayal of Maggio. “When the mood is on him,” the Newsweek reviewer declared, “Sinatra can act.” The New Yorker hailed him as “a first rate actor.”
Suddenly Frank was a crowd-pleaser again, pursued in the street by admirers. “Now,” he said, reminding Jule Styne of the time when no one seemed to care who he was, “I’m a star again.” Yet he wanted his resurrection endorsed. “Although Mr. S. was one of the least religious men I had ever met,” recalled George Jacobs, the valet he had recently hired, “the entire month before the Oscars he’d go down to the Good Shepherd church in Beverly Hills and pray.”
The prayers were answered on Oscar night in March 1954, when the Best Supporting Actor award was announced. As the audience broke into tumultuous applause, Frank ran down the aisle to be presented with his statuette, a moment he recalled as having marked the “greatest change” of his life.