Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [106]
Sinatra took immediate notice of Bacall: Bogart’s fourth wife was just twenty, with lazily insinuating feline eyes, voluptuous lips, and perfect skin. She smiled at Sinatra, he smiled back at her, and Bogart took it all in. He was jealous—what man wouldn’t be?—but he also wore an air of carefully maintained irony. He was a world-weary forty-five years old, with a rapidly receding hairline, bags under his eyes, and a perpetual cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers. Humphrey Bogart looked at Frank Sinatra and, smiling that wolfish smile, said, “They tell me you have a voice that makes girls faint. Make me faint.”
Frank grinned. The world’s toughest tough guy was giving him the full treatment. He accepted the compliment. “I’m taking the week off,” he told Bogart.
Bogart liked his sand, asked him to sit down for a minute and have a drink.
But there were other nights when Sinatra was out with Marilyn—or, since she was, after all, married (for whatever that was worth in Hollywood), any one of a dozen other girls, at Ciro’s, the Trocadero, Mocambo—and Hedda and Louella and their colleagues had to write something. “What blazing new swoon crooner has been seen night clubbing with a different starlet every night?” ran one blind item. Another: “Wonder if the wonder boy of hit records tells his wife where he goes after dark.”
In a small town, a company town, Wonder Boy’s wife was all too aware, and it was killing her inside, but what could she do?
She did her best. In a land of extreme, overbearing beauty, Nancy Barbato Sinatra of Jersey City was mousy at worst, merely lovely at best. She did her best. She had more work done on her teeth, and, as much as she hated spending all that money (she could never forget the days when she’d slaved as a secretary at American Type Founders in Elizabeth), Nancy bought some Jean Louis gowns for those rare occasions when he took her out. She tried to look as good as she possibly could, but deep down she knew she was Jersey City and always would be. She was both ashamed of it and proud. She took care of her babies, she talked for hours with her mother and sisters, and—having taken the driving lessons but still unwilling to scratch the new Cadillac convertible—she tooled around town doing errands in the other new car he’d bought her, a big Chrysler station wagon. She was quite a sight in it. Petite as she was (a little taller than Dolly, but not much), Nancy could barely see over the steering wheel without sitting on a pillow.
She also took care of his business. In a handwritten letter to Manie Sacks, undated, on heavy white stationery with “FRANK SINATRA” embossed in blue across the top, she expressed concern for the record executive’s health, noted that she was returning (for unexplained reasons) a check of his, passed along household news about the children’s health and schooling (oddly, strikingly, referring to Frankie as Francis Emanuel1), and then came to the point. Frank was beginning a New York theater stand (probably the Paramount), and she asked Manie’s help in seeing that he got his rest. “I am depending on you to watch him,” she wrote, “for you know how Frank likes to make the spots … and stay out late talking.”
It would take a heart of stone not to melt. I am depending on you to watch him. Frank likes to make the spots and stay out late talking. Talking. Poor Nancy! Poor Manie!
Frank Sinatra didn’t have a heart of stone, but rather, one that was divided into a million chambers. He knew all too well how his wife felt, yet he could not change. Nancy was going thirty miles an hour; Frank was moving at the speed of sound. Even while he slept, his mind churned, calculating the possibilities: Metro. Columbia. Radio. Theater. Marilyn. Lana. Betty. Jean. Jane.
The possibilities were infinite, and he never stopped. He darted back and forth between the two coasts