Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [123]
There was also a new picture, a musical called It Happened in Brooklyn. Frank was to play an Army vet (if the Duke could play soldier, so could he) named Danny Miller, returning from the war to find that the Brooklyn he’d lovingly obsessed about while overseas was not quite as he remembered. Jimmy Durante and Kathryn Grayson were to co-star, as well as—a nice surprise—his new pal Peter Lawford, portraying a sensitive young English composer named Jamie Shellgrove. (Of course he was a poofter. How could he not be a poofter with a name like Jamie Shellgrove?) Principal photography on the film began on the MGM back lot in March; in June, the company would travel to New York City for location work.
But in the meantime, there was the Metro lot, with its deeply shaded alleys between soundstages and sunstruck fake Main Streets and phony city blocks and its commissary and dressing rooms, and its many actresses—stars and supporting players and extras—every one of them beautiful, every one of them wanting him.
And he, of course, wanted them.
He saw her, Marvelous, on his first day back, walking across a knife-edge of shadow between buildings, her hair like the sun. They shook hands, just shook hands (passersby were watching them carefully, pretending not to). Frank suddenly remembered, just for a second, his promise that he would never speak to her again. But as his palm touched hers, her perfume, that perfume, made his brain turn over.
She smiled brightly and told him she was divorcing her husband. She would be free at last.
He smiled back. People were watching.
She didn’t give a damn who was watching. She was going to be free at last. Did he want her?
He took a deep breath, inhaling her perfume.
More than anything.
Not three minutes later, turning a corner on his way to his dressing room, he came upon Lana, walking out of a soundstage in horn-rimmed sunglasses, dictating something to a secretary who followed her attentively. Lana saw him, and waved a dismissive hand to the secretary.
She looked at him and lowered her glasses, smiling.
And there were others, too, of course.
On March 7, 1946, United Press put a story on the wires about a forty-five-year-old New York construction-company executive, one Sven Ingildsen, who had filed a cross complaint in state supreme court to the separation action brought by his twenty-year-old wife, Josephine. “The day after our marriage, my wife told me she simply had to see Frank Sinatra, the singer, alone—both at the theater where he was appearing and in his apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel,” Ingildsen’s petition stated. “I objected emphatically. She replied that she knew him and his wife and that it would only be for a short visit and she would return in no time.”
Frank Sinatra’s wife was, of course, in Los Angeles. And newlywed Josephine Ingildsen (the report said) didn’t return home to her husband until 5:00 a.m.
“If I had as many love affairs as you’ve given me credit for,” Frank would tell reporters many years later, “I’d now be speaking to you from a jar in Harvard Medical School.” It was a great quote, a true Sinatra quote, poetry down to the deliciously absurd image, the inner rhyme of “jar” and “Harvard”—except that it was an evasion. No, it was more than an evasion, it was the Big Lie. “Love affairs” was more than a euphemism, but less than the truth: Love was always what it was about, and never quite what it was really about. Love was the fleeting ideal, the thing to be sung about, to be dreamed of while he zipped his trousers on his way from one conquest to the next. In truth, there were probably even more affairs than the hundreds he’d been given credit for. For there always had to be someone. His