Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [131]
Frank, of course, wasn’t having any. He had made up his mind.
So the press would have to be informed. The timing couldn’t have been worse: the papers would be all over the story first thing Monday morning. Evans phoned the gatekeepers, Lolly Parsons and Hedda Hopper, and read them both the same script. “It’s just a family squabble,” he said. “The case of a Hollywood career, plus a man-and-wife fight. There’s no talk of divorce. I think they’ll make up in a few days. Frankie has a few days off so he’s gone to a desert resort for a little privacy. This is the first public battle they’ve ever had, and I don’t think it’s serious. He will be back in three days to work on his current movie.”
MGM production memo for Monday, October 7:
He did not report. He was called to rehearse but because Durante was not available, Sinatra said he would not come in as he didn’t see any point in rehearsing by himself. Mr. Donohue felt that he could have used Sinatra’s services to good advantage, but Sinatra said he would not be in.
The desert resort was Palm Springs.
For centuries desert was all it was, home to the Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla Indian tribe, a scattering of adobe buildings on the edge of the southern Mojave, in a bone-dry, sun-shattered valley surrounded by dead stony mountains. The springs themselves were hot—as though more heat were needed in the godforsaken place—and the palms around them not plentiful, but the waters were reputed to have healing properties. Crazy white people trickled out from the city looking for relief from their big-city ailments, and then the movie people began to come.
It was an ideal retreat from Hollywood: just 120 miles away, but in those days of two-lane blacktop, the drive took at least three hours. Tijuana was fun for whoring and horse racing; the Springs was for lying low, for basking like a lizard on a rock in the healing desert sun. Tan was good in those days. The big hotels, the Desert Inn and El Mirador, opened not long after World War I; the little resorts, with names like Wonder Palms and Lone Palm, cropped up in the 1920s and 1930s: clusters of Mission-style bungalows around crystalline blue pools, in the shade of the signature trees. Labor was cheap. People wouldn’t bother you, the staffs were discreet, agents and publicists and columnists and spouses were far away, at the other end of a long-distance phone line.
Jimmy Van Heusen discovered the Springs in 1940, when he flew his shiny-skinned Luscombe-Silvaire to Los Angeles to go to work at Paramount, writing songs with Johnny Burke for Bing Crosby. Crossing the southwest desert as he entered California, he decided he’d better fuel up for his final approach—he wasn’t quite sure where the Van Nuys airport was. He touched down at a primitive airstrip in the midst of the sand.
In the late summer of 1940 the Palm Springs airport was nothing but a couple of adobe huts and a few fuel drums, and the incredible heat shimmered off the tarmac, yet the minute Van Heusen stepped out of his plane, he was happy. He had suffered all his life from sinus trouble; suddenly he could really breathe. He fell in love with the desert and told all his friends, including Sinatra.
The place grew fashionable, as a secret shared among the rich and well-known. Fancy restaurants were a necessity, so a few opened up: the Palm House, the Doll House, Trav Rogers’s Mink and Manure Club. You could get a superb steak for $2.50 or a lobster flown in on ice from Maine for $3. Then came the nightclubs. Even when you were lying low, entertainment was required. The first, and for a long time the best, was called Chi Chi. Dining, dancing, and big-time entertainment in the Starlite Room.
Frank thought the Springs was the perfect place to hide out: Lana had a little place down there. But Frank craved action and company, and so they went to Chi Chi.
During one fox-trot, Frank felt a tap on the shoulder. He turned and saw Howard Hughes, recently recovered from a near-fatal plane crash, dancing with his date, Ava Gardner, soon to divorce Artie Shaw. Sinatra and Hughes,