Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [132]
The two had much in common (besides very brief marriages to Artie Shaw), including hardscrabble backgrounds and fathers who’d died young. And an earthy sense of humor. They liked to drink cocktails and giggle together. Ava liked sex a good deal, as young ladies then, even young ladies who acted in the movies, were not supposed to. Lana, on the other hand, was a materialist. She quickly turned clinical while under the influence, comparing her lovers’ respective endowments with the cold eye of a practiced anatomist.
Much information was conveyed in the mischievous glances the two actresses now exchanged.
Smiling obliviously, Hughes suggested to Sinatra that the two couples change partners. Lana’s look suggested that Ava would be getting the better part of the bargain. Then Ava found herself in Frank’s arms. The band struck up “Dancing in the Dark.”
She had been drinking steadily over the course of the night—Hughes bored her—and she was in a saucy mood. Liquor, and success, and the desert emboldened her: she was considerably less demure than the young woman Frank had encountered before.
She looked straight into his eyes: she didn’t usually dance with married men. He liked the challenge, and he liked the way she felt in his arms. In her heels she was as tall as he, maybe slightly taller, lean but curvy, fleshy in just the right places.
Except when she was married to them? The plural was pointed.
She smiled, sideways—with one plural pronoun he’d won the exchange—and put her head on his shoulder.
How about that, he thought.
Then the song was over, and she was back in Hughes’s arms.
Frank and Lana were seen together, as they wanted to be. It was inevitable, a game of cat and mouse. He and Lana Turner had gone to Palm Springs and danced at Chi Chi, among other celebrities, and their presence had been duly noted and reported. Evans read about them within hours. As did Louis B. Mayer.
On Wednesday night, Frank was back in Hollywood to do his radio show, and Mayer was with him, to present Sinatra with an award from Modern Screen magazine as the Most Popular Star of 1946—along with a $10,000 bronze bust of the singer by the sculptor Jo Davidson. Before the mikes went on, however, the fatherly hand came down heavily on his shoulder.
Mayer glared at him. What was all this?
Frank shrugged. It was just a personal matter.
Mayer had to disagree. Where he and Lana were concerned, it was very much a professional matter. He must have Frank’s word that he would sort this out quickly.
Frank nodded.
Then the mikes went on.
“Let me welcome you to the MGM family,” Mayer told him. He didn’t have to emphasize the last word.
“I’m proud to be in that family, sir,” Sinatra said.
The studio chief gave him a look that would have done Benny Goodman proud.
The MGM conduct police went into overdrive, piling the pressure on Frank and especially on Lana, the more vulnerable of the pair. Turner’s morals clause, unlike Sinatra’s, was in full effect, and where Mayer was concerned, Lana Turner’s morals were always suspect. “The only thing you’re interested in,” the studio chief had once told her in an office meeting, “is this.” He pointed at his groin.
It would certainly have appeared that way. Turner was never a proponent of monogamy, serial or otherwise. Even as she was carrying on with Sinatra, she was also conducting a torrid affair with the also married Tyrone Power. Yet Turner appears not to have been a mere sex addict. In later, more contemplative years she wrote that sex itself had never been that interesting to her. What seems to have been much more compelling was company,