Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [133]
The solemn injunctions of Louis B. Mayer held extraordinary power for her. And soon Lana was tearfully reading from a new script. “I am not in love with Frank, and he is not in love with me,” she told Louella Parsons. “I have never in my life broken up a home … I just can’t take these accusations.”
Parsons played the good cop—“I think Frank has done his best to be a good family man and still remain the glamorous figure he’s been in the public eye,” she wrote in her column—and Hedda Hopper, the bad. Hopper took Sinatra to task in print and in person, warning him when she encountered him at a reception “that he was public property, and that part of that public property was Nancy and his children.”
Sinatra didn’t scare easily; normally, he would have shrugged off the admonition. But pressure was coming from all sides: after publicly (and somewhat contradictorily) musing, “You know, Frank has had a lot of career for one man, and he hasn’t had much time for home life. I think they’ll get it straightened out,” the relentless Evans even sent Manie out to L.A. to try to reason with him.
And on October 23, Frank caved. The occasion was Phil Silvers’s opening at Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom’s nightclub on Beverly Boulevard, and this time Sinatra’s stooge act was in dead earnest.
He attended the opening as a friend, and also to contribute to Silvers’s show in much the same way he had in New York. But this time the fix was in: Nancy was present, all dolled up and sitting at Jule Styne’s table. Midway through the show, Rosenbloom—a former prizefighter who had turned to playing tough guys in the movies—asked Sinatra for a song.
Frank rose and asked the band to play “Going Home.”
A very odd selection, given that the lugubrious spiritual was best known at the time for having been played at Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral. But it was the title, not the song, that was the point: when Sinatra was through, Silvers—who after all had written the words to the song about Nancy—grabbed Frank in a bear hug and steered him over to his wife’s table. Through tears, Frank asked Nancy (she was also crying) how the kids were. Fine, she told him. They missed their daddy. He had to clench his teeth to keep from bawling.
You could’ve heard a pin drop in Slapsie Maxie’s. Then Frank asked his wife to dance, and the place went nuts.
Frank and Nancy didn’t go home that night. She wanted to see his apartment, to feel its illicit thrill—and to make it her own. And so at the end of an evening of dancing at Slapsie Maxie’s, they got in a cab and rode to Sunset Tower and went up to his penthouse and made a baby.
Despite the reconciliation, he continued to do exactly what he wanted. It Happened in Brooklyn was limping to a close amid further delays by the star; Sinatra and the director were barely speaking.
One of the problems was the rate at which Frank kept on recording that fall. He was privately gratified to hear that Dick Haymes’s sales were beginning to drop. That was what happened, he thought, when you didn’t keep pushing in all directions. There was a radio show Sinatra badly wanted to do in early November, George Burns and Gracie Allen’s, and so he informed Whorf that he, Frank, needed to wrap up his work on the picture before then. Whorf refused. And so, as the MGM production memo for November 7 notes tersely, Sinatra “left at 2:30 to appear on Burns & Allen broadcast.”
The camel’s back was stressed to full curvature. Mayer called a conference with his production executives, then fired off a telegram to the recalcitrant star:
NO CONSENT WAS GIVEN BY US TO SUCH A RADIO APPEARANCE AND YOUR PARTICIPATION IN SUCH BROADCAST WAS IN VIOLATION OF YOUR OBLIGATION AND AGREEMENT UNDER YOUR CONTRACT WITH US … THESE INCIDENTS ARE THE CULMINATION OF A LONG SERIES OF VIOLATIONS OF YOUR CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS