Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [138]
Whether the part about carrying a gun was eerily prescient or merely a case of Louella’s making it her business to know absolutely everything, three days later the Los Angeles Times photographed Frank being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff Robert Rogers as he applied for a permit to carry a pistol.
The gun may have been a Walther, as has sometimes been reported, or it may have been a Beretta. Sinatra later told Hedda Hopper he “wanted Nancy to have some protection in case of an emergency. So I bought a little gun for the house.” (With what he was up to lately, Nancy would have been the last person in whose hands he’d want a gun.) Or maybe, as he told another reporter, he needed the sidearm “to protect personal funds.”
Whose personal funds is another question. It seems unlikely Frank meant his own. He had already begun the habit of having someone in his retinue carry his wad of crisp new twenties and hundreds, but even if he kept the money in his own pocket, a couple of thousand bucks was scarcely worth protecting with a gun. Whatever he meant to use the weapon for, it was a symbol, and not a good one, of what Frank Sinatra was in the process of becoming.
Maybe Frank was frazzled and needed a vacation; maybe he was a man on a mission, however misbegotten. Maybe both were true. Or perhaps he simply needed to get out of town.
For Nancy had found out about his meetings with Lana in New York. News travels fast in Hollywood. If Lana Turner was under the illusion once more that Frank Sinatra was going to leave his wife for her, the story would travel even faster.
Nancy had other news for Frank: she was pregnant. Was Lana Turner going to give him babies? The bitch had one already, a three-year-old bastard daughter, by the nobody she’d married twice. Did Frank really want to be that child’s stepfather? Did he really want to be Lana Turner’s third husband (and fourth marriage)? Hollywood would laugh at him.
Nancy told Frank she was going to have an abortion.
He stared at her. In the mid-1940s, a time of enforced conventionality, it was unspeakable. For a Catholic couple, it was unthinkable. And for this Catholic couple—Nancy knew it; Frank knew it—it was the stain that Dolly Sinatra had brought to their marriage.
The challenge was clear: if he left on this trip, whatever it was, anything could happen. She might do this unimaginable thing. He didn’t believe it, even as part of him feared it. He repeated to her that he had obligations in New York and Miami—a radio show, a benefit concert—and that he was going to take a few days off in Florida and then Havana. Boys only.
He told her it was all over with Lana. He had been a fool, a great fool. It was his nature. He knew Nancy understood: she was the only one in the world who really knew him. There was a loneliness deep in his soul, and he was susceptible. Lana Turner was scheming, inconstant (Frank knew about Tyrone Power), vain, and shallow. He realized she didn’t love him, and—bending the truth—he certainly didn’t love her.
He was exhausted, frayed out. He had been making bad decisions left and right, mistreating those who loved him best. He would make it up to her.
He had an inspiration: they would have a second honeymoon. In Mexico—Acapulco. Valentine’s Day. Two weeks.
The car horn was blowing in the driveway. His suitcases sat in the hall. Frank tried to kiss her, but she evaded his lips. And then he was gone.
He relaxed at the Fischetti mansion on Allison Island in Miami—cool tile floors, quiet servants, views of palm trees and the sparkling bay: a very nice place to be in February. The beautiful weather, luxurious surroundings, and pleasant company put Frank in such an expansive mood that on the night of the tenth he gave a free concert at the Colonial Inn, a gambling casino in Hallandale owned