Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [142]
There were other consequences. Frank’s behavior at the end of 1946 and the beginning of 1947 had the effect of a giant electrical surge creating power outages in its wake. On February 14, the day an orgy unfortunately detained him in Havana, he sent a plaintive cable to Nancy, who was already cooling her heels in Acapulco:
WILL YOU BE MY VALENTINE?
When he finally arrived in Mexico for their romantic interlude, he made a shattering discovery: his wife, as good as her word, had aborted their third child. “She found a doctor in Los Angeles through a friend and had the procedure while my father was in Cuba,” Tina Sinatra writes. “The doctor’s prep was evident, ‘and [Nancy told her daughter] he knew immediately what I’d done.’ ”
The horror—all too uncomfortably reminiscent of the scene in Godfather II when Kay tells Michael Corleone that she has not suffered a miscarriage but aborted their child (“An abortion, Michael. Just like our marriage is an abortion”)—rings down the decades. Nancy Sinatra had exerted the only real power she had over her relentlessly wayward husband, and her single act of revenge had terrific impact.
Tina Sinatra tells us, strangely, that her father’s reaction was to order his wife, “Don’t you ever do that again.” As though she had committed a nuisance. As though he had the upper hand. It seems more likely, given Frank’s seismic temper and Nancy’s by now steely resolve, that the result of his discovery was something more than a curt directive: that the two had a messy and furious scene soaked with tears.
Then, Tina writes, sunlight came after the storm:
Dad made a dramatic turnaround. He kept his road trips briefer and threw himself into home life. By day he was absorbed in his children. By night he was courting Mom all over again, with dinner and dancing at Ciro’s. He was really trying. He would make this marriage work in spite of himself.
Soon my mother was pregnant again, in the fall of 1947.
It’s a romantic picture, but the real story is far more complicated: 1947 would be a long, hard year.
It seemed not to matter to him that his radio show, Old Gold Presents Songs by Sinatra, was a superb vehicle for his talents: Frank had made up his mind that the indignity of earning a mere $2,800 a week (for a half hour’s work) was too much for him. In January he had publicly floated the notion of returning to Your Hit Parade, at almost three times the salary. Variety reported Sinatra’s monetary musings, and Old Gold got upset, informing him that he still had a year to go on his three-year contract and that it would be very expensive to get out of it. Frank struck back as he often would in years to come, by announcing that he was sick and was taking three weeks off to rest up in Florida.
When it turned out that he had gone to Havana, his sponsor was unhappy, as were others. Afterward, while Frank hunkered down, throwing himself into family life and doing a little recording (“Stella by Starlight,” “Mam’selle,” “Almost Like Being in Love”), the newspapers raged, and Louis B. Mayer fumed. He never fumed long. Very quickly Frank was called to the principal’s office to endure the tough squint from Ida, the panicky wait in the tiny antechamber, the long trudge to the big desk with the grim-faced little man behind it.
Mayer informed Frank that after his next movie, The Kissing Bandit (Frank had read the script, and looked forward to making it much as he would look forward to taking poison), in view of his recent deportment (Mayer cleared his throat), the studio would be loaning him out to his old employer, RKO, for a new picture called The Miracle of the Bells.
He would play a priest.
This last was pointed. Mayer studied him coldly through the rimless spectacles that rode his hawk nose. Frank’s image must be rehabilitated.
In the middle of March,