Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [156]
At the construction site on Alejo Road, out in the desert at the edge of Palm Springs, the bulldozers and cement mixers ran double shifts, working all day and then at night under floodlights as the builders hurried toward the Christmas deadline. E. Stewart Williams had shown Frank Sinatra two very different sets of drawings: one was of the Georgian mansion Frank had requested, and the other depicted Williams’s far more modern concept, a low-lying concrete structure with tall picture windows and a shed roof. The young architect had literally held his breath as the singer scanned the drawings, a serious look on his tanned features. Sinatra’s domineering reputation had preceded him, yet Williams, trying to forge a career, knew that building Georgian in the desert—impractical as well as retrograde—would make him a laughingstock in the field. He would be seen as a servant rather than an artist. Frank nodded, frowning, as he inspected the modern design, then, suddenly looking interested, nodded some more.
Williams exhaled.
The house wasn’t quite a mansion—at forty-five hundred square feet, it was large but not gigantic, and there were only four bedrooms—but the rooms and the windows were big, and every window, as well as a sliding glass wall, looked out onto the swimming pool, which was shaped (Williams couldn’t help smiling at this inspired touch) like a grand piano. A breezeway over one end of the pool was designed to shed shadows that would resemble piano keys. Bright sun and sparkling light off the pool filled the living room: if shade was needed, the flick of a switch closed a $7,000 motorized curtain. In the distance stony Mount San Jacinto shimmered white in the fierce sun; in the foreground, two palm trees waved in the desert wind. The house, made pleasant by air-conditioning in the summer and fireplaces in the winter, would be a shelter from the desert around it. Frank would call the place Twin Palms.
Twin Palms, Palm Springs. Architect E. Stewart Williams designed the desert retreat, complete with piano-shaped swimming pool, for his demanding client and his family; within weeks of its completion, Frank was courting Ava Gardner. (photo credit 21.2)
22
No one like her, before or since. “I just noticed the body,” said Sammy Cahn’s first wife. “It just moved like a willow. She was built beautifully. She was a gorgeous creature.” (photo credit 22.1)
As his wife grew great with child for the third time, Sinatra found more and more reasons to be elsewhere. Pregnancy may be deemed sexy by some cultures in some eras, but in late-1940s America it was anything but. The women got fat and sick and peevish; the men took increasing notice of the unbelievably slim waistlines of the young women they passed. For Frank, the delectable bodies of the young women all around him proved increasingly irresistible.
It was a time of challenge in general. A new American Federation of Musicians strike had begun on the first day of 1948: once again, there could be no recording with orchestras. The ban wouldn’t end until early December. In the interim, Sinatra would go into the recording studio exactly twice, laying down just three sides—two that would be released later with overdubbed orchestral backing, and one with a choir (“Nature Boy,” a version far inferior to the glorious one Nat Cole had recorded before the strike began).
Sinatra was not spending much time in movie studios, either. The Kissing Bandit had wrapped, thank God (though Frank’s agony was to be prolonged: extra scenes had to be shot the following March); production on The Miracle of the Bells had finished at the end of September. He would start work on a new Metro