Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [157]
In the meantime, he was largely idle. On Saturday nights came Your Hit Parade, with its occasional pleasures but mostly its tribulations: in January, he sprinted through a version of “Too Fat Polka” (“I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me”) so dispiriting that to listen to it is to risk bursting into tears. Worse was to come. He did a couple of guest spots on Jack Benny’s and Maurice Chevalier’s radio shows. But mainly, he did a lot of drinking and poker playing with the Varsity.
Frank had officially moved out of his penthouse at the Sunset Tower apartments years before, but had held on to it—for the times he recorded late at night and had to be at the studio early the next morning; for business meetings; for other things. For a while, Axel and Sammy Cahn had roomed together in a suite a couple of floors below: now Sammy was married, but he still liked to stop by Frank’s place now and then for a drink, a few hands of cards, some laughs.
One night, after some of each, Sammy and Frank were out on the terrace, looking down over the Sunset Strip. A violet evening, the little lights twinkling in the Hollywood hills. Sammy pointed, a little unsteadily, across the street. Did Frank know who lived down there?
Frank just shook his head at him.
“If you looked down from Frank’s terrace,” Cahn wrote in his autobiography, “you’d see, across the street, a series of little houses, one of them owned by Tom Kelly, a noted interior decorator; the occupant of that house was Ava Gardner.”
When Sammy told him this, Frank shook his head again, this time in wonderment. For a moment, he stared fiercely into the twilight. Then he cupped his hands to his mouth. “Ava!” he yelled. The big voice carried far into the quiet evening. “Ava Gardner!”
Sammy Cahn looked at his hero and grinned. Nobody like him. Now he cupped his hands to his mouth. “Can you hear me, Ava?” he called, in his high, hoarse tones. “We know you’re down there, Ava!”
“Hello, Ava, hello!” Sinatra called. As if he were yelling down a wishing well.
The two men looked at each other and began to giggle. Giggling turned to laughing. Laughing became hysteria. Soon they were both clutching their sides painfully and bellowing into the night. Down on the sidewalk, one or two passersby—in those days there weren’t many pedestrians on the Strip—stared up at the terrace.
And then a miracle: in the little house nestled into the trees on the north side of Sunset—torn down many years ago and replaced by a railroad-car restaurant—a curtain was drawn, a window opened.
Ava stuck her head out the window and looked up. She knew exactly who it was: the voice was unmistakable. She grinned, and waved back.
Was it an accident that they ran into each other just a few days later, in front of her place? And then again, a few days after that, near Sunset Tower? Frank wasn’t much for walking, but suddenly there was something compelling about those stretches of sidewalk. The third time, they both spotted each other a half block away; both began laughing as they converged.
He grinned as he said hello.
Ava’s eyes searched his. Was he following her?
He met her gaze boldly. If he were following her, he’d be behind her.
She put a hand on her hip. Uh-huh.
“Ava, let’s be friends. Why don’t we have drinks and dinner tonight?”
“I looked at him,” she wrote in her autobiography.
I damn well knew he was married, though the gossip columns always had him leaving Nancy for good, and married men were definitely not high on my hit parade. But he was handsome, with his thin, boyish face, the bright blue eyes, and this incredible grin. And he was so enthusiastic and invigorated, clearly pleased with life in general, himself in particular, and, at that moment, me.
She accepted his invitation, and they went to Mocambo, just up the Strip. There were a lot of drinks. She had taken up the habit soon after she married the tyrannical Artie Shaw, to quell the feelings of intellectual inferiority he so easily aroused in her. This night