Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [159]
When they got back, Nancy was sitting by the pool in the sun, her belly rising like a hill in her maternity bathing suit. As the kids bounded into the water, Frank leaned down and kissed her on the top of the head; she patted his hand, pressing her lips together.
She knew almost everything, knew that this was the way it was going to be until—or unless—they weren’t together anymore. She had fooled herself, till the pregnancy was too far along to change anything, that this time might be different. Tonight he would disappear once more: even in the desert, there were places to go. When he returned, deep in the night, she would smell the liquor and tobacco and perfume on him; when he patted her shoulder, she would turn and pretend to be asleep.
Many years later, Nancy Sandra remembered one of these weekends at Twin Palms: Her father had gone out there first, then the next day big Sam Weiss—the song plugger who had helped Frank out during the Mortimer encounter at Ciro’s—drove Big Nancy and the children to the Springs. Three hours over two-lane blacktop, the warm wind shooting through the open windows, Nancy and Sam chatting in the front seat, then falling into long silences. “On this trip,” Nancy Sandra writes in Frank Sinatra: My Father,
the plan was … for us to see Daddy for a couple of days, and then for Sam to drive us home, leaving our parents alone. They didn’t get to spend time alone very often. When I realized I was being sent away, I couldn’t stand it. I cried and cried—not a tantrum, not angry, but afraid of leaving my mom; I had never been without her.
I couldn’t stop crying. Frankie, never lacking emotion, caught it, and we both cried and cried. Daddy, out of pity, or in a desperate attempt to save his sanity, eventually said to Mom, “I guess you’d better go with them.” So Mom packed us up, put us in the car with Sam, and climbed in the back seat next to her spoiled brat of a daughter. When we were out of sight of the two skinny palm trees and Daddy, Mom started to cry softly. She tried to hide her tears behind dark glasses. Now, I had never seen my mother cry before—I mean, mothers don’t cry, children cry. It’s not a mother’s job.
I was shocked and frightened …
And Weiss, Nancy writes, was “disgusted” with both children—the three-hour drive back to Toluca Lake felt like twelve. When they got home, the children’s new governess, Georgie Hardwick—until recently employed by the Bing Crosbys—came out to meet them:
We’d had a few other governesses—Whitey, Kathleen, Dolores, Mamie—but Georgie was the toughest. She was great. And in this situation, expecting to see only two very small people walk through the door sans mother, she flashed me a look I’ll never forget. From that day on, without lectures, without words, Georgie quietly, gently, transformed me into an unspoiled child.
The account is chilling—the gruff, ultimately unsympathetic bodyguard; the frightened children; the distraught mother. The ever less present father. Frank himself is little more than a cipher in the episode: a voice on the radio … a picture in the newspaper, as Nancy had recalled of her earliest childhood. Nothing had changed.
I guess you’d better go with them.
Why couldn’t they all just have stayed? Was it pity that made him send them away, or impatience—or did he not really want them there in the first place?
What was the reason for Big Nancy’s tears?
And what is it that makes a scared child a spoiled brat?
The trail leads straight to the governess with the Dickensian name, Georgie Hardwick. She had left the Crosby household for a very specific reason. “When the Crosby kids talk about being punished and beaten, it was Georgie