Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [165]
And so, legend has it, Jack did just that. Gardner, in her memoir, denies the episode ever happened, but Keller taped a reminiscence of it before his untimely death—he was a four-pack-a-day smoker—at the age of fifty-nine in 1975; he also told the story to Peter Bogdanovich. In his account of that wild night in Indio, the publicist wakes up a pal, the manager of the Hollywood Knickerbocker hotel, who happens to have $30,000 in his safe. Keller borrows all of the money, charters a plane, flies to Indio, and papers the town with high-denomination currency to keep everybody quiet.
Everybody certainly kept quiet. Whatever happened that night in the desert, no one ever talked, and the dead tell no tales—unless they happen to leave a taped oral history.
“A lot of silly stories have been written about what happened to us in Palm Springs, but the truth is both more and less exciting,” Ava Gardner wrote in her autobiography, which, while entertainingly blunt in its language, is unfortunately euphemistic when it comes to her many exploits.
We drank, we laughed, we talked, and we fell in love. Frank gave me a lift back to our rented house. We did not kiss or make dates, but we knew, and I think it must have frightened both of us. I went in to wake Bappie up, which didn’t appeal to her much, but I had to tell someone how much I liked Frank Sinatra. I just wasn’t prepared to say that what I really meant by like was love.
Perhaps Frank and Ava really were as chaste as junior-prom sweethearts that night. Yet Keller’s story, while too good to be true, is too irresistibly crazy not to be. Sinatra certainly carried guns—once Lee Mortimer dropped his assault charges, the suspended pistol permit was reinstated—and he certainly drank heavily, as did Ava. There are copious records of wild, booze-fueled behavior on the part of Sinatra and Gardner once they became a bona fide couple. Why should the night they fell in love not have set the pattern?
Frank fell as fast as she did. In a blinding flash, all his self-discontent—a combustible amalgam of artistic failure and disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes—alchemized into the most powerful feeling he had ever known. He was deeply in love with Ava Gardner. He phoned her, dead sober, when he got back to town, and asked her out.
We met for dinner at a quiet place [Ava wrote], and we didn’t do much drinking. This time I did ask him about Nancy. He said he’d left her physically, emotionally, and geographically years before, and there was no way he was going back. The kids, however, were something else; he was committed to them forever. I was to learn that that kind of deep loyalty—not faithfulness, but loyalty—was a critical part of his nature.
We didn’t say much more. Love is a wordless communion between two people. That night we went back to that little yellow house in Nichols Canyon and made love. And oh, God, it was magic. We became lovers forever—eternally. Big words, I know. But I truly felt that no matter what happened we would always be in love. And God almighty, things did happen.
Not surprisingly, Frank’s fabled confidence was starting to crack. That autumn, vocal problems cropped up for the first time. In October, when Sinatra made a guest appearance on the bandleader Spike Jones’s Spotlight Revue, Jones, famous for cutting up, asked him seriously, “How you feeling tonight, Frank? Is your voice all right?”
Frank tried to make a joke out of it. “Well, I think so—lemme see,” he said. He blew a pitch pipe and let out a big off-key bellow, much to the audience’s amusement. “I am majestically in voice!” he crowed—and then, ominously, as the orchestra played the intro to “Everybody Loves Somebody,”3 coughed. He then proceeded, on live national radio, to blow the first note of the song.
In November, three days after The