Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [166]
Since Frank could behave badly among movie collaborators he respected, it’s easy to imagine how he conducted himself on a quickie comedy (the shooting schedule was just three weeks) at the off-brand studio he thought he’d outgrown, alongside the remote and distrustful Groucho Marx and the menacingly protuberant Jane Russell (whom the delighted boob man Hughes had discovered a few years earlier—not working at his dentist’s office, as the myth has it, but through his casting department). “Frank and my father did not get along at all,” Groucho’s son, Arthur, recalled. “Sinatra always showed up on the set like a real star, like two hours late, and my father would be fuming because he already knew his lines, which Sinatra usually did not know. So they weren’t too compatible and the movie wasn’t too good either.”
Yet Frank got along swimmingly with Jane Russell, who, like him, was not especially happy to be working on It’s Only Money. “It was nothing,” she said. “It was not a very good picture. Frank and I certainly knew it.” And he was a perfect gentleman with Russell. “Frank was always very polite and very sweet,” she remembered. “There was no funny business at all.”
For good reason. “Ava was sitting up in the sound booth most of the time while we made the picture,” Russell said. “She certainly was a character. A raving character.”
It’s Only Money—such a stinker that RKO wouldn’t release it until 1951 under the hokily lecherous new title Double Dynamite—was the least of Frank’s problems. His life was coming unmoored. His recording career was dead in the water; his one performing outlet, besides the occasional radio guest spot, was the reliably lousy Your Hit Parade. In December, a headline in the industry journal Modern Television & Radio read, IS SINATRA FINISHED? Around that time Frank told Manie Sacks, according to Nancy junior, that “so many things were going wrong that he felt like he was washed up. Sacks replied that life is cyclical, and that he was too talented not to bounce back. ‘In a few years,’ he said, ‘you’ll be on top again.’ ”
In the meantime, though, he had fallen off the mountain. Down Beat’s end-of-the-year poll for Best Male Singer, which Sinatra had easily topped since 1943, found him in the number-four spot, beneath Billy Eckstine, the leather-lunged Frankie Laine (“Mule Train”), and Bob—not Bing—Crosby.
Frank was still making big money—MGM paid him $325,833 that year—but as always, he spent it faster than it came in. Taxes were for chumps. The IRS respectfully disagreed. In her year-end wrap-up for Silver Screen, the columnist Sheilah Graham estimated that Sinatra had made $11 million in the last six years, yet he “not only can’t save anything but … is behind with his income tax.”
Frank’s solution was to buy a new house.
Holmby Hills, just north of Sunset and to the east of Beverly Glen, was a pricey enclave whose denizens included Loretta Young, Walt Disney, and Humphrey Bogart. Three-twenty North Carolwood Drive was a sprawling redbrick Mediterranean on three acres. There was no lake, but the summer heat didn’t settle in the way it did in the Valley, and the drive to MGM was just fifteen minutes instead of forty-five. The house cost a fortune—a quarter of a million in 1948 dollars—but then, that’s what movie stars had to pay for a house in those days.
Why the Sinatras moved just then is something of a mystery. They had paid a huge sum for the Palm Springs place