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By Root 2367 0

not a year before, and Frank’s career was on the downswing. What’s more, he was in love. But as always, no matter his circumstances, he liked to have the best of everything. Still, however nice the new digs, the uprooting must have been difficult. Nancy junior, eight at the time of the move, writes that her father bought 320 North Carolwood “to be nearer his work so that he could spend more time at home.” This sounds more hopeful than realistic. A photograph from the period shows Sinatra sitting in an armchair holding baby Tina as his adoring family surrounds him: Big Nancy at one shoulder; Little Nancy at the other, gazing at her sister; little Frank is resting his elbow on Dad’s knee. Frank himself is directing a ghastly fake smile at his young son (maybe the needy Frankie was already starting to get on his nerves). He looks as if he can’t wait to get the hell out of there.

Tina, always more clear-eyed than her sister about her father’s character, has a different take on the move to Holmby Hills: it was, she writes, a move “up in the world.” This rings truer. If Frank couldn’t act with Bogart, at least he could live across the street from him.

Yet he was restless and discontent. He was recording again, but not well. The yearlong layoff during the AFM strike, in combination with the weekly travesty of Your Hit Parade, had eroded not just his artistic confidence but his relationship with Axel Stordahl. The two men weren’t making magic anymore; they were just making music, much of it not very good. The week before Christmas, in his first post-strike recording with Sibelius, the all too appropriately titled “Comme Ci Comme Ça,” Sinatra’s voice seems utterly without conviction:

And this was what he was leaving. The Sinatras at home, 1948. (photo credit 22.2)

It seems my friends have been complaining,

They say that I’ve been acting rude.

At this moment, unfortunately, the lyrics—filled with petulant world-weariness, the ennui that sets in when a grand passion is absent—fit him like a glove.

“It wasn’t a very happy Christmas in 1948,” Big Nancy recalled, “but it was the cutest card I’d ever seen.” Cute, yes: the card was a cheery cartoon of a Christmas tree, with photos of the family members printed inside globe ornaments. Little Nancy and Frankie each occupied one of the upper globes; underneath, Big Nancy and baby Tina cuddled cozily inside one ornament, and Frank—all alone—grinned from another.

23

Jimmy Van Heusen with Ava and Frank, early 1950s. (photo credit 23.1)

Look at him! Who you got waitin’ for ya in New York? Ava Gardner?

—Jules Munshin, as Ozzie, to Gene Kelly’s character, Gabey, in On the Town

It hadn’t been a very happy Christmas thanks to Frank’s extreme emotional distance—an air of distraction that drifted in more and more often, like a fog bank, at which point he would simply walk out of the house to God knew where. Nancy finally admitted to herself that whatever he promised, whatever he bought her, he was never going to change. Out in the world, Sheilah and Hedda and Louella were stepping up the drumbeat about his affairs. Years later, Nancy junior wrote:

One day while I was playing dress-up in Mom’s dressing room, I climbed up on a chair to get a shoe box off a shelf and knocked to the floor a stack of magazines that Mom had hidden in her closet. I sat down in the midst of the pile. They were movie magazines like Photoplay and Modern Screen, and they were filled with pictures of Dad and … Mom and Frankie and Baby Tina and me. There were also pictures of Dad with other ladies. I remember Marilyn Maxwell and Lana Turner. I was devastated.

For a long time Frank’s wife had shielded herself from the extent of his infidelities, but more and more she realized, with a sorrowful but hardened resignation, that just about everything she’d heard or imagined was true. He came and went as he pleased and did exactly what he wanted, with whomever he wanted. Nancy tried to busy herself with fixing up 320 North Carolwood, but there were times when she couldn’t take it anymore. At those times she