Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [168]
At a January engagement party for Mel Tormé and the Columbia starlet Candy Toxton, Frank and Jimmy Van Heusen showed up uninvited (and in Frank’s case, loaded). Sinatra was carrying a magnum of champagne wrapped in ribbon. “Here ya go, Mel. Happy Birthday,” he said, handing the bottle to the younger singer—whose birthday had been in September—and calling loudly for the bride-to-be, on whom he apparently had a crush. “The moment Candy saw him walk in,” Tormé recalled, “she rushed up the stairs to my bedroom and locked herself in.” Tormé ran up the stairs,
on the heels of Sinatra, who announced that he wanted to “wash up.” He went into my bathroom, tried the door to my bedroom, found it locked, and began to bang on the door. Invited or not, he was a guest in my home, so I tried to reason with him …
He tossed an expletive at me and continued to pound on the door. I heard Candy, inside my bedroom, say, in a small, rather sad voice, “Go away, Frank, please.” Van Heusen, a true gent, shamefacedly came up the stairs and pried Frank away from the bedroom door.
“Come on, Frank. Let’s go,” he pleaded.
“No,” Sinatra said sullenly. “Wanna see Candy.”
I gritted my teeth. I could now hear Candy crying in the bedroom. “Frank, I think you’d better get out of here,” I said.
Van Heusen tugged at his arm. “Yeah, he’s right, pal. Let’s go.” Frank hesitated at the top of the stairs and gave me one hard look. Buddy Rich told me that Sinatra was able to handle himself pretty well, and I sure as hell did not want to tangle with him.
Frank stormed out of the house.
When he was drunk, which was more and more often these days, he was a law unto himself. Evans saw it happening and despaired, then he too grew resigned. Around this time, Earl Wilson ran into the publicist at the Copacabana:
I found [him] in a grave mood. “I make a prediction,” Evans said across the table in the lounge. “Frank is through. A year from now you won’t hear anything about him.”
“Come on,” I protested to the man who’d done more than anybody to make him famous.
“He’ll be dead professionally,” Evans said. “I’ve been around the country, looking and listening. They’re not going to see his pictures. They’re not buying his records. They don’t care for Frank Sinatra anymore!”
“But you’re the fellow that’s supposed to whet up that yearning for him, aren’t you?” I asked.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Evans said. “You know how much I’ve talked to him about the girls. The public knows about the trouble with Nancy, and the other dames, and it doesn’t like him anymore.”
“I can’t believe that,” I said.
“In a year,” Evans reiterated, “he’ll be through.”
In January, MGM celebrated its Silver Jubilee by gathering fifty-seven of its biggest stars, including Lassie, for a historic group photograph. There they sat (except for Lassie, who stood in front), in chairs arranged on bleachers on a soundstage, row on row of them, Tracy and Hepburn and Gable and Astaire and Garland and Durante and Errol Flynn, living proof that the great studio had, if not quite more stars than in the heavens, then at least more than anyone else. Wearing an unflattering light gray suit and looking oddly pallid (and distinctly balding), Sinatra sat at the far right in the second-to-last row, in between Ginger Rogers and Red Skelton (who had broken everyone up when he walked in, calling out, “Okay, kids, the part’s taken, you can go home now”). Ava sat front and center in the second row, between Clark Gable and Judy Garland, strangely sedate in her blue suit and pearls and bright red lipstick. Her hands, clutching a pair of red gloves, lay demurely folded in her lap.
Appearances—as was always the case where the movies were concerned—were deceiving. As was the distance that separated Ava and Frank in the bleachers.
When she drove onto the studio lot that day, Gardner recalled, “a car sped past me, swung in front, and slowed down so much I had to pass