Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [169]
The first weeks of February saw an escalating series of transcontinental shouting matches between Sinatra and George Evans, who was increasingly exasperated with his most famous client. Evans, who had eyes and ears everywhere, knew about Ava. And by early 1949, the publicist was at his wits’ end. When Frank wasn’t yelling at him over the phone, Nancy was. She wanted George to do the impossible: Make him change. Bring him back.
Evans had worked wonders before, but in Ava Gardner he saw real trouble. He was sure she didn’t care whose life she destroyed, whose home she wrecked. Evans had gotten a whiff of her heedlessness. “Do you suck?” she liked to ask strangers, when shaking hands for the first time. Lana Turner had been a different story: At least she cared about her career. There was leverage. Gardner cared about nothing except having a good time. She was that most dangerous of creatures, a gorgeous nihilist.
Frank, for his part, had made up his mind about her years before when he saw her on the cover of a movie magazine. “I’m going to marry that girl,” he remarked to a friend—forgetting, for the moment, that he already was married. Now when Evans told him, over and over, that he couldn’t have her, that she was bad news, that she would drag him and his career down, Sinatra reacted much as he had when Manie Sacks had informed him that he had to pay for his own arrangements—with complete outrage and absolute assurance.
Despite Jack Keller’s heroic efforts on Sinatra’s behalf, Frank demanded that Evans fire his West Coast counterpart. The main problem was that while Keller was an energetic publicist, he lacked subservience. Jerry Lewis, who employed Keller for many years, laughed when he recalled the press agent’s insolence: “I’d say, ‘How come you didn’t get my name in the paper this week?’ And Jack would say, ‘I kept it out, you putz.’ ” Keller’s first reaction when Sinatra phoned from Indio at 3:00 a.m. to say “We’re in trouble” had been: “How can I be in trouble when all night I’ve just been lying here in bed?”
Yet Evans steadfastly resisted firing Keller, who was really just the whipping boy: Frank’s real beef was with George Evans. At the end of February, Sinatra finally called it quits with the man who, in many ways, had made him Sinatra.
In March, Take Me Out to the Ball Game came out, to tepid reviews. “Don’t be surprised,” Crowther wrote, “if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.” The movies were providing diminishing returns for Sinatra, but with not much else going on in his career, he needed that MGM paycheck. At the end of the month he got back into a sailor suit and began shooting On the Town, with Gene Kelly, who was co-directing the film with Stanley Donen. For the first time on one of his movies with Sinatra, Kelly would get first billing. Not only were Frank’s fortunes falling, but he was thirty-three, not so young in those days. The thinness that had once seemed so cute was now something more like gauntness: with age and trouble, his face was growing harder. “He just didn’t seem comfortable with his looks,” said Betty Garrett, who co-starred with him on both Ball Game and On the Town. MGM cosmeticians had to do extensive work on him every morning, augmenting his hairline, filling in his facial scars, even padding the posterior of his sailor pants to give a more pleasing contour to Sinatra’s totally flat fanny.
Frank’s discontent went well beyond the physical: The rift with Evans gnawed at him. He would impulsively reach for the phone to call George for advice, only to realize he had burned that bridge. The IRS was dunning him, big time, for back taxes, and Dolly was hitting him up for money every time they talked. He was nervous, self-doubting, and cranky—sometimes his skin felt too tight. At a party in Palm Springs, he