Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [178]
Sacks would have no official replacement as manager of popular repertoire at Columbia, but in February the label brought in a new head for its pop-singles division: Mitch Miller.
George was gone, Manie was gone, but business was business: Frank rescheduled the Shamrock gig for the first week of February. On the sixth, he and Van Heusen flew from New York to Houston—and unbeknownst to Frank, Ava, in Hollywood, decided impulsively to go meet him. Following MGM protocol, she put in a request to the studio to make the trip. Mayer sent down the word: no. She went anyway. Gardner biographer Lee Server wrote:
She arrived late for his performance, the house lights down, but even in the dark she caught every eye and provoked a stir of excited whispers across the entire room. When he saw her Sinatra beamed as if he had been hit with a hot red spotlight. If the audience wondered about a possible relationship between the two stars, Sinatra did little to disconnect the dots, compulsively directing each song directly to Ava as if everyone else in the room had gone home.
After the show, the mayor of Houston, Oscar Holcombe, took Frank, Ava, Van Heusen, and several others to dinner at an Italian restaurant, Vincent’s Sorrento. It wasn’t a spontaneous decision: Holcombe’s office had made a reservation—and the restaurant’s owner, delighted at the prospect of such spectacular glamour descending on his establishment, had tipped off the Houston Post, which dispatched a photographer. The next morning the wires reported:
Frank Sinatra squired Siren Ava Gardner to dinner last night and almost got a chance to show off his fancy footwork in the art of fisticuffs … In the middle of his spaghetti Houston Press Photographer Eddie Schisser approached the table to ask Sinatra to pose for a quick shot.
“I’d like to take your picture eating spaghetti,” Schisser said.
Unsmilingly, the bantam singer said he wasn’t having his picture taken, with or without spaghetti.
Schisser reminded him that it would “take only 30 seconds,” and Sinatra shoved back his chair, as if about to rise.
Nobody heard exactly what was said, but a few uncomplimentary phrases allegedly were passed by both sides as the management moved in to maintain equilibrium.
Miss Gardner tried to cover her face with her hands.
George Evans, freshly laid in his grave, was already spinning in it.
It was the first in what would be a lifelong series of such conflagrations with the press, and in a very real way the subtraction of Evans (and even the departure of Manie) made it all possible. The requisite accelerants were present: the interrupted meal; Sinatra’s powerful but scarcely admitted guilt (he would later call going out publicly with Ava “a major mistake,” then said, “But I was so in love I didn’t care”); his generally battered self-esteem. And then there was (again relevantly) the casual, barely understood ethnic insensitivity of the times: an Italian-American should be photographed eating spaghetti, the same way an African-American, in 1950, would be photographed eating watermelon. Sinatra didn’t like it a bit, nor should he have.
But far more damaging than the flare-up itself was the national publicity. For Nancy Sinatra, who had held a scrap of hope that her husband might come to his senses and return to his home, this was her final humiliation. That afternoon she called a hardware store and had the locks changed at 320 North Carolwood.
Their eleventh wedding anniversary had been two days earlier.
The affair, previously just whispered about (though in Hollywood it was the worst-kept secret in town), was officially public. Reading about it over his morning coffee,