Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [179]
Still. Now Frank could—God help him—do precisely as he pleased.
On February 10, Sheilah Graham wrote: “Ava Gardner’s current travels with Frank Sinatra include a stop-over in San Francisco. Ava is telling her friends that she wants to get married. She did not say to whom.”
The day after Valentine’s Day, Hedda Hopper’s piece ran in the Los Angeles Times:
FRANK SINATRA’S WIFE DECIDES ON SEPARATION
Nancy Sinatra has finally decided to separate from her husband Frank, claiming that her married life with the crooner has become “unhappy and almost unbearable.”
“But I do not see a divorce in the foreseeable future,” she said yesterday.
First a property settlement will be worked out, and Nancy will ask for custody of their three children, Nancy, 9; Frank, 6; and Christina, 2. Her attorney is Arnold M. Grant.
This is the third separation for the Sinatras, who were married Feb. 4, 1939. Frank left home in October, 1946, but reconciled with his wife two weeks later.
In January, 1950, he again left home, but that time Nancy said, “He’s done it before and I suppose he’ll do it again, but I’m not calling this a marital breakup.”
With Nancy taking the initiative this time, it looks like the real thing.
The next day, as Gardner wrote in her autobiography,
the shit really hit the fan. In the next few weeks, I was receiving scores of letters accusing me of being a scarlet woman, a home wrecker, and worse. One correspondent addressed me as “Bitch-Jezebel-Gardner,” the Legion of Decency threatened to ban my movies, and Catholic priests found the time to write me accusatory letters. I even read where the Sisters of Mary and Joseph asked their students at St. Paul the Apostle School in Los Angeles to pray for Frank’s poor wife.
Louella Parsons had apparently heard the good Sisters’ plea. She wrote:
I am very glad Nancy Sinatra will not divorce Frankie—that she will ask for a legal separation, because somehow I believe these two will go back together.
Frankie is planning a trip to Europe this spring, just about the time Ava Gardner leaves to make Pandora and the Flying Dutchman with James Mason in England.
But I’ve seen Frankie get these crushes before, and I’m not for a minute taking his friendship with Ava as anything serious. Ava, too, gets crushes, and gets over them. But the one I really feel sorry for is little Nancy, who is such a fine woman.
And hate mail was only the beginning of Ava’s problems. Soon Dorothy Kilgallen was reporting in her column that, as if Ava weren’t in enough trouble with the country at large, her “romantic episode with Frank Sinatra has put her in the MGM doghouse. She has been warned to avoid further ‘entanglements.’ ”
Earlier that month, in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy held up a piece of paper and said, “I have here in my hand a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
The effect of the so-called Wheeling speech on a country already in the throes of Communist paranoia was electric. McCarthy, heretofore a marginal and intensely unpopular legislator, instantly shot to prominence.
Frank Sinatra, suspected by many of having Communist sympathies and now a certified moral reprobate, was ripe for the pillory. As was Ava. Erskine Johnson’s March 10 column noted: “Ava Gardner’s lines as a husband-snatching hussy in East Side, West Side drew snickers at a preview.”
There was a satisfying symmetry in the equally