Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [180]
Bergman or Sinatra? Newspapers could hardly decide which scandal to run with on any given day. The March 17 edition of the Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Daily News carried a page-one story headlined HUSBAND WILL FIGHT BERGMAN IN COURT and, inside, a United Press dispatch that read as if it had been written by Lee Mortimer himself:
Crooner boy Frankie Sinatra’s charm seems to have gone afleeting.
His bobby sox brigades are conspicuous—by their absence.
Frankie currently is sequestered in a 33rd-floor duplex suite at Hampshire House, on Central Park, where reportedly he is paying a little bagatelle of $100 a day.
By a coincidence, actress Ava Gardner occupies a suite in the same diggings …
And—horrible thought—the crooner’s once-faithful squealing teen-age admirers aren’t bothering him a bit. Only two fans showed up yesterday at Hampshire House to get a look at their idol.
One was a youngster of about 13. The other, a patient middle-aged matron, hid behind a potted evergreen in the lobby.
But the irked Frankie avoided them like the plague.
Nor was there any word from Miss Gardner.
Times, it seems, have changed. Maybe the bobby soxers are getting more absorbed in such little matters as the H-bomb.
Sinatra was in New York to begin an eight-week stand at the Copacabana,3 his first New York nightclub appearance since he’d played the Riobamba five years earlier. He was scared. He had avoided the Copa, worried that its grinding three-show-a-night format would strain his vocal cords. And these days, he had plenty of reason to worry about his instrument: those guilt germs George Evans used to talk about were in the air.
Walter Winchell, March 19: “Items-We-Doubt: That F. Sinatra’s parting from his wife is a gimmick to attract the attention he used to get by crooning.”
It was the phone calls that got to him, Little Nancy calling every day and asking when he was coming home, that little voice sounding so far away on the scratchy cross-country connection, the voice of Judgment itself. Frank had the shakes. “I found myself needing pills to sleep, pills to get started in the morning and pills to relax during the day,” he would recall. And it wasn’t just pills. Ava remembered: “Every single night we would have three or four martinis, big ones in big champagne glasses, then wine with dinner, then go to a nightclub and start drinking Scotch or bourbon. I don’t know how we did it.”
They were both on edge. She was on her way to England to start shooting her movie; the steady barrage of angry letters and bad press was tempting her to get out of the country early. But she stayed for Frank’s big opening on Tuesday, March 28.
It didn’t help that Nancy’s birthday, her thirty-third, was on the twenty-sixth. He sent her a mink coat: no reply. Ten grand and no reply. For days he pestered everyone around him (except Ava, naturally), agonizing: Should he call her? Should he?
Sanicola and Van Heusen, who sensed that he really did want to call his wife, advised him to do so.
So he called her—and reached the maid, who told him that Missy Sinatra was in Palm Springs. Frank phoned there, too: no answer. He found out later that night that her friends had thrown her a big party, that Nancy had made a grand entrance in the mink coat.
Frank knew he needed help. You couldn’t open at the Copa without special material. Sammy Cahn was the world master of special material—but Cahn had been on Sinatra’s shit list for over a year for some minor infraction. That was the way it went with Frank. (“Someone told Sinatra that at a dinner party at my house his name was, as I believe they say, taken in vain,” Sammy