Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [182]
Frank wouldn’t like to. Over the years, he would go considerably out of his way to forge bonds with people he considered classy. He just hated Artie Shaw.
The feeling was mutual. In the early 1940s, Frank had wanted to sing with Shaw’s band, then the hottest in the land: Shaw had turned him down. Over the course of his long life, the pedantic bandleader, always eager to flaunt his intellect, would go to great lengths to deprecate the singer, with subtle rationalizations or faint praise. “We took a plain, ordinary singer, who was a good singer—there was nothing wrong with that; he was able to sing—and we made him into an icon,” Shaw told an interviewer many years later.
Frank knew that Ava still called Shaw up for advice sometimes. (“Artie solved other people’s problems in a couple of sentences,” she would write years later, with barely disguised irony.) Frank also knew that Artie Shaw was very smart, very talented, and a devil with the ladies, and he had a gnawing fear that Shaw was going to lure Ava back into the sack.
And after a couple of nights of listening to the Fischettis’ deses, dems, and dirty jokes, she was feeling not just bored—always a dangerous mode for her—but rebellious. Who the hell was he to tell her what she should or shouldn’t do? And worse, what did it say about him that he liked those goons?
She finally went to see Shaw.
Accounts of the evening differ. One version says that Ava rebelled and decided to attend one of Shaw’s high-toned gatherings alone. Ava herself—not necessarily the most reliable of narrators—says she and Frank had a fight, ostensibly about his wandering eye:
Restaurants were frequently where our quarrels began, and I have to confess I started a lot of them, sometimes before the appetizer arrived. A pretty girl would pass and recognize Frank. She’d smile. He’d nod and smile back. It would happen again. Frank would feel the temperature rising across the table and try to escape with a sort of sickly look. I’d say something sweet and ladylike, such as, “I suppose you’re sleeping with all these broads,” and we’d be off to the races.
She says she stomped out that night and took a taxi back to the Hampshire House. After stewing awhile, she phoned Shaw, who told her his girlfriend was with him but she was welcome to come over and talk. Another account has Ava leaving the Copa, ostensibly to wait for Frank back at their suite, but actually to go nightclubbing with a writer friend, Richard Condon,4 and Condon’s girl. According to this story, the three wound up at Bop City, seated at Shaw’s table, and when Ava phoned Frank, ostensibly to ease his mind about her whereabouts, Frank shouted that he was going to kill himself.
In Ava’s version, Sinatra shows up at Shaw’s apartment, loaded for bear—or, rather, Frank’s version of being loaded for bear, which meant bringing along Hank Sanicola. This is where Artie Shaw’s side of the Rashomon tale comes into play. Since he told the story frequently, he occasionally liked to freshen it with piquant new details:
She called at two a.m. and said she had been with Sinatra and the Fischetti boys. One of the guys had thrown a glass of whiskey in the face of one of her girlfriends, and she had to get away. She said she wanted to see me. I explained that I wasn’t alone. But she came anyway, dressed to the nines and saying she wanted to ask me some questions. I asked my girlfriend to go back to bed so Ava and I could talk.
Ava complained to Artie about Frank and his mobsters, but then, according to Shaw, she got down to the nitty-gritty:
“When you and I were, you know, doing it”—that was her way of saying it—“was it good?” I said, “If everything else had been anywhere near as good, we’d have been together forever and I’d never have let you out of my sight.” She gave a sigh of relief. I asked why. She said, “With him it’s impossible.” I said I thought he was a big stud. She said, “No, it’s like being in bed with a woman. He’s so gentle. It’s as though he thinks I’ll break, as though I’m a piece of Dresden china and he’s