Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [183]
Then, as if the sexual self-aggrandizement weren’t enough, Shaw declares Ava left and Frank entered, along with “the heavyweight fellow.” All that’s missing are the slamming doors.
It’s all very entertaining. And ultimately, what truly happened is unknowable. But on this score everyone seems to agree: After Ava got back to the Hampshire House, where she and her sister Bappie were sharing one bedroom and Frank was staying in another, her phone rang. “It was Frank, and I’ll never forget his voice,” Ava recalled. “He said, ‘I can’t stand it any longer. I’m going to kill myself—now!’ ”
Then there was this tremendous bang in my ear, and I knew it was a revolver shot. My whole mind sort of exploded in a great wave of panic, terror, and shocked disbelief. Oh, God! Oh, God! I threw the phone down and raced across the living room and into Frank’s room. I didn’t know what I expected to find—a body? And there was a body lying on the bed. Oh, God, was he dead? I threw myself on it saying, “Frank, Frank …” And the face, with a rather pale little smile, turned toward me, and the voice said, “Oh, hello.”
The goddamn revolver was still smoking in his hand. He had fired a single shot through a pillow and into the mattress.
She wasn’t mad at him, only relieved. “He was alive, thank God, he was alive,” she wrote. “I held him tightly to me.”
At this point—since a gunshot in the middle of the night in a luxury hotel suite will not go unnoticed, even in New York City—the farce continues: the desk clerk phones, Sinatra professes innocence, good old Sanicola is summoned to spirit away the incriminating mattress (in one version he’s helped by, of all people, David O. Selznick, who’s staying down the hall). The NYPD arrives, and different versions of the story hit the papers.
Frank on the edge. The Copacabana, spring 1950, just before his voice gave out. He wears a coonskin cap and snaps a whip to lampoon Frankie Laine; meanwhile, he’s taking “pills to sleep, pills to get started in the morning, and pills to relax during the day.” (photo credit 24.2)
Whatever really happened that night, the episode speaks to Frank Sinatra’s deeply divided nature. He is a thirty-four-year-old man, famous and brilliant and deep voiced and well-endowed and sexually voracious, certainly by many measures the big stud Artie Shaw makes him out to be. Yet his behavior throughout this singular evening is oddly childlike, especially when it comes to the faked suicide. That pale little smile when Ava—on top—finally gives him his sought-after, maternally consoling embrace; that cartoonish “Oh, hello.” It’s like the climax of a game of hide-and-seek.
Artie Shaw’s story about Ava’s sexual confession (“It’s like being in bed with a woman”) may be half-true; it certainly shows Shaw to best advantage, and Sinatra to worst. But it chimes oddly with the incident at the Hampshire House. Sinatra certainly had a hysterical side, and was nothing if not hypersensitive. And Ava was all things to him, siren and drinking buddy and mother surrogate, and great artists have polymorphous souls. Even her private name for him, Francis, sounded (perhaps purposely) androgynous. Picasso, who was every bit as macho as Frank, said, “Every artist is a woman and ought to be une gouine [a dyke].” In any case, if Ava was looking for a man who would dominate her, she was, as would become increasingly evident, betting on the wrong horse.
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Frank and Mitch Miller rehearse in Columbia recording studio, circa 1951. The tension between the domineering singer and the domineering producer is palpable. (photo credit 25.1)
Now that Manie had left the picture, Columbia, too, was starting to wonder about Sinatra. From virtually carrying the company, he had become a major liability. (As soon as Sacks arrived at RCA, he tried to sell his colleagues on signing Sinatra: no one was interested.) On March 30, 1950, Columbia Records’ president, Ted Wallerstein, sent a memo to his next in command, Vice President Goddard Lieberson:
As you know, we got rid of a very bad Sinatra deal some