Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [190]
The sun came out. Shooting resumed. The sun hurt Sinatra’s eyes. As Chester sat by solicitously, Frank sulked and drank champagne and out of sheer boredom tossed a few bones to the reporters. (“Of course, I knew what people would say when I flew here. I am not a youth anymore,” he said, sounding oddly Spanish. “I expected this curiosity.”)
“Don’t you have anything else to say, Frank?” a reporter asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Bing Crosby is the best singer in the world.”
On Sunday, the lovers and Van Heusen went out tuna fishing. The sea sparkled; the Americans laughed and drank more champagne and caught a couple of big fish. The reporters were far away.
On Monday she had to go back to work. The reporters were clustering again. One of them handed Sinatra an American newspaper carrying a story about Nancy. She had spent Mother’s Day without Frank for the first time ever, the report read. She had received gifts from the children, but nothing from her husband, who had spent the weekend in Spain with Ava Gardner. The story mentioned the diamond-and-emerald necklace.
“They can’t make this one of those things,” Frank growled. He denied the existence of the necklace. “We have been chaperoned every minute we have been together,” he said. He was referring, in all seriousness, to Van Heusen. “We know now that because of this publicity, it was a mistake for me to have come here,” he said, and announced he was leaving twenty-four hours early.
There was another tearful parting, then he and Van Heusen flew to Paris to console themselves with whores.
Earl Wilson tracked Frank down at the Café Lido, a lively nightclub featuring bare-breasted chorus girls. Frank shouted over the phone—partly because he had to, due to the faint transatlantic connection, but mostly because he was upset:
“This bullfighter is nothing to her. NOTHING! This girl is very upset because she’s had nothing to do with this boy,” Frank went on. He was screaming a little; him with not too good a throat, either!
“What did you and Ava do in Spain?” I innocently inquired. A reporter on this kind of story has got to ask a lot of foolish questions.
“We were sunning ourselves all day and we went out for a ride when she wasn’t working,” Frank shouted.
“She and I took a lot of drives. We took a lot of looks at the countryside. We caught a couple of tuna fish.”
And that reminded Frank of something he had been wanting to get across to the whole world and, though that beautiful Lido show with the creamy-skinned beauties was waiting, he took time to explain.
“We’ve kept this clean as anybody could,” he exclaimed. “Just so nobody could hit below the belt, we were well chaperoned all the time. We were chaperoned like a high school dance. ALL THE TIME!”
“And did you talk about getting a divorce so you can get married?”
“I’ve never said a word about it. NOT A WORD,” he fiercely insisted, “and here’s something you can use. Everybody’s talking about Ava and me getting married … EVERYBODY … except Ava and me!”
The trip to Spain had been a fiasco. He wasn’t working (while Ava was): he hadn’t sung in a month. On the way home—and where exactly was home? in his office on South Robertson?—squadrons of reporters met him at every stop along the way, in London and in New York and finally in Los Angeles, all asking the same stupid questions: Was Ava in love with the bullfighter? Was Frank running away from the bullfighter? And by the way, were Frank and Ava planning to get married?
He stopped at his office just long enough to shower and change clothes, then drove out to Holmby Hills bearing gifts: dolls and toys from Paris for the kids, a gold charm bracelet for