Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [196]
Ava blew through town on her way back to California to prepare for her new movie, Show Boat. Frank was starting his CBS television and radio shows, and was looking for a Manhattan apartment. In the meantime, he was once again borrowing Manie’s suite at the Hampshire House. A temporary—very temporary—love nest. Work was about to separate the lovebirds again, and the tension, as always, was erotic. But Ava wanted to get married, and while Frank told her he wanted that too, she could sense his ambivalence. When she called him on it, he’d shake his head. He didn’t know if Nancy would ever give him a divorce. It was the Church—she was just a better Catholic than he was.
Ava, her biographer Lee Server writes, “heard the whispered scuttlebutt from others: ‘She thinks she can wait you out, you two will blow over and she’ll have him back one day. That’s all she wants.’ ” Server continues:
To Ava, it was an infuriating irony: There they were, wanting to do the right thing and get married, and there was this woman using her religion as an excuse to keep them “living in sin” … The affair and the scandal had provoked the first serious rift in her relationship with Bappie, who disliked Sinatra and believed he was harming her career. “You hang on to him, Ava,” Bappie told her, “and he’s going to ruin you like he’s ruined himself.”
So there was more fighting, more makeup sex; they stayed in and they went out. Going out was always important. On Wednesday night, September 27, the two of them attended the Joe Louis–Ezzard Charles fight at Yankee Stadium: the news photographers snapped them sitting cozily close, Sinatra with his thinning hair and love-struck grin, Ava with a fur coat, thick red lipstick, and a cigarette between her fingers. Charles outpointed the former champ Louis in fifteen rounds to become the world heavyweight champion.
The next day, Nancy Sinatra outpointed Frank in Santa Monica Superior Court, winning her separate-maintenance suit and custody of their three children. The Los Angeles Times ran a large photograph of her above the photo of Frank and Ava at the prizefight, and she won this contest, too, hands down, looking every inch the wronged woman in her demure checked suit, white blouse with Peter Pan collar, and brown leather gloves. Her chin is held high, her hair attractively (and no doubt freshly) coiffed in soft waves, her expression neither triumphant nor stricken but distant and philosophical. To glance back and forth between the pictures of her and Ava—who looks frankly vulgar—is to wonder what the hell Frank was thinking about.
Nancy (who had lived in Hollywood long enough to know the value of images) surely had all of it in mind when she dressed for her court appearance.
She dabbed away “a tear or so,” the Times reported, as Judge Orlando H. Rhodes awarded her “the Holmby Hills home, its furnishings and effects, a 1950 Cadillac, 34 shares of stock in the Sinatra Music Corp. and one-third of Sinatra’s annual gross earnings on the first $150,000 and 10% of the next $150,000.” For his part, Frank got a 1949 Cadillac, a jeep, the Palm Springs house, rights to some oil property in Texas, and “any phonograph records or radio transcriptions he may desire.” He was also given “all money in bank accounts”—not much at that point.
At the hearing, the Times account continued,
Mrs. Sinatra testified that on numerous occasions her husband would go to Palm Springs for week ends without her and that he would “stay away for days at a time.”
On other occasions, she said, when they were alone or had company he would go into another room, ignoring her and the guests.
Accompanying this particular testimony were tears edging down