Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [197]
Summing up, she said her husband’s conduct “made me terribly nervous and upset and humiliated me.”
Mrs. Sinatra’s sister, Miss Julie Barbato, was her corroborating witness.
She testified that she knew from her own knowledge that Sinatra embarrassed his wife by staying away from home and by rudely refusing to assist in the entertainment of guests.
Frank didn’t contest the action.
As Nancy left the courthouse, the photographers called out to her, asking for a smile. “I don’t feel much like smiling,” she told them.
She had won, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. “I would see her faint into her plate at dinner from the stress,” Nancy junior wrote.
Sometimes it was heart palpitations, sometimes a cold, sometimes fatigue. Until then, she had never been sick. I used to think it was the food. Maybe she wasn’t eating right. She was in pain. And though I wasn’t aware of it, her pain was exacerbated by the scandal. She was deeply in love and terribly hurt. I would hear her crying quietly at night while I was going to sleep. She would never show it in front of us, never, but my room was next to hers and I would tiptoe out and I’d listen at her door and she’d be crying. Sometimes I would go in to her and just put my arms around her. And sometimes I would just go away, thinking, “Mind your own business. Daddy’s just on the road again,” and cry myself to sleep.
The picture of Frank painted in court by Nancy and her sister is not a pretty one, and while it was certainly tinged by rancor—no doubt many of the guests he snubbed were Barbatos—it feels all too true. Sinatra certainly used Twin Palms as a bachelor pad, and would continue to do so for as long as he owned the place. And though his remoteness was exacerbated by his obsession with Ava, it was also deeply ingrained in his character. He was, and always would be, the loneliest son of a bitch he knew.
It therefore made perfect sense, in Frank’s world, that the Varsity was still up and running: Sanicola, Ben Barton, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, Al Silvani, Tami Mauriello, Manie Sacks, and whoever else might be lighting his cigarettes and laughing at his jokes. Ava hated the whole thing, hated the sycophancy and the boys’-club exclusivity, but there was little she could do about it. Frank—much like Picasso, with the group of hangers-on he called his tertulia—was a king who required a court.
And he needed all the support he could get on October 7, at 9:00 p.m., when The Frank Sinatra Show made its debut on CBS television, opposite the smash hit Your Show of Shows on NBC. Continuing Bob Hope’s swimming-pool metaphor, the New York Times’s Jack Gould wrote, “Frank Sinatra walked off the television high dive on Saturday night, but unfortunately fell into the shallow end of the pool.” Gould went on to call the show “a drab mixture of radio, routine vaudeville and pallid pantomime.” John Crosby, of the Herald Tribune, called Sinatra “a surprisingly good actor but a rather bad emcee.” And Variety cited “bad pacing, bad scripting, bad tempo, poor camera work and an overall jerky presentation.”
And the $41,500 the episode cost was money straight out the window for CBS, which hadn’t been able to attract a sponsor.
Clearly the occasion called for a big celebration.
Toots Shor’s (of course) was the venue, and Sinatra’s new publicist, Nat Shapiro, invited 150 of the singer’s closest friends. Three hundred showed up, along with a writer and a photographer from Look magazine, which ran a feature on the bash.
But no amount of publicity could slap much life into The Frank Sinatra Show. The broadcast would limp along for the rest of the season at forty grand per episode (though in November, Bulova signed on to sponsor the first half hour), as the critics continued to snipe and the viewing public mostly tuned to Sid Caesar. Things might have been different if Sinatra had devoted himself to the program, but he appeared to have other fish to fry. “Frank was always late, sometimes two and three hours late,” recalled Irving Mansfield, whom the