Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [207]
Dolly showed me the house, every inch of it, and was it clean? Oh, my God. I mean Frank was the cleanest man I ever knew … If I’d caught him washing the soap it wouldn’t have surprised me, and he inherited it all from his ma … And of course Dolly had to tell me all about Frank, with Frank squirming at every word … getting more and more furious as Dolly dragged out album after album of cute pictures of Frank as a child, dressed up in all kinds of little outfits …
It was all so welcoming, such a great warm Italian household with no holding back. They even had an old uncle, either her brother or Marty’s, living with them.
No holding back, except for the fact that Marty (“quieter, withdrawn, with a nice smile”) said barely anything, and poor Chit-U, not a single word. Dolly was the one who didn’t hold back; Ava followed her lead, growing less inhibited with every glass of Chianti. And Frank, Ava recalled, “[looked] at me very carefully, trying to sense how it was going, whether I was approving or not, his face reflecting that slight worry you have when you want someone you love to love what you love.”
Also that more than slight worry he felt every second he spent with his mother.
Of course the visit was more than casual. And once Ava saw how thoroughly her prospective mother-in-law approved of her, she applied the screws even more tightly to Frank. When was he going to get a divorce?
They were riding back to the city. Frank stared out the car window, drawing on his cigarette. He had no answer: it was all in Nancy’s hands.
Ava, who had heard it once too many times, told the driver to pull over as soon as they emerged from the tunnel. She gathered her stole around her, loosing a cloud of that mind-numbing perfume, opened the car door, and got out.
A few days earlier, Frank had taken Ava along to watch the live broadcast of his television show. She was unimpressed. “Stagehands running in and out,” she recalled. “You never knew what camera was on you. I got a nervous breakdown just watching.”
The production values of a TV variety show in the early days certainly couldn’t bear comparison to those of a gold-standard movie studio like MGM, but The Frank Sinatra Show had—technically and artistically—an especially flea-bitten air about it. The rudimentary comedy sketches submerged the talents even of bright lights such as Phil Silvers and Don Ameche. And then there were lesser lights, such as one Virginia Ruth Egnor, known professionally as Dagmar.
Dagmar was Li’l Abner’s Daisy Mae incarnate: a tall, eye-poppingly buxom West Virginia blonde with a big wide smile and a pleasant, unaggressive personality. She could act a little, but mostly all she needed to do was stand there. She was so well-known to the national TV audience that all Sinatra had to do to draw big laughs was raise an eyebrow.
She was therefore a natural to join the troupe when Frank began his first live engagement in six months, a two-week stand at the Paramount starting on April 25. He introduced her by saying, “Please nobody sit in the front row—if she takes a bow you’ll get crushed.” The comedy stayed on that level, though the musical portion of the show was solid: Sinatra was backed by a band led by his old Dorsey pal Joey Bushkin. But the bobby-soxers were gone; there were empty seats in the orchestra. “The only autographs I’m being asked for now,” Sinatra told Bushkin, “are from process servers.” And the movie on the bill was, all too poignantly, My Forbidden Past, starring Ava and her old flame Mitchum.
The only notice the New York Times took of Frank’s Paramount show was in a single sentence at the bottom of a two-column review of the movie: “Featured on the stage of the Paramount are Frank Sinatra, Dagmar, Eileen Barton, Joe Bushkin and his orchestra, Tim Herbert and Don Saxon.”
Not a single Sinatra side had charted since “Nevertheless (I’m in Love with You)” notched a pallid number 14 the previous December. Ballads weren’t working; up-tempo numbers weren’t working; folk tunes were last