Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [210]
As soon as he left the gloomy confines of the Holmby Hills house (which, without telling him, Nancy had already put on the market, priced to move fast at $200,000), Frank’s mood lifted. His spirits soared as he drove the winding roads up to Nichols Canyon.
He was still walking on air when he returned to New York. “Frank Sinatra was the happiest I’ve seen him in years—and also in wonderful voice—when he opened a one-week engagement at the Latin Quarter,” Earl Wilson wrote.
Nancy’s decision to give him a divorce so he can marry Ava Gardner had seemingly put fresh bounce in his songs—especially some of the love songs that some of us romanticists thought might have reminded him of Ava.
Frank—who was bending those notes beautifully—told a friend, rather proudly, that when Ava’s next picture, “Showboat” [sic], is released, she’ll be one of the outstanding movie actresses of the world.
And as for his movie career? Meet Danny Wilson, which he spent July shooting at Universal, would show him how transient happiness was. The problems began with Frank’s co-star, the formidable Shelley Winters. Winters, whom the studio was wrongheadedly trying to build up as a blond bombshell, was a Jewish girl out of St. Louis and Brooklyn (née Shirley Schrift): an actress of unconventional looks, high intelligence, and strong opinions. Like Sinatra, she was a committed liberal, though, if anything, her sympathies lay even further to the left. Prickly and vulnerable, Winters usually liked her leading men—but she hated Frank.
The enmity was inevitable, and mutual. Winters, determined to become a serious actress, was hardworking and insecure. She was scared of him; he was irritable and distracted. When he sent a note suggesting they rehearse together in his dressing room, she saw only one possible interpretation. She fired a self-righteous note back saying they would rehearse, as planned, on the soundstage. It wasn’t that she found him unattractive. “I too had sat in the orchestra at the Paramount Theater when I was a teenager and screamed every time he opened his mouth,” Winters wrote in her autobiography. “But he was married to Nancy, whom I knew and liked from various charity committees, and there were the children. I was determined to keep my association with Mr. Sinatra as professional as possible. In retrospect, I suspect he wanted the same thing.”
That was in retrospect. In the near term, her rebuff sat less than well with him. They began on a footing of edgy hostility, which made their romantic scenes tricky. When it came to their big duet together (as the titular nightclub entertainer, Sinatra performed a half-dozen songs in the movie), Winters was so intimidated that she could barely open her mouth. Her nerves seem to have inspired Frank to his only charitable moments of the shoot—he helped her through.
The rest, though, was debacle. As the lawyers hammered out the details of the divorce, Sinatra realized just how complicated winning his freedom was going to be. “His children were quite young and there were always psychiatrists and priests and his kids visiting him on the set,” Winters recalled.
Sometimes the children would come to the commissary and I would join them. A priest from the Catholic Family Counseling Service would sometimes be with them. The priest was a very nice man, but the afternoons he visited Frank on the set we all might as well have gone home. Frank was truly impossible and so disturbed that he couldn’t hear anything that anyone said to him, including the other actors, the crew, and the director, Joe Pevney.1
Halfway through the shoot, Sinatra attended the premiere of Show Boat with Ava, all of Hollywood falling at her feet. A few days after that, his radio show Meet Frank Sinatra (which he’d been broadcasting from L.A.) came to the end of its sputtering run. Neither of these events could have improved his mood.
He was achingly thin (“Frank was losing about a pound a week, which made me look heavier in the rushes,” Winters recalled). He