Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [219]
The miracle was that amid all his travails, Sinatra kept doing the show week after week, and actually got somewhat better at it. Berle’s ratings even started to erode slightly.
Still, Frank’s sponsor, never fully committed in the first place, grew more and more disaffected. The columnists continued to inveigh against Sinatra; priests advised their congregations to avoid buying his records and attending his movies. He was the anti-Crosby.2
Frank couldn’t bear the thought of losing Twin Palms. He borrowed the twelve grand he owed his lawyers from Ava—though since she didn’t have that kind of cash lying around, she borrowed it from her agent Charlie Feldman. It was a hell of a way to start a marriage, but what else could he do? She smiled sadly and handed him the check. Her dowry. His big grin assured her she’d done the right thing: he was unencumbered at last. He signed a new property settlement, increasing Nancy’s separate maintenance to the tune of one-third of his gross income up to $150,000 a year, plus 10 percent of earnings above that. On October 15, his soon-to-be ex-wife filed for her California divorce.
Two weeks later, Nancy appeared once more in the Santa Monica courthouse, this time to receive her interlocutory decree of divorce. One photographer, presumably a municipal employee, took several shots as she sat in a courtroom.
They are extraordinary images. Wearing a checked suit, white gloves, the triple-strand pearl necklace and pearl earrings Frank had given her, and a small black hat with a face net, Nancy Rose Barbato Sinatra looks radiant. It is a face without mean-spiritedness. In two of the pictures she’s grinning delightedly right at the photographer, but two others, both with eyes averted, are far more arresting. In one Nancy appears lost in thought, and whatever she may be thinking seems of the greatest possible interest. And in the other, smiling slightly and looking up to the left, she looks, quite simply, transcendently beautiful.
Two days later, in a five-minute closed session in a Las Vegas courtroom, Frank was awarded an uncontested divorce. That night he flew east, and on November 2 he and Ava applied for a marriage license in Philadelphia, where they hoped to avoid publicity.
It was all a circus, of course. How could it have been anything else? The newspapers were watching their every move. When Frank and Ava went to the judge’s chambers to apply for their license, they were accompanied by Manie Sacks and another Philadelphian, CBS co-founder and board member Isaac Levy. Levy, who was enormously wealthy, had a mansion on the Main Line in Germantown. It stood to reason that the wedding was going to be held at his house. And since the couple had applied for their license on Friday the second, and Pennsylvania had a seventy-two-hour waiting period, clearly the date would be Monday the fifth.
Then the pair returned to New York for the weekend, and the wedding nearly fell through. On Saturday they went out for a celebratory dinner at the Colony with the James Masons. Afterward, the two couples went nightclubbing in Harlem, and then Frank and Ava returned to the Hampshire House. In the suite Ava was sharing with Bappie, there was a knock at the door. It was a bellman, with a letter. Ava made him wait while she found fifty cents in her purse.
She opened the envelope and unfolded the sheets inside. The letter was handwritten in a looping feminine scrawl, slightly childish, its forward thrust suggesting urgency. It was full of misspellings. As Ava’s eyes traversed the page, her heart began to thud.
The letter described several trysts the writer claimed to have had with Frank. So far, so bad. But as Ava read on (putting her hand to her chest and sitting in a wing chair without even realizing she was doing so), it came to her that the woman had to be telling the truth. There were details, shameless and horrible details about Frank and his anatomy and his proclivities, that only a lover could know.
Except that this woman wasn’t a lover. She was a pro, cold and precise and crude and impertinent,