Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [220]
The writer of this letter, Ava realized, wanted to reduce her to nothing.
Like an automaton, she walked over to the window and with some effort pulled up the heavy sash. The cold November night wind, ripe with the tang of burning trash, swirled in. Bappie stood in the doorway. Her first horrified thought was that her sister was going to jump.
“Ava—” Bappie moved toward her.
But self-destruction was the furthest thing from Ava’s mind. Gritting her teeth, she pulled Frank’s engagement ring—a six-carat emerald set in platinum, flanked with pear-cut diamonds—from her finger and threw it out into dark space.
She turned to her sister, not registering the look of fear on her face. “The wedding is off,” Ava said. “Finished. Forget it!” She ran to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her. The lock clicked.
“Now the bedlam began,” Ava recalled.
Frank was going crazy, Bappie and Manie Sachs [sic],3 Hank Sanicola, and [the former Dorsey arranger and Varsity member] Dick Jones were all rushing backward and forward between Frank’s room and mine arguing, wheedling, yelling, protesting. They told me no one could cancel a wedding at this late date. It had all been prepared: the cars, the catering, the minister, the flowers, the elegant house. I said I was an important part of that wedding and I could damn well cancel it.
I think it took most of that night with a lot of back and forth before I agreed to change my mind. Thinking about it now, and wondering who could be so malevolent as to arrange for that letter to arrive at such a critical moment and drive me almost out of my mind, the finger points in only one direction.
The diabolical rival Gardner had in mind was none other than Howard Hughes. When the dashing aviation tycoon and movie mogul wasn’t busy crashing experimental aircraft and running RKO into the ground, he was keeping obsessive tabs on a whole harem of real and imagined lady friends, including Jane Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Lana Turner, the sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, Gene Tierney, Jean Peters, and Ava. For the handsome but strangely sexless Hughes, the chief pleasure of romance seemed to lie in the pursuit, even (if not especially) if the object of his desire had told him in no uncertain terms to beat it. This Ava had done any number of times, but then his lavish gifts would soften her a little, again and again. The cycle continued until Frank came along, but Hughes kept having her watched anyway, waiting for something to give—or trying to make something give.
The singer and the tycoon had infinite contempt for each other. For Sinatra, Hughes was a right-winger and a creep, in all likelihood a pervert of some kind. For Hughes, with his ultraconservative Texas oilman’s mentality, Sinatra was a greaseball pinko, bent on undermining American family values. As for the fact that RKO had a soon-to-be-released Sinatra film in the can—well, the studio head would deal with that shortly.
In the meantime, his attempted sabotage failed. On the rainy morning of Wednesday, November 7, Frank and Ava emerged from the Hampshire House holding hands. “They were giggly, obviously very much in love and sober,” recalled Earl Wilson.
I congratulated them and wished them eternal happiness. Frank threw his arm around me; Ava gave me a kiss. They slid quickly into the backseat of a limousine with two friends [Frank’s best man, Axel Stordahl, and Stordahl’s wife, June Hutton, the matron of honor] in the frontseat, and waved to me. Some photographers who had been waiting for them were unable to move quickly enough to get pictures, and that delighted both.
Just before he got into the car, though, Sinatra barked out, “No questions, no questions!” and clamped his hand over the lens of a Movietone newsreel camera. Then the car door slammed behind him and the flotilla of Cadillacs headed off to what the wedding party fervently hoped were parts unknown. To throw