Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [222]
“I’ll do anything to make him happy,” Ava said.
“Then help him get back his self-confidence,” Manie told her.
This time they went out the back door. Before the newsmen out front knew what was happening, the couple ran to a waiting car and sped to the airport, where they boarded a chartered twin-engine Beechcraft—a fantastic extravagance; Frank’s idea, naturally—which would take them to Miami, where they planned to stay for a night before going on to honeymoon at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. As Ava stepped onto the plane, she realized that in the flurry of escape she had left the suitcases containing her honeymoon trousseau at Lester Sacks’s house. “All I had with me was my handbag!” she recalled.
Well, there was no point in having a fit; it would rejoin me sometime or other. But hell, I didn’t even have the beautiful little nightie I’d saved for our wedding night. I didn’t have a bathing suit. I didn’t have anything to go to the beach in—nothing! So I slept in Frank’s pajamas, at least the top half of them, and the next day we walked along the empty beach, me in the bottom half of my travel suit and Frank’s jacket.
To throw reporters off the trail, they had chosen an out-of-the-way hotel, the Green Heron, on the beach in the Sunny Isles district north of town. “It was a chilly day for the beach resort and a brisk wind dotted the ocean with whitecaps,” wrote the early Sinatra biographer Arnold Shaw. “As they strolled along the deserted beach in the afternoon, a lone photographer shot one of the most appealing pictures ever made of them. Their backs to the camera, they walk barefoot, hand-in-hand. Frank’s trousers are rolled up above his thin ankles. And Ava is wearing Frank’s jacket over an old blouse and sports skirt.”
It is an appealing picture, and an iconic one, but Ava Gardner had a different view of the moment. “Naturally a photographer was lying in wait and snapped a shot of us, barefoot, holding hands,” she remembered.
I’ve always thought it was a sad little photograph, a sad little commentary on our lives then. We were simply two young people so much in love, and the world wouldn’t leave us alone for a second. It seemed that everyone and everything was against us, and all we asked for was a bit of peace and privacy.
Just two kids in love … not exactly. Publicity was not something that could be turned on and off like a spigot. Ava seems to be setting up the argument that the world came between them, but what possessed him to book their honeymoon at the Nacional, the site of his Mafia disgrace? It only fed the stories in the press.
From the beginning, there was a third party in the marriage: the fourth estate.
In Ava’s autobiography, she recalls their Havana sojourn as idyllic. “We drank a lot of Cuba libres and went out to the nightclubs and the gambling joints,” she writes.
Fortunately, most of the paparazzi seemed to have other things to do, so we were pretty much left alone. I don’t even know if I would have noticed if we weren’t; I was finally on my honeymoon with the man I loved. On one of our last nights, I climbed up on one of the hotel’s high archways, convincing Frank that I was going to throw myself off. But I was just being mischievous, swinging along on rum and Coke with no intention of ending it all. I was having far too much fun.
Yet in a taped interview that didn’t make it into the book, she remembered things a little differently. “Frank and I didn’t start very good,” Ava said.
We went to Havana, in Cuba, and had a fight the first night.
Who knows what we fought about? … I remember standing up, pissed drunk, on the balcony of the hotel, on the edge. Standing there, balancing. Frank was afraid to go near me. He thought I was going to jump … God, I was crazy!
Back in New York there was further unpleasantness with the press the moment they stepped off the plane.
Where were the couple staying?
Frank scowled. None of their damn business.
Ava grinned and shook her head. The reporters followed the couple