Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [224]
Meanwhile, the newlyweds made a nod at nesting at Twin Palms. “We’re going to redecorate Frank’s home,” Ava gushed. “I’m going to learn to make all of Frank’s favorite dishes. Mama Sinatra has promised to send the recipes. Oh, it’s all so thrilling and wonderful! And Mrs. Sinatra—you know, I’m not used to my new name and it takes a second before it clicks—Mrs. Frank Sinatra is the happiest girl in the world!”
And she was, sometimes. Then, in December, Frank and Ava flew to London, where Frank was to give a charity command performance before Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. While he was rehearsing—and yelling at his British horn section for playing too loud during the tender passages—a burglar climbed up to the Sinatras’ third-floor suite at the Hotel Washington and stole $17,000 worth of jewelry, including the diamond-and-emerald necklace Frank had taken to Ava in Spain. As if that weren’t trouble enough, after Ava reconsidered her plan to sing a duet with Frank (stage fright), the press reported they’d quarreled about it. Sinatra, furious at everything and everybody, gave a lackluster performance. The newspapers reported yawns among the star-studded audience.
Soon after Frank and Ava relocated to Hollywood, they sat down with Sinatra’s new West Coast press agent, Mack Millar, to figure out how to rehabilitate the singer’s image.
Millar, an old Hollywood hand, looked his client in the eye and gave him the bad news: Frank was going to have to end his feud with the press and woo the newspapers. Aggressively. Millar told his client that a writer at the New York Post, Fern Marja, was writing a six-part series on him. Why not call her and use that fabled charm and that fabled voice of his and woo the pants off of her? Sorry, Ava.
Sinatra thought about it: Maybe humility would work. Anything was worth a try at this point. He phoned Marja and, on his nickel, gave her an hour’s worth of honey. He explained, carefully and undefensively, how often he felt he’d been misquoted and mistreated by the press—but then, in the next breath, allowed that he’d sometimes mistreated them back. “I lost control of my temper and said things,” he told the young reporter. “They were said under great stress and pressure. I’m honestly sorry.”
While he spoke the last sentence, he made a hideous face, a face like a medieval gargoyle, for nobody’s benefit but his own.
Marja asked, over the scratchy connection, how Frank was feeling.
He was much better. Better all the time.
And his voice?
It had been a little rocky there for a while, but it was improving, too.
And he and Ava—?
They were extremely happy.
The articles appeared in the Post. Fern Marja, young but nobody’s fool, acknowledged her initial skepticism about Sinatra’s insistent niceness, but then admitted he had won her over. The Post called the series “The Angry Voice.”
Double Dynamite, with Frank billed third after Jane Russell and Groucho Marx, opened on Christmas Day. The movie had been sitting in the can for three full years while Howard Hughes tried to figure out what to do with it. There was nothing much to do with it—the picture was an out-and-out dog. But in December 1951, as RKO was divesting its theater chains and hemorrhaging money, it was time to get the thing out there and try to make a couple of dollars back.
Nobody was buying. “Even the most ardent devotees of Frank Sinatra, Jane Russell and Groucho Marx,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, “will find meager Christmas cheer in ‘Double Dynamite,’ yesterday’s arrival at the Paramount. Whatever that sizzling title is supposed to mean, this thin little comedy is strictly a wet firecracker.”
That sizzling title, to the puzzlement of nobody except Bosley Crowther, referred to Jane Russell’s size 38D breasts, a subject of endless fascination to Howard Hughes—and, to paraphrase Bob Hope, the two and only marketing gimmicks the sinking studio had for this crummy picture. (So low had Sinatra’s reputation