Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [233]
But the addition satisfied Ava, and, even more important at that sensitive moment, it satisfied Frank. She signed.
In return, Metro sent her to hell.
She was to report to work immediately on Ride, Vaquero! yet another dog of a Western, to be shot largely on location in Kanab, Utah, in the hottest part of the summer. It was the foothills of the Rockies, a hundred dusty miles from civilization of any kind: “the asshole of creation,” recalled her co-star Howard Keel. “Beautiful territory, but we were out there for about, oh, Christ, a month, and there was nothing there and nothing to do there. Nothing.”
Nothing, that is, except drink and fuck. Ava did a lot of the former and some of the latter with the stuntmen, and a little of both with the director, John Farrow, a cold-eyed drunk who came on to her so relentlessly that she finally gave in out of sheer boredom, hating herself for it afterward and hating Farrow, too, who was even mean to the horses.3
When Sinatra wasn’t being ignored, he was being attacked. His old nemesis Lee Mortimer still wasn’t through with him. The columnist went at Frank hard in 1952 with an American Mercury piece called “Frank Sinatra Confidential/Gangsters in the Night Clubs” that pinned Mafia control of show business squarely on the singer’s skinny shoulders. Mortimer extended the theme in a book called U.S.A. Confidential, which he co-authored with his uncle and Daily Mirror boss, Jack Lait.
In a time of ringing public piety, a season when Dwight Eisenhower was making common cause with Joseph McCarthy to further his presidential campaign, Sinatra decided to wax confessional. He hired a publicist named Irving Fein (whose main client was Jack Benny) to ghostwrite a long apologia—and to place the piece with Hearst. The two-part article, titled “Frankly Speaking,” ran under Sinatra’s name in two July issues of American Weekly, the syndicate’s Sunday supplement. Fein’s version of Frank was lavishly contrite. “Most of my troubles with the press were my own fault,” the piece began. It then tried to milk sympathy by playing up Frank’s supposedly rough childhood in those purported Hoboken slums. His poor parents, Fein wrote, “needed whatever money I could bring into the house”—thus young Frankie had had to resort to “hooking candy from the corner store, then little things from the five-and-dime, then change from cash registers, and finally, we were up to stealing bicycles.”
It was an odd foundation on which to lay his denial of any associations with organized crime.
And then there was the failure of his marriage to Nancy, for which he knew America blamed him. Yet in fact, the Frank of the article pointed out, he had been not blameworthy but heroic. Having realized a year into his first marriage that he had mistaken friendship for love, he’d strived, out of family mindedness, to make it work anyway. Should he have been less public about his pursuit of Ava? He should have—but when you’re so in love (Fein wrote), it’s hard to think about things like that. Besides, he insisted, he and Ava had never dated until after his separation from Nancy.
Any reader who bought all that would love the windup. “Well, there it is,” Fein-as-Frank wrote, inflated with phony piety. “That’s my side of the story, and I must say I feel better for having gotten it off my chest. I know that I never meaningly hurt anyone, and for any wrongs I may have done through emotional acts or spur-of-the-moment decisions, I humbly apologize.”
“That should have told you right there that Frank didn’t write that thing,” his former gofer Nick Sevano said years later. “He’s never apologized to anyone in his life.”
Decades afterward, the memory of the piece still stung. “When I recently asked Dad whether he wrote it,” his daughter Nancy wrote in 1995, “he said succinctly, ‘It’s C-R-A-P. They made the whole thing up.’ ”
Yes, and he paid them to do it.
31
Landing in El Paso en route to Mexico City, August 1951. They oscillated constantly between hot intimacy and cold distance. And the press ate it up. (photo credit 31.1)
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