Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [234]
She then returns here to prepare for her journey to Africa and wait for Frank Sinatra to finish his night club engagements. They both will leave for location around Oct. 9, and Ava hopes they’ll have time to visit North Carolina so she can introduce Frank to her family.
Frank not only goes to Africa with her, but will remain on location there unless business calls him elsewhere.
Ava was going to shoot Mogambo, a remake of the 1932 Clark Gable–Jean Harlow sizzler Red Dust. Mogambo would be a considerable step up from Ride, Vaquero!—Gable would be starring again (and the newcomer Grace Kelly co-starring), and the great John Ford, as opposed to the considerably less than great John Farrow, would be directing. Ava was excited. “After all,” she recalled, “I still remembered sneaking into the theater balcony in Smithfield, Virginia in 1932 and swooning as my hero Clark Gable tried to decide between Jean Harlow and Mary Astor in Red Dust.”
As for Frank, his new agent, Abe Lastfogel of William Morris, was making the best of the hand he’d been dealt. The first gig was at Bill Miller’s (formerly Ben Marden’s) Riviera,1 in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the place that had helped launch Eddie Fisher. (Sinatra might have gotten in with a little help from the wiseguys who ran the club’s clandestine casino, Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo and Longy Zwillman.) Frank opened there on Friday the fifth. The reviews were good, if a little backhanded. “Whatever Sinatra ever had for the bobbysoxers, he now has for the café mob,” Variety wrote, going on to commend him “for self-assurance and a knowing way with a crowd, whatever the misadventures of his personal life and career.”
Ava flew in on Wednesday the tenth. That night, before the first show in Fort Lee, she accompanied him to the Firemen’s Ball at the Union Club in Hoboken.
It was a favor for Marty Sinatra, and it was a disaster for Frank. Maybe his confidence was down; maybe, after his recent run of bad luck, the local crowd smelled blood. Their boy had made good and gotten too big for his britches, then the world had cut him down to size; now it was Hoboken’s turn. “He sang onstage that night and hit some clinkers, and so people booed him and threw fruit and stuff, kidding around,” recalled his boyhood friend Tony “Mac” Macagnano. “Oh, did he get mad.”
And when Sinatra got mad, he stayed mad. On his way out of the club, he told a cop he knew, “I’ll never come back and do another thing for the people of Hoboken as long as I live.” He would be as good as his word, not returning to the Square Mile City for decades. Once, flying over his hometown years later, he spat at the plane window.
The premiere of Snows of Kilimanjaro was September 17 at the Rivoli. Ava’s nephew Billy Grimes, a North Carolina college student in town to visit his famous aunt, remembered: “There were twenty thousand people there. Police barricades were up, and spotlights and flashbulbs were everywhere. There were at least fifty Pinkerton guards trying to control the crowd.”
The fuss was all for Ava. (Sammy Davis Jr., who was in town at the same time, recalled spotting Sinatra walking in Times Square one afternoon, alone and unrecognized.) After the movie, Frank proceeded to the Thirtieth Street studio for his final Columbia recording session. Mitch Miller was present to seal the fade-out. Percy Faith, rather than Stordahl, conducted the orchestra. The one and only song Sinatra would wax that night, written by a twenty-three-year-old wunderkind named Cy Coleman, was a perfect valedictory to both the label and Miller. It was called “Why Try to Change Me Now.” Frank sang it exquisitely:
Don’t you remember, I was always your clown, Why try to change me now?
After the musicians faded to silence, Miller turned on the studio intercom.
“That’s it, Frank,” he said, in a flat voice.
And that was it. Sinatra’s association with Columbia