Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [235]
Billy Grimes, who had gone to the opera after the Kilimanjaro premiere, had come afterward to the recording session at Frank’s invitation. When it was over, they rode back to the Hampshire House in silence. Ava met them at the door.
“Well! What whorehouse have you two been to?” she said.
“Whorehouse?” Billy said. “I’ve been to an opera house!”
“That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard!” Ava told him.
Earl Wilson stopped by the Hampshire House the next day to interview the couple. “Breakfast with the Sinatras is … well … sort of different,” he wrote.
It was … about 2 p.m. Ava was in white silk pajamas and housecoat. Frank was dressed. Both were waiting for room service to bring the food … Ava meanwhile sucking a lollypop.
“How long’ve you been married now?” I asked Ava.
“Ten months in about a week,” she said. “Twelve months on Nov. 7. A whole fat year! Anybody want a lollypop?”
“It’s true about you wanting a family?” I asked later.
“Well, sure, anytime. I’m ready,” Ava answered. “Maybe in Africa …”
Frank was by now in the next room listening to a ball game.
“He’s going with me. He’s going to do some theaters around Nairobi. God, I look sick, don’t I?” She was looking at herself in a mirror.
She referred to chest pains she suffered from a fall in Hollywood.
Lollipops and silk pajamas aside, there was a lot of psychodrama packed into this little meeting. Maybe in Africa … He’s going with me. He’s going to do some theaters around Nairobi. (Really?) God, I look sick, don’t I?
Their volatility was at its peak. “The battles between Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra are getting louder and longer,” Erskine Johnson had noted in a recent column. Now things were about to blow.
That night she accompanied him to the Riviera and, in the packed house, spotted a head of blond hair glowing softly at ringside: Marilyn Maxwell. As Frank softly sang
You’re all that I desire,
Love me
his lower lip gave that patented quiver. Ava looked at her husband, who at that moment was singing in Miss Maxwell’s general direction. It was all she needed.
She stood up in the middle of the song. Fuck this shit. She stomped toward the exit.
She went back to the Hampshire House, took off her platinum wedding ring, scrawled a bitter note on hotel stationery, sealed the note and the ring in an envelope, and left the envelope on the bed. Then she packed her bags and caught the early-morning flight to Los Angeles.
The hotel bill would be sent to her.
Billy Grimes recalled many years later that when he left New York to return to North Carolina, Sinatra asked him if he needed cab fare. Billy, who had $40 in his pocket—decent money in that year—told Frank that he was fine. But then Frank, who, as Billy and the rest of the world knew, was “nearly broke and unsure of his future,” pressed a $100 bill into his hand.
Sinatra badly needed the next booking Lastfogel had secured for him, a week at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis—and badly wanted to break the date. He was climbing the walls with anxiety: once more Ava wouldn’t take his calls, wouldn’t even talk to Sanicola. Lastfogel insisted Sinatra go to St. Louis: candidly speaking, his career was teetering. In the meantime, Hank had to ply his boss, who was by turns agitated and despondent, with uppers to get him started in the morning, downers to try to give him some rest at night. Frank would sometimes sit on the edge of the bed, talking in a monotone about the futility of life. Hank was keeping careful track of the .38, making sure it was unloaded at all times, the bullets inaccessible.
Somewhere during the trip from New York to St. Louis, Ava’s wedding ring vanished. Frank had a duplicate made, at no small expense (the money advanced by William Morris against his next paycheck), and sent by overnight courier to the Chase Hotel.
On October 7, the wire services quoted Earl Wilson as saying Frank and Ava were desperately trying to avert “a crackup of their marriage.”
“We’re having oral battles and I’m trying to fix it all up,” Sinatra told the