Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [238]
Touring the provinces … it had such an air of noblesse oblige about it. And it was all talk, of course: if Frank was going to tour any provinces, it would be the provinces of Missouri or Pennsylvania, or wherever else he could dig up a gig or two. The humble act that had gone over so well with Ava was all too real, and the flip side of it was that he felt lousy about himself. All that stuff about staying as close as possible to her in Africa was her idea: that, and a visit to her family in North Carolina, were her price for reconciliation. A family visit he could take; Africa was another matter. In truth, he dreaded the trip—dreaded John Ford with his sharp tongue and his three Academy Awards, even dreaded Gable, the King, with his phony teeth and his easy insouciance (and, perhaps, his assumptions about the leading man’s prerogatives when it came to Ava). What would Frank say to them?
He had heard nothing from Cohn. A day went by, and another day, then a week, and soon Sinatra began to believe that Cohn had just been humoring him. In fact, Columbia was dickering with the stage actor Eli Wallach, whom everybody, Cohn and Zinnemann and Buddy Adler, wanted for Maggio. But Wallach’s agents were being a pain in the ass, insisting that the thespian be paid $20,000 for the role when the studio had budgeted $16,000, tops.
Frank, knowing nothing of all this, was as nervous as a cat. Three nights after Hedda spied him in Frascati’s, he made a guest appearance on Jimmy Durante’s All-Star Revue—a bone tossed to him by his old It Happened in Brooklyn sidekick. Afterward, Frank and Ava went out to dinner with friends in the Valley, and they got drunk, and Frank said something awful. It was all too predictable. “By the time we’d gotten home to Pacific Palisades, my mood had taken on an icy, remote, to-hell-with-all-men tinge,” Ava recalled.
To emphasize the remoteness I felt, I retired to the solitude of my bathroom. So there I was, lying in my tub, soothing myself under the bubbles, when Frank came breezing in, picking up the argument where it had left off.
I was furious. I hate intrusions when I have my clothes off. It’s a bred-in-the-bone shyness, some sort of deep insecurity which I guess comes from my childhood. As I’ve said, with each of my three husbands it took me several drinks and a lot of courage to appear disrobed in front of them.
I reacted instinctively. “Get out of here!” I yelled.
Naturally, that gave my husband the feeling that he was not truly loved.
Frank exploded. He yelled back, “For Christ’s sake, aren’t I married to you?”
That cut no ice with me. I was still outraged.
“Go away!” I screamed.
Which paved the way for what I have to admit was a truly memorable exit line. “Okay! Okay! If that’s the way you want it, I’m leaving. And if you want to know where I am, I’m in Palm Springs, fucking Lana Turner.”
How to get your wife’s attention … Thus began a Hollywood operetta that would become the subject of heated fascination for years to come. History swirls with conflicting accounts of the next twenty-four hours, which commenced with Frank slamming doors, jumping into his car, and screeching off into the night, ostensibly in search of Lana Turner, who was indeed in Palm Springs—a fact of which Frank was well aware because she was staying in his goddamn house. Ava had lent her the goddamn house.
Frank’s old flame was hiding out in Twin Palms under the protection of her (and Ava’s) business manager Benton Cole, because Turner’s boyfriend, Fernando Lamas, had recently beaten her up in a jealous rage. Lana, who possessed an infallible trouble-seeking radar when it came to men, had provoked Lamas’s ire by dancing with the movie Tarzan Lex Barker at the very party (Marion Davies’s) at which Lamas had stared deeply into Ava’s eyes …
In fact, Hollywood in the early 1950s was a slick and dark fantasy world in many ways like the climactic house-of-mirrors scene in Orson Welles’s recent Lady from Shanghai—self-reflective to the point