Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [239]
All this at a party Marion Davies had thrown for over a thousand guests, including the press, because, said Davies, “I want to have some fun before I die.”
Benton Cole had come to Lana’s aid before. The previous September, in the wake of marital woes and a couple of box-office flops, Lana had (not unperceptively) declared her career “a hollow success, a tissue of fantasies on film,” and slit her wrists in the bathroom of her Beverly Hills house. Cole broke down the door and took her to the hospital.
Now, with her career on the upswing but her personal life a familiar shambles,2 the movie queen Frank Sinatra had once promised to marry was sitting with her manager-protector, smoking and drinking and bruised, in the love nest on Alejo Road as Frank and Ava converged separately on Palm Springs.
Despite his shouted declaration, Frank had absolutely no desire to fuck Lana Turner. He had just been angry. (Not to mention the fact that in her early thirties, she was already starting to look middle-aged.) He had passed over Lana and married Ava for a reason, and it was more than just that the sex was great. Lana Turner was, as witness her long, sad stumble through life, an empty shell of a human being, devoid of intellectual or spiritual resources of any sort. Ava Gardner, on the other hand, was a woman of enormous mettle and variety and spirit, one who would, after Frank, go on to fascinate Hemingway and Robert Graves, and not just because of the beauty of her person.
Frank knew all this (and the sex was great). Ava knew it only intermittently. She wasn’t sure she could act, she wasn’t sure she could think, but she did know she was a physical phenomenon. It was her one piece of certainty, and she gloried in it and suffered from it like any other star—if not more so, because of the depth of her sensibility. Her perpetual state of insecurity often made her feel that at bottom, nothing was really worth anything. The ground was constantly shifting beneath her feet—and beneath the feet of anyone who stood close to her. It made her at once fascinating and impossible.
Some of this may have occurred to Frank as he drove toward the desert in the pre-sunrise twilight, but what he was mainly thinking about was his own problems. He was feeling extremely sorry for himself, and he just wanted to take solace in the one place that gave him any comfort. And he wanted to be there alone. First, though, he wanted to pay a call on Jimmy Van Heusen—who loved the desert as much as Frank did, and had a place out in Yucca Valley—and talk it all out.
The first thing Ava did after Frank’s dramatic exit was call Bappie and ask her to drive with her to Palm Springs. She wanted, against all logic, “to catch Frank in the act.” When the sisters reached Twin Palms, Ava climbed over the chain-link fence in back and tried to peer in the windows, but the curtains were all drawn. Then the door opened. Benton Cole had heard her poking around; now he let her in—and Frank was nowhere in sight. Just Lana, “looking lovely as ever,” Ava remembered.
I knew that at one time she felt like she’d been on the verge of marrying Frank, which certainly gave some impetus to my suspicions, but we’d always been good, if not close, friends. And I’d always admired her as a great movie star. I remembered when I first arrived in Hollywood, a starlet green as a spring tobacco leaf. I’d glimpsed Lana on a set one day, and I’d thought, Now, there’s the real thing. She had a canvas-backed chair inscribed with her name and a stool next to it holding her things. What struck me was that among them was a gleaming gold cigarette case and a gold lighter. Without envy I’d thought,