Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [240]
To say that she was style without substance is perhaps shining too harsh a light on Turner: stardom is a real phenomenon. But the remoteness that combines with physical presence in the peculiar chemical reaction that produces stardom is usually a measure of distance from self. “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant,” Grant once said. “Even I want to be Cary Grant.” “It is true,” Earl Wilson wrote, “that movie stars get to believe their own publicity.” It is actually half-true. Stardom is a seductive idea, easier to believe in if the self doesn’t get muddled up in it. Stars find it easier to believe in other stars’ publicity. Now, there’s the real thing. To Ava, Frank’s angry talk had all the power he’d intended: he was, after all, talking about Lana Turner.
On the other hand, in the morning light that filtered in around the edges of the heavy drapes, Ava couldn’t help taking note of the tired-looking woman who sat across from her in Frank’s living room—the tired-looking woman with bruises on her face who kept tapping her cigarette on the ashtray as she drank glass after glass of vodka. Ava and Bappie and Ben Cole and Lana had decided to make a regular party of it, getting pie-eyed and telling scandalous Hollywood stories, hooting with laughter.
That was when Frank burst in, furious.
Chester had not been home. And so Sinatra had headed down to his place, seen the cars parked outside, driven around Palm Springs awhile as the sun rose, building up a head of steam. When the light began to hurt his eyes—he loved the blue just before sunrise, hated the full morning light—he went back to Alejo Road, walked up to the front door, and heard the loud laughter inside. In his goddamn house.
At first the sight of them all sitting there having a gay old time rendered him speechless. Then Ava piped up. “Ah, Frank! I thought you were going to be down here fucking Lana!”
He blinked, looking flustered for a second. “I wouldn’t touch that broad if you paid me,” he said.
Lana jerked upright as if Fernando had slapped her again. It was the truth, and the truth hurt. No one was more sharply aware than she of the new lines on her face and the puffiness under her eyes, not to mention the contusions on her cheek.
For his part, Frank could only think of his own hurt. “I bet you two broads have really been cutting me up,” he said.
Lana was shaking her head, her eyes brimming at the injustice.
“Frank—” Ava warned.
At this point, accounts diverge. Frank either ordered Ava into the bedroom or commanded everyone to get out of his house. Ben Cole and Lana may have left immediately or somewhat later. In her memoir, Lana recalled that Ava shrugged and went to the bedroom, followed by Frank, and that soon the sounds of a terrific battle, complete with crashing furniture, could be heard. According to Turner, Bappie later brought a “battered” Ava to stay with her and Cole. “We did what we could to make Ava comfortable,” she recalled.
Poor Ava. She was badly shaken, and after my own grim experience, I could sympathize with her humiliation. But alone in my room I was surprised that I also felt sorry for Frank. It was a bad time for him. His career had slipped badly, and he was losing Ava.
This has a self-serving sound to it—as though Turner merely wanted a sister in suffering. In her own reminiscences, Ava mentions nothing about a beating, even though her fights with Frank always seemed to devolve into physical mayhem as a prelude to sex. Instead, she claims she gave as good as she got, informing her husband haughtily that it was her house too, and proceeding to pull all her books and phonograph records from the shelves. “Frank seemed to approve of this idea,” she remembered.
Furiously he scooped up everything I’d thrown on the floor and heaved it all out the still-open front door … and onto the pitch-dark driveway. Not to be outdone, I stalked across to the bedroom and bathroom and started to pile my clothes, cosmetics, and every other goddamn odd and end I had in a heap on the floor. And