Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [241]
Soon, according to Ava, Frank had seized her by the waist and was trying to toss her out too, while she clung for dear life to a doorknob. In the meantime, the forty-nine-year-old Bappie—conceivably with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other—was attempting to make peace between the two. “For God’s sake, kids, will you please knock it off?” she said. “This is disgraceful!”
At last somebody, either Frank or the neighbors, or both, called the police, who arrived, in the form of the genial former football star August “Gus” Kettmann—Palm Springs PD chief and, according to Ava, a friend of Frank’s. Kettmann looked at the mess, looked at Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra’s flushed faces, looked at the mess again. He pushed his hat back and scratched his head. There had been a lot of noise but no criminal activity, and the whole episode had taken place on private property. He could book the couple for disturbing the peace, but what would be the point? He told everyone to simmer down and left.
Naturally, word got out. Word always got out.
Two days later the Los Angeles Times put the story, what they had of it, right on page one, under the headline NOT CONFIRMED, and the subhead “Sinatra-Ava Boudoir Row Story Buzzes.”
At that point it was all sizzle and no steak. The Times quoted Chief Kettmann as saying he knew nothing about anything. “I was off duty and there’s nothing on the record about a disturbance,” he claimed, not very convincingly.
The reporter then tried to goad the chief into more of a response by citing “Palm Springs rumors”: namely, “that Sinatra ordered his beautiful film actress wife out of their desert mansion.”
“Well,” harrumphed Kettmann, “after all, if John Smith and his wife had a fight at their house I wouldn’t feel privileged to tell you of any discussion that went on in their bedroom between Mr. and Mrs. Smith and our officers. I know nothing about it.”
Kettmann may not have been telling the press much, but according to Earl Wilson “the Palm Springs police were talking”—their tongues perhaps loosened by some folding money. It was the peak of a big presidential election season—a tight race between Adlai Stevenson and Dwight D. Eisenhower—but the Frank and Ava Show was vying for America’s attention. In the October 21 Fresno Bee, at the top of a page filled with headlines like NIXON SAYS ADLAI HAS RING IN NOSE, BARKLEY PREDICTS SWEEP IN SOUTH, STEVENSON OPENS LAST BIG WHISTLE STOP CAMPAIGN, and MRS. FDR PICKS ADLAI AS HER CHOICE IN RACE, there appeared the following news flash:
COLUMNIST SAYS SINATRA BOOTS AVA OUT OF HOME
NEW YORK—AP—Columnist Earl Wilson reported today in the New York Post Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner have separated after a spectacular quarrel.
When Wilson phoned Van Heusen and asked to speak to Sinatra, Chester said, “Frank’s in the bathroom throwing up.”
In the absence of hard information, rumors sprouted and flourished. Soon the kinds of salacious tales that Ava and Lana had been bandying over vodkas in the living room of Twin Palms were flashing around Hollywood: Ava had walked in on Lana and Frank having sex. Frank had walked in on Lana and Ava having sex. A more elaborate version even found its way into a subsequent FBI report on Sinatra: Frank had walked in on Lana and Ava having a three way with another man. Why not throw in poor Bappie too?
The fact was, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner were a permanently unstable compound, and no amount of sexual intercourse, no matter how spectacular, was sufficient to keep them bonded. Or as Ava later confided to the singer Bricktop: “The problems were never in bed. The problems would start on the way to the bidet.”
Then they were back together again. Fittingly, since they belonged to the public, the reconciliation proceeded largely through public channels. Phase one was brokered by their hovering chronicler Earl Wilson, who leaned on Frank to admit how miserable he was, then ran a column in the New York Post