Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [242]
He called.
After the obligatory private phase two, phase three took place onstage at the Hollywood Palladium in front of four thousand people, at a rally for Adlai Stevenson on October 27. Then as now, many of the stars came out for the Democrats, Frank and Ava prominent among them. The couple had been slated to appear together for weeks, but of course in the wake of the previous weekend’s events no one had any idea if they would actually show up.
Then Ava walked out onto center stage, wearing a black-satin strapless dress and a mink jacket, and smiled dazzlingly into the spotlight. The audience, filled with her peers, smiled back at her, knowing a great show when it saw one. She stepped to the microphone and waited for the applause to fade. “I can’t do anything myself,” Ava said, “but I can introduce a wonderful, wonderful man. I’m a great fan of his myself. Ladies and gentlemen, my husband, Frank Sinatra!”
The roar that followed was more about them than about him and he knew it, but he smiled anyway as he stepped into the spotlight and put his arm around his wife’s shoulder. Frank looked like hell. He wore a big ADLAI button on the lapel of his dark suit, and as he stood with Ava, he spoke a few words about the candidate they both admired, but he might as well have been moving his lips soundlessly for all the audience cared. Here was a couple whose magnetism trumped that of all Hollywood couples before or since.
Then Frank was kissing Ava, she was waving and stepping out of the spotlight, and the band struck up and he sang—first hard and swingingly, on “The Birth of the Blues”; then soft and feelingly, on “The House I Live In”—and the hushed crowd remembered, for a few minutes, just how great he had been.
She stood in the wings staring at him as he sang, head over heels all over again. He was just fucking magic, she thought. The reporters gathered backstage kept tossing questions at her as she watched and listened, but Ava just gazed at Frank, smiling.
Some guy from a Chicago paper, greasy hair and thick glasses, tried to cut through the clutter. “Hey, Ava—come on!” he called. “What do you see in this guy? He’s just a hundred-and-nineteen-pound has-been!”
Not even blinking, she said, “Well, I’ll tell you—nineteen pounds is cock.”
The reporter stood frozen, his mouth open, his pencil poised over his notebook amid heavy masculine laughter. Ava smiled serenely and kept watching the audience held spellbound by the memory of Sinatra.
Frank and Ava and Bappie landed at Idlewild and found the usual wall of reporters, hoping for a fight, a cross word—anything. Seeing the couple apparently happy, the men of the press did their best to get something going.
“So, Frank—are they going to try and find you a role in Mogambo?”
He gave the guy a look. “Yeah, I’m gonna play a native, in blackface.”
Another reporter: “What’ll Frank be doing while you’re making the movie, Ava?”
“Oh, he’ll do his act in some African nightclubs.”
“Who’s opening for him, Tarzan?” a guy in the back called out.
After braving it as best they could, they had sandwiches and a few drinks, then got on another plane for Winston-Salem. This was Frank’s end of the bargain, or the first half of it at any rate: they had spent plenty of time with his family; now it was time for him to meet hers. It was her first trip back home in three years.
He was not in a good frame of mind. A month had gone by since his lunch with Cohn: no word. Frank now knew Columbia was testing other actors, real actors, for the role of Maggio. He had sent more telegrams signed with the character’s name, trying to be cute, trying not to show how desperate he felt. Silence. Ava, of course, had mentioned nothing of her meeting with Harry’s wife: she understood her husband’s complex Italian pride. She looked at him, worried; she tried to keep his spirits up. The best he could manage was gallows humor.