Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [243]
This was his life for now. They would go to North Carolina, then they would go to Africa, where she would work and he would sit. Just before Thanksgiving he would fly back to do two weeks at the French Casino, a club in the Paramount Hotel on Forty-sixth Street, at ten grand a week. It would have been half-decent money if Frank were actually getting any of it. (By comparison, Martin and Lewis, who were all over television, radio, the movies, theaters, and clubs, were then earning a guaranteed ten thousand a night for live performance.) It wasn’t much of a booking, but it was a booking. He had no television or radio show, no movie deal, no record label, no concerts, no nothing. Lastfogel was working on all of it for him, making heroic efforts. “Sinatra smelled like a loser in those days,” the agent would say years later.
So, reeking of failure, Frank went to Winston-Salem. There, at least, he was Frank Sinatra. There, the locals blushed and tripped over themselves at the mere sight of him—or rather, him and Ava. He and his wife and Bappie went to Ava’s sister Myra’s house: a little house, filled with relatives and the smells of delicious cooking. It all took Frank back to Hasbrouck Heights: the smells were different, the voices were different, but the mixed tides of love and claustrophobia were much the same.
Ava gleamed and glittered, too big and bright for the small rooms, her gorgeousness burnished by her success and the proud love of her family. Frank did his best. Myra’s husband, Bronnie Pearce, ran a laundry in Winston-Salem, with a pick-up-and-drop-off diaper service. Frank’s interest in the laundry business was limited … But they were good people, the Pearces and the Grimeses and the Creeches and the Gardners, so he made an effort, answering every question no matter how dumb, making conversation while he held a plate heaped with country food, glancing out at the gray trees and wondering when he could escape.
“Frank was very nice—a little quiet and shy,” Billy Grimes’s sister Mary Edna remembered many years later. A stray moment stayed with her: seeing Sinatra in the living room, sitting on the piano stool and talking with her ten-year-old brother about his clarinet lessons at school. “I heard him tell Michael how he’d learned to play the flute when he was young,” she said. She was struck by Frank’s serious respectfulness with the boy.
He was also depressed. Under the circumstances, one day in North Carolina was about all he could stand. He told Ava he had to get back to Manhattan; he was desperate to recharge his batteries. She wasn’t happy, but she understood. She told him she needed another day with her family. Things were cool between them now: she was rising, rising, like a runaway balloon, and there was nothing Frank could do to stop her. Nor anything she could do to stop him—Ava went to see him off at the airport. Reporters were present, of course: they groaned with disappointment when Frank gave her a farewell peck on the cheek. Once more with feeling, please, for the cameras … And then he was dashing across the tarmac, turning for a second to say one more thing to his wife as he ran to the plane. The men of the press listened carefully, pencils poised.
“Goodbye, Dolly,” Frank yelled, over the engine noise. “I’ll call you.”
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Arriving in Nairobi as Ava heads to work on Mogambo, November 1952. (photo credit 32.1)
They celebrated their first anniversary on board another plane, this time en route to Nairobi, opening a warmish bottle of champagne and exchanging gifts that she had paid for: a diamond-studded ring from him, a platinum watch from her. “It was quite an occasion for me,” Ava recalled. “I had been married twice but never for a whole year.”
Clark Gable came to meet their flight at Eastleigh Airport in Nairobi. “Hiya, Clark!” Ava called, when she spotted him. They embraced. Gable growled hello: she looked as ravishing as always. He looked magnificent in his khakis and bush hat. Frank,