Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [256]
Then she’d gone off the radar screen.
She had checked out of the Grand in Rome; Reenie Jordan and Benton Cole were vague about her whereabouts. Frank had Sanicola phone Metro’s production department in Culver City and extract her drop-dead date for arriving at Boreham Wood.
But she still sounded remote when he reached her at the Savoy—all she would say was that there was some kind of medical problem. That was when he got on a plane.
The newspaper accounts tell how Ava met Frank at Heathrow, minus her customary sunglasses, and didn’t recognize him at first because he was wearing a hat. The man whose icon status in the 1950s would be synonymous with a fedora clearly hadn’t worn one up to this point. The simple reason for the change was that his baldness was accelerating. And while Frank had begun wearing a hairpiece on film at least as early as 1948’s The Kissing Bandit, he wasn’t yet solvent (or shameless) enough to sport a toup in civilian life.
If his wife didn’t recognize him, the public wouldn’t either: Sinatra’s trip to London was not only abrupt but furtive. He told one of the few reporters who tracked him down that he had come to make arrangements for a European tour he’d be doing in the late spring and early summer. This might have been true, but what he was mainly there for (he finally discovered after he landed) was to try to talk Ava out of having another abortion.
Unsurprisingly, her memoir glosses the episode over. “I didn’t think that big expensive clinic [where she’d had the first abortion in November] was prepared for a second round of someone responding to their ever-so-correct questions with my incorrect answers,” she wrote,
so I was checked into a small nursing home near Wimbledon where they didn’t ask any questions at all. I knew Frank was coming across to London to start a singing tour through Europe, but I wasn’t sure exactly when. But clearly someone told him about what I was doing, because as long as I live I’ll never forget waking up after the operation and seeing Frank sitting next to the bed with tears in his eyes.
She’d probably avoided the big expensive clinic for secrecy’s sake—and because she could scarcely ask MGM, which had picked up the tab for the first procedure, to pay for another one three months later.
And the procedure was in February, not in May as some accounts have it, and as Ava’s red herring about Frank’s coming over to start his European tour would indicate. A May abortion could have made the baby Frank’s for sure, but she can’t have it both ways. If her tender story about his singing to her as they bumped across the African plain in a jeep is true—and her memory in this instance has a solid ring of truth—then that second (or third4) pregnancy had commenced while she was still on location, which means no later than January, and specifically no later than mid-January, because that’s when Sinatra left for his Latin Quarter gig. (Nor could the jeep-bumping-over-the-plain story refer to the first African pregnancy: Frank had departed for his screen test in November before he knew she was with child.)
She meets him at Heathrow; the next thing we know, he’s sitting by her bedside in tears after the procedure. Sometime after he took off his hat, Ava told him where she was going and what she was going for. He can’t have been happy about it. To put it mildly. Coming so soon after the November abortion, this one would have been unacceptable, unimaginable. And yet she was adamant—and of course could never, ever tell him the real reason: not only did she not want a child—not now, not ever—but she also wasn’t sure whose baby this was. (If one dalliance with a bullfighter had driven Frank crazy, an out-of-wedlock child would have ended the marriage for good.) The collision between them, irresistible force and immovable object, must have been terrible. And the tears on his face were surely from fury as much as sadness. Starting with Nancy’s 1947 abortion, this would have been (by his reckoning, anyway) the fourth child he had lost. “He never got over it,