Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [272]
Crooner Frank Sinatra arrived at London airport today and greeted his wife, Ava Gardner, in the privacy of the customs hall [the Associated Press reported on Monday, May 4]. “It is two months since we have seen each other—much too long,” Sinatra said.
They will leave this week end for Milan, where Sinatra will begin a three months’ singing tour of the continent and Britain.
It sounded romantic and glamorous: Frank had told Ava it could be their second honeymoon, but the tour was also desperately practical. Working for over two months on From Here to Eternity for a sum total variously reported as $10,000, $8,000, or $5,000 (he didn’t get a dime for the weeks of preparation and rehearsal) had put him in deeper hock than ever. His first Capitol single, “I’m Walking Behind You,” with “Lean Baby” on the flip side, had come out on April 27; a week later it had reached the nether regions of the Billboard chart—but troublingly, RCA Victor had released Eddie Fisher’s version of “Walking” just a few days after Sinatra’s, and by the time Frank left the country, Fisher’s record was already starting to pull ahead.
Lacking a radio or television show, domestic bookings, or any record royalties from Capitol, Sinatra was trying to drum up whatever cash he could. That spring, quietly, he had put his beloved Palm Springs house on the market. A wealthy widow, one Mrs. George Machris, scooped it up at a fire-sale price of $85,000—just a bit more than half of what it had cost Frank. The proceeds went straight to Nancy, who was still hanging on in the Holmby Hills house. The place was too big, too expensive to maintain, she worried; she and the children really should move someplace smaller (but this didn’t happen until Nancy junior and Frankie left home, years later).
In the meantime, Nancy entertained regularly, giving her best impression of a merry divorcée. On slow news days, the columns liked linking her to one suitor or another. “Nancy Sinatra’s steadfast date is Tom Drake … Barbara Stanwyck’s is George Nader,” wrote Winchell. In fact, it was Stanwyck—whose marriage to Robert Taylor had been broken up by Ava Gardner—who was Nancy’s steadfast companion. “Sob sisters,” the two women sometimes liked to joke, clinking their cocktail glasses. The truth was that finding another man was the last thing on Nancy’s mind. Between the children, the church, the Barbatos, and her various causes, she had more than enough to occupy her. According to Frank’s longtime valet, George Jacobs, “There was no way she would ever get remarried, or even go on a date.” Nancy had her own explanation for this. “When you’ve been married to Frank Sinatra …,” she liked to say in later years. You stay married to him. She even kept some of her wandering ex-husband’s clothes in the closet and welcomed, in a complicated way, his periodic visits.1
At Heathrow, Ava fondled her husband’s cheek, amazed all over again at his face. She was amazed, too, at how much she wanted him. She hadn’t been especially good over the long weeks since she’d last seen him, but then, she hadn’t been too bad, either. They stayed in each other’s arms in the back of the big car that took them to her flat in Regent’s Park; they stayed in bed for three days, until it was time to leave for Italy. And then, since the dreadful piece of trash in which she was currently acting wasn’t in need of her services for a couple of weeks (Metro had tried but failed to argue her into taking horseback-riding lessons so she could more convincingly portray Guinevere), she and Frank—along with many pieces of luggage—got back in the car and headed for Heathrow.
The car blew a tire on the way to the airport (Frank gritted his teeth and drummed his fingers while the liveried chauffeur, apologizing constantly, put on the spare). When they finally arrived, their plane was taxiing out to the runway. A BEA gate agent patiently explained, as the couple goggled at him in disbelief,