Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [277]
Eternity was breaking box-office records in New York and Chicago, the only two cities where it was playing so far: canny Cohn had decided to build the fire slowly. And the Oscar talk was gathering steam. ACADEMY AWARD RACE BEGINS, read an August 30 headline in Lubbock, Texas, where From Here to Eternity couldn’t even be seen yet. “Biggest surprise of the film is the reportedly fine straight acting of Song-and-Dance Man Sinatra,” the accompanying story read, a little wistfully.
Naturally, his good fortune couldn’t go uncontested. “Frank Sinatra has been receiving a merciless needling,” Jimmie Fidler noted, “from a New York columnist—one with whom Frank swapped punches in front of a night club a year or so back. Some of the newspaperman’s cracks have been so ugly that even people who admit they have no great admiration for Sinatra are beginning to take offense.”
In fact, Frank’s assisted mugging of Lee Mortimer at Ciro’s had taken place not a year or so before, but in April 1947—ancient history in newspaper terms. Mortimer had long since had the opportunity to mug Sinatra back, and to savor his downfall. And Frank had fallen and fallen, but—maddeningly—never quite hit bottom. Now, just as the singer was starting to enjoy an improbable resurgence, the columnist was gently fading into obscurity. Throughout the summer, filling in for the vacationing Walter Winchell, Mortimer snapped at Sinatra’s heels. On August 31, he wrote: “Those dark cheaters Frank Sinatra is sporting on Lexington Ave. are not to hide him from the autograph hunters. He’s got a beautiful shiner.”
Whether Frank had received an actual black eye from a romantic rival or a metaphorical one from the envious columnist was never answered. It was Mortimer’s last shot at the singer.
Frank called his wife almost every day, even after he’d sent another conquest home in a cab. Ava, after all, was the one he couldn’t conquer. He tried everything on the transatlantic phone that August: at times, knowing that she took pleasure in his success (and disdained him for his failures), he spoke with pride of his growing triumph; but the second he began to sound cocky, he could hear her glancing at her watch. Then there were the bad moments, when she made him crazy enough to try to bully her.
The hell with St. Louis Woman. He’d rather work with Marilyn Monroe.
Click.
At last, they made a provisional agreement to make up. The minute Ava’s work on the dumb costume epic was completed, she and Reenie threw all her things into her bags. She was bored with England anyway. Clark Gable, who’d stayed in London after Mogambo wrapped, came over for a farewell drink—and reminded her that she’d completed only half of the eighteen months’ foreign residence the IRS required for a massive tax break.
“Ava, honey, you do know what you’re doing, don’t you? You’re packing up and throwing away a hundred fifty thousand dollars in those suitcases.”
She didn’t give a flying fuck. She wanted to see her husband.
Gable smiled, squinty eyed, over his highball glass. Lucky husband.
But at the last minute, Ava decided to stop over in Madrid: Spain made her happy, and she had new friends there, not the least of whom was Luis Miguel Dominguín.
As always, the press took note of her every movement, and since Frank read the papers like everyone else, he got wind of her layover. As far as he was concerned, she had stood him up, but he wasn’t about to tell the reporters that. No comment, was what he said instead. He was booked at the 500 Club through Labor Day—the very day Ava arrived in New York. Frank stayed put.
Ava walked off the plane at Idlewild, her big sunglasses hiding the circles under her eyes, and ran smack into a crowd of eager reporters.
Where was Frankie? Were she and he not getting along?
She adjusted the shades and walked coolly through the pack. “I have nothing to say about it,” she said. She believed he had a singing engagement in Atlantic City.
Did she plan to see him?