Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [278]
The reporters crowded closer. One suggested that her answers strongly implied there was some kind of rift.
“It doesn’t imply anything,” she said, getting into a waiting car. The driver closed the door, and then she was gone.
Frank came to New York the next day and checked into the Waldorf. Ava was in the Hampshire House.
The press smelled blood. “A close friend said the couple had been squabbling and that things might be patched up with a telephone call or ‘blow sky high in 24 hours,’ ” the United Press reported on September 9. And, the next day:
FRANKIE AND AVA FEUDING
NEW YORK (UP)—Ava and Frankie are feuding in frosty silence today just 12 city blocks apart …
Sinatra … told his friends he was completely mystified over Ava’s unannounced return three days ago and her anger. He refused to say why he didn’t pick up the phone and ask Ava.
“I hope to see Frank before I leave next week,” Ava said. “That’s what I came home for.” She wouldn’t say why she neglected to phone him or where she intended to go from here.
“I don’t care to talk about it further,” she said pleasantly, leaning back on the couch and exposing her bare legs. The question of hemlines arose.
“If women follow that very short skirt fad they’re fools,” Ava said. She paused and smiled. “But then, we’re fools.”
It sounded like a high-school quarrel. Speaking to another reporter, Sinatra was the soul of disingenuousness. “I saw a picture of Ava at the airport,” he said, “and that’s the first inkling I had that she was in town. I don’t understand it. We’d had no trouble. I can’t make a statement because I don’t know what she is planning. It’s a crying shame, because everything was going so well with us. Something may work out, but I don’t know.”
Ava replied (to another reporter): “You start with love, or what you think is love, and then comes the work. I guess you have to be mature and grown up to know how to work at it. But I was the youngest of seven kids and was always treated like the baby, and I liked it, and played the baby. Now I’m having a hell of a time growing up.”
While Frank opened at the Riviera, she went with a girlfriend to a Broadway show—as it happened, the premiere of Carnival in Flanders, book by Preston Sturges, music and lyrics by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke. Despite the brilliant creative team, the critics murdered the show, which ran for only six performances. The failure hastened Burke’s decline into alcoholism and steeled Chester’s resolve to stick to writing for the movies. (But as Ava sat there that night, she got to hear John Raitt debut Van Heusen’s greatest song, “Here’s That Rainy Day”—of which Sinatra would record the greatest version six years thence.)
Meanwhile, across the river, Frank was knocking them dead. “Every big star—except Ava Gardner—was at Frank Sinatra’s big, spectacular opening at Bill Miller’s Riviera,” Earl Wilson wrote. “(Martin & Lewis couldn’t get a table!)”
It was true: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, virtual protégés of Frank’s, and now arguably the biggest stars in the world, were refused the ringside table they demanded. It was a maître d’s dream and nightmare: the place was simply too jammed with celebrities to admit any more. The duo walked off in a huff. It was a subtle changing of the guard.
Dean and Jerry missed a hell of a show. “Electrifying,” said Eddie Fisher, who had been more prudent about getting a reservation. “Frank let loose a vocal tour de force, accompanied by Bill Miller at the piano and a seven-piece band,” Variety’s critic wrote.
He held the floor a solid 60 minutes and while he might and should cut 10 minutes there was no gainsaying the consistency of his socko. He’s in for $10,000 a week, for two weeks, and both he and [club owner] Bill Miller owe a lot to Harry Cohn for what the Columbia picture did for all concerned. Oh yes, he also sang “From Here to Eternity” and wisely sh-sh’d some exuberant