Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [279]
Frank was in great voice and delighted to be performing for an American audience, and a hip one at that. He could even make fun of his marital troubles: when he sang Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,” he mimed getting booted in the butt, as if by you-know-who, to gales of laughter. “Frank Sinatra’s intimates say he hasn’t been as happy in years, despite the rift with Ava,” Dorothy Kilgallen wrote early in the second week of the stand. “The success of his dramatic effort in ‘From Here to Eternity’ plus his great hit as a ballad singer at the Riviera have lifted him out of the bitter depression that was beginning to worry all his associates. In the long run, his career seems to be more important to him than any luscious female.”
While this was true in the long run, Sinatra was paying a bitter price. Friends like Van Heusen and Sanicola and Jule Styne, friends he made stay up with him every night until dawn, took the true measure of his misery. And no matter how many laughs he enjoyed with his buddies, Ava made him miserable. He couldn’t dominate her; he couldn’t understand her. The more inconstant she was, the more he needed her.
On September 12, Earl Wilson, who fancied himself a friend, devoted almost his entire column to a jocular account of his failed attempt to bring Frank and Ava back together. “As a Cupid, I’m stupid, for I just made a gallant effort to melt the deep freeze between Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra … and fixed everything up so good that the freeze is now twice as deep,” he wrote.
Ava and I met in a large eatery run by a large eater. After talking about her next picture, “Mogambo,” in which she is a real sexpot, I happened to mention her Herculean husband whom she considers has neglected her, which—if it’s true—makes him this century’s man of iron.
“You still haven’t seen him or talked to him?” I asked.
“No.” She sipped her tea … She was wearing, I noticed, Frank’s wedding ring, also a large frosty smile of independence …
“Can I be an intermediary?” I asked. “I know a lot about patching up quarrels with wives. First the husband says it was all his fault and after that everything’s easy.”
“Nobody can help us but ourselves,” she answered. “You must talk, you must understand each other. Listen to me. Lady psychiatrist!”
“I still think you should have been [at the Riviera],” I said.
“I don’t have to defend myself,” she said, “as long as I’m sure in my heart that I was right.”
Dolly sailed into the breach. Talking to her son on the phone, she instantly heard the sadness in his voice.
He went on and on about the crowds at the Riviera. He was doing great.
Dolly grunted. Bullshit.
She phoned Ava at the Hampshire House. Ava asked her please to come right over. “She kissed me, and after a few minutes she began to cry,” Dolly recalled.
She had been tired, she said, when the plane came in, and when she didn’t see Frank, she felt bad. Then she found out he was in Atlantic City with me and said, “Mama, I don’t know how to explain this, but I know how little you get to see him. I thought for once you’re together, just the two of you, and I didn’t want to spoil it.”
“Frankie is so upset,” Dolly said. “It’s drivin’ him nuts you two not speakin’.” He was drinking; he was taking pills to sleep. Ava’s mother-in-law looked her up and down.
“Jesus Christ! You know you two kids love each other! So quit all this fuckin’ shit, for God’s sake!”
And so Dolly hatched her grand plan. She invited Ava to Weehawken for a big Italian dinner the next night, then she phoned Frank and invited him.
“Who’s gonna be there?” he asked suspiciously.
“Never mind—you just come.” Seven sharp. If he was late, she would feed his dinner to the dog.
Ava came at six thirty; Frank, at seven. They stood in the hall and stared at each other, smiling a little bit. “Hey,” Dolly told her son and daughter-in-law. “Come into the kitchen and see what I’m making for you tonight.”
They followed like obedient children. “We walked to the stove,” Dolly recalled, “and I took the big spoon