Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [280]
After dinner, Dolly and Marty and Ava and Frank drove to Fort Lee for Frank’s late show. He forgot all about the boot-in-the-ass shtick from “I Get a Kick Out of You”—now he sang the song right to her. Her eyes gleamed. “The Voice unleashed a torrent of sound at the sultry Ava,” the New York Journal American’s reviewer wrote. “Emotion poured from him like molten lava.”
The next day, Frank moved out of the Waldorf and into Ava’s suite at the Hampshire House.
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Ava at the Los Angeles premiere of Mogambo, October 8, 1953. Alone. She and Frank were headed inexorably toward separation. (photo credit 36.1)
It couldn’t last, of course: it never had, and it never would. In the end, Dolly’s Cupid act was to prove no more effective than Earl Wilson’s. Cupid didn’t have enough arrows in his quiver for this pair.
A couple of nights after Frank moved back in with Ava, he told her he’d be home by 2:00 a.m.—and stayed out till 5:00, getting congratulated for everything by his pals. He could take a lot of congratulation.
“Isn’t it a little late to be coming home?” she asked him.
His lips tightened. “Don’t cut the corners too close on me, baby,” he said. “This is the way my life is going to be from now on.”
That night Ava’s reserved table at the Riviera was empty. His concentration shot, Frank gave a dud of a show.
“When he was down and out,” Ava said, “he was so sweet. But now that he’s successful again, he’s become his old arrogant self. We were happier when he was on the skids.”
There was a grain of truth to it, but just a grain. The reality was that their relationship was impossible by definition. They were competitors as well as lovers. And now the only glue that held them together was loosening: Ava confided to friends that Frank could no longer satisfy her sexually.
“Almost since their marriage, the Ava Gardner–Frank Sinatra situation has been what the military experts call ‘fluid,’ ” Dorothy Kilgallen wrote on September 30.
So anyone who writes a newsnote about them does so in the full knowledge that it may be one hundred per cent wrong by the time the paper is on the stands.
However, the latest bulletin from their chums has them apart again. As evidence, the pals point to the fact that Frank dined alone at the Villanova and later turned up at the Marciano-LaStarza fight without his glamorous bride. True, they say she might not like fights (especially after all the ones she’s had in her own private life) but what has she got against spaghetti?
It wasn’t the meals she disliked; it was his choice of dining companions. At Joe E. Lewis’s Copacabana opening, Frank sat ringside with a group including Frank Costello and a comely young thing who reportedly found Sinatra “devastating.” Ava read the report, and blew up. Ava’s old ally, the quiet but effective MGM publicity chief, Howard Strickling, got wind of the umpteenth domestic disturbance, and gently reminded her that the studio was still paying her sizable salary. Could she and Strickling figure out a way, just for a moment, to divert the public’s attention from her marriage and redirect it to Mogambo? It would be nice if Ava could attend the premiere with her husband; it would also be nice if they managed to look like a happy couple.
Somehow they brought it off. On October 1, at Radio City, an Associated Press photographer got a shot of the pair standing close together and grinning real grins. “Together again,” the caption read. “The situation may change greatly before press time, but Frank Sinatra and his actress wife, Ava Gardner, were together Thursday night and here’s a picture to prove it.”
The next morning, the papers were full of rave reviews for her performance as Honey Bear Kelly. But when a reporter phoned and read her some of the notices, she told him, “Don’t believe