Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [281]
She might as well have been talking about her marriage.
That night, she and Frank took a TWA Constellation to Los Angeles—she had an L.A. premiere for Mogambo; he was booked for a week at the Sands—and, somewhere over Nebraska, they reached an accommodation. A reporter called one of Strickling’s minions (the studio employed a publicity staff of fifty) and wondered aloud about the dissonance between the cozy images and the continuing reports of marital unrest. “They’re together—and that’s the main thing,” the MGM rep said.
Ava did her best to defend the united front. “If Frankie goes to New York to do ‘Waterfront’ for Elia Kazan, I’ll accompany him,” she told a columnist. “Meanwhile, we are sort of up in the air. We don’t have a house or even a car.”
It was all a ruse. The moment the press wasn’t looking, they put on their sunglasses and went their separate ways—Frank to 20th Century Fox to discuss Pink Tights, Ava to Culver City to see what fresh outrage Metro had in mind for her. But it seemed there was a live possibility outside the studio: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Herman’s younger brother and currently the hottest writer-director in Hollywood (he’d won Oscars in both categories in 1950 and 1951, for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve), had written a script called The Barefoot Contessa, and would be shooting it in Rome in January. Mankiewicz would also be producing. He had already signed Humphrey Bogart, and he wanted Ava, badly. He was bargaining with the studio chairman, Nicholas Schenck, in Metro’s New York office, for her services.
Ava sat up and took notice. Bogart … Rome … a barefoot contessa … She didn’t know what the hell the movie was about, but it sounded just right for her. She decided she wanted it.
Meanwhile, an odd item appeared in Jimmie Fidler’s column:
Two intimates of Frank Sinatra are the source of my information that the singer is becoming daily more upset over the constant bickering between himself and his wife, Ava Gardner. They don’t think Sinatra will put up with it much longer, because (they swear to this) Frank is a changed man since his career went on the zoom and he wants to settle down to a quiet, secure future … One of the two mused into my willing ear: “Wouldn’t it be ironic if Sinatra, now apparently desirous of a peaceful life, should return to the person with whom he had it, his ex-wife?”
Most likely the leak was an attempted warning, on Frank’s part, to Ava; but it only steeled her resolve to get out of town—without Frank. On October 5, she officially asked MGM for a temporary release from her contract in order to do The Barefoot Contessa.
And Frank went on the radio. He didn’t want to do another television series—it was too hard, and the screen was too small. His future, he felt, would be about making records and movies. In the meantime, though, he could keep his profile high, and his wallet full, with comparatively little effort. On October 6, at Radio City West on Sunset and Vine, Sinatra taped the first episode of a detective-themed new series titled, a little too poignantly, Rocky Fortune.
Frank played the title character, “a footloose and fancy-free young man”—out of work, in other words—who got a different job assignment every week from the Gridley Employment Agency. Over the show’s twenty-five-week run, Rocky would labor as a process server, museum tour guide, cabbie, bodyguard (to a professional football player—the magic of radio!), truck driver, and social director for a Catskills resort, among other things.
On the premier episode, he took script in hand and read into the mike: “Hi, I don’t know what it is about me and employment—we start out together but sooner or later, usually sooner, we reach the fork in the road. You take last week: the employment agency sent me out on a job as an oyster shucker, but someone tried to serve me up on a half shell, with a real crazy cocktail sauce—blood.”
It was the radio equivalent of a B movie—unapologetically cheesy, though perhaps there should have been some apologies. Among the writers who produced