Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [284]
Other paradoxes crop up when Jacobs’s account appears to contradict the smooth chronology of Sinatra’s life. Why, for example, would Frank even have a valet in 1953, when he was rarely in the same place for more than a week at a time, and in any case was pretty much broke?
Sinatra appears to have first met George Jacobs sometime in the summer of 1951, when the singer’s career was plummeting. The scene was a Hollywood party. Jacobs was standing outside, next to the Rolls-Royce he drove for the agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar.1 Lazar was indoors. Jacobs badly wanted a cigarette, and decided he would cadge one from the first person who came up the street. That person was Frank Sinatra. Sinatra told Jacobs he didn’t have a cigarette—oddly enough—but a few minutes later emerged from the party holding a gold bowl full of them. Jacobs took one, but Frank insisted he keep the whole bowl. He patted Jacobs’s arm and went back into the house.
Sometime in early 1952, Sinatra realized he needed a Los Angeles base of operations. Hotels were too expensive, and Ava’s Pacific Palisades love nest was often a little too hot for comfort. Accordingly, Frank rented a five-room apartment in a Spanish Mission–style garden complex at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Glen—the same complex, it turned out, where Irving Lazar lived.2 According to George Jacobs, Lazar spoke witheringly about Sinatra’s career slump. “He’s a dead man,” the agent would say. “Even Jesus couldn’t get resurrected in this town.”
Now and then, after Frank moved into the new place, Jacobs would spot him taking a walk down Beverly Glen to Holmby Park, “head down, all alone,” as Jacobs remembered.
Where were all those screaming teenagers now that he needed them, I’d think to myself … If I ever made eye contact, I’d smile at him, and no matter how down he looked, he’d always pull it together and smile back. I’m not sure he remembered the cigarette incident. He was just a naturally nice guy. “Everybody’s nice when they’re down and desperate,” was Lazar’s take on the situation. “Losers have the time to be nice.”
By the fall of 1953, things had changed substantially. Frank’s marriage was disintegrating: he didn’t just need a place to camp out; he needed a permanent residence. At the same time, counter to everyone’s expectations (especially Swifty Lazar’s), his career was on the upswing—there was enough new action that he had to hire a secretary, a mousy-looking lady in spectacles named Gloria Lovell, and install her in an office at the Goldwyn Studios. One day, while Jacobs was doing an errand there for Lazar, he ran into Frank, who greeted him with great friendliness and directed him to go see Lovell at once. She handed him an envelope that turned out to contain keys to Frank’s apartment. “Welcome aboard,” Lovell said. Sinatra, who always enjoyed giving Swifty the needle, had simply hired Jacobs away.3
This was the apartment where Frank retreated from the chaos with Ava; this was where he ripped up the script for On the Waterfront. Everything about the place spoke eloquently of its unique and obsessive-compulsive tenant. “When I opened his apartment door, I was surprised he needed a valet at all, the place was so immaculately neat,” Jacobs recalled.
The five-room, two-bedroom unit was a shrine to Ava Gardner. There were pictures of her everywhere, in the bathrooms, in the closet, on the refrigerator. There were a couple of framed photographs of his children and of his parents but none of his ex-wife Nancy. Aside from one bookcase, almost all biographies (Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Booker T. Washington, and a lot of Italians—Columbus, da Vinci, Machiavelli, Garibaldi, Mussolini), most of his possessions were records and clothes. There was a whole wall of sound, though it wasn’t all jazz as I would have guessed, but albums and albums of classical music.
The closets were in perfect order, with all the clothes organized by color, fabric, and