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By Root 2415 0

style. Most of the colors were orange (his favorite) or black. I figured the guy wanted to come off like a tiger. There were more sweaters than I’d ever seen, cashmere, mohair, lamb’s wool, alpaca, you name it. And as for shoes, Imelda Marcos had nothing on Frank Sinatra. He had a whole closet just for shoes, dozens of wingtips predominating, with a good number of elevators. No wonder he seemed taller than his given five seven. There were also a lot of hats, which seemed odd for casual Los Angeles, but because of a receding hairline, hats had become his thing, just as they were Humphrey Bogart’s. It was clear from his wardrobe that he had been keeping his eye on Bogart, because a lot of Sinatra’s clothes were identical to Bogart’s. The biggest surprise in the apartment was the industrial supply of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. I had no idea the man was a gum chewer, like his original teenage fans, but he was.

Frank chewed a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint as he drove Jacobs (rather than the other way around; he insisted) up Beverly Glen in his black and silver Cadillac Brougham Coupe. He was taking his new valet to meet his family.

It was odd, Jacobs recalled, being introduced to his new boss’s ex-wife, “who didn’t seem ex at all.” On the other hand, the valet thought, “Mr. S was like a little boy who had just gotten out of camp coming home for a home-cooked dinner … Big Nancy was so maternal to Frank, she seemed like his mother rather than his wife.”

Jacobs was struck by 320 North Carolwood’s “rococo New Jersey style” furniture, its “bright orange and black color scheme, and countless family pictures everywhere, with Mr. S in all of them.” The place looked, he thought, exactly as though Frank still lived there.

After dinner, while her ex horsed around with the kids, Nancy gave George a crash tutorial on how to cook for Frank:

The correct way to prepare the paper-thin steaks and pork chops, the scrambled-egg sandwiches, the bread to be sautéed in Italian, never Spanish, olive oil, the soft, never crisp, bacon he wanted for breakfast. She emphasized his disinterest in most vegetables, except for eggplant parmigiana and roasted peppers, and precisely which brands of pasta were acceptable, how many minutes to cook each, and how much salt to put in the water. Finally, of course, that marinara sauce, with the Italian plum tomatoes, crushed just so, and the prescribed balance of garlic, parsley, and oil.

When they left,

[t]he kids never begged him to stay, but their longing expressions conveyed the powerful message, and it hurt. Driving back to the apartment, Mr. S looked down. I told him how much I liked his family, and all he could say was, “I know, I know.” He would call them every single day, wherever he might be, at six o’clock just before their dinner, and be the best telephone father there ever was.

And in the meantime, the woman for whom he had sacrificed it all wasn’t speaking to him.

While Frank opened at the Sands, Ava attended the Los Angeles premiere of Mogambo on the arm of her business manager Benton Cole, looking spectacular in a décolleté silver-spangled gown and a white mink stole, throwing her head back and laughing as the flashbulbs popped. “There’s nothing like the premiere of a girl’s new picture to lift her spirits,” read a newspaper caption.

“Everything is fine, for the moment at least, between Frankie and Ava,” Louella Parsons wrote a few days later, “in spite of the rumors of a new rift that popped up when she failed to attend his opening at the Sands in Las Vegas.”

Of course everything was far from fine. On opening night at the Copa Room, in front of a capacity crowd, Frank cursed out his musicians when somebody hit a clam; a couple of days later he was crying on Parsons’s shoulder over Ava: “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I love her.”

He certainly wasn’t sleeping. Not even in the Sands’s Presidential Suite, with its three huge bedrooms and its own swimming pool. After finishing the last show of the evening toward 5:00 a.m., Frank, in his silk dressing gown, would sit on the side of the bed and phone