Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [286]
But Frank’s attempt at face-saving was hollow: all the calls were going in the other direction, and Ava was immovable. Then came the call that did the trick. Unable to bear her coolness any longer, he took an old acquaintance to bed one night after the late show: a six-foot showgirl from Lou Walters’s Folies Bergere revue (they’d met once before, in Boston). As she lay snoring afterward, Frank again phoned Palm Springs. Ava answered, sounding groggy.
Frank announced that he was in bed and he wasn’t alone. He’d been drinking, a good bit; he was holding a glass now.
Silence on the other end.
Frank spoke a little too loudly. If Ava was going to accuse him all the time when he was innocent, he said, he might as well get the fun out of being guilty.
When Ava hung up, she remembered years later, she knew she and Frank had reached a point of no return.
“Hollywood’s still betting the Ava Gardner–Frank Sinatra reconciliation ends in a divorce,” Erskine Johnson wrote on the twenty-first.
Hollywood was betting on a sure thing. On October 29, Howard Strickling issued a memo on behalf of MGM: “Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra stated today that having reluctantly exhausted every effort to reconcile their differences, they could find no mutual basis on which to continue their marriage. Both expressed deep regret and deep affection for each other. Their separation is final and Miss Gardner will seek a divorce.”
In the meantime, Frank had brought record-breaking crowds to the Copa Room. True, these were still early days in Vegas—there were only seven hotels on the Strip; the tumbleweeds blew among them. The Sands had been open less than a year; the paint was barely dry. But a pattern had been set, thanks in no small part to the heat of From Here to Eternity: suddenly, in this two-horse town, Sinatra meant excitement, excitement meant crowds, crowds meant gambling, and gambling meant money for the casinos, especially the one where Frank was playing. Ten years later, Billy Wilder summed up the phenomenon: “When Sinatra is in Las Vegas, there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It’s like Mack the Knife is in town, and the action is starting.”
In a very real way, Sinatra built Vegas: not only was he present at the creation, but he was responsible for it. And the town’s true owners—Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello and Joe Adonis and Doc Stacher—wanted him to feel welcome, to come back again and again, and to bring all those lovely crowds with him. “The object was to get him to perform there,” Stacher said, “because there’s no bigger draw in Las Vegas. When Frankie was performing, the hotel really filled up.” The Sands’s real owners wanted Frank to own a piece of the place, 2 percent, and they wanted it badly enough that they were glad to front him the money, a mere $54,000. The problem was the Nevada Tax Commission, which smelled a New York or Miami rat and used Sinatra’s difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service as a club to beat him with.
The equity idea had first come up in March; Nevada newspapers had inveighed against it; the tax commission had tabled it. Now, however, for whatever reason, the wheel had turned. On October 31, Frank went before the commission, in Carson City, to plead his case, and though one out of the state’s seven commissioners remained adamantly opposed,4 wondering yet again why the $54,000 Sinatra supposedly had in hand shouldn’t go straight to the IRS, the matter was put to a vote