Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [289]
I AM DESPERATELY ANXIOUS TO DO THIS PICTURE … YOU MUST KNOW MY TERRIBLE DISAPPOINTMENT AT NOT BEING ABLE TO ACCUMULATE SOME MONEY AND SECURITY WHICH I HAD CONTEMPLATED WHEN I MADE MY NEW CONTRACT WITH METRO … AND I THINK THE LEAST THAT THE COMPANY CAN DO IS TO GIVE ME SOME MEASURE OF HAPPINESS IN DOING THE KIND OF PART I WANT TO DO AT THIS TIME AS I COULD LEAVE FOR EUROPE IMMEDIATELY.
Metro, of course, didn’t give a good goddamn about its spoiled star’s happiness, except insofar as it affected business. The right deal was all Schenck cared about. The horse-trading continued.
Frank knew how badly Ava wanted this role. What it really meant as far as he was concerned was that she wanted to return to Europe. Alone. And not just for a visit, but to stay, as long as she could. If she got the job—and she tended to get what she wanted—she would leave at the end of November for an indefinite period: three months of shooting in Rome, and then Spain, probably.
If she didn’t get the job, she told the press, she might go to Spain anyway.
Frank knew who was in Spain, and he felt a kind of rising panic—the end of November. Maybe the two of them really were through; maybe she could resist him after all. There were times, at five or six in the morning, when he had to pour another Jack Daniel’s and tell himself he must think of something to keep her here. He couldn’t. He was constantly on edge: when he found out she’d had a drink with Peter Lawford at the Luau on Rodeo Drive (a totally innocent thing—Lawford’s manager and Bappie were also present—but Hedda Hopper blared it as a date in her column the next day), Frank went nuts. He was not just a cuckold but a public cuckold, and in his own backyard. He phoned Lawford and told him he was a dead man—his exact phrase. He screamed into the phone that he was sending somebody to break the actor’s legs.
Now it was Lawford’s turn to panic. He called his manager, Milt Ebbins—whose idea it had been in the first place to go have that drink with Ava—and begged him to call Sinatra and tell him that he was completely innocent.
Ebbins was glad to call Frank and try to set things straight, but there was a small problem: Frank had left town, and nobody knew where he was.
Hysterical with fear, Lawford begged his manager to find him.
Ebbins found him, but it wasn’t easy. It turned out Van Heusen had flown Sinatra to New York on his plane, and Frank was holed up at Chester’s West Fifty-seventh Street apartment. Jimmy answered the phone, whispering hoarsely, his hand shielding the mouthpiece: “Yeah, he’s here! Jesus Christ, and he’s driving me crazy! Ava, Ava, Ava! A billion fucking broads in the world, and he’s got to pick the one that can take him or leave him!”
“Eventually they got Frank onto the phone,” Ebbins recalled.
And he started threatening me … I said, “Frank, Frank, listen to me, it wasn’t Peter. I wanted to see Ava!” He said, “What?!” I said, “Listen, it was my idea to go to the Luau, I just wanted to meet Ava is all” … And it took some time to calm him down. I think he believed me. Well, he never said anything more. He never says that he’s sorry. And when he got a hate on, forget it. He didn’t talk to Peter for years.
He’d come to New York to begin yet another radio show for NBC: To Be Perfectly Frank, a fifteen-minute, twice-a-week broadcast on which Sinatra played DJ, spinning the records of other vocalists and singing a number or two of his own, backed by a five-piece combo. The show was a strangely mixed bag, reflecting both Frank’s resurgent fortunes and the declining state of radio. At first a sponsor couldn’t even be found. “Ten years ago, even five,” wrote the critic Jack O’Brian, “such a show starring such a revivified ‘hot’ personality as ‘The Voice’ would have had 35 musicians, a ‘name’ conductor, a chorus of 16, several announcers and highly-paid guest