Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [290]
He was taping the shows for later broadcast on NBC affiliates, and during the ten days he spent in New York that November, he was in a kind of fever, consuming coffee and pills and cigarettes instead of food, recording episode after episode over the course of long days in the Rockefeller Center studios, stockpiling shows against the trip he knew he had to make to win back his wife.
In the meantime, he was a walking wreck, able at times to simulate his old charming self, but mostly obsessing about her, trying in vain to reach her on the phone (she and Bappie were lying low in another Palm Springs rental). Van Heusen took him out to Toots Shor’s and “21,” where Frank—still wearing his wedding ring, the gossips were interested to note—declined to sing when Chester sat down at the piano. Not in the mood, he said. A pretty blonde sitting nearby, “Melissa Weston Bigelow of New York and Southampton society,” according to Kilgallen, found his moodiness attractive. After a couple of days it wore thin. When she left, Chester brought in the usual paid company (after an early experience with a pro who bore a slight resemblance to Billie Holiday, Frank had discovered a special fondness for black women), sometimes in twos and threes.
Jimmy Van Heusen indulged his friend as fully as his imagination and resources would allow, but even he, renowned for his heroic energy, was fraying out. He marshaled the usual reinforcements: Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn (though not together, just at the moment: they were having an idiotic feud), Manie Sacks, Ben Barton, Frank Military, Al Silvani.
Not Tami Mauriello, though. The old pug had actually gone and gotten a part—a pretty fair-sized one—in Kazan’s fucking waterfront picture, which was just about to start shooting in Hoboken, where the populace was all agog at the arrival of the movie people with their trucks, lights, and cables. Not to mention the breathlessly awaited appearance of Marlon Brando.
After a few days, Frank stopped going out. He stiffed NBC, failing to appear for the premiere of Perfectly Frank, which was to be broadcast live; the network had to do a fast shuffle and throw one of the tapes he’d already stockpiled onto the air. The suits were not pleased—there were grumbles about legal action. Sinatra couldn’t have cared less. He was walking around Jimmy’s apartment in his pajamas, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, gazing into space or out the window or at the flickering gray and white images on TV: Lucy and Ricky jabbering about this or that, to uproarious laughter. Husband-and-wife situation comedies were all the rage that fall, and a number of them featured actual couples—the Arnazes, Ozzie and Harriet, Burns and Allen, the Stu Erwins, Anne Jeffreys and Robert Sterling on Topper. When MGM announced the Frank-and-Ava split, some Hollywood wit cracked, “Well, that washes them up. They’ll never get a TV situation comedy show now!”
On Monday, November 16, Mankiewicz and Schenck signed: Ava was to play the lead in The Barefoot Contessa. Mankiewicz would pay MGM $200,000 for her services; of this amount, Metro would pay Ava $60,000 for three months’ work. It was well below her usual rate, but she didn’t give a damn. All the trade papers carried the news. They also carried the news that Elia Kazan had started shooting On the Waterfront in Hoboken. Marlon Brando, wearing blue jeans and a red-and-black-checked hunting jacket, had slipped into town, listened attentively as Kazan explained the setup, done a couple hours’ work, then slipped away in a black car. (He’d had it written into his contract that he could leave every afternoon to go see his psychiatrist in Manhattan.)
Across the river in Chester’s place, Frank, still in his pajamas, sat and talked dully on the phone—to his agents, to Hank Sanicola. He had Sanicola read him the trades. Hank said he was sorry, about Ava, about Waterfront. Frank didn’t answer.
He was due in St. Louis the next day, to rehearse for a week-before-Thanksgiving gig at the Chase