Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [291]
Frank stared into space. He would try.
Chester told him he had to go out. Could he get Frank anything? Blonde? Redhead? Brown sugar?
Frank didn’t answer—not even a smile. Van Heusen left, exhaling with relief the second he walked out the door. He had had it, and so had the rest of Sinatra’s friends. Frank had committed the worst sin, one of which he’d previously been incapable: he had finally bored them all to tears.
Chester went home at 2:00 a.m. after attending another party at “21.” It had been a gala occasion: he’d played the piano and sung, mostly his own songs, and he’d been a big hit. At forty, Jimmy Van Heusen wasn’t anything like a good-looking man—tall, powerful, gravel voiced, he had a bullish presence enhanced by a thick neck and shaved head (he’d begun the ahead-of-his-time practice when he started losing his hair in his late twenties). “You would not pick him over Clark Gable any day,” Angie Dickinson recalled. “But his magnetism was irresistible.” He played piano beautifully, wrote gorgeously poignant songs about romance, and, quite straightforwardly if rather unromantically, loved to fuck. Women knew it at once by the look in his eye, the way he ran his fingers down a girl’s arm—playing her like a piano!—and growled, in those W. C. Fields–ian tones, “Bee-yutiful.” He had a fat wallet; he flew his own plane; he never went home alone.
Tonight, though, he did: he had a sick friend to tuck in. Van Heusen shook his head as he turned the key—and then stared at the spots of blood on the floor. He followed the red trail across the living room, his heart thudding. At the entrance to the kitchen, he saw Frank, his left pajama sleeve soaked deep scarlet, lying semiconscious on the linoleum.
Frantic when their star attraction failed to appear, the bookers at the Chase Hotel phoned everyone: Sinatra’s agents, his lawyer, even Alan Livingston at Capitol Records. No one knew anything. Finally they called Morris Shenker. Shenker was a St. Louis defense attorney with a large and grateful clientele of men whose bona fides might not have stood up to scrutiny by the Kefauver Committee. An enormously powerful figure with ties to Vegas and the East Coast, the lawyer made it his business to know everyone and everything. And with one telephone call, he found out. Quickly and simply, he told the entertainment managers at the Chase Hotel that Sinatra had slit his wrists.
In truth, it had only been one wrist—his left. Van Heusen had paid his doorman $50 to get a cab fast and keep his mouth shut, then paid the cabbie $20 to run every red light on the way up to Mount Sinai Hospital. More money passed hands, and with great haste Frank was attended to and checked into a suite under his own name. The cover story was to be that he was exhausted. This was true enough. His weight was down to 118 pounds from 132, and he hadn’t really slept for weeks. Though no official announcement had been made yet, the flowers and telegrams started arriving in great quantities the next morning.
After a drugged sleep, Sinatra awoke alert and agitated. He had to get out of there now, he kept repeating. Around his bed, his doctors, along with Van Heusen, Sacks, Styne, and Cahn (forgetting their feud), tried to reason with him. He was in no shape to move, let alone leave. Why not just put his feet up for a few days?
He had to get to California. Had to see her.
She was leaving him, he knew it. He’d tried to leave her, the only way he knew, but maybe he just didn’t have the guts. Now he was pinning everything on looking her in the eye, holding her hand, and begging her to stay. He finally reached her on the phone—she’d returned to L.A. to go to the opera and see friends.
Oh Jesus, Francis.
She sounded both solicitous and slightly exasperated, but her voice was balm to his soul. He imagined her standing at his bedside, imagined the dimpled chin and lush lips and green eyes looking down at him.
His voice was weak. He was