Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [292]
She told him to just stay put until he was healthy. She wasn’t going anywhere.
But he knew her: she probably had her bags packed already.
“Sinatra’s father says he went to Mt. Sinai hosp for a checkup,” wrote Winchell, the All-Powerful. “But the rumors had it he tried to End It All.”
Whenever Frank Sinatra taxed his patience to the utmost, Jimmy Van Heusen had to remind himself that this, after all, was Sinatra. A man who put his pants on one leg at a time, picked his nose, and told stupid jokes, but … Sinatra. As a songwriter of brilliance but not genius, Van Heusen was in an ideal position to understand what genius really was, and he recognized that Frank surely possessed it. It didn’t excuse his excesses—only God could do that—but it began to explain them. Jimmy might bad-mouth Frank behind his back (and he meant it when he did), he might hate him at times and even fear him, yet he also loved him, as much as he could love anybody. And when the little bastard sang, Chester got more goose bumps than anyone else.
“I would rather write songs than do anything else—even fly,” Van Heusen once told an interviewer. And he loved flying. He loved fucking, too, but the sublime pleasure of songwriting trumped all other joys—and made them possible. He had written some good songs for Sinatra, and he hoped to write more. Staying as close as possible to Frank, Chester sensed, might just accelerate that process.
But Jimmy Van Heusen had another notable quality: he was a hypochondriac of the first order. He kept a Merck manual at his bedside, he injected himself with vitamins and painkillers, he had surgical procedures for ailments real and imagined. He was terrified of illness and death, and earlier that year, close to his fortieth birthday, he’d had what he’d felt might be a heart attack. The doctors weren’t sure, but he was. Terrifyingly, over these last taxing weeks with Sinatra, Jimmy had begun to feel chest pains again.
Accordingly, while Frank got dressed in the hospital room, shooting his cuffs to cover the bandages (the doctor had just walked out, shaking his head, after warning Sinatra that he was leaving Against Medical Advice), Van Heusen looked his friend in the eye and told him he had to have a word with him.
The songwriter had already gone over in his mind what he wanted to say. If it meant the end of the friendship, so be it. But he’d come to the end of his rope. The two men looked at each other in the mirror as Frank looped his tie. And Jimmy, his voice serious, told Frank that he had to see a headshrinker when he got back to Los Angeles. He couldn’t take this anymore.
Sinatra smiled a little. Why not?
Worried about their newly successful client’s fragility, William Morris assigned Sinatra a shadow, in the person of the New York agent George E. Wood, a dapper, slightly shifty-eyed fellow who prided himself on his wide acquaintanceship among organized criminals of the top rank—many of whom functioned as a kind of show-business directorate. Wood relished the assignment. “When Frank ate, I ate; when he slept, I slept,” the agent recalled. “When he felt like walking, I walked with him. When he took a haircut, I took a haircut. I loved the guy.”
Wood bribed a TWA gate agent at La Guardia to let him walk his charge through a hangar so Frank could get on his L.A.-bound flight unmolested by the pack of reporters. He rode cross-country with him, watching him as he slept a drugged sleep, now and then glancing at the bandage on his left wrist. And Wood did his best to fend off the reporters who met the plane at Los Angeles International the next morning. It wasn’t easy. The whole country was tuned in to what looked like the final act in the Frank-and-Ava saga.
RUMOR MILL IS MUM ON FRANKIE’S ROCKY ROMANCE, read a November 21 headline, punning lightly on the name of his radio show. “Whether skinny, harried Frank Sinatra would win back luscious Ava Gardner today prepared to be a matter known only to the principals,” began the wire-service story, datelined Hollywood.
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