Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [293]
Several thought it was significant she did not meet him at the airport …
Newsmen followed him to the baggage stand and again he growled:
“Nothing. No comment.”
The crooner, down to 118 pounds from his normal 140, darted into a waiting limousine leaving still more questions unanswered.
Will he follow Ava to Europe?
Has she said she would talk to him?
“No comment.”
They’d made a plan to have dinner that night, at Bappie’s place—Ava’s big sister was now living with her husband, Charlie, in the Nichols Canyon cottage. Ava had insisted on a neutral location, with Bappie and Charlie present, so that Frank couldn’t misconstrue the occasion.
She met him at the door, kissing him on the cheek and immediately noticing his bandaged wrist.
He deflected her concern, instantly sensing that vulnerability wouldn’t play this time. It was nothing—a stupid accident. How was she?
Warm but cool at the same time, and nervous. He saw her hand shaking slightly as she held her cigarette. Frank was all charm, especially with Bappie, who’d once considered him an oily little dago (she didn’t have much patience for Negroes or Jews, either) but now felt considerable warmth toward her brother-in-law.
It was too late, all of it. Ava had written him off. Not, of course, just for the one infidelity he’d boasted about, but for the hundreds he would never mention. Years later she would say, “I was happier married to Frank than ever before in my entire life. He was the most charming man I’d ever met—nothing but charm. Maybe, if I’d been willing to share him with other women we could have been happy.”
She smiled at him now with a kind of relief: she’d worried before he came that she might not be able to resist him, that something would trigger her old susceptibilities. Nothing did. He looked like shit—that helped. Nor was she in the mood to mother him. She tapped her cigarette, she drank her drink, she looked at him and smiled, and all the while she was thinking of Rome, and Luis Miguel.
He saw it. He was endlessly intuitive—he could pick up a vibe from a room-service waiter or the second reporter from the left (though he didn’t like the world to know what he knew), and he was, if anything, over-attuned to the love of his life. Early he had learned to watch Dolly closely, closely, to try to figure out whether she was going to hug him or hit him; early he’d learned to watch Ava closely, to see whether she was going to love him or leave him.
She was leaving him.
Her bags might as well have been sitting by the front door.
“F. Sinatra will spend Thanksgiving with Nancy and their tots,” Winchell wrote the next morning.
Meanwhile, Ava came up with her own way to spend the holiday. “Ava Gardner on Thanksgiving morning boards the plane from Los Angeles to Rome, obviously in the hope of catching reporters and cameramen more interested in a turkey drumstick than in the Sinatras,” Dorothy Manners wrote in her column. “One thing came out of her ‘talks’ with Frank—or at least one talk—they haven’t seen each other since. She will not file for divorce (if she does at all) until she returns to this country in the spring.”
The photographers caught up with her at Idlewild as she was about to board her Rome-bound connecting flight. She was standing on the aluminum steps in her big sunglasses, grinning in the November sun, holding a manila envelope containing a Barefoot Contessa script (she hadn’t gotten around to reading it just yet) in her right hand and, with her left, waving to the cameras, showing the whole world that she was no longer wearing her wedding ring.
That night Frank was back at the El Capitan Theatre, once again guest starring on The Colgate Comedy Hour, along with Eddie Fisher, no less. The host, Eddie Cantor, brought Fisher out first, to croon a medley of his hits (including “I’m Walking Behind You,” the number that had aced out Frank