Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [296]
F. Sinatra is taking his usual beating from most of the press. He’s often merited it in the past. But we don’t dig how several reporters could chronicle as they did, when F.S. brushed ’em off at the airport here. Of him they front-paged, “he admitted he was upset”; “he said he is a sick man” (which he is!). They further itemed Frank was fresh out of a New York hospital, and then a few sentences later, beat his brains in because the guy wasn’t all smiles, affable and gabby!
Sinatra is on the verge of a whole new career—musically and dramatically. He is also on the verge of hysteria over “emotional problems.” The fact that Ava Gardner is taking off for Europe again (to do “The Barefoot Contessa”) won’t be much help! Strikes us, The Voice rates at least half the break in print others in the spotlight might get!
That was certainly the way Frank felt. Christmas was coming and he wanted to spend it with his wife, but there was little evidence that his wife wanted to spend it with him. When he had talked to her in Rome over the fucking transatlantic phone line, she’d been infuriatingly breezy, chattering on about the magic of the Eternal City, her wonderful new apartment, and her funny Italian maid …
The moment he told her he loved her, the connection was mysteriously severed.
The holiday blues descended on him early and heavily. And so, as Van Heusen had demanded, Frank began seeing a psychiatrist: Dr. Ralph Greenson, whose sister happened to be married to Sinatra’s new lawyer, Milton “Mickey” Rudin. Like so many pilgrims to the Golden State, Ralph Greenson was a reinvented character: born Romeo Greenschpoon in Brooklyn forty-two years before, he had gravitated to Los Angeles after serving as an Army doctor in the war and quickly built a practice composed of movie stars and Beverly Hills housewives. Appropriately to the territory and to his great benefit, the darkly handsome doctor looked the part: with his square jaw and ironic (though sympathetic) Jewish (but not too Jewish) features, his black mustache and closely cropped graying hair, Greenson could have played a psychiatrist in a movie. Funnily enough, he almost had: a close friend, the writer Leo Rosten, had based the title character in Captain Newman, M.D., his novel about an Army psychiatrist—eventually adapted for the screen, with Gregory Peck in the title role—directly on Greenson.
Ralph Greenson, who was to become Marilyn Monroe’s psychoanalyst, would later gain notoriety in the therapeutic community for violating doctor-patient boundaries: he treated Monroe in his home, where she became virtually a part of his family, and eventually more or less took control of her life. Sinatra was no Monroe, but there is evidence that Greenson may have overstepped the bounds with him in a similar way. Since Frank would certainly have attracted unwanted notice by going to Greenson’s Beverly Hills office, the psychiatrist offered to see him in his Spanish Mission–style house a stone’s throw from the Brentwood Country Club.
The psychiatrist was titillated to be treating the most famous entertainer in the world. “Of all Greenson’s interests,” wrote Marilyn Monroe’s biographer Donald Spoto, “it was the nature and burden of fame that seems to have most intrigued him and celebrities to whom he was most attracted. This was a recurring theme in his life’s work.” In a paper titled “Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous,” Greenson wrote: “I have found the impatience of the budding star and the fading film stars to be the most difficult with whom I have tried to work.”
All Frank would have wanted to talk about, of course, was Ava, and the doctor would have been very interested—maybe a little too interested for Sinatra’s taste. But there was another subject that Greenson also would certainly have wanted to discuss, behind the closed but not altogether soundproof door of his home study—one that would’ve made Frank quite uncomfortable: namely, the first woman in his life.
As for Marilyn Monroe: December