Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [298]
And to change his mind: he’d bought a ticket to Rome, but he had decided to go to Madrid.
The reporters were waiting at Heathrow.
“I’m going to spend Christmas with my wife,” he said, walking fast toward customs as two redcaps laden with bags did their best to keep up. The pack of newsmen walked with him.
“I never talk about my personal affairs, but yes, my wife is expecting me.”
The cheeky chap from News of the World chased him. Frank chewed his gum and walked straight ahead. A BOAC representative, tall with gray brushed-back hair and a large triangular nose, caught up with him.
“I gotta get to Madrid,” Frank said. “The first flight, even if I have to stand all the way.”
But he was ticketed to Rome, and the flights to Madrid were full.
While the customs people looked through his bags, he paced the terrazzo floor of the hall, back and forth, back and forth, for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. He sent a cable to Ava in Madrid, saying he would be there by evening. He was standing with his hands on his hips, tapping his foot, when the BOAC man finally returned. The flights were full.
Croydon Airport was fifteen miles away.
Chartering a twin-engine plane to Madrid would cost 160 pounds—about $440, a month’s wages for a fairly well-off English office worker. Frank took out a thick wad of bills, pointed at one of the redcaps.
He grabbed a cab to Croydon.
Ava had spent her first couple of weeks in Rome preparing for The Barefoot Contessa: being fitted for costumes, finding an apartment, hiring a maid and an assistant, socializing with Bogart and Mankiewicz, making a splash on the Via Veneto. She even read that script—which, she was surprised to find, she loved. Not only was Mankiewicz a superbly witty writer, but her part was wonderful: she was to play Maria Vargas, an international woman of mystery who goes from dancing in a sleazy Madrid cabaret to marrying one of the richest men in the world. She would get to wear peasant costumes and ball gowns and seduce every man in sight.
The bit about Madrid caught her eye. It was as if Mankiewicz had been reading her mind. Spain was the place she now knew she loved most in the world, and she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the handsome bullfighter Dominguín since she’d met him in January. And so, since shooting wasn’t to start till after the holidays, she made a beeline for the Spanish capital, to soak up some sun while she stayed at the villa of her expat friends Frank and Doreen Grant, but primarily to find Dominguín.
There was an urgency about Ava’s actions over Christmas that year. She was about to turn thirty-one—then a far more advanced age for a woman (and especially a movie star) than now; also, as her biographer has written, she had been without a sexual partner for months. Frank’s cable had come at a most unwelcome moment. “She was,” Lee Server writes, “not a little distressed over Frank’s pursuit, could not trust her resolve in the face of his determination, and so felt a pressing need to affirm a new romantic alliance right then, before anyone could do anything to stop it.” She had edged out Dominguín’s beautiful young girlfriend within hours of arriving in town—child’s play—and in short order (“just hours before Sinatra’s arrival,” according to Server) had shacked up with the torero at the Hotel Wellington.
The newspapers always delighted in noting when Frank and Ava failed to meet each other at this or that airport, but her absence when Frank’s chartered plane landed in Madrid on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, her birthday, had nothing to do with pique: she was making love with Dominguín in their hotel suite at the time. The inopportune arrival of a lady’s old beau just as she has taken up with a new one may seem like the stuff of commedia dell’arte or a farce by Feydeau, but the next few days were characterized less by romantic intrigue than by anger and sadness between the two former lovers, combined with the low-grade misery of keeping up appearances.
That night the two sat on the