Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [300]
The cover of Sing and Dance had shown a hatless Frank (with a full head of hair), looking neat and collegiate in a striped necktie and light-colored jacket, smiling amiably against a bouncy pink background, complete with a couple’s dancing feet. The cover of Young Lovers established a new, infinitely moodier Sinatra: against a dark background, the singer, in a dark suit and fedora, stood under a lamppost, a lonely figure with a cigarette, looking meditative while a pair of couples promenaded by. Sinatra and the young lovers were in separate universes—he was their serenader, not their friend.
George Siravo had arranged seven of the eight songs, but Nelson Riddle, the arranger of “Like Someone in Love”—a master at expressing emotional complexity and sexual tension—was poised to carry the baton forward.
Frank was living the reality of that figure on the album cover. Arriving back at his Los Angeles apartment, he found he couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, didn’t feel like singing, and had little to do with his days besides see his headshrinker and do the radio show (“You may have heard it—if you’ve got a car,” he told a television audience, which, like most of America, wasn’t gathering around the radio in the living room anymore). On the movie front, Zanuck had suspended Monroe for noncompliance, and apart from pre-recording a couple of songs for Pink Tights, Frank didn’t have much to do besides collect his paycheck. If he picked up a newspaper, he could read reports that Ava, who’d told him that she wasn’t feeling well enough to see him off at the airport in Rome, had that very afternoon gone to the atelier of the sculptor Assen Peikov to begin posing, “in a chilly studio without much on,” for a statue to be used in The Barefoot Contessa. Oh, and by the way, other reports said that she’d taken up with Shelley Winters’s soon-to-be ex-husband, Vittorio Gassman.
Frank needed company, and fast, so he went to extreme measures: he moved Jule Styne into his apartment. “He literally moved me in,” Styne recalled. Sinatra simply went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the recently divorced composer was renting a bungalow, and had Styne’s belongings packed up and carted over to Beverly Glen.
The affable and energetic Styne was flattered—at first. The odd-couple arrangement would last for eight months in all, but it was a trial from the beginning. Frank thought and talked of little but Ava through the long days and nights. “I come home at night and the apartment is all dark,” Styne remembered.
I yell “Frank!” and he doesn’t answer. I walk into the living room and it’s like a funeral parlor. There are three pictures of Ava in the room and the only lights are three dim ones on the pictures. Sitting in front of them is Frank with a bottle of brandy. I say to him, “Frank, pull yourself together.” And he says, “Go ’way. Leave me alone.” Then all night he paces up and down and says, “I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep.” At four o’clock in the morning I hear him calling someone on the telephone. It’s his first wife, Nancy. His voice is soft and quiet and I hear him say, “You’re the only one who understands me.” Then he paces up and down some more and maybe he reads, and he doesn’t fall asleep until the sun’s up. Big deal. You can have it.
Frank was in a sleep-deprived daze. Driving his Cadillac convertible through Beverly Hills one afternoon, he crashed into a small English sports car at an intersection. It was a mismatch. The collision threw the other driver, one Mrs. Myrna McClees, out of her vehicle and onto the pavement: she was taken to the hospital unconscious, with a fractured skull and lacerations. Frank swore he had come to a full stop and looked both ways before proceeding. The woman recovered; Frank stumbled on.
His ex-wife, too, felt his pain. “Nancy Sinatra