Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [302]
“I’ll never figure you broads out,” Bogart said. “Half the world’s female population would throw themselves at Frank’s feet, and here you are flouncing around with guys who wear capes and little ballerina slippers.”
As Dominguín looked puzzled, Ava said, “Oh, mind your own goddamn business, Bogie.” She wasn’t smiling.
“It was to be the beginning of a rocky relationship,” Server continues.
Their rapport did not improve on the set. Ava’s “stage fright” was still in place, and she found her confidence shriveling when confronted with Bogart’s chronic irritability and what she perceived as his deliberate disruptions of her concentration with his complaints. Shooting one of their first scenes together, Bogie turned away from her during a take and shouted, “Hey, Mankiewicz, can you tell this dame to speak up? I can’t hear a goddamn word she says!” To others he grumbled, “She’s giving me nothing to work with.” When not complaining, the sad fact was that Bogart ruined countless otherwise good takes with his racking coughs—warning heralds of the cancer that would kill him three years later.
The movie was a disaster, she told Frank. He listened carefully, then reassured her: Mankiewicz was puffed up with all those Oscars. She should just let him strut around a little bit, then look him in the eye and let him know she was the star of his movie. He’d change his tune. As for Bogie, he was probably pissed off that Ava’s salary was twice as much as his.
But he was getting his whole salary, and Metro wasn’t giving her shit.
Frank’s tone was calm. It didn’t matter. Bogie’s pride was hurt. Ava should give him time. He was a good Joe.
They talked awhile longer, then she thanked Frank for the pep talk. She’d needed it.
It was easy. He loved her.
She loved him too. It was the first time she’d said it in weeks.
“I saw Frankie at Chasen’s a few nights ago,” Louella Parsons wrote at the end of January. “He looks so well these days, so everything must be okay with Ava Gardner. When he’s unhappy he’s a boy who shows it in his face.”
Frank had started spending time with Bogart and Betty Bacall the year before, soon after he moved to the apartment on Beverly Glen. It was just one of those Hollywood things: Betty, driving by Holmby Park in her woody station wagon one afternoon, had spotted Sinatra taking one of his walks, head down, and called cheekily out the car window. There was a fella who looked like he could use a drink!
Frank looked up, smiling with surprise.
Betty smiled back. He should come on over sometime. The door was always open. And she drove off.
So he went over. The Bogarts lived just up the road, in a sprawling white-brick house on South Mapleton, and the door literally was open. There were small children and boxer dogs and shy Mexican maids: It was almost bourgeois, except that it wasn’t. It was Hollywood. Frank had first met Betty and Bogie ten years before, when she was a girl of twenty and she and the married Bogart were seeing each other on the sly. Now they were the most glamorous couple in Hollywood, with a little boy and a little girl, a Holmby Hills mansion filled with a witty, glittering cast of characters who stopped by to drink and eat, but mostly drink, at all hours of the day and night: Spencer Tracy, Ira Gershwin, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, Judy Garland and her husband Sid Luft, the David Nivens, Oscar Levant and Mike Romanoff and, of course, Bogart’s agent, Swifty Lazar.
Bogart loved liquor (“The whole world is three drinks behind,” he often said) and he loved company, but he didn’t like to go out, and so the world came to him. Sinatra, who as George Jacobs said, “craved class like a junkie craves the needle,” was agog at the Tinseltown aristocracy that gathered at Betty and Bogie’s, but mostly he was agog at Bogart himself. “Sinatra was like a starstruck kid, in awe of Bogart, and watching his every move,” Jacobs recalled.
With all the people around, it was hard to be alone with Bogart, but Sinatra tended to shadow him, following him into the kitchen or out into