Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [303]
To Frank, Bogart was that most magnetic of creatures: a great star who hated the phoniness of Hollywood but loved Sinatra. Bogie was also a genuine aristocrat, a Manhattan rich boy who’d flunked out of prep school, chucked it all, and had been spoiling for a fight ever since. He had a thing for strong women, just like Frank. Like Frank, he had a lifelong dislike of being touched by strangers. And he could wear a fedora like nobody else.
And then there was Betty. Now twenty-nine and the mother of two, Lauren Bacall was, if anything, even sexier than she’d been at twenty, her perfect skin still tawny, her blue feline eyes more insinuating. She was tall and long legged and, while not as heart-stoppingly beautiful as Ava, equally arresting. Also like Ava, she came from a humble background—the Bronx, in Betty’s case—but she was watchful and quick-witted, and her modest beginnings didn’t get in her way as much. Under the close tutelage of the director Howard Hawks, she’d found a character for her first film with Bogart, To Have and Have Not—slyly self-possessed, smoky voiced, tart tongued—and held on to it.
Nowadays she was spending more time at home with the kids than acting, and sometimes it frustrated her. She wouldn’t have minded going out to kick up her heels every once in a while: the only place Bogie ever wanted to go was his goddamn sailboat, which made her seasick. She was crazy about Bogie, but like the rest of Hollywood she’d heard the whispers about him and his wig maker, Verita Peterson: since she refused to stoop to the role of jealous wife, though, she was trapped. And so now and then, when Frank was over, he would give Betty an appreciative look, and she didn’t mind it a bit. She liked talking to him, too: they were much closer in age than she and her husband.
She was delighted to hear Sinatra’s voice when he phoned her in New York. Betty was on her way to Rome, to join Bogie—and to make sure he was behaving himself. She and Frank chitchatted for a moment, then he paused and turned serious. Would she mind taking something to Ava for him?
Now it was her turn to pause. She was ever so slightly disappointed—and sorry for him, too.
Of course not. A little something from Cartier?
Not quite. He would have it delivered.
An hour later she opened her door to a small man holding a large white box: it was an orange-and-coconut cake, from Greenberg’s Bakery on Madison Avenue. Frank had thought long and hard about the gift. The cake was Ava’s favorite. And he had to consolidate his gains, so he’d decided to send something that would remind her of their sweetness together.
Betty took the cake with her in the car to Idlewild, carried the big box onto the plane, and parked it on the seat next to her. As she bounced over the dark Atlantic, every once in a while she adjusted the cake to keep it secure. “I stayed a night in London, and then Bogie was at the Rome airport to greet me,” Bacall remembered.
He took me and my cake box to the Excelsior Hotel and I asked him to tell Ava Gardner I had brought it. He told her—she did nothing about it—so two days later I decided to take it to her before it rotted. I didn’t know her and