Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [305]
Ava was also nominated, as Best Actress in a Leading Role, for Mogambo. When she heard about it in Rome, she laughed out loud.
Frank, however, began to pray. We know this; what he said was between him and God. He could barely remember the last time he’d set foot in a church—every once in a great while, when he was in New York, he stopped by St. Patrick’s and lit a candle for his sins (though he never dared to set foot in a confessional: where would he start?)—but that Monday afternoon, before going to the airport (and several times in the weeks that followed), he drove over to the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, a lovely, Spanish Mission–style complex on Bedford and Santa Monica in Beverly Hills, went inside, and knelt in a pew.
The interior was cool and fragrant with the scents of incense and polished wood, the nave flanked with simple arches in smooth white stucco, the altar standing in a light-washed apse surrounded by tall stained-glass windows. He was alone in the sanctuary, except for one woman sitting a few rows ahead. Frank bowed his head.
Joe DiMaggio was advising his new bride to face down 20th Century Fox the way he’d faced down the New York Yankees: the studio owed her a raise, he told Marilyn, and something a hell of a lot better to do than Pink Tights. In the meantime, Zanuck looked for another female lead—maybe Jane Russell, maybe a sultry blond ingenue named Sheree North—and Sinatra consoled himself with the cash. “Frank Sinatra—who’s collecting $50,000 for not working in ‘Pink Tights’—grabs $23,000 for 9 nights at the Miami Beachcomber,” Earl Wilson wrote in early February. And, a few days later: “There’s a tug-of-war going on between La Vie en Rose and the Copacabana over Frank Sinatra’s next NY singing date. Monte Proser of La Vie says Frank promised to appear for him. ‘If he doesn’t,’ says Proser, ‘I’ll get out of the business.’ Frank’s also got a fat offer from the Copacabana, which has about twice the capacity of La Vie and could therefore pay him about twice as much.”
Everybody wanted him except Ava. But everybody else wanted him a lot. All at once, he was hot as a pistol. There were nightclub dates, TV spots, and, most of all, all kinds of movie offers: Besides the role of Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls (for which a director had already been tapped—Joseph L. Mankiewicz), he’d been offered the title role in another adaptation of a Broadway musical, Pal Joey. And then there was a dark thriller, in which the lead role, a crazed presidential assassin, was a showpiece for a real actor. The script was called Suddenly, and Frank liked it a good deal.
While he rehearsed at the Beachcomber, the wire services ran, next to reports of Marilyn Monroe’s spectacularly successful trip to entertain the U.S. Marines in Korea, a story picked up from New York’s Daily News. QUADRANGLE: ROME COMIC SINATRA’S TOP RIVAL was the headline; the piece was datelined Rome, February 16.
Walter Chiari, 28-year-old comedian known as the Danny Kaye of Italy, is the reason why Ava Gardner and Frankie Sinatra have not kissed and made up, according to the talk in Rome film circles today.
Ava and Chiari have been seen together frequently, both before and since Frankie flew here for four days last month in a fruitless attempt at reconciliation.
One Italian newspaper today named Ava as the fourth corner of a quadrangle, saying that Chiari had split with Lucia Bosé, Miss Italy of 1947, because of Miss Gardner.
It was all gossip, of course, but it was hard to ignore. And the quadrangle image, while picturesque, omitted a fifth leg, which complicated the romantic geometry considerably: the bullfighter Dominguín.1
Frank did a week at the Beachcomber, relaxed for a few days in the Florida Keys, then Chester flew him up to New York to try to put a smile on his face. While there, he had a brief but memorable encounter, as noted by Winchell