Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [306]
Frank kept busy. There was work and there was after work—paid company, chance encounters, old flames. The work made him happy, but it still left a lot of hours in the day. Winning the Oscar, he sometimes thought (knowing the thought was childish), would solve everything, would bring him work and wealth and maybe bring Ava back too.
At the same time, he felt pessimistic, superstitious. The other nominees—Eddie Albert and Robert Strauss and Jack Palance and Brandon De Wilde—were actors. What was he? (One thing he knew he wasn’t, in an era when academy members voted only within their own categories, was popular among other performers. Albert and Palance were very popular.) Frank told Bob Thomas of the Associated Press that he probably wouldn’t even be in Los Angeles for the Oscars. “I’m a saloon singer,” he said plaintively. “I gotta go where the work is.”
But remarkably, his wandering wife seemed discontent, too. In a lengthy syndicated interview at the end of the month, Laura Lee of the North American Newspaper Alliance sat down with Ava in Rome and found her in somber, regretful spirits. “What does Ava Gardner want most in the world? A baby,” Lee wrote.
She didn’t have to think twice before answering. The thing she has wanted most in life for a long time is a couple of babies and a normal, happy marriage.
What stands in the way?
Miss Gardner swallows, bows her head and shakes it ever so slightly, as if to say, “Who knows?” …“Some day” is all she ventures by way of reply—“It must be some day.”
If she is putting on an act, Hollywood’s No. 1 box-office star is a better actress even than her many fans believe.
“Marriage for two people in the field of entertainment is a very difficult thing,” Ava concedes. “Bogie …, who has been married to four actresses, and I were discussing this just this morning.”
What they were discussing, no doubt, was the fact that the fourth and final actress Bogart had married, who had flown seven thousand miles to join him in Rome, was missing her couple of babies, badly, longing to fly back to them—and never forgetting the movie career she’d put in abeyance to be their mother.
“There isn’t a single thing about this lousy business I like,” Ava told Lee.
I hate acting and hate not having a private life. You aren’t allowed any privacy in this business.
I haven’t got a home. I haven’t got a chauffeur or a car or even a mink coat [!]. I work for only one reason. The same reason everyone works, because I need the money and I can make more this way than any other I know of …
I could walk out of making pictures tomorrow and never have a moment’s regret.
Lauren Bacall carried a coconut cake from Frank to Ava when she went to Rome to visit her husband, Humphrey Bogart, on the set of The Barefoot Contessa. Ava ignored the cake. Bacall and Sinatra later formed a close friendship. (photo credit 39.2)
“A friend of Ava’s,” Lee wrote, “says she talks about Frankie constantly, but confesses that they ‘Can’t live together and can’t live apart.’ What the trouble is neither of them is willing to admit in public—if either really knows.”
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Frank escorts Frank Jr. and Little Nancy to the Academy Awards at the Pantages Theatre, Hollywood, March 25, 1954. (photo credit 40.1)
Young at Heart” had entered the Billboard chart on February 13; two weeks later, it climbed to the Top 10. Songs for Young Lovers was also selling. Alan Livingston was ecstatic: time to start another album. At the end of February, Sinatra flew back to Los Angeles; on March 1, he went back to meet Nelson Riddle in the Capitol studios.
Frank recorded three numbers that Monday night: Johnny Mercer and Rube Bloom’s “Day In, Day Out,” Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg’s “Last Night When We Were Young,” and a Sammy Cahn–Jule Styne title theme for an upcoming movie, “Three Coins in the Fountain.” That insipid film, starring Louis Jourdan and Jean Peters, would premiere in June; Sinatra