Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [308]
Infinitely restless, Frank flew to Palm Springs with Chester for fun and games, then, impatiently, flew back to Los Angeles. “Just for the record,” Parsons sniffed possessively, two weeks to the day before the Oscars, “Frank Sinatra is here in town. He came in a few days ago from Palm Springs. He’ll be on Bing Crosby’s radio show, so the New York and Rome trips are canceled.”
Rome: the world simply refused to stop believing—in much the same way the world couldn’t stop believing in Santa Claus—that Frank and Ava would eventually get back together. But in the absence of hard news, writers were also coming up with their own material. Ava’s new studio publicist, Dave Hanna, was probably responsible for the fanciful item Leonard Lyons used to lead his March 12 column—the subject, the famous coconut cake. “Ava was sure that a diamond ring, bracelet or necklace was inside the cake,” Lyons wrote. “After all, a husband who is as carefree about money as Sinatra is wouldn’t send an ordinary cake as a way of having a beautiful wife keep him in mind, 7,000 miles away.
“She therefore ate it all herself, chewing each bite carefully, in search of a hidden gem. ‘I finished the whole cake,’ she said, ‘and all I found was that I couldn’t get into my costume the next day.’ ”
Meanwhile, the real Frank and Ava behind the cartoonish images kept grabbing whatever pleasures they could, trying to keep the sadness at bay. Frank’s method, as always, was ceaseless motion. Van Heusen kept the revels going, the plane warmed up. Just three days after she’d claimed Sinatra was staying put, Louella had to eat her words. “Frank Sinatra’s excuse for missing the Look and Photoplay Magazine awards: ‘I have business in New York’ and the thought that Frankie’s MOST important business is to attend all events furthering his career,” she harrumphed, incoherent with indignation.
So there really had been a New York trip—was he on his way someplace else? Rome, perhaps? “Frank Sinatra off to Italy to escort Ava to the Academy Award doings—as though Ava couldn’t find her way back to Hollywood,” wrote Jimmie Fidler, who’d heard it from someone who’d heard it from someone else.
But it wasn’t Rome; it was just New York. And it wasn’t even business; it was just to keep moving.
Westbrook Pegler had laid off Frank for quite a while, not out of any merciful tendencies, but mainly because the Sinatra of the mid-1950s had fallen beneath the notice of the subversive-hunting columnist. For one thing, since Frank’s Mafia scandals of the late 1940s, he had kept his contacts with the wiseguys as quiet as possible—not least because Ava hated the hoods even more than Pegler did. For another, Frank, with plenty to distract him, was no longer the liberal firebrand he had been in the 1940s. And in any case, the political climate of 1953 and 1954 was extremely unfriendly to liberalism. There was a Republican majority in Congress; Eisenhower was in the White House. It was one thing to rally for causes at Madison Square Garden when FDR was president; it was quite another to wear one’s political heart on one’s sleeve when the Hollywood blacklist was at its raging height. Even Bogart, who’d courageously gone to Washington to face down the House Un-American Activities Committee, felt compelled to distance himself from the Hollywood Ten.
In mid-March, though, Pegler had a halfhearted last whack at Frank. The occasion was the arrival at San Quentin of Jimmy Tarantino, the New Jersey lowlife and co-founder (with Hank Sanicola) of the short-lived scandal sheet Hollywood Nite Life. Under Tarantino’s guidance, Hollywood Nite Life had been nothing more than a vehicle for shaking down film-colony denizens with sexual and pharmaceutical idiosyncrasies: Frank had gone to lengths to distance himself, and to make sure Sanicola distanced himself, from the whole business. Tarantino had kept up his extortionate ways, had been nabbed and convicted,