Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [309]
It was a reminder to the Hearst-reading public that Frank had once been down-and-out and a little bit dirty. (Why Pegler didn’t dig into Sinatra’s recent investment in the Sands is a mystery.) The public didn’t care. The public wanted to know about Frank and Ava and the Academy Awards. Pegler was growing more shrill and irrelevant by the week; even Joe McCarthy was running out of gas. America was in the mood to forgive Frank, and Frank had his eye on the brass ring.
He went to prizefights and harness races and jazz clubs, and the whores came to him. New York in the early spring of 1954 was a cavalcade of pleasures, and Van Heusen and Sanicola were working overtime to keep Frank away from the telephone, maybe even coax a smile from him now and then. They were finally beginning to get some results. His smile grew broader; his pals smiled back. Five nights in a row, he ate with them at La Scala on West Fifty-fourth Street, Frank and Hank and Jimmy and the music publisher Jackie Gale, plus whatever hangers-on happened to be hanging on. And five nights in a row, they all told Frank that he was going to take the Oscar. Every night they closed the joint: late nights with cigarettes and anisette and gorgeous broads and loud laughter. Frank would never let anyone else go near the check.
Then, very early in the morning of March 24, it was time to leave. Chester’s plane was parked at Teterboro; the sun would be rising in an hour or two. As Frank and Hank and Jimmy left the restaurant, someone at the table called out: “Bring back that Oscar!”
Frank turned around to look at whoever it was, sitting there staring at him like he was God. He nodded. “I’m gettin’ it,” he said quietly.
He drove straight from Van Nuys Airport to 320 North Carolwood, for an Italian dinner. It was cool and rainy in Los Angeles, but the house was warm and smelled wonderful; after the kids jumped on him and he kissed Nancy on the cheek, Frank put La Bohème on the hi-fiand, just for a moment, with tomato sauce in his nostrils and Puccini in his ears, thought of another household long ago. He sat in the den—his den—and put his feet up and sipped Jack Daniel’s and listened to the splendid music; Nancy came in and sat down, smoothing her skirt decorously, and they talked for a bit, for all the world like an old married couple, about how the kids were doing. Nancy Sandra, in the eighth grade, was loving school and had a ton of friends—male and female—but while Frankie was getting decent marks in fourth grade, he never said anything. He played with his planes and trains and cars and kept to himself. And little Tina’s first-grade teacher said that she was daydreaming instead of paying attention (it would turn out that she had astigmatism).
When they sat down at the table, though, all four of them were smiling at him mysteriously.
He looked around the table—Tina giggled—and raised an eyebrow. Nancy ordered them all to eat before the food got cold.
They ate. Family chitchat, about school, about the coyotes they sometimes heard howling in the hills at night. Frank grilled his older daughter about boys; Frankie watched his father as if he were trying to memorize something. The maid cleared the table and put coffee cups at Nancy’s and Frank’s places. Frank’s attention was distracted for a second; when he turned back, there was a small white box tied with blue ribbon sitting next to his cup.
He looked around the table at them.
It was a small gold medal on a thin chain, with Saint Genesius of Rome, the patron saint of actors, on one side and on the reverse a little Oscar statuette in bas-relief. “To Daddy—all our love from here to eternity,” the inscription read.
Tears started to his eyes.
Frank looked at Big Nancy, for it had been her doing, of course: