Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [53]
He had seen, on his first trip to the Coast with the Major Bowes Number Five tour unit, that just about every spectacular girl in the country gravitated to Hollywood, hoping to get into pictures. Since only a small percentage succeeded, the town was ridiculously overstocked with ridiculously available young women, all of them working the angles, doing absolutely anything they could to get their moment in the klieg lights.
Alora Gooding’s moment came when the director Ralph Murphy—who would go on to make such classics as Sunbonnet Sue and Red Stallion in the Rockies—needed a pretty girl to stare adoringly at Frank Sinatra as he stood by a piano and sang the nation’s number-one hit, “I’ll Never Smile Again,” along with the Pied Pipers. Murphy only had to glance around the set for a moment, tapping his megaphone against his hip, before he spotted the honey blonde with the long stems and big bright smile. He nodded at her. Okay, sweetheart. She beamed. The sequence required staging and setting up and lighting, all the painstaking and time-consuming effort stimulating the illusion, in the minds of Alora Gooding and Frank Sinatra, that the moment would be their Moment. In reality, the short segment of the number that made it to film happened in the background behind a close-up of the film’s two stars, Constance Moore and Bert Wheeler. A moment in a sidelight in a B picture.
But there she was, staring adoringly, and, Christ, she was luscious, thought Frank—lissome, long legged, pert nosed, and smiling. So unlike Nancy, that vague, judgmental, faraway presence in Jersey City, all neighborhood-serious and heavy with the baby weight and fretting at him, clinging to him, even when, now and then, they indulged in the expensive, non-pleasurable luxury of a staticky long-distance call.
Looking at the honey blonde’s big eyes and big bright mouth and perfect breasts and legs, he toppled. He had been with—where did the count now stand? a lot—a lot of women and girls, but something about this one, standing in glittering sunlight in front of the bougainvilleas and blue-blossomed jacarandas, something turned his brain to jelly, and he was gone.
Overseas, the Brits were fighting the Nazis in the skies over England. At home, Roosevelt had just announced a national draft. Hollywood on the cusp of the war was like a picnic on a cloudless day with thunder booming far in the distance.
The girl had a day job as a parking attendant at the Garden of Allah, a fancy, boisterous apartment complex on Sunset (Scott Fitzgerald had lived there in the late 1930s, and would die just around the corner, in Sheilah Graham’s apartment on North Hayworth, that December). Frank went to visit her. She wore a butt-twitching uniform and velvet gloves so she wouldn’t get fingerprints on the chrome door handles of the nice cars that pulled up in front. Frank smiled that smile of his and took her picture with his new camera. He put the picture in his wallet, and forgot about it. (He should have remembered.)
It was the way she had of looking thrilled—thrilled just to be in his presence—that caught him. Innocent, but knowing just what to do. He couldn’t get enough of her. The first time they woke up in his room at the Hollywood Plaza (on Vine, right across from the Brown Derby and just around the corner from the Palladium), he knew he wanted her there again that night. She moved in. Giggling when he carried her across the threshold. Nylons on the shower rod—it didn’t matter. He loved her laugh.
Her real name was Dorothy, she told him. Like the girl with the ruby slippers. He nuzzled her neck, imagining she came from a farm someplace. Dorothy Gooding. It sounded like a girl who had milked cows.
In fact her name was Dorothy Bonucelli, and she was from a broken home on the wrong side of the tracks in Rockford,