Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [57]
Frankie! Henderson said, as they shook hands. His old chum was doing all right these days.
Sinatra smiled, not at Henderson. The glorious creature smiled back bashfully, but with a teasing hint of directness in her dark eyes. The pianist—he was doing rehearsal duty at the studio—then got to say the six words that someone had to say, sometime, but that he and he alone got to say for the first time in history on this sparkling morning: Frank Sinatra, this is Ava Gardner.
Ava Lavinia Gardner, to be exact. She was not quite nineteen, and she was from the picturesquely named hamlet of Grabtown, North Carolina, deep in tobacco-farming country. Her presence in Hollywood was a sheer fluke, the result of a mildly absurd chain of events set in motion by her traffic-stopping face. Visiting her older sister Bappie several months earlier in the big city, New York, Ava had been photographed by Bappie’s boyfriend, who ran a photo portrait studio on Fifth Avenue. The boyfriend put one of the pictures of Ava in his store window as a sample of his work. Passing the window one day, a messenger from the New York legal department of Loew’s, the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was stopped in his tracks by the photograph. He decided he would like to go out with that beautiful girl. And so the messenger called the store and inquired about the girl, saying he worked for MGM and hinting he could get her into the movies, even though he could do nothing of the sort. Bappie’s boyfriend told the messenger that the girl had gone back home to North Carolina; the messenger sighed and gave up his quest. But Bappie and her boyfriend, excited by MGM’s “interest,” and not wanting to let the matter drop, packed up the boyfriend’s best shots of Ava and hand-delivered them to Metro’s New York office. Things moved very swiftly from there.
Ava had just arrived in town that August with Bappie; the two were living together in a tiny efficiency apartment in a seamy hotel on Selma Avenue. Every morning Ava took three buses to Culver City, then disembarked to spend her day taking lessons: in walking and talking and acting. The great studio machine was nudging and prodding and poking her, trying to mold her into someone as different as possible from the barefoot, sharp-tongued country girl she really was. Both she and the studio were having a rough time of it.
In the meantime, one of Metro’s biggest stars was putting the full-court press on her. Mickey Rooney, only twenty-one but quite the rake, was crazy for Ava. In fact, Mickey Rooney wanted to marry her. Marry her. Why? Because Ava wouldn’t sleep with him. That was the ridiculous 1941 long and short of it. And truthfully, Ava Gardner wasn’t that interested in sleeping with or marrying Mickey Rooney—which made him even crazier with desire—but she had been watching him on the screen for years, and here he was, in person, right in front of her! And cute as a button, and so persistent.
Frank Sinatra knew none of this. All he knew as he shook her hand that morning—for just a second too long—was that he wanted to possess her. It was a familiar-enough feeling, and he was as confident as ever that he would. But as she released his hand, she gave him another look, slightly inquisitive this time, and something in his gut revolved a little bit. It was just the flicker of a sensation, and it confused him momentarily. He took a sip from his cardboard