Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [87]
She couldn’t. Not yet.
But she knew it was the only way. She ached with loneliness. This wasn’t a way for a married woman to live.
And Frank, of course, was almost never alone. Everyone wanted to be near him, to touch him; and it was so strange, he couldn’t bear to be touched (especially by strangers) except on his own terms, but he needed someone near him, always, like a drug. Chance encounters arose at delightfully odd moments: in a janitor’s closet off a soundstage, for example. But the constant was his entourage—the Western Varsity. Hank was here, naturally, and Sammy Cahn and now Jule Styne, and a couple of other funny Jews Frank kept running into at poker games and prizefights, Phil Silvers and a comedy writer named Harry Crane, né Kravitsky. Stordahl was rooming in a luxury suite in the Wilshire Tower with Jimmy Van Heusen, who was frequently absent for some shadowy reason …
In fact, three days a week, Jimmy was working as a test pilot at Lockheed’s Burbank plant, flying P-38s and C-60s, under the name Edward Chester Babcock. The other four days, he was writing movie tunes at Paramount with Johnny Burke, under his professional name. No one at Lockheed knew about his other career, and nobody at the studios was wise, either. As Burke said, “Who wants to hire a guy to write a picture knowing he might get killed in a crash before he’s finished it?”
And there were plenty of crashes: wartime production was so breakneck that quality control was haphazard. Test piloting was a dangerous business. “I was at Lockheed more than two and a half years and I was scared shitless all of the time,” Jimmy later said. But he never told Sinatra.
It was Eat, Drink, and Be Merry time: the Wilshire Tower suite quickly became a twenty-four-hour free-for-all of poker, booze, and sex. The hookers paraded in and out while Cahn and Crane and Silvers sat around the card table, cracking wise, and Stordahl puffed serenely on his pipe. Once, all jaws at the table dropped when Frank walked in with his arm draped over the shoulder of none other than Marlene Dietrich. Forty-two years old, and dazzling as ever. Hello, boys, she said, in that German accent. And then, bold as brass, to Sinatra: Well, Frank? She took his hand, smiling, and they closed the bedroom door behind them. Just like that. The poker continued—but not before Sammy Cahn, ever the P.S. 147 wiseacre, stage-whispered what he’d heard about Dietrich’s sexual specialty.
Phil Silvers gave him a look. Hearing was as close as Sammy was gonna get.
Soon afterward Sinatra brought another visitor, the dark, entrancingly beautiful starlet Skitch Henderson had introduced him to at MGM in 1941. As in one of those romantic comedies, Ava Gardner and Frank kept bumping into each other around town. The funny thing was that when he brought her up to the Tower, it turned out to be for a cup of coffee only. She was a smokingly sexy kid—but she was a kid, and she had a certain dignity to her; her heels weren’t round. She appeared to be ambivalent at best about what every other girl in town was obsessed with: getting ahead at any cost. Therefore, there was no leverage, and in a funny way this was perfectly fine with Sinatra. He was content to stare at those cheekbones, those shy and haughty green eyes.
George Evans had his hands full in New York—he had other clients besides Sinatra, hard as that was to believe sometimes. So he deputized a West Coast pal, a firecracker of a young publicist named Jack Keller, to ride herd on Frank in Hollywood, a more than full-time job. The twenty-eight-year-old Keller was a character: a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, impeccably tailored former pro golfer who looked like Jackie Gleason. He had a fierce work ethic and a ferocious loyalty to his clients, both of which were good things where Frank Sinatra was concerned. After dropping by the Wilshire Tower suite once or twice, Keller quickly realized he had his work cut out for him. Some