Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [93]
Still, it wasn’t just the money. He was now officially with the studio that had “more stars than in the heavens.”1 Back on the Coast in April from Frank junior’s christening, he attended a party given by Mayer for the twenty-six-year-old Henry Ford II, freshly mustered out of the Navy and soon to take over the family business. (The record doesn’t show whether young Ford agreed with his grandpa Henry’s notorious anti-Semitic writings, but Mayer was never one to scruple where Americanism was concerned.) No doubt the event was a crashing bore except for the presence of several of the studio’s loveliest, their morals clauses all atwitter at the sight of Frankie, and one other interesting party: a very handsome, quite funny, ever so slightly world-weary twenty-year-old English contract player named Peter Sydney Ernest Aylen Lawford.
Peter Lawford liked to give an impression of charming superficiality, but Sinatra was intuitive enough to see at once that like him, the young actor was a complex and layered personality and, also like him, carried scars both visible and unseen. For one thing, Lawford had a slightly deformed right arm, the result of a childhood collision with a glass door; ironically enough, the deformity was as much a source of his success as his good looks and suave manner, for it had kept him out of military service. Metro was currently keeping him very busy shooting war movies, in which he was a natural to play the sensitive young English pilot or Tommy Atkins, or even, in 1942’s A Yank at Eton, a bullying young snob, opposite Ava Gardner’s husband, Mickey Rooney. Mr. Mayer loved Lawford, though he was less fond of the young actor’s eccentric stage mother, Lady May Bunny, who had a title but not a farthing, and who had tried (and failed) to prevail on Mayer to pay her a salary as her son’s assistant. Lady May, young Lawford would reveal at the drop of a hat, had dressed him in girl’s clothing until age eleven.2
On the surface, Sinatra and Lawford couldn’t have been more different, but they had a natural affinity. Both had overbearing mothers; both had minor physical deformities. Both were beguiling and sexually voracious. Each had qualities the other envied.
Lawford—whose status consciousness as a Brit on the low end of the Hollywood pecking order was acute—was fully aware of Sinatra’s status. And Sinatra seemed aware of everything. The singer’s wide blue eyes surveyed the whole crowded room and took in everything at once—Greer Garson’s lovely posterior (she was forty, for Christ’s sake); the sonorous Louie B.’s awareness of same, even as he chatted up the moonfaced young Ford.
But the singer, for all his ability to snap his fingers and order up any woman in the room (the young Brit saw them gazing at him as if their knickers were already halfway down their thighs), saw that Lawford had something even Frank could never have—that six-foot height, those impossibly handsome good looks.
Frank regarded Lawford and shook his head. If he looked like that, he’d be—
Lawford’s eyes crinkled. Dick Haymes?
The singer bent double at the waist, laughing hard. Then he straightened up and pointed at Lawford in a way that the young Englishman had always been taught was rude. Hey, Chauncey here was all right.
On the golf course I’m under par,
Metro-Goldwyn have asked me to star.
They arrived on June 1 at the Union Pacific station in Pasadena, Nancy and four-year-old Little Nancy and the baby, along with Nancy’s twenty-one-year-old sister, Constante—known as Tina—whom she’d brought along for company, and also to fill in on official Frank Sinatra letter-writing duty while Nancy tended to the kids. Mike and Jennie Barbato, as well as their four other daughters, along with husbands, would soon follow. A whole cockeyed caravan, and they had to be put up somewhere while the new house