His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [126]
One friend suggested that he call Ava, and said she was as miserable as Frank was. “Then why is she going to Rome to make a picture?” Frank asked. “How are we going to make up if she’s going to be so far away?” He never made the call.
A few nights later, the newspapers reported that Ava was seen dining quietly with Peter Lawford at Frascati’s in Los Angeles. Knowing that Peter and Ava had dated years before, Frank flew into a rage and called Lawford, threatening him.
“Oh, God, he was furious with me for going out with Ava,” said Peter Lawford many years later. “He screamed, ‘Do you want your legs broken, you fucking asshole? Well, you’re going to get them broken if I ever hear you’re out with Ava again. So help me, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me?’ Then he slammed the phone down. I was panicked. I mean I was really scared. Frank’s a violent guy and he’s good friends with too many guys who’d rather kill you than say hello. I didn’t want to die, so I called Jimmy Van Heusen and said, ‘Please tell him nothing happened. Please.’ Jimmy said not to worry. That Frank would get over it. He knew we’d been friends since 1945. Well, Frank got over it all right, but it took him six years!”
Out of his mind with grief over Ava, Frank flew to New York en route to a nightclub engagement at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. He wandered around Manhattan like one of the damned, filled with remorse and self-pity, unable to focus on anything but his terrible personal loss. He began frightening friends by telephoning in a gloomy voice, “Please see that the children are taken care of,” and hanging up.
On November 18, 1953, Jimmy Van Heusen, who had an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, found Frank on the floor of the elevator with his wrists slashed. Van Heusen immediately called a doctor and rushed Frank to Mt. Sinai Hospital, but not before paying the man at the front desk of his building fifty dollars to keep quiet about the incident.
The people in charge of Frank’s booking at the Chase Hotel had no idea of what had happened, but they grew more concerned by the minute when he failed to show up for rehearsal.
“We were frantic,” said the booking agent, “and we started calling all over. We called the Sands in Las Vegas; we called his home in Los Angeles; we called Palm Springs and New York, but no one could find him. Finally someone decided to call Morris Schenker, a lawyer in St. Louis who has ties to everyone, to see whether he could find out something. He called us back minutes later and said Frank would not be coming because he’d just slashed his wrists.”
Frank’s closest friend, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen, had lived through the traumas of the Ava Gardner courtship and the tumultuous marriage. Affable and easygoing, he had never crossed Frank, no matter how deplorable Frank’s behavior. He had harbored him in Palm Springs every time Frank stormed out of the house after a fight with Ava, and had spent those nights helping Frank drink his misery away.
When Van Heusen’s apartment in New York had been the scene of one of the worst rows between Ava and Frank, with both of them cursing and screaming and breaking furniture, Jimmy had laughed it off. But having recently suffered what he thought was a heart attack, Van Heusen was now trying to protect his health. The sight of his bloodied friend was more than he could take. So he finally stood up to Sinatra and told him he would end their friendship forever unless Frank promised to seek psychiatric care.
Frank agreed, and upon his return to Los Angeles he began seeing Dr. Ralph H. “Romy” Greenson, who was Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist and the brother-in-law of Milton “Mickey” Rudin, who had become Frank’s attorney when he signed with William Morris.
Frank remained in Mt. Sinai while his representatives fielded questions from the press. His agent said that Frank was “not seriously ill”; his doctor said he was suffering from “complete physical exhaustion, severe loss of weight, and a tremendous amount of emotional strain.” The slashed wrists were dismissed as “an accident with a broken