His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [129]
Brooding over Ava, Frank barely weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. He did everything he could to endear himself to her, hoping to change her mind about the divorce; he called her repeatedly and sent her all his records. He even had a large coconut cake delivered by Lauren Bacall, who was going to Rome to join her husband, Humphrey Bogart, Ava’s co-star in The Barefoot Contessa.
The touching gesture was not appreciated. “She couldn’t have cared less,” said Lauren Bacall. “She wanted me to put it down on some table she indicated—not a thank-you, nothing.… Her reaction had only to do with Frank—she was clearly through with him, but it wasn’t that way on his side.”
“Betty [Bacall was born Betty Persky] got a little miffed about that cake,” recalled Verità Thompson, Bogart’s hairdresser. “She had felt responsible for her charge and had hand-carried it by taxi and limousine and several thousand miles across the Atlantic by plane to ensure its arrival in one piece. And when she finally presented it to Ava, Ava thanked her but pushed it aside and didn’t even open the box. The action was so uncharacteristic of Ava that we figured it signaled the end of her relationship with Frank.”
It was no secret that Ava had started a love affair with a Spanish bullfighter, Luis Miguel Dominguin, who, after Manolete’s death, was considered the greatest bullfighter in the world and revered in Spain as no movie star had ever been.
But Bogart kidded her about the affair. “I’ll never figure you broads out. Half the world’s female population would throw themselves at Frank’s feet, and here you are flouncing around with guys who wear capes and little ballerina slippers.” Ava arched her eyebrow and told Bogie that he was being nosy.
She had already rented a house in Madrid and was planning to go there for Christmas to be near Dominguin, but at the last minute Frank called, saying he could not get through the holidays without seeing her. Unable to stay away any longer, he flew to Spain to celebrate her birthday. After the Christmas holidays, he accompanied her back to Rome and stayed with her in her apartment.
Ava had been posing in Rome for sculptor Assen Peikow for a classic Greek statue to be used in a cemetery scene, and Frank was bewitched by the white alabaster model of her face and body. At the end of the filming, the movie company gave him the statue, which he later installed in his backyard like a shrine.
Frank returned to Hollywood, admitting that his plans for reconciliation had failed. “We are trying to work out our problems,” he said, “but there are still problems.”
Sinatra remained so tortured by Ava’s affair with the great matador that years later, when he was approached to play Manolete, he turned the part down, claiming that the American public didn’t like bullfighting. Sammy Davis, Jr., tried to persuade him otherwise, but couldn’t. “Maybe the subject brought back memories he wanted to forget,” Davis said.
Suffering bouts of insomnia and depression, Frank no longer wanted to live alone, so he moved his friend, Jule Styne, into his five-room apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. “He literally moved me in,” said the composer, who had been staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When Styne asked for his room key, the desk clerk informed him that Frank Sinatra had come to the hotel, packed all of his belongings, and moved him out. “I stood there wondering what this was all about,” said Styne. “I couldn’t understand Frank’s motives. I knew he was going through hell with Ava and perhaps he just wanted company. I was flattered, of course.”
The nights were the hardest for Frank, and he tried to fill them with dates and nightclubs and card games with the boys. “One time he called us over to play cards, and when we got there he was on the phone to his first wife, Nancy,” said one friend.