His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [130]
“By the time we got the game started, he didn’t even want to play anymore. He went into the den, opened a bottle, and started drinking alone. Okay. So we keep the game going awhile, and then Sammy Cahn gets up and he goes in to try to get Frank to join us. So what does he see?
“There’s Frank drinking a toast to a picture of Ava with a tear running down his face. So Sammy comes back and we start playing again. All of a sudden, we hear a crash. We all get up and run into the den, and there’s Frank. He had taken the picture of Ava, frame and all, and smashed it. Then he had picked up the picture, ripped it into little pieces, and thrown it on the floor. So we tell him, ‘Come on, Frank, you’ve got to forget about all that. Come on and play some cards with us.’ He says, ‘I’m through with her. I never want to see her again. I’m all right. I’ve just been drinking too much.’
“So we go back to the game, and a little while later Sammy goes back to Frank, and there he is on his hands and knees picking up the torn pieces of the picture and trying to put it back together again. Well, he gets all the pieces together except the one for the nose. He becomes frantic looking for it, and we all get down on our hands and knees and try to help him.
“All of a sudden, the doorbell rings. It’s a delivery boy with more liquor. So Frank goes to the back door to let him in, but when he opens it, the missing piece flutters out. Well, Frank is so happy, he takes off his gold wrist watch and gives it to the delivery boy.”
Despite his regular trips to the psychiatrist, Frank’s depression over Ava seemed to deepen. Some friends felt that he enjoyed wallowing in his misery.
“I come home at night and the apartment is all dark,” said Jule Styne. “I yell ‘Frank!’ and he doesn’t answer. I walk into the living room, and it’s like a funeral parlor. There are three pictures of Ava in the room, and the only lights are three dim ones on the pictures. Sitting in front of them is Frank with a bottle of brandy. I say to him, ‘Frank, pull yourself together.’ And he says, ‘Go away. Leave me alone.’ Then all night he paces up and down and says, ‘I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep.’ At four o’clock in the morning, I hear him calling someone on the telephone. It’s his first wife, Nancy. His voice is soft and quiet, and I hear him say, ‘You’re the only one who understands me.’ Then he paces up and down some more and maybe he reads, and he doesn’t fall asleep until the sun’s up. Big deal. You can have it.”
Everywhere Jule went, people asked what it was like living with Frank Sinatra; Jule told them in excruciating detail. Soon Jule’s stories of Frank’s drunken crying jags over Ava, his insomnia, his truculent depressions, and his late-night calls to Nancy got back to Frank. Eight months after Jule had been moved in, he came home to find a note from his host: “I’d appreciate it if you’d move.” He received no further explanation, no apology, no good-bye. So he packed his bags and returned to the Beverly Hills Hotel, wondering what he had done.
“I was told to leave in no uncertain terms,” he said, figuring the reason was Frank’s anger that Styne’s best-selling song, “Three Coins in the Fountain,” which he wrote with Sammy Cahn, had been given to another firm for publication and not to Sinatra’s firm, the Barton Music Corporation. Ironically, the song that Frank sang in the movie became a hit for the Four Aces and not for Frank.
“Why didn’t he get angry with Sammy Cahn too? It was Sammy’s song as much as it was mine,” said Jule.
Frank did not speak to Jule again for five years, and it took Jule that long to figure out that he had been kicked out because of the personal stories he told about Frank’s anguish and grief over Ava. Years later, he admitted that Frank’s request for him to leave was justified.
Ava did not apply for her divorce until 1954, when she established residency in Nevada, and even then she did