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By Root 1965 0

with him. He said he wanted to cook pasta for me. In his house, there was an icon to Ava—a little painting of her on the wall going up the stairs with a candle underneath that he lit every day. It was a shrine to her. He talked about her all the time and how she had walked out on him and how he had lost his voice. He said he was so depressed that he shouldn’t go out of the house during the day because he didn’t want anyone to see him. He kept talking about the pain he felt at being rejected, and the terrible humiliation. I’ll never forget it.”

* * *

As if to get even, Frank seemed to need to humiliate others, women especially.

“He’s a little twisted sexually,” said Jacqueline Park, an actress who later became the mistress of Jack Warner. “There are a lot of odds and ends in his sex life. He loved call girls for orgies and he liked to see women in bed for kicks, but not all the time.… I didn’t see him again because he wanted me to go to bed with another woman.… There were a lot of women who fell in love with Frank but he’d reject them and throw them over. There’s a monster in him who wants to screw the world before it screws him—hurt people before they hurt him. Then he feels guilty about being so ugly, and that guilt makes him a Mr. Nice Guy and so he does favors for some of the girls he’s used or rejected. When Joi Lansing, who was a regular bedmate of Frank’s for years, was dying of leukemia, he paid for all of her hospital bills.”

Judy Garland experienced the same type of treatment. After her marriage to director Vincente Minnelli broke up, she fell in love with Frank and confided to Joan Blondell that he would be her next husband. One night, she invited him to her house for an intimate dinner, and he accepted. She set the table beautifully with silver for two, but Frank never showed up and never called to explain why. Humiliated, she called Blondell in tears and begged her to come over to keep her company. “Oh, please, come,” she said. “I’m alone in this big place I’ve taken. …” Joan went over and, after a few drinks, Judy told her that Frank had stood her up. A few months later, when Judy entered the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for “exhaustion,” Frank bombarded her with telephone calls and sent daily gifts of flowers, perfume, lingerie, and records. One night, he flew a planeload of mutual friends to Boston, and with the hospital’s permission, took Judy out for the evening.

Although Frank dated other women, his secret relationship with Lauren Bacall was already being whispered about among their close friends. Noel Coward, who attended Frank’s New Year’s party in Palm Springs, commented on her possessiveness in his diary January 1, 1956, saying, “Frankie is enchanting as usual and, as usual, he has a ‘broad’ installed with whom he, as well as everyone else, is bored stiff. She is blond, cute, and determined, but I fear her determination will avail her very little, with Betty Bacall on the warpath.”

As the party ended, Frank asked the Bogarts to stay on. Lauren Bacall wanted to, but her husband insisted they leave. In the car going home she said, “We should have stayed.”

Her husband disagreed. “No, we shouldn’t,” he said. “You must always remember we have a life of our own that has nothing to do with Frank. He chose to live the way he’s living—alone. It’s too bad if he’s lonely, but that’s his choice. We have our own road to travel, never forget that—we can’t live his life.”

There was no one in Hollywood whom Frank admired more than Humphrey Bogart. He worshiped the cynical, outspoken fifty-six-year-old actor as an artist, and looked up to him as a kind of mentor, continually asking him what books to read, knowing that Bogart had a thorough grounding in the classics. Bogart had attended Trinity and Andover in preparation for Yale, but had joined the navy instead of going to college. He was everything Frank wanted to be—educated, sophisticated, respected. On screen, Bogie was the ultimate tough guy and in person he had an intractable sense of self.

Bogart, in turn, was amused by Frank’s mercurial temperament.