His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [149]
One writer was threatened. Movie actress Gloria Rhoads wrote a book involving Frank that she submitted to him for approval before publishing.
“The book wasn’t intended to embarrass Mr. Sinatra,” she said, “but evidently they thought it was. When I brought it to them to get Mr. Sinatra’s approval, one of his closest advisors told me: ‘If you pursue this, you will never work another day in Hollywood. We are very powerful, and we don’t hesitate to use this power. We can call up any top studio and tell them not to use you, and they will not.’ And I haven’t worked a day since then.”
Zealously guarding his privacy, Sinatra built a wall of secrecy around the women in his life. He was humiliated when his affair with Shirley Van Dyke became public in 1957 after the thirty-two-year-old film actress took an overdose of sleeping pills. Recovering in General Hospital after being revived by police, she said that she had known Frank for fourteen years. “I’ve dated him on and off since I met him,” she said.
Frank admitted that he had obtained bit movie parts for her since she came to Hollywood, but he refused to comment on the contents of her suicide note, which said, “The one I’ve really loved, Frank Sinatra, you’ve done me wrong. You’re so big and I’m so small.”
During 1957, Frank was being seen with Lauren Bacall, escorting her to premieres, dinner parties, and weekends in Palm Springs.
“Frank and I had become a steady pair,” she said. “We flew to Las Vegas for The Joker Is Wild opening—he took me to the Pal Joey opening in town—at all his small dinner parties, I was the hostess. People were watching with interest. It seemed to everyone—to his friends, to mine—that we were crazy about each other, that we were a great pair; that it wouldn’t last; that Frank would never be able to remain constantly devoted, monogamous—yet that maybe with me, he would.”
Bacall galloped toward marriage while Frank tried to rein her in, calling friends and asking them to get him out of the relationship. One night, Jule Styne invited them for a quiet dinner.
“Well … you know … going with Betty … I’d like to make it more than a quiet dinner,” said Frank. “I’d like to have someone else talking, or else it gets too serious between her and me.”
To please Frank, Jule invited Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor. And to please Mike, he invited Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds because they were having marital troubles.
“So there we were at the Beachcomber’s,” said Jule Styne. “First there was a great confrontation between Sinatra and Bacall. In the middle of it, my girl turns to Frank and says, ‘You’d be lucky to marry her.’ Well, that’s the last thing Frank wants to hear, and I give my girl a nudge, but immediately Frank hates me and my date. Next thing, there’s a big hassle between Eddie and Debbie, and they’re carrying on across the table from each other. And Mike, trying to settle it down, says, ‘Come on, Debbie, Eddie’s a nice kid.’ In the meantime, Liz is irritated because she’s being ignored and sitting in the middle of this battlefield, and she tells Mike to mix out. Mike turns to me in a stage whisper and says, ‘Thanks, Jule, this is a wonderful idea. We ought to make it a regular weekly event.’ ”
It was months of what Bacall described as an “erratic” courtship. Frank would be “wildly attentive” one minute, and sullen the next. “He’d had so many scars from so many past lives—was so embittered by his failure with Ava—he was not about to take anything from a woman,” she said. “ ‘Don’t tell me—suggest.’ God knows how many times I heard that. But I didn’t know how to suggest.”
Deeply in love, she wanted nothing more than a wedding ring from Frank, but he vacillated until the evening of March 11, 1958, fourteen months after Bogart’s death, when he finally proposed.
“I must have hesitated for at least thirty seconds,” she said later.
That evening, they went to the Imperial Gardens on Sunset Boulevard to celebrate with Swifty