His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [150]
“I was so happy, I wanted everyone to know that we were getting married, but I kept my mouth shut,” she said.
Frank left the next day for Miami, and Lazar took Bacall to the theater. During intermission, a columnist asked her if she and Frank were going to get married. “Why don’t you telephone Frank in Florida?” she said before admitting the truth, which Swifty confirmed minutes later. That night, she saw the headlines on the early edition of the morning paper: SINATRA TO MARRY BACALL.
Not knowing how he would react, Bacall phoned Frank in Miami to tell him what had happened. He didn’t call her back for days. When he did, he said, “Why did you do it? I haven’t been able to leave my room for days—the press are everywhere. We’ll have to lay low for a while, not see each other for a while.”
That was the last Lauren Bacall ever heard from Frank Sinatra. He didn’t speak to her again for six years, and then only in rage. When reporters asked him about the marriage report, he said, “Marriage? What for? Just so I’d have to go home earlier every night? Nuts!”
That night, Ava called Frank from Spain. “I hear you called off the marriage,” she said.
“What marriage?”
“The marriage to Betty Bacall.”
“Jesus. I was never going to marry that pushy female.”
Ava gleefully related the story every time the Sinatra-Bacall affair was mentioned to her. Not so gleeful was Lauren Bacall, who wrote in her autobiography years later how devastated she was by Frank’s rejection. “To be rejected is hell, a hard thing to get over, but to be rejected publicly takes everything away from you,” she said. “But the truth also is that he behaved like a complete shit. He was too cowardly to tell the truth—that it was just too much for him, that he’d found he couldn’t handle it.”
Frank resented her book. “I think it was unfair, because there is another side to it,” he said, “but I’m not going to give it. Some things should rest.”
19
Frank’s three-year contract with the American Broadcasting Company for three million dollars in upfront cash, plus a share of the profits, was one of the most phenomenal television deals ever signed. Known in 1957 as “the third network,” ABC-TV sweetened the deal by buying stock in Frank’s motion picture production unit, Kent Productions, which gave him handsome capital gains tax advantages. The company also agreed to let him film his thirty-six half-hour shows and keep sixty percent of the residuals. With the shows on film, Frank figured they would be shown again and again, with his corporation, Hobart Productions, collecting most of the money.
“This guarantees me seven million dollars, and most of that will go into a trust fund for the children. For years, I’ve been looking to get into a position to set aside money for them, and this is the one way I can do it.”
The network gave Frank complete artistic control, allowing him to develop each show in his own way, a degree of freedom that was unheard of in television. “If I flop this time, it’ll be my own fault—and that’s the way I want it,” Frank said.
In 1952, he had signed with CBS, the biggest television contract to date, but his ratings had been so low that the show lasted barely a year. Afterward, he had blasted the industry.
“Television stinks,” he had said then. “Except, of course, if you can do a filmed show. That way, you avoid a lot of the panic and no-talent executives who get in it from merely writing an essay on fire prevention in the first place. The only time any of these bums have even been in the theater was when they bought a ticket.… My blood boils when I see the mediocrities sitting on top of the TV networks.”
Now. five years later, with his records selling in the millions and his movies (Johnny Concho, Meet Me in Las Vegas, High Society, Around the World in 80 Days) box office successes, he was the number-one star in Hollywood. His weekly series was being hailed by ABC-TV as the smash