His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [58]
The New Yorker faulted the movie as “not a particularly engaging film,” but said Frank, as the star, “comes out fine. He has some acting to do, and he does it.”
In Hollywood, however, the critics swooned. The Los Angeles Examiner said, “It’s hard to dislike a guy who seems so friendly, simple, and natural … and Frankie seems that way on the screen because that’s the way he is.”
The Hollywood Reporter agreed: “The cinema captures an innate shyness in the singer who has uniquely become an idol of the airlanes and the bobby-sox trade.… People who have never understood his appeal to swooning fans, have even resented him, will have no trouble in buying the guy they meet on the screen here.”
The Los Angeles Times said, “The crooner certainly doesn’t fulfill the cinema’s traditional idea of a romantic figure, which may be a break for him eventually. He plays himself in Higher and Higher, appears more at ease than we expected, and should find a place as a film personality with careful choice of subjects. Crosby did, didn’t he?”
Frank stayed in Hollywood with his entourage and celebrated his new stardom. Most of them were without their wives and were gamboling like kids away from home for the first time—going to the fights, to the track, to Palm Springs, to Las Vegas, and to all of Frank’s performances. On the weekend, they headed for Beverly Hills High School, where they had formed a Softball team called The Swooners. Regulars included Frank, Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne, Hank Sanicola, actors Anthony Quinn and Barry Sullivan, and comedy writer Harry Crane. The cheerleaders were Virginia Mayo, Marilyn Maxwell, Lana Turner, and Ava Gardner, all wearing Swooner T-shirts.
Frank went home in March but stayed only a few weeks before returning to Hollywood to start work on Anchors Aweigh with Gene Kelly at MGM. He had told Nancy that he no longer wanted to live in Hasbrouck Heights; he loved the California sunshine, and after his good reviews he felt that his life was now in Hollywood. He wanted to be a movie star like Bing Crosby. He wanted to move to the West Coast and so did Nancy, but she was afraid to leave her family in New Jersey. Frank easily persuaded her with the promise of driving lessons and a new Cadillac. A few weeks later he bought Mary Astor’s rambling estate in the Toluca Lake area of the San Fernando Valley, sight unseen.
Frank was a movie star now. But Nancy was still a little Italian housewife who was incredulous that her husband would be making more than one million dollars by the end of the year. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Only millionaires made millions. All I could think of was the time six years ago when I had spaghetti without meat sauce because meat sauce was more expensive. And now Frank has made a million in a year!”
Nancy moved with the children to California and took her five married sisters with her. She even moved her sister, Tina, into the new house to act as her secretary and answer fan mail. Frank’s mother was furious about all the Barbato girls going to California, but Nancy no longer cared what Dolly thought. The two women had long ceased to be allies. Nancy was delighted to be putting twenty-five hundred miles between herself and her mother-in-law.
“Nancy never liked Hoboken people,” said Marion Brush Schreiber, “and when she came back from California for a visit, she acted real hoity-toity, saying, “Oh, we’re very close to Lana’ and ‘We see Lana all the time.’ That kind of thing. It made Dolly want to kill her. You’d write a letter to Frank, and one of Nancy’s sisters, Julie or Tina, would send you a reply. A nice letter, but it wasn’t from Frank. That drove all of us crazy.”
But Nancy was not to blame. Her life had changed so radically that she couldn’t adjust to the glory and glamour of her husband. He regularly flew back and forth across the country for singing engagements