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By Root 1811 0

“It was Frank with a magnum of champagne wrapped with a ribbon. I think there were two guys with him—Jimmy Van Heusen and someone else. I was astonished to see him. He had not been invited, and he was not too gracious. He handed me the champagne and said, ‘Here ya go, Mel. Happy Birthday.’ Then he charged in and started looking for my fiancée. He had been calling Candy and had not been able to get her on the phone because we were going together. Apparently, he had a big case on her. He even went upstairs looking for her. Finally, I went to him and said, ‘Look, Frank, I don’t know why you’re here, but Candy and I are committed. We’re spoken for, so to speak, and I’d be very grateful if you’d stop running all over the house looking for her.’ We were young macho guys then, acting like two bulls locking horns over the heifer. It was pretty silly.”

Frank and his male friends made these nocturnal rounds like a street-corner gang cruising the neighborhood looking for excitement and adventure. One night he found it alone with Ava Gardner in the desert and had to call Jack Keller at three o’clock in the morning to rescue him. The press agent was sound asleep when the phone rang. As he recalled the conversation, Frank said:

“Jack, we’re in trouble.”

“How can I be in trouble when all night I have just been lying here in bed?”

“This is no time for jokes, Jack. I’m in jail. Out here in the desert. Indio, California.”

Frank told Jack that he and Ava had just “shot up the town.”

“With what?” screamed Keller.

“Oh, you know them two thirty-eights I got the permits for? I keep them in the Cadillac now because I might get held up, traveling with all this jewelry on me and all. Well, tonight me and the kid here, we got a little loaded, see, and we drove down here from Palm Springs and we thought we’d have a little fun and we shot up a few streetlights and store windows with the thirty-eights, that’s all.”

“Oh, my God,” said Jack. “Did you hit anybody?”

“Well, there was this one guy, we creased him a little bit across the stomach. But it’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

“Have you been booked at the police station? Do the newspapers know anything about it?”

“No, the chief here is a good guy. He knows who I am and all, and he ain’t doing nothing until you get down here. You better make it fast, Jack.”

Keller hung up and arranged to charter a plane in Burbank. He woke up a friend who was the resident manager of the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel and asked how much money he had in the safe. The man said he had thirty thousand dollars.

“I can’t tell you why, but I need it all,” said Keller. “I’ll give it back to you first thing in the morning.”

With thirty thousand dollars in cash, the press agent got on the chartered plane, arrived in Indio, and headed for the police station. While Frank and Ava slept in the squad room, Jack sat down with the chief, put his briefcase full of money on the desk, and said: “Okay, Chief, let’s get down to business. How much to keep this whole thing quiet?”

According to Keller, the chief figured it was worth ten thousand dollars—two thousand for the officers who had made the arrest, two thousand to repair the damage to city property, one thousand to get rid of the hospital records on the man who had been hit, and five thousand for the chief himself. Keller counted out five one-thousand-dollar bills and fifty one-hundred-dollar bills. Then he asked for the names and home addresses of all the storekeepers whose places were shot up and of the man who was hit. The chief obliged.

Between seven and nine A.M. the press agent visited all the storekeepers at their homes and offered to pay them on the spot if they would give him an estimate of their damages. All readily agreed. The man whose stomach had been creased with the bullet was more difficult. Although he did not know the name of his assailant, he felt that if he went to court, he might get a sizable judgment. He showed Jack where the bullet had gone through the front of his jacket, barely cutting the skin. He said he wasn’t hurt very much, but it certainly scared