His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [84]
“I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to help you get over your fright,” said Keller. The man grabbed the money.
At ten A.M., reasonably sure that the shooting spree would never get into the newspapers, Jack put Ava and Frank into the chartered plane and took off with them for Los Angeles. He dropped Ava at her apartment and delivered Frank, cold sober, to his wife and children. Then he returned the thirty thousand dollars to his friend at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel and called George Evans in New York.
The telephone calls went back and forth between coasts for days, with George screaming at Frank to stop seeing Ava Gardner, and Frank screaming back at him to mind his own business and slamming the phone down. But it was Keller, the original messenger of the bad news, who took the brunt of Frank’s anger.
Of all George Evans’s clients, Frank was still the biggest. Flexing his muscle, he demanded that George get rid of Keller and replace him on the West Coast. As much as George loved Frank, he refused to toss aside his friend and business partner.
“I can tell you that the soul-searching that went into that decision involved many hours of walking up and down Broadway late at night,” said George Evans’s oldest son, Phil. “My dad’s decision not to fire Jack was based on the fact that no amount of success or reflected glory from Frank was worth selling your soul for.… My father kind of looked on Frank as a sort of son and a creation of his at the same time. He was a hero-builder and in a sense a worshipper as well. He didn’t like to admit that anything would tarnish. He covered up a lot … but the drain on him during those years left some of us in the family with a sour taste … the price was very great in terms of stress, anxiety, and pressure. I’d say there were no more than two or three consecutive nights when there wasn’t a phone call of some kind—Nancy crying, or Frank in a jam, or Lana, or Ava, or somebody. Dad would get home at one or two in the morning, and then at three or four the phone would ring from California. …”
The long distance yelling between George Evans and his client accelerated until Frank, in frenzied anger, fired his press agent of nine years—and all because of Ava Gardner, the woman whose green, yellow-flecked eyes seemed to radiate a light brighter than the sun itself.
11
Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on Christmas Eve, 1922, in North Carolina, near Smithfield, in Grabtown, a squalid tobacco-farming community too tiny and unimportant to be marked on the map. Ava was the youngest of seven children of sharecropper Jonas Bailey Gardner, a lean, hard-drinking Catholic farmer, and his wife, Mary Elizabeth, a Scottish Baptist.
Even as a child, Ava was extraordinarily beautiful. Her almond-shaped eyes, high, full cheekbones, sensual mouth, long chestnut hair, and lissome body made her the prettiest girl in her high school class. Despite her beauty, she had few boyfriends because of the stern restrictions of her Bible-thumping mother.
At eighteen, Ava made her first trip out of North Carolina. She went to New York City to visit her oldest sister, Beatrice (Bappie), who was married to a photographer, Larry Tarr. Captivated by her beauty, Tarr took pictures of Ava and put one of them in his studio window, where it was seen by Barney Duhan, a young man who worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Wanting a date with the model in the photograph, Duhan called Larry Tarr’s studio, introduced himself as “Duhan from MGM,” and asked if the model would contact his office as soon as possible. Bappie told him that Ava had returned to North Carolina. “But if you like, I can send for her,” she said eagerly.
“No, no,” said Duhan. “This is just routine. But send me the pictures of her anyway and I’ll show them to Marvin Schenck, who’s in charge of talent.”
Tarr delivered twelve portraits of Ava to Metro’s New York office that afternoon but heard nothing. On Ava’s next visit to New York, Tarr called the studio to say that she was back in town. He spoke to Ben Jacobson, an MGM talent scout, who knew nothing of Duhan