His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [86]
By the time the couple met again and spent a drunken evening together shooting up the streets of Indio, two combustibles had ignited, throwing off sparks that would singe everyone close to them. Frank was as much illusion and fantasy as the Great Gatsby, and Ava was as infantile and intoxicating as Daisy. Yet both belonged more to the aggressive world of Ernest Hemingway than to the sensitive realm of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Frank shared the Hemingway creed of machismo and the exaggerated sense of maleness, while Ava personified the sexual abandon of Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. Both espoused the Hemingway creed that aficion (passion) justified the expenditure of the self in public. Their tumultuous life together seemed to celebrate the “fiesta of life”—Hemingway’s phrase for those “who give each day the quality of a festival and who when they have passed and taken the nourishment they need, leave everything dead.”
Each must have seen a mirror image in the other, for the similarities between Ava and Frank were astounding. Both were sleek and catlike despite gargantuan appetites. Both were insecure about their lack of education; Frank had had only forty-seven days of high school before he was expelled, and Ava, although a high school graduate with one year of business school, still felt intellectually inadequate. Before marrying Artie Shaw, the only book she’d ever read was Gone with the Wind.
“You don’t know what it’s like to know you’re uneducated,” she said, “to be afraid to talk to people because you’re afraid that even the questions you ask will be stupid.”
Both Ava and Frank smoked cigarettes, drank hard liquor, cursed profanely, and worshiped F.D.R. Both loved blood sports; his was boxing, hers bullfighting.
Each rose to the top of show business. Frank did it with a voice of bedroom honey, Ava with alabaster beauty.
Both were nocturnal animals who thrived on partying well into the morning. Ava, who devoured movie magazines, told a reporter in 1948: “Deep down, I’m pretty superficial.” In Frank, she found her temperamental double. Both of them seemed to crave action, excitement, and adventure—to be constantly in motion. Each seemed to have a savage dark side filled with a violent temper, mercurial moods, and raw jealousies.
“I’m possessive and jealous, and so is Frank,” said Ava, trying to explain their cataclysmic fights. “He has a temper that bursts into flames, while my temper burns inside for hours. He never finished an argument. He’d just get up and walk away, leaving me frustrated and furious.”
Their jealousies were intense and their retaliations were swift, sometimes cruel. One night at a club opening, Ava thought that Frank was singing to Marilyn Maxwell and stormed out. Then Frank discovered that Howard Hughes, one of Ava’s previous lovers, was having him followed.
“We had one of our worst fights over that,” recalled Ava many years later. “I had a rather valuable gold bracelet that Howard had given me. I got so mad during the argument that in order to prove to Frank that Howard meant nothing to me, I grabbed this bracelet and hurled it out of the window of the Hampshire House. I never got it back. I hope some lucky girl picked it up and sold it for what it was worth, which was quite a lot.”
There was one striking difference between them: Ava was frighteningly insecure. Even after she became an international star, she remained full of misgivings. “You know I can’t act worth a shit,” she’d say when complimented on a performance. Frank, on the other hand, possessed confidence bordering on arrogance. Firmly believing that he was the best there was, he refused to be intimidated by competition. “I can sing that son of a bitch off the stage any day of the week,” he’d say about his rivals.
Despite his own married status, Frank became so smitten with Ava that he didn’t want her to see anyone else. But Ava, angry that he was taking