His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [87]
“He really had hot nuts for Ava Gardner,” recalled Cohen years later. “There was a lot of heat, and my house in Brentwood was being watched around the clock. At the time, Sinatra calls and says, ‘I got to see you on something important.’ I says, ‘Ya know ya don’t want to come out here now, Frank. They got a twenty-four-hour detail on me.’
“But he insisted it was that important. So I said okay. Frank comes over to the house and says to me, ‘Lookit, I want you to do me this favor. I want you to tell your guy, Johnny Stompanato, to stop seeing Ava Gardner.’
“So my answer was, ‘Ya mean to tell me ya came all the way out here where they are recording everybody’s name and number that comes near this house? This is what ya call important? I don’t mix in with no guys and their broads, Frank. Why don’t ya go on home to Nancy where you belong? You ought to go back to your wife and kids.’ I talked to him like a friend. I mean, this is what a friend would say. Besides, I had troubles of my own.”
Because of Frank’s wife and three young children, his affair with Ava was conducted secretly at first. The public scandal this would have raised in 1948 could have caused MGM to drop Ava under the standard “morals clause” in her contract, which stipulated:
The artist agrees to conduct herself with due regard to public conventions and morals and agrees that she will not do or commit any act or thing that will degrade her in society, or bring her into public hatred, contempt, scorn, or ridicule, that will tend to shock, insult, or offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency, or prejudice the producer (MGM) or the motion picture industry in general.
While “the Ava business,” as Frank’s friends referred to his furtive romance, was hidden from the public in the beginning, it was known to their friends who helped them meet on a regular basis during 1948 and 1949.
“Bobby and I had a house on the beach, and so Frank and Ava would be there all the time,” recalled Betty Burns, the wife of Frank’s manager. “We would be sitting in the living room and hear them upstairs in the bedroom quarreling and arguing. Ava would scream at Frank, and he would slam the door and storm downstairs. Minutes later, we’d smell a very sweet fragrance coming from the stairs. Ava had decided she wasn’t mad anymore, and so she sprayed the stairwell with her perfume. Frank would smell it and race back up to the bedroom. Then it would be hours before he’d come back down.”
With George Evans out as his publicist, there was no one to try to stop Frank’s reckless romance. Nor was there anyone to contend with the press, which was now beginning to criticize his singing and question his appeal.
In 1949, there were no Sinatra discs among the best-selling records and most played on jukeboxes, prompting Lee Mortimer to gloat, “The Swoon is real gone (and not in jive talk).” He noted that the only Sinatra record in a list of the fifty most requested of disc jockeys was number forty-nine, suggesting that the bobby-soxers had “merely grown up and grown out of Sinatra” and that the swooning hysteria had just been “an unhealthy wartime phenomenon.”
The Downbeat poll pushed Frank out of the top spots for the first time since 1943, elevating Billy Eckstine to first place and Frankie Laine to second while Bing Crosby and Mel Tormé tied for third. Frank could only manage fifth spot. This had not happened since he had become famous. He was not among the singers in a “Best Discs of the Year,” 1949 compilation.
“To Frank Sinatra, I award a new crop of bobby-soxers,” wrote Sheilah Graham. “The old screamers are now in their sedate twenties. And without hullabaloo, Frank’s voice doesn’t seem quite so potent. Am I right?”
Frank continued recording with Columbia Records, but the critics weren’t enthusiastic. In March 1949, Downbeat said of a group of his sides recorded