His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [88]
That same month his movie Take Me Out to the Ball Game was released to a tepid review from Bosley Crowther in The New York Times: “Don’t be surprised if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.” Time magazine was similarly unimpressed: “It involves Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in a whirl of songs and dances that are easy to forget.”
In May, Frank was dropped from Your Hit Parade; in August, Downbeat panned his new album, Frankly Sentimental: “Expertly done but Sinatra could never have become a name on this.… For all his talent, it very seldom comes to life.” By December, the reviews were disheartening. “ ‘Lost in the Stars’ seems pitched too low for Sinatra—he has trouble making the notes of ‘dim’ and ‘him,’ nor is he able to make the rather complex lyric hang together. On the simple ‘Old Master Painter,’ he fares better. A hit song … though Sinatra’s is not the best record.” By the time On the Town was released in December 1949, MGM had changed the billing, making Gene Kelly first and Frank second.
Having heard that his days at MGM were numbered, Frank had tried to get himself lent to Columbia Pictures for the part of Nick “Pretty Boy” Romano in Knock on Any Door. After reading the Willard Motley novel, Frank identified with Nick, the young slum kid on trial for murder. He approached Anita Colby, the former model who was working as an executive assistant to David Selznick.
“He asked me to call David to give him the role,” she recalled. “He said that he was perfect for the part because he had grown up on the tough streets of New Jersey. I said that the part needed a younger man. Frank was thirty-four at the time, but he said, ‘I look younger,’ and he did, too. He said, ‘That’s my life. Everybody in my class either went to the electric chair or was hung. If I hadn’t had a voice, I’d have been right along with the rest of them.’ I talked to Selznick about Frank for the role, but David felt that he was just too old. The part went to John Derek instead.”
As concerned as Frank was about his career, he was also passionately, wildly, and defiantly in love with Ava Gardner. In December 1949, he took her to New York with him while he did his NBC radio show, Light Up Time, with opera star Dorothy Kirsten. He wanted to introduce Ava to his parents.
Although Frank was still married, Dolly Sinatra no longer felt any loyalty toward her daughter-in-law. She accused Nancy of putting on Hollywood airs and thought Nancy was the reason Dolly did not see as much of Frank and her grandchildren as she wanted.
Frank and Ava stayed in Manie Sacks’s suite at the Hampshire House, and they went to the premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes accompanied by another couple to camouflage their being together in public. Four days later, Jack Entratter, the manager of the Copa, gave Frank a thirty-fourth birthday party, to which he brought Ava. The next month, when Nancy refused to give him a divorce, he walked out on her.
“Frank has left home, but he’s done it before and I suppose he’ll do it again,” Nancy told the press. “I’m not calling it any kind of a marital breakup. He will come home. I’m not even calling it a separation. I’ve got something that is much too precious and fine to give up. It’s unfortunate that Frank is who he is. If he wasn’t a famous singer, known to all the world, we could have a quarrel just like any other normal married couple and no one would think anything of it.”
Willie Moretti, Frank’s padrone in Hasbrouck Heights, was shocked to read the news. While his Mafia sensibilities condoned murder, prostitution, and extortion, he prided himself on being a good family man, albeit one who suffered from syphillis. He revered his mother and respected his wife and children, holding the home as sanctified; he expected the same of Frank. He telegraphed him immediately, saying: “I am very much surprised what I have been reading in the newspapers between you and your darling wife.