His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [89]
This was a separation that George Evans was not around to reconcile. He had to watch the personal and professional demise of his bobby-sox idol from afar. Discussing the matter with Earl Wilson one night at the Copacabana, he said: “I make a prediction. Frank is through. A year from now, you won’t hear anything about him. He’ll be dead professionally. I’ve been around the country, looking and listening. They’re not going to see his pictures. They’re not buying his records. They don’t care for Frank Sinatra anymore. You know how much I talked to him about the girls. The public knows about the trouble with Nancy now, and the other dames, and it doesn’t like him anymore.”
“I can’t believe that,” said Earl Wilson.
“In a year, he’ll be through,” said the discarded press agent.
Temporarily free of Nancy, Frank publicly flaunted his love for Ava Gardner. Against everyone’s advice, he insisted that she accompany him to Houston, where he had accepted a two-week engagement to open the new Shamrock Hotel. “This was a major mistake,” he admitted later, “but I was so in love, I didn’t care how bad it looked having her there while I was still married.”
Following studio practice, Ava requested permission to leave Los Angeles. She had no film commitments pending, so MGM had no valid reason to deny it, but, fearing adverse publicity, the studio said no. She, too, refused to listen.
“Neither Metro nor the newspapers nor anyone else is going to run my life,” she told her sister Bappie, who drove her to the airport.
That night, George Evans got into a loud argument with a reporter while defending Frank and his illicit romance. The next morning, Thursday, January 26, 1950, the forty-eight-year-old press agent dropped dead of a heart attack. Frank was in El Paso with Jimmy Van Heusen, en route to Houston, when he got the news. He wired the Shamrock that he would be delayed because of the funeral and immediately returned to New York.
“For Frank, the sudden death of George Evans was an emotional shock that defies words,” said Jimmy Van Heusen.
“George was the only one who would stand up and slug it out with Frank,” said Budd Granoff, who had joined the Evans agency in 1948, and who became Frank’s press agent after Evans died. “Everyone else would fall away. If Frank wanted something and George thought it was wrong, he would just stand up and tell him off. Everyone else more or less capitulated quickly.… The night before George died, he had been worked up about the Ava Gardner business. ‘He’s making a terrible, terrible mistake, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ he said. He cared so much for Frank, like he was a son or something.”
Ever since Frank’s first appearance at the Paramount in January 1943, George had been his mentor, guiding his career toward success. He had provided the strong father figure that Frank had never had, combining the unbridled drive of Dolly Sinatra with the gentleness of Marty.
“George and Jack Keller covered for Frank so many times,” recalled one of Jack Keller’s relatives. “Finally, it got to a point where they’d meet the press and say to reporters, ‘Okay, we know what a son of a bitch he is and this is what he’s done, but here is what you’re going to print.’ Then George or Jack would give them a story and that’s what got printed. Both those guys spent their lives covering for Frank.”
Emotionally committed to Frank’s best interests, George had always been there to protect him from the consequences of his sexual indiscretions, his Mafia associations, his arrogance, and his temper tantrums. He had even managed to keep Frank’s marriage intact by breaking up every extramarital affair before it took hold to threaten Nancy and the children. He had failed only once—when he underestimated Frank’s passion for Ava Gardner—and that failure caused the first and final rupture between the two men.
After George Evans’s funeral, Frank flew to Houston, where Ava was waiting. They went to dinner with Jimmy Van Heusen at