His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [90]
Nancy was so humiliated by reading about her husband and Ava Gardner that when Frank admitted everything, she hired a lawyer and locked him out of the house. On Valentine’s Day, 1950, she announced their separation. “Unfortunately, my married life with Frank has become most unhappy and almost unbearable,” she said. “We have therefore separated. I have requested my attorney to attempt to work out a property settlement, but I do not contemplate divorce proceedings in the foreseeable future.”
The press reaction was swift and harsh: Frank was depicted as a heel for treating his wife so shabbily, and Ava was labeled a “home wrecker.” These pronouncements came easily in an era that revered tradition and repressed references to sex. This was a time of tightly held morals, when the Catholic Church forbade divorce and remarriage under pain of excommunication. The Hays Office, Hollywood’s moral arbiter, demanded that movies show married couples wearing pajamas and sleeping in single beds. The word virgin was not mentioned on screen. The mores of the day condemned illicit romance, and Frank and Ava created such a public scandal with their love affair that they became front-page news. The Sisters of Mary and Joseph asked the students at St. Paul the Apostle School in Los Angeles to pray for Nancy, a poor woman whose husband wanted to divorce her.
Yet, when Frank returned to New York in March to open at the Copa, Ava went with him, ostensibly on her way to Europe to film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. They both stayed at the Hampshire House again, prompting a sensational headline in the Journal-American: “Stars Staying at Same Hotel.” Letters poured in vilifying Ava for her role in the break-up of Frank’s marriage. Public sentiment was such that Frank felt compelled to deny the obvious.
“The fact that Ava and I have had a few dates means nothing,” he said. “My marriage was already broken up long before Ava and I became interested enough in each other to have dates. I am separated from my wife and I don’t intend to sit at home alone. I always stay at the Hampshire House, and Ava has always stayed there too.”
Ava was so angry about the criticism that she threatened to skip Frank’s Copa opening and leave early for Europe. “Since Frank is still officially married, it would be in the worst possible taste to discuss any future plans,” she said. “One thing I’m sure of is that Frank’s plans to leave Nancy came into his life long before I ever did.”
Nervous about his first nightclub appearance in five years, Frank called Sammy Cahn and begged him to write some material for his three-week engagement. Although Frank had refused to speak to Sammy for over a year—“We had had a real falling out,” recalled Cahn. “Someone told Sinatra that at a dinner party at my house his name was, as I believe they say, taken in vain. He thought I should have slapped the offending person’s face.”—Sammy obliged by providing him with a take-off on Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” and “The Cry of the Wild Goose,” complete with coonskin cap, whip, and duck horn. Then Frank pleaded with Cahn to go to New York for his opening night. So Sammy took the Twentieth Century Limited and was there on March 28, 1950, along with Frank’s parents, Phil Silvers, Manie Sacks, and two Mafiosi, Joe Fischetti and Willie Moretti.
Opening night, Frank was so distraught that he needed a doctor to give him a mild sedative. Before he walked onstage he was shaking, pale, and sweating. His voice had been