His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [91]
“My voice was so low the other night singing ‘Ol’ Man River’ that I got down in the dirt, and who do you think I found throwing mud down there? Two Hollywood commentators! They got a great racket. All day long they lie in the sun, and when the sun goes down, they lie some more!”
The mobsters sitting ringside with Frank Costello, the Mafia owner of the Copa, roared their approval and clapped heartily, as did the rest of the nightclub audience. The reviews were mixed. “Today he may have less voice than ever before, but he has a compensating quality that considerably makes up for his vocal void,” said Variety. “That would be salesmanship.”
“Whether temporarily or otherwise, the music that used to hypnotize the bobby-soxers—whatever happened to them anyway, thank goodness?—is gone from the throat,” said the Herald-Tribune. “Vocally, there isn’t quite the same old black magic there used to be when Mr. Sinatra wrenched ‘Night and Day’ from his sapling frame and thousands swooned.… He relies on what vocal tones are operating effectively.… He uses carefully made musical arrangements during which the orchestra does the heavy work at crucial points.”
At a late supper hosted by Manie Sacks, Ava, still fuming about the snickers she had heard during his singing of “Nancy with the Laughing Face,” confronted Frank. “Did you have to sing that fucking song? It made me feel like a real fool.”
“It’s been a good-luck song for years,” he said. “I sing it in almost every big show. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Well, don’t expect me to sit out there and get laughed at every night,” she said. “Either the song goes or I go.”
Frank dropped the song, and for the next ten nights Ava attended every show. On the eleventh night, she went to Artie Shaw’s apartment for a party that she and Frank had fought bitterly about. She had gone to see Shaw perform at Bop City and then had talked to him at length about her problems with Frank, how jealous and possessive he was, how bored she was sitting around with Joe Fischetti, Frank Costello, and the rest of “the boys.” So Artie had invited them both to dinner with some of his New York “intellectual” friends, but Frank had refused to go and threatened Ava if she went without him.
“That was a horrendous evening,” recalled Artie Shaw many years later. “Frank hated me because I was with Ava. I don’t know if hate was the word … he never sang for me; he wanted to but I told him that I didn’t use boy singers. The only one I ever used was Tony Pastor, who kind of made fun of the lyrics.… There’s a lot of vindictiveness in Frank, a lot of hatred there … but he can be shamed. He was shamed once by me. I saw it. He was shamed into becoming for about maybe five minutes a semi-human.”
The shaming had occurred in New York when Frank had warned the bandleader to stop seeing Ava. Artie was not frightened.
“Are you as tough as you sound?” he asked.
“Yeah,” snarled Frank.
“Then why do you need him?” said Artie, pointing to the massive bodyguard hovering over Frank.
Frank did not reply, but he now vented his rage on Ava.
An hour after she arrived at Shaw’s apartment for the party, he called her. “Well, I just called to say good-bye,” he said.
“Where are you going, Frank? Why can’t I come too?”
“Not where I’m going, baby,” he said.
Then came the sound of a pistol shot, a pause, and then another shot.
Ava dropped the phone and went screaming from the party in a panic, Artie and his friends accompanying her as she rushed to the Hampshire House and to Frank’s suite on the eighth floor.
The producer, David O. Selznick, who was staying on the same floor, had heard