His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [92]
Columbia Records chief Manie Sacks, who had a permanent suite down the hall, had also been startled by the shots. He ran into Frank’s suite with Selznick and saw that Frank had simply shot his pistol into the mattress twice. Knowing that the police would be there quickly, he and Selznick grabbed the mattress with the two holes and carried it to Manie’s suite, then rushed Manie’s mattress back to Frank’s bed. By the time the police arrived to search Frank’s suite, there was no trace of bullets or bullet holes.
Breathlessly, Ava recounted her story to the police, but Frank, sitting up in bed in his pajamas, denied firing any shots.
“You’re dreaming,” he said. “You’re crazy.”
He said that he had called Ava to say good night and then gone directly to bed. The next thing he knew, the door had been battered down by firemen and his suite was full of people.
“I was staying there at the time,” said actor Tom Drake. “Everyone in the hotel was talking about Ava and Frank and their love affair, and now this! The corridor was full of police, firemen; you never saw anything like it.”
“He shot the bullets through the mattress to scare her,” said Artie Shaw. “Just did it to scare her. What a dumb, stupid thing to do.”
MGM insisted that Ava leave at once for Spain to start work on Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. She had postponed the trip three times to remain in New York with Frank, but the studio could no longer afford the adverse publicity resulting from the volatile romance.
Months before, Metro had decided to terminate Frank’s contract one year before its expiration, and studio lawyers, who had been negotiating terms with Sinatra’s lawyers, agreed to pay him eighty-five thousand dollars in compensation. Before the check could be written, Nancy’s lawyer, Greg Bautzer, hit the studio with a restraining order that forbade release of the money to Frank until Nancy’s separate maintenance suit was settled.
On April 27, 1950, after prolonged discussions between MGM’s publicity department and MCA, Frank’s agency, a joint statement was released announcing Frank’s departure. “As a free-lance artist, he is now free to accept unlimited, important personal appearance, radio, and television offers that have been made to him,” said the deceptive release.
Unfortunately, there were few such offers because MCA agents were no longer knocking themselves out to get Frank bookings. His relationships with David “Sonny” Werblin in MCA’s New York office and with Lew Wasserman in Hollywood had deteriorated because of his belligerent attitude.
“In those days, Sinatra had a temper, and when everybody didn’t do what he wanted, he got upset,” said the MCA agent who booked theaters. “As a result he’d say different things, ‘screw you,’ whatever. Sonny Werblin got blasted a lot and so did I. I was very close to Frank at one time, but he gave me a real bad time—real bad—and all I ever did was work for him and get him sensational deals. Frank wanted to be the top guy, and I mean the top. He wanted everybody to bow down to him, to kowtow, and not everybody would do it. So he vented his fury.
“Then Frank went to Jules Stein [chairman of the board of MCA] for a loan. Jules wouldn’t give it to him, and that tore it for Frank. He didn’t mince any words about it either. He was very unhappy and let everybody know about it. That started his big beef with Jules.”
Frank needed money. With all that he had made, he had been financially reckless. When he had signed the contract on his Palm Springs home at the close of October 1948, he had demanded that it be ready for a New Year’s Eve party. When the architect had explained that such speed would require triple shifts at exorbitant cost, he had answered, “Build it!” Now, with no movie contract and no bookings, he turned to his lawyer, Henry Jaffe, to make the deals that MCA had handled so expertly in the past. But it was hard for Jaffe to book an MCA client that MCA no longer supported. Justice Department