His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [94]
The Copa announced the next day that Frank had suffered a submucosal hemorrhage of the throat and was ordered by his doctor to take a two-week vacation. He canceled the remaining two days of his engagement and headed straight for Ava in Tossa Del Mar on the Mediterranean coast with a ten-thousand-dollar emerald necklace. The press followed en masse.
“I have to keep my mouth shut,” said Frank to reporters in New York. “Yes, I’ll probably see Ava, but we’ll be as well chaperoned as at a high school dance.”
“Even if he has to hire sixteen duennas,” said Jimmy Van Heusen, his traveling companion.
Upon his arrival in Spain, Frank was again besieged by reporters asking if he knew Mario Cabre. “I don’t know him, but I have heard of him,” said Frank, declining to elaborate.
That afternoon, the toreador declared his adoration of Ava to the Associated Press. “She is the woman I love with all the strength in my soul. I believe this love and sympathy are both reciprocal and mutual.”
At a dinner Ava gave for Frank that night, he threatened her about the bullfighter. “If I hear that Spanish runt has been hanging around you again, I’ll kill him and you!” he said.
“Be reasonable, Frank,” she said. “We’re in a fucking movie together, and he’s supposed to be my lover—how can he avoid being near me? Besides, I haven’t raised hell about Marilyn Maxwell, have I?”
“That’s different. We’re old friends and you know it.”
“Well, Mario and I are new friends.”
After five days of torrential rains, the bullfighter’s public declarations of love, and continual queries from reporters who kept a twenty-four-hour vigil on the couple, Frank decided that the trip to Spain to see Ava had been a catastrophe.
“We know now that because of all this publicity it was a mistake for me to come here,” he said. He left the next day for Paris, then flew to London, where British reporters were waiting at the airport. Stamping his foot on the runway, Frank lambasted the Spanish press for concocting a love triangle involving him and Ava and the bullfighter. “It’s a lie, a vicious lie, and not a word of it is true. Why should Ava be the butt of this sort of vicious gossip? Ava was given a very bad shock by this business. She has come off very badly—it’s a great shame. She’s a wonderful person, and she’s done nothing to deserve this kind of treatment.”
Frank flew to New York, where he was again besieged by reporters hungry to know about Ava’s bullfighter. “No, I didn’t run away from him,” he snapped, “and, no, he didn’t cramp my style. They’re working in a picture together, and that’s all there is to it. Why should I be worried?”
By the time he arrived in Los Angeles to see Nancy and the children, the press was waiting for him at the airport. “When I got to Spain, I figured somebody would say something about romance,” he said. “I’m not that naive. But I hadn’t counted on that bullfighter. He was an added starter they ran in at the last minute. I never did meet him. I assume that what he said was just a publicity stunt.”
Loathe to open new wounds, Frank and Nancy made an effort to be cordial and kind to each other, especially when dealing with the children, whom Frank was visiting as often as he could. Through their attorneys, though, they fought over money and wrangled about a property settlement of their community holdings, which totaled $750,000. That included their homes in Holmby Hills and Palm Springs, an office building Frank owned in Los Angeles, and the home he had bought for his parents in Hoboken, New Jersey. By June 1950, all they could agree to was conveying ownership of the Hoboken home to Dolly and Marty Sinatra. After rancorous negotiations, they both signed over their shares in the Hudson Street house, but beyond this they failed to agree