Frank_ The Voice Part 25

And she was, sometimes. Then, in December, Frank and Ava flew to London, where Frank was to give a charity command performance before Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. While he was rehearsing-and yelling at his British horn section for playing too loud during the tender pa.s.sages-a burglar climbed up to the Sinatras' third-floor suite at the Hotel Was.h.i.+ngton and stole $17,000 worth of jewelry, including the diamond-and-emerald necklace Frank had taken to Ava in Spain. As if that weren't trouble enough, after Ava reconsidered her plan to sing a duet with Frank (stage fright), the press reported they'd quarreled about it. Sinatra, furious at everything and everybody, gave a lackl.u.s.ter performance. The newspapers reported yawns among the star-studded audience.

Soon after Frank and Ava relocated to Hollywood, they sat down with Sinatra's new West Coast press agent, Mack Millar, to figure out how to rehabilitate the singer's image.

Millar, an old Hollywood hand, looked his client in the eye and gave him the bad news: Frank was going to have to end his feud with the press and woo the newspapers. Aggressively. Millar told his client that a writer at the New York Post New York Post, Fern Marja, was writing a six-part series on him. Why not call her and use that fabled charm and that fabled voice of his and woo the pants off of her? Sorry, Ava.

Sinatra thought about it: Maybe humility would work. Anything was worth a try at this point. He phoned Marja and, on his nickel, gave her an hour's worth of honey. He explained, carefully and undefensively, how often he felt he'd been misquoted and mistreated by the press-but then, in the next breath, allowed that he'd sometimes mistreated them back. "I lost control of my temper and said things," he told the young reporter. "They were said under great stress and pressure. I'm honestly sorry."

While he spoke the last sentence, he made a hideous face, a face like a medieval gargoyle, for n.o.body's benefit but his own.

Marja asked, over the scratchy connection, how Frank was feeling.

He was much better. Better all the time.

And his voice?

It had been a little rocky there for a while, but it was improving, too.

And he and Ava-?

They were extremely happy.

The articles appeared in the Post Post. Fern Marja, young but n.o.body's fool, acknowledged her initial skepticism about Sinatra's insistent niceness, but then admitted he had won her over. The Post Post called the series "The Angry Voice." called the series "The Angry Voice."

Double Dynamite, with Frank billed third after Jane Russell and Groucho Marx, opened on Christmas Day. The movie had been sitting in the can for three full years while Howard Hughes tried to figure out what to do with it. There was nothing much to do with it-the picture was an out-and-out dog. But in December 1951, as RKO was divesting its theater chains and hemorrhaging money, it was time to get the thing out there and try to make a couple of dollars back.

n.o.body was buying. "Even the most ardent devotees of Frank Sinatra, Jane Russell and Groucho Marx," wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times New York Times, "will find meager Christmas cheer in 'Double Dynamite,' yesterday's arrival at the Paramount. Whatever that sizzling t.i.tle is supposed to mean, this thin little comedy is strictly a wet firecracker."

That sizzling t.i.tle, to the puzzlement of n.o.body except Bosley Crowther, referred to Jane Russell's size 38D b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a subject of endless fascination to Howard Hughes-and, to paraphrase Bob Hope, the two and only marketing gimmicks the sinking studio had for this crummy picture. (So low had Sinatra's reputation sunk, and so complete was Hughes's detestation of him, that Frank didn't even appear on the poster, which-it was a simpler time-showed Groucho's eyes popping after he got a load of Jane's chest.) The story, such as it was, concerned a meek bank clerk, Johnny Dalton-Sinatra, in his last Bashful Frankie role ever-who saves a gangster from being beaten up by rival thugs, thus earning the crook's deepest grat.i.tude. The crook, who runs a bookie joint, gives Johnny a thousand-dollar reward-and then, with a few phone calls, parlays Johnny's thousand into sixty grand. Voila-the timid little clerk now has enough money to marry his ladylove and fellow bank wage slave, the pneumatic, perpetually sneering, helium-voiced Russell. Except that his sudden wealth arouses everyone's suspicions. Groucho, as the philosophical waiter in the couple's favorite luncheonette, hijacks the picture.

It's all kind of low-grade fun for a little while. Frank is charming and natural, despite the tiresomeness of the milquetoast act, and his scenes with Groucho are pretty good, their on-set enmity notwithstanding. The most surreally delightful touch is Nestor Paiva's energetic turn as the sungla.s.ses-wearing bookie: with his bald dome and dark round lenses, he bears an eerie resemblance to 1960s photos of Sinatra's great and good friend Sam Giancana.

Then comes the world's cheesiest process shot (even Robert De Gra.s.se couldn't make this dog look good) as Frank and Groucho skip down a soundstage sidewalk with a street scene shakily projected behind them, singing "It's Only Money," the lousy would-be t.i.tle song (one of the two mediocre tunes Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne dashed off for the occasion), and your heart sinks for just how bad movies can be sometimes.

Double Dynamite fizzled, like the dud it was. fizzled, like the dud it was.

Frank kept reading. His nose was always in some tome or other, especially when he was flying (which was often). And there were a lot of good books to read in late 1951. There was John Hersey's Hiros.h.i.+ma Hiros.h.i.+ma and and The Diary of Anne Frank The Diary of Anne Frank and John Gunther's big book about the United States and Churchill's and Eisenhower's memoirs and and John Gunther's big book about the United States and Churchill's and Eisenhower's memoirs and Kon-Tiki Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl and by Thor Heyerdahl and The Caine Mutiny The Caine Mutiny. Then somebody gave him a great big doorstop of a novel called From Here to Eternity From Here to Eternity, James Jones's scathing postwar portrait of the prewar U.S. Army. Once Frank started reading it, he couldn't put it down.

Early in the novel, there was a character Frank couldn't stop thinking about. His name was Angelo Maggio, and he was a buck private from Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, "a tiny curly-headed Italian with narrow bony shoulders jutting from his unders.h.i.+rt." A fast-talking, wisecracking, no-s.h.i.+t street guy who liked to drink and play cards and c.r.a.ps and pool and cared little about Army discipline. Frank read all the Maggio parts raptly, speaking his dialogue along with him. He knew this guy. More than that. He was this guy.

The book had come out in February and immediately shot to the top of the best-seller lists. In March, Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures bought the screen rights for $85,000-a fortune in those days, especially for a novel that was critical of the Army in an era of fear and conformity. Soon cynics were calling the project "Cohn's Folly."

But from the moment Frank laid his eyes on Maggio, he was obsessed with wanting to play him. f.u.c.k Double Dynamite Double Dynamite. It was forgotten anyway. All he needed to turn his career around, Frank began to tell everyone around him over and over and over, was one good role. This was that role. (And it was better than good. As Tom Santopietro wrote in Sinatra in Hollywood: Sinatra in Hollywood: "No wonder Sinatra felt desperate to play Maggio-the character is ingratiating, complex, a bit dim-witted, vulnerable, and ultimately doomed. It was a role that had Oscar written all over it.") That he was the last person on anyone's mind to play Maggio was a mere technicality. "No wonder Sinatra felt desperate to play Maggio-the character is ingratiating, complex, a bit dim-witted, vulnerable, and ultimately doomed. It was a role that had Oscar written all over it.") That he was the last person on anyone's mind to play Maggio was a mere technicality.

30.

The Empress Club, London, December 1951. When nothing else got in the way-which was seldom-they cared deeply for each other. (photo credit 30.1) (photo credit 30.1) Ava Gardner writes in her autobiography that Frank was once again having voice troubles soon after their marriage, but she doesn't say why. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out why. In early 1952, Sinatra's matchless instrument was undergoing unusual physical and emotional stress, for a whole gamut of reasons. One of the new ones was his marriage itself.

Sammy Cahn's then wife, Gloria Franks, recalled a dinner she and Cahn had early on with Frank and Ava and the Axel Stordahls. "It was like we were sitting on cracked eggs," Franks said. "You never quite knew if it was going to be pleasant or there were going to be verbal daggers, or if she was not in a good mood. And Frank was so subservient to her. He was insane insane about that woman. I thought, 'My G.o.d, look at him.' He'd hold the door, pull the chair out, that kind of thing. I used to think, 'G.o.d, I don't remember seeing him do that with Nancy.' It was a whole other Frank. He was a different person around Ava. And she was...Ava." about that woman. I thought, 'My G.o.d, look at him.' He'd hold the door, pull the chair out, that kind of thing. I used to think, 'G.o.d, I don't remember seeing him do that with Nancy.' It was a whole other Frank. He was a different person around Ava. And she was...Ava."

It was hard work being married to Ava Gardner. It was hard work being married to Frank Sinatra, too, but there is evidence that he did the heavy lifting in the relations.h.i.+p. "Neither gave an inch, though I must say Frank worked harder on the marriage than she did," a friend of Ava's once said. "She's a very selfish girl."

Well, she was a movie star. And cla.s.sically, show-business marriages involve one high-maintenance partner, usually the better-known spouse, and one maintainer. Frank was being pushed into the latter role. G.o.d knows he could be high-handed with friends and lovers and underlings, but Ava had a unique power over him-and all the more so as his own power waned. As a foulmouthed and dominant facsimile of Dolly (certified by Dolly), she wielded the metaphorical baton. (Jimmy Van Heusen, who when out of Frank's earshot could be scathing about all things Sinatra, took to calling her "The Man.") As a s.e.xual volcano, she ruled him in bed. And to top it all off, she was paying the bills.

The combination was corrosive. Sinatra's voice was delicate in the best of circ.u.mstances, and now he was spending sleepless nights worrying about his career, taking downers and uppers, reading obsessively at From Here to Eternity From Here to Eternity, dog-earing pages, marking up the Maggio sections. He was ragged and irritable during the day, and when he snapped at Ava, she snapped right back. At a point when even getting to make love with his wife involved a lot of preliminary yelling, it was a wonder he could sing a note at all.

Yet just a week into the new year, he went into Columbia's Hollywood studio and recorded three songs in gorgeous voice and high style. Axel Stordahl arranged and conducted, and for the first time Bill Miller was sitting at the piano. The first number, Rodgers and Hart's "I Could Write a Book," marked a new artistic peak. Singing with beautiful simplicity and perfect diction, Frank sounded like the artist he was fated to become after he had crossed the valley of the shadow of death. He made a great song sound so believably brand-new (it had debuted on Broadway in Pal Joey Pal Joey in 1940) it practically glistened with dew. Then, after the forgettable "I Hear a Rhapsody" (schmaltzily written, beautifully sung), he belted out the utterly charming (and little-known) "Walkin' in the Suns.h.i.+ne," a romping, bra.s.sy, bluesy jump, growling and winking his way through in a wham-bam style that looks ahead to the best of his late-1950s collaborations with Billy May: in 1940) it practically glistened with dew. Then, after the forgettable "I Hear a Rhapsody" (schmaltzily written, beautifully sung), he belted out the utterly charming (and little-known) "Walkin' in the Suns.h.i.+ne," a romping, bra.s.sy, bluesy jump, growling and winking his way through in a wham-bam style that looks ahead to the best of his late-1950s collaborations with Billy May: Just so you know, dear, I'm gonna tell ya Your smile's my golden umbrella.

Unfortunately, the world outside the studio wasn't listening. Frank urgently needed to get something going. He was, according to his old pal, the Paramount Theater manager Bob Weitman, "knockin' on doors."

It was February; Weitman was down in Miami, getting a tan. Someone handed him a poolside phone. The voice on the line was unmistakable. Frank wanted to know when Bob was coming back. He was in trouble.

Meet Danny Wilson, which had premiered in L.A. and San Francisco in early February, was to open in New York in late March, Sinatra told Weitman; maybe it could premiere at the joint, with him singing onstage?

Weitman shook his head. It wasn't a Paramount picture.

Frank knew, but couldn't Bob make an exception this one time? It was a nice movie-it had a lot of nice songs and a pretty good story. And it'd been getting pretty good write-ups. Frank thought it, and he, could do business.

Weitman put the question to Paramount's chairman, Barney Balaban. A long silence on the phone line. Then old Balaban growled: "What are you starting up with that guy again for?"

Weitman mulled it over and decided to go ahead anyway. "Frank was a friend and we knew he had talent," he told Earl Wilson years later. "We took a chance on him for two weeks with Frank Fontaine, June Hutton and Buddy Rich."

Ava, though, had plans of her own.

Metro had loaned her to 20th Century Fox for one picture,1 an adaptation of the Hemingway short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." "Adaptation" is putting it extremely loosely. The script, as conceived by the producer Darryl F. Zanuck and the screenwriter Casey Robinson, took the downbeat, stream-of-consciousness tale of a writer dying of an infected wound in the shadow of the African mountain and turned it into a Hemingway extravaganza, replete with grafted-on characters and story elements from an adaptation of the Hemingway short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." "Adaptation" is putting it extremely loosely. The script, as conceived by the producer Darryl F. Zanuck and the screenwriter Casey Robinson, took the downbeat, stream-of-consciousness tale of a writer dying of an infected wound in the shadow of the African mountain and turned it into a Hemingway extravaganza, replete with grafted-on characters and story elements from The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." ("I sold Fox a short story, not my complete works," the author later complained.) In addition, the movie's writer-hero and Hemingway surrogate, Harry Street, played by Gregory Peck, would live, rather than die, at the end of the story. But then, that was big-studio moviemaking in the 1950s.

Legend has it that Papa Hemingway himself, who apparently had seen Ava in The Killers The Killers and liked what he'd seen, nominated her to play the love of Harry's life, "Cynthia, from Montparna.s.se, a model with green-gray eyes and legs like a colt, who lit a fire in Harry Street that could only be quenched by and liked what he'd seen, nominated her to play the love of Harry's life, "Cynthia, from Montparna.s.se, a model with green-gray eyes and legs like a colt, who lit a fire in Harry Street that could only be quenched by ...The Snows of Kilimanjaro ...The Snows of Kilimanjaro," as the hard-breathing ad copy put it. The whole Technicolor mess was shot on the Fox back lot-a gigantic cyclorama painting of snowcapped Kilimanjaro was erected on Stage 8-and not in Kenya, as some Sinatra books have reported. However, it might as well have been Africa as far as Frank was concerned: production on the movie was scheduled to run from mid-February through the third week in April, and he badly wanted his wife with him for his Paramount premiere on March 26, about which he was much more nervous than he was letting on.

At first Frank refused, explosively, to let Ava do the movie at all. She told him to f.u.c.k himself. Complicated negotiations ensued. In the end, Zanuck, Robinson, and the director, Henry King, worked out a formula by which all her scenes could be shot in ten days, freeing her to get to New York in time for Frank's big show.

It didn't work out. On her tenth day of shooting, technical problems developed during a big Spanish civil war scene, outdoors, involving hundreds of extras. Rather than go into costly overtime, King approached Ava, hat in hand, and asked: Could she possibly give him one more day of work?

Ava burst into tears. Frank had been phoning her every day from New York, worrying that she wouldn't finish shooting in time. She'd kept rea.s.suring him: Everything was going fine. What was she supposed to tell him now? Finally she worked up the courage to call Frank-who promptly blew up at her. She blew up right back. Three thousand miles apart, they couldn't even make up properly.

Later that week, in a report headlined SINATRA SCRAMBLES TO RECOVER FRIENDLY PUBLIC HE ONCE HAD, the old Hollywood hand Wood Soanes wrote that Danny Wilson Danny Wilson had flopped so badly at its San Francisco premiere that exhibitors had demoted it to the second half of a double-feature bill in Oakland. Frank's troubles were beginning to s...o...b..ll. Universal International elected not to proceed with the second film in Sinatra's two-picture deal. "And the crowning blow," Soanes wrote, "came in a decision of Music Corporation of America to withdraw as his agent." had flopped so badly at its San Francisco premiere that exhibitors had demoted it to the second half of a double-feature bill in Oakland. Frank's troubles were beginning to s...o...b..ll. Universal International elected not to proceed with the second film in Sinatra's two-picture deal. "And the crowning blow," Soanes wrote, "came in a decision of Music Corporation of America to withdraw as his agent."

Jules Stein and Lew Wa.s.serman, long irritated at Sinatra in general, and long embroiled with him in a dispute over $40,000 in back commissions the agency said he owed, finally decided to cut their losses. And not quietly: MCA took out full-page ads in Variety Variety and the and the Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Reporter to trumpet the divorce. to trumpet the divorce.

Frank was devastated. (He wouldn't speak to Wa.s.serman for years.) On the advice of his publicists, he had gone to New York ten days in advance of the Paramount premiere to try to mend fences with the press. But by this point he couldn't even manage a good entrance. Stepping off the plane, he obligingly offered to pose for pictures-and then, when Joan Blondell came down the stairs right after him, the photographers ditched him en ma.s.se. Two of them, though, paused for a moment in front of Sinatra. "f.u.c.k you," they told him in unison.

On the advice of his New York PR men, Frank agreed to suck it up. He sent a note to the National Press Photographers a.s.sociation. "I'll always be made up and ready in case you want to take any pictures of me," he wrote, rather pathetically. He got no takers. He even lowered himself to a practice he had abandoned long ago, dropping in on disc jockeys to sweet-talk them into spinning his latest record-in this case, "I Hear a Rhapsody," with "I Could Write a Book" on the flip side, from the January session.

In Sinatra's new upside-down world, all journalists were welcome. When the jazz columnist George Frazier, freelancing for Cosmopolitan Cosmopolitan, interviewed him backstage during rehearsals at the Paramount, the writer had the nerve-and the leverage at that point-to inform Frank that he might not write a completely complimentary piece. Frank's first reaction came straight from the heart: he winced, then gave Frazier a long, angry stare. Then he remembered the fix he was in. "Nodding, he became amiable again," Frazier wrote.

"Look," he said, "I won't mind if it pans me just as long as it helps me correct the things I've been doing wrong"...It was the first time I ever heard him concede that Sinatra is only human. For the first time, he seems skeptical of his own infallibility...He no longer takes the view that he is a law unto himself. His sullenness has given way to an authentic eagerness to be pleasant and cooperative.

Earl Wilson did all he could, up to and including papering the house, to try to ensure a successful Paramount premiere for Frank. "As one of his surviving and loyal friends in the press, I tried to create excitement for him," Wilson recalled.

The Paramount gave me a couple of rows of seats for VIPs whom I got out for the opening on March 26, 1952. Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Ted Lewis, Jimmy Durante and the columnists stood up in the audience and sang out greetings to Frankie, and I reported it in the papers: "Jule Styne reached for his handkerchief when Frank sang 'The Birth of the Blues.'"

Maybe he was blowing his nose. After all, a claque was just a claque, no matter how high the star wattage. The rest of the crowd, while enthusiastic, were dry-eyed. After the Times Times reviewer gave his kind word about reviewer gave his kind word about Meet Danny Wilson Meet Danny Wilson, he reflected on the "somewhat subdued" crowd, noting: "Perhaps it is the beginning of the end of an era."

A feature article in the New York World-Telegram and Sun New York World-Telegram and Sun was far less genteel. GONE ON FRANKIE IN '42; GONE IN '52, read the three-column headline. And to put a finer point on it, the subhead: "What a Difference a Decade Makes-Empty Balcony." The article was cast in the form of an open letter from the reporter Muriel Fischer. Fischer was young and ambitious, and her tone was snarky. "I saw you last night. But I didn't get 'that old feeling,'" she wrote. was far less genteel. GONE ON FRANKIE IN '42; GONE IN '52, read the three-column headline. And to put a finer point on it, the subhead: "What a Difference a Decade Makes-Empty Balcony." The article was cast in the form of an open letter from the reporter Muriel Fischer. Fischer was young and ambitious, and her tone was snarky. "I saw you last night. But I didn't get 'that old feeling,'" she wrote.

I sat in the balcony. And I felt kind of lonely. It was so empty. The usher said there were 750 seats in the second balcony-and 749 were unfilled...Later I stood outside the stage entrance. About a dozen people were waiting around. Three girls were saying "Frankie" soft and swoonlike. I asked, "How do you like Frankie?" They said, "Frankie Laine, he's wonderful." I heard a girl sighing, "I'm mad about him," so I asked her who. "Johnnie Ray," she cried. All of a sudden, Mr. Sinatra, I felt sort of old!

Johnnie Ray wasn't just that season's sensation but a game changer: a skinny, androgynous, half-deaf, sob-singing white soul singer who pounded the piano and writhed on the bench-even sometimes on the floor-while he performed. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis were in the wings. Just four months earlier, Ray had been all but unknown, but then along came "Cry," his million-selling 45 on the Columbia subsidiary Okeh. The lyrics, by the one-hit-wonder composer Churchill Kohlman, were sheer schmaltz: If your sweetheart sends a letter of goodbye It's no secret you'll feel better if you cry and Ray's vocalizing was appropriately sappy. He had a theatrical way of hanging on to syllables ("but it's on-lyy fal-se ee-motions-uh that you feel-l-l"), and something about his whole sound-that Great Plains accent (he was an Oregonian, half Native American) and keening voice, that big echo behind him-chimed with the era's taste for emotional bombast (Mario Lanza; Laine) and pointed toward a growing American predilection for countrified songs and singers such as Brenda Lee, Teresa Brewer, Patti Page, and, of course, the great Hank Williams himself. We were still a spread-out, lonely nation in those blue-highway days, and something about those high, lonesome sounds struck home in ten thousand back-roads burgs-and, maybe, served as welcome counterpoint to such urban (and ethnic) sensations as Uncle Miltie, Your Show of Shows Your Show of Shows, and Martin and Lewis, not to mention Sinatra himself.

Under the headline JOHNNIE'S GOLDEN RAYS DAZZLE MUSIC BUSINESS, Down Beat Down Beat wrote that Ray had "most certainly established himself as the phenom of the music-record business of the second half of the century." Big words-there were many phenoms still to come. But the point was made: Bing and Frank, those sensations of the century's wrote that Ray had "most certainly established himself as the phenom of the music-record business of the second half of the century." Big words-there were many phenoms still to come. But the point was made: Bing and Frank, those sensations of the century's first first half, were old news. Even Earl Wilson succ.u.mbed. "Do you folks suffer, too, from juke box jitters, or Johnny [ half, were old news. Even Earl Wilson succ.u.mbed. "Do you folks suffer, too, from juke box jitters, or Johnny [sic] Rayitis?" the columnist wrote in March. "Well, you will. They call Johnny Ray 'the Heat Ray' and he's the wildest, craziest, looniest, goofiest, weirdest singer since Frankie Swoonatra...He has this broken-hearted voice and...when he opens soon at the Copacabana, we expect to hear crying all over town, especially at the other night clubs."

With Ava in tow (she'd finally come to New York, so the fighting and making up could commence afresh), Frank attended Ray's Copa premiere in early April-more on his wife's say-so (and of course to be seen) than because he really wanted to be there. When Earl Wilson asked him what he thought of the new sensation, Frank said, "I'd like to tell you, but my girl won't let me."

His girl was behaving as singularly as ever. One night at the Paramount, Johnnie Ray returned the favor and came backstage to meet Sinatra, entourage in tow. According to eyewitnesses, Frank was gracious, introducing Ava to one and all and making amiable chitchat. Then he was called out of the room on a business matter. While he was gone, Ava climbed onto Ray's lap and began stroking his hair and cooing to him. Frank returned while she was still at it. After an awkward moment, he grabbed his unrepentant wife's arm, yanked her off the fruity upstart's lap, and hustled her out of the room.

On April 1, CBS finally pulled the plug on Sinatra's TV show. Ratings had continued to erode (introducing an act on Texaco Star Theater Texaco Star Theater, Berle smirked, "These people have never been seen on TV before-they were on the Sinatra show last week"). Ekco had dropped its sponsors.h.i.+p in early January. Since then, except for fifteen minutes of the Valentine's Day broadcast underwritten by Elgin watches, The Frank Sinatra Show The Frank Sinatra Show had been entirely sustaining, a straight cash drain to the network of $41,500 a week. Word around the industry was that CBS had taken a million-dollar hit on the program. had been entirely sustaining, a straight cash drain to the network of $41,500 a week. Word around the industry was that CBS had taken a million-dollar hit on the program.

Frank was now reduced to booking himself, and the only engagements he could sc.r.a.pe up were a couple of concerts in Hawaii. He mulled it over for about a half minute, and agreed to go. The weather in New York was cold and rainy; he could use a change of scene. He had nothing else happening.

Ava, on the other hand, had been summoned by MGM to Mexico, to shoot something called Sombrero- Sombrero-a frothy confection about three pairs of lovers, complete with c.o.c.kfights and bullfights and beauty contests.

It sounded like The Kissing Bandit The Kissing Bandit warmed over, Frank told her. Why not come to Hawaii? He could do a little work, then they could relax. warmed over, Frank told her. Why not come to Hawaii? He could do a little work, then they could relax.

She smiled mischievously.

Ava (who these days was signing autographs "Ava Sinatra") wired MGM's vice president Eddie Mannix that a vacation trip with her husband unfortunately prevented her from being able to report, et cetera-and Mannix wired her right back, expressly forbidding her to go to Hawaii.

Three days later, in Honolulu, Ava got another wire from Mannix's office, informing her that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had sent Yvonne De Carlo to Mexico in her stead, and that Miss Gardner was now officially on suspension. Stop. All further salary and benefits were to be withheld. Stop.

She flipped the telegram into the wastebasket. They would come crawling back, she knew it.

Frank winked at her. But in truth, he was afraid. He was broke-and now she had nothing coming in, either. The chicken feed he was getting paid in Hawaii wouldn't take them very far.

The weather on Kauai mirrored his mood: heavy rain on a Sunday afternoon. Ava was back at the hotel in Honolulu, and Frank was playing a county fair in a tent. A leaky tent.

He pulled aside a flap and peered out at the audience. It was just a couple hundred red-faced tourists and hicks in aloha s.h.i.+rts and jeans and muumuus. Jesus Christ. The rain was drumming on the canvas, dripping on the ground. There was no orchestra, just an upright piano on a wooden platform. He closed the flap and looked at Bill Miller sitting on a folding chair, lean as a spider and pale as death-in Hawaii!-and sipping a cup of tea. Miller raised his eyebrows. Sinatra shook his head. Soon he'd be playing revival meetings.

Miller's thin lips formed into something like a smile.

Suddenly two brown-skinned girls in gra.s.s skirts came in, carrying flowered garlands, beaming. They dropped the leis over Frank's head, one by one, giggling, covering his cheeks with little kisses, and even as he grinned, his eyes grew moist.

Frank turned to Miller. Should they do it?

Miller nodded and rose. Frank pulled the canvas aside and walked out onto the little stage, the garlands around his neck. The small crowd went nuts the second they saw him, clapping over their heads, whistling, stamping the ground. For a minute you couldn't even hear the rain on the tent. Sinatra was still smiling, the first time he'd been happy in weeks. He sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his legs, and said: "What do you want to hear?"

On the plane back from Hawaii (he and Ava had quarreled, and she'd flown back ahead of him) he sat with his dog-eared copy of From Here to Eternity From Here to Eternity on his lap, rereading for the tenth time all the Maggio sections-the scenes with the bugler Prewitt, wh.o.r.ehouse scenes, drunk scenes, the fatal fight with Fatso-and marking them up in pencil. After he landed, he began sending telegrams: to Harry Cohn; to the director the Columbia chief had chosen for on his lap, rereading for the tenth time all the Maggio sections-the scenes with the bugler Prewitt, wh.o.r.ehouse scenes, drunk scenes, the fatal fight with Fatso-and marking them up in pencil. After he landed, he began sending telegrams: to Harry Cohn; to the director the Columbia chief had chosen for Eternity Eternity, Fred Zinnemann; to the producer, Buddy Adler; to the screenwriter, Daniel Taradash. One wire a week per man, every week, beseeching, cajoling, joking, but always coming straight to the point: he was the only man who could play this role. He signed every telegram "Maggio."

One night in early June, Sinatra recorded five songs at the Columbia studios in Hollywood. (Three songs per session, the maximum before the musicians went into overtime, was the norm.) It was Frank's third recording date of only four that year, and the last on the West Coast that he would do for the label. Mitch Miller had flown out for the occasion.

Columbia was about to announce that it was not going to renew Frank's contract. He hadn't come close to making back the more than $100,000 Manie Sacks had advanced him to pay his taxes. Miller was looking for just one last hit from Sinatra to slow the flow of red ink, and he and Sinatra were on the coolest possible terms.

There were any number of bones of contention, not least of them the fact that Frank didn't want Mitch around when he was recording. The headstrong executive, as brilliant and domineering in his own way as Sinatra, tended to march in and take over all aspects of a session, even the recording engineer's role of manning the dials in the control room. "Frank didn't want you turning dials," recalled the drummer Johnny Blowers.

But Mitch did [turn them], and then all of a sudden one day Frank had as much as he could stand. Quietly, he looked in the control room, pointed his finger, and said, "Mitch-out." When Mitch didn't move, Sinatra turned to Hank Sanicola. "Henry, move him." To Mitch, he said, "Don't you ever come in the studio when I'm recording again."

Now Mitch was back. And while Frank had decided to make the best of a bad situation and go ahead with the session, Miller was bent on showing him who was boss. Columbia's West Coast A&R man Paul Weston, who was nominally producing, stood aside and let Miller take over.

One of the songs Mitch had high hopes for-and let us remember that Sinatra had the right of refusal-was a tw.a.n.gy piece of nonsense called "Tennessee Newsboy." To give the tune the right country-and-western-flavored sound, Miller had hired a steel guitar player named Wesley "Speedy" West, who, as Weston recalled, "was known for making the guitar sound like a chicken. Frank sang the vocal, and Mitch rushed out into the studio, and everybody thought he was going to congratulate Frank for getting through, because he did it well. Instead, he rushed right past Frank, and embraced Speedy West, because he'd made a good chicken noise on the guitar. Frank was disgusted."

Nothing Frank recorded that night became a hit, but "The Birth of the Blues," orchestrated by the clarinetist, saxophonist, and arranger Heinie Beau, was every bit as bra.s.sy as January's "Walkin' in the Suns.h.i.+ne," and much tougher. Sinatra's singing had a forward-looking, microphone-cord-snapping authority, the same kind of authority he would wield in Vegas ten years later. And his little vocal snarl at the end was certainly directed at the goateed tormentor behind the control-room gla.s.s.

He was still booking himself, scrounging whatever gigs he could, running around the map. Meanwhile, Ava was sitting at home, nursing a grudge. "Today is our seventh anniversary," she told Modern Screen Modern Screen that spring. "Seven that spring. "Seven months months. You want to see your husband, and where is he? Playing the Chez Paree in Chicago! Then he's. .h.i.tting St. Louis...it's rough."

In late May, despite feeling lousy, she'd done her n.o.ble-wife bit by attending Frank's opening at the Cocoanut Grove in L.A.-and then he went and ignited their usual tinderbox by winking at some broad in the audience. Afterward, having drunk too much for a change, they started going at it, then he gave her a hard slap that sent her reeling. She tripped over a table and landed on the floor, and suddenly she was bleeding.

An ambulance rushed her to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where Dr. Leon Krohn, a gynecologist and friend of Frank's, discovered that Ava had suffered a miscarriage. She honestly hadn't known she was pregnant-or perhaps she'd just tried to pretend she didn't know.

When the Hollywood columnist Harrison Carroll interviewed her a week later, she was still hurting-and still mad. Would Ava accompany Frank to his engagement at the Chez Paree in Chicago? "I don't know," she replied coldly. "It will depend on how I feel."

It wasn't just Frank's anger, and the lost pregnancy, that ate at her; there was also her continued tenancy in MGM purgatory.

This she tried to brazen out. Carroll wrote: Under present conditions, Ava isn't anxious to get off suspension. "I believe," she says, "that the studio has given me a series of bad parts and has showed a lack of interest in my career."