Frank_ The Voice Part 17

The account is chilling-the gruff, ultimately unsympathetic bodyguard; the frightened children; the distraught mother. The ever less present father. Frank himself is little more than a cipher in the episode: a voice on the radio...a picture in the newspaper a voice on the radio...a picture in the newspaper, as Nancy had recalled of her earliest childhood. Nothing had changed.

I guess you'd better go with them.

Why couldn't they all just have stayed? Was it pity that made him send them away, or impatience-or did he not really want them there in the first place?

What was the reason for Big Nancy's tears?

And what is it that makes a scared child a spoiled brat?

The trail leads straight to the governess with the d.i.c.kensian name, Georgie Hardwick. She had left the Crosby household for a very specific reason. "When the Crosby kids talk about being punished and beaten, it was Georgie who did most of it, not Bing," Crosby's biographer Gary Giddins said. Bing's son Gary Crosby wrote in his autobiography: I remember her as a short, stocky, fanatically devout Irish Catholic with a Boston accent, wiry hair and a grim face. She was hired on as our nurse when I was about eight and quickly became the lord high executioner of all my mother's rules. The instant one was broken she went running off to Mom or, more and more frequently, took care of the punishment herself by going after us with wire coat hangers.

"When Bing realized what a monstrous thing she had made of the home," Giddins said, "he fired her, and Frank immediately hired her."

In the process of his research, Giddins tried to draw Nancy junior out about Hardwick: "She said, 'Well, yes, she worked for us. She was part of the family.' Long pauses. I finally said, 'Look, this is what I heard about her.' There was a long pause, and she said, 'All I'll say is, she was very, very-tough.' That was the end of the interview."

Without lectures, without words, Georgie...transformed me into an unspoiled child.

Leaving the "quietly, gently" open for discussion.

In February, Frank sat down with Metronome Metronome's George T. Simon-the very man who seven and a half years earlier had had to be sweet-talked into writing up the brand-new singer in the magazine-and did some serious venting about the state of American popular music.

"Right now certain conditions in the music business really have him down," Simon wrote. "Chances are that he can't stand Your Hit Parade Your Hit Parade any more than most of us can...But his biggest gripe of all right now is the terrible trash turned out by Tin Pan Alley." any more than most of us can...But his biggest gripe of all right now is the terrible trash turned out by Tin Pan Alley."

In fact, Sinatra was more than down-he was hopping mad: Frank was a pretty weary guy when he sounded off during a short break on a recording date...but it seems that when you're really p.o.o.ped you relax more, you lose your inhibitions, and you say what you want to say. Some of the stuff Sinatra pa.s.sed along was so libelous that it's not printable, but all the rest is something The Voice feels just as strongly about, even though the language may be more pianissimo."About the popular songs of the day," pet-peeves Frankie, "they've become so decadent, they're so bloodless. As a singer of popular songs, I've been looking for wonderful pieces of music in the popular vein-what they call Tin Pan Alley songs. You can not find any. Outside of production material, show tunes, you can't find a thing..."I don't think the music business has progressed enough. There are a lot of people to blame for this. The songwriter in most cases finds he has to prost.i.tute his talents if he wants to make a buck...The publisher is usually a fly-by-night guy anyway and so to make a few fast bucks he buys a very bad song, very badly written. And the recording companies are helping those guys by recording such songs. I don't think the few extra bucks in a song that becomes a fast hit make a difference in the existence of a big recording company or a big publis.h.i.+ng firm. If they turned them down, it wouldn't do any harm and it would do music some good If they turned them down, it wouldn't do any harm and it would do music some good [italics mine]. [italics mine].

In a very short time, of course, Sinatra would be turning down very little himself.

The subject he was dancing around was the root causes of the change. Was the music business really leading the public, or was it the other way around? The one possibility the singer couldn't stand admitting, to the press or to himself, was that America's tastes had simply changed.

The novelist William Maxwell once told me, when I asked, starry-eyed, what it had been like to be alive during the Roaring Twenties, that it had been a terrible time, a time of giddiness, shallowness, escape. Much the same kind of mind-set was prevalent after World War II. The country wanted to forget the terrible near past and the deeply troubling present. America was jumpy. We wanted our pleasures quick, and we wanted them simple: they shouldn't trigger any problematic emotions. We got what we wanted.

The Miracle of the Bells premiered the day before St. Patrick's Day. RKO, having filled its coffers under the watchword of "Entertainment, not genius," was still saving money by cranking out B pictures. When it made the odd A feature, it borrowed stars from other studios. premiered the day before St. Patrick's Day. RKO, having filled its coffers under the watchword of "Entertainment, not genius," was still saving money by cranking out B pictures. When it made the odd A feature, it borrowed stars from other studios. Miracle Miracle, with Sinatra on punishment leave from MGM and Fred MacMurray loaned out from Paramount, was an attempt, right down to its reverberating t.i.tle, to cash in on the success of Bing Crosby's holy-Joe pictures Going My Way Going My Way and and The Bells of St. Mary's The Bells of St. Mary's. The difference was that Crosby had Leo McCarey to direct him, and Sinatra had Irving Pichel. And then there was the fact that Bing, the sly old genius, could play quite a charming and credible priest. Frank, at this stage of his life, had too much s.e.xual vanity and too many internal conflicts to believably act such a role. Maybe he could have pulled it off ten years later, when he was more manly and battle scarred and able to make fun of himself on-screen.

But the movie's problems didn't begin with its star. Ben Hecht, who co-wrote the screenplay with Quentin Reynolds, apparently took the job on the condition that he not be forced to read the sappy popular novel he would be adapting.2 And then there was the picture's glum setting, a Pennsylvania mining town, and its generally dark tone. "Pompous and funereal," Bosley Crowther wrote of the finished product. And while Crowther was reliably stuffy, in this case he had a point. The story concerned a young actress who died-just like Camille, of a hacking cough-after starring in her first film. The cynical press agent (MacMurray) who lifted her from the burlesque house to movie stardom takes her body back to her Pennsylvania hometown for burial. Miracles occur. And then there was the picture's glum setting, a Pennsylvania mining town, and its generally dark tone. "Pompous and funereal," Bosley Crowther wrote of the finished product. And while Crowther was reliably stuffy, in this case he had a point. The story concerned a young actress who died-just like Camille, of a hacking cough-after starring in her first film. The cynical press agent (MacMurray) who lifted her from the burlesque house to movie stardom takes her body back to her Pennsylvania hometown for burial. Miracles occur.

The dark and dazzling Alida Valli played the actress: even The Third Man The Third Man, the following year, would not be enough to resuscitate her career after this stinker. And as Father Paul, Sinatra, in his first drama, was subdued to the point of seeming depressed. ("Frank Sinatra, looking rather flea-bitten as the priest, acts properly humble or perhaps ashamed," Time Time wrote.) The best that can be said about him in this role is that, as would not be the case in wrote.) The best that can be said about him in this role is that, as would not be the case in The Kissing Bandit The Kissing Bandit, he didn't sink the movie. It did that all by itself.

Sinatra was ashamed-not just of The Miracle of the Bells The Miracle of the Bells, but of the whole year. He was singing junk on the radio. He was losing his audience, his prestige, his hair. And with Sinatra, as we have seen, shame quickly changed to rage. When the movie's producer, the Hollywood inst.i.tution Jesse Lasky, reminded the star that he was contractually obliged to attend the San Francisco premiere, Frank bullied the old man until Lasky was forced to plead for his presence. Sinatra went to San Francisco, but in full Monster mode. Ensconced in the biggest suite at the Fairmont hotel with Jack Keller, Bobby Burns, and Jimmy Van Heusen, Frank ordered eighty-eight Manhattans from room service. Up came several waiters pus.h.i.+ng carts full of clinking gla.s.ses: Sinatra told them to leave the drinks in the entry hall, and there the eighty-eight Manhattans sat for three days, untouched. Unable to sleep at 4:00 a.m., he ordered a piano to be sent to his suite. A store manager had to be awakened, and a delivery-truck driver paid triple time to deliver the instrument. The next night Frank took twenty people out on the town, then brought them back to the suite for a party that didn't break up till 7:00 a.m. Two hours later, still revving, he took Keller, Burns, and Van Heusen to a sw.a.n.ky haberdasher and bought each man $1,200 worth of cashmere sweaters, ties, s.h.i.+rts, and socks-all of it charged to Sinatra's suite at the Fairmont, which of course was on the studio's dime.

Frank slept through the afternoon, then behaved perfectly at the premiere that night. The next morning, though, he decided he had to get to Palm Springs-instantly. Unfortunately, a thick fog had settled in over San Francisco during the night, and the airlines weren't flying. Sinatra ordered Van Heusen, the pilot, to charter a plane. No planes were to be had. In the end, Frank and Jimmy took a limousine from San Francisco to Palm Springs-a five-hundred-mile trip-at a cost of over $1,100. Multiply all figures by nine to get the present-day equivalent. So much for cost cutting at RKO.

Hedda Hopper summed up the feelings of pretty much every reviewer in the country when she called The Miracle of the Bells The Miracle of the Bells "a hunk of religious baloney." And then, more shame. In a wrap-up of the previous year's movies, "a hunk of religious baloney." And then, more shame. In a wrap-up of the previous year's movies, Life Life chose Frank's cameo in the Metro musical chose Frank's cameo in the Metro musical Till the Clouds Roll By Till the Clouds Roll By as "the worst single moment" in any picture: "MGM struck a high point in bad taste when Frank Sinatra stood on a fluted pillar and crooned 'Ol' Man River,' including the line 'You and me, we sweat and strain...,' wearing an immaculate white suit." as "the worst single moment" in any picture: "MGM struck a high point in bad taste when Frank Sinatra stood on a fluted pillar and crooned 'Ol' Man River,' including the line 'You and me, we sweat and strain...,' wearing an immaculate white suit."

With The Kissing Bandit The Kissing Bandit in the can (and every bit as bad as he suspected it to be), and his recording career at a standstill, Sinatra didn't have much to look forward to in the middle of 1948-with one exception. In the early hours of June 20 (the anniversary of Bugsy's death), as Frank and Nancy played charades at Toluca Lake with the Jule Stynes and a few other couples, Nancy went into labor. Frank bundled her into the Cadillac convertible and-with great pleasure; just let them try to stop him-ran every red light between the Valley and Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. As it turned out, the haste was justified: Christina Sinatra (she would be called Tina, after Nancy's sister) was born just minutes after Nancy was brought into the maternity ward. Frank kissed his wife and new baby daughter and drove back to Toluca Lake and jumped right back into the charades, which were still going strong. He mimed an hourgla.s.s to signify it had been a girl and held up fingers to indicate her weight. It was early Sunday morning, Father's Day. It was the first time he had been in town for the birth of one of his children. in the can (and every bit as bad as he suspected it to be), and his recording career at a standstill, Sinatra didn't have much to look forward to in the middle of 1948-with one exception. In the early hours of June 20 (the anniversary of Bugsy's death), as Frank and Nancy played charades at Toluca Lake with the Jule Stynes and a few other couples, Nancy went into labor. Frank bundled her into the Cadillac convertible and-with great pleasure; just let them try to stop him-ran every red light between the Valley and Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. As it turned out, the haste was justified: Christina Sinatra (she would be called Tina, after Nancy's sister) was born just minutes after Nancy was brought into the maternity ward. Frank kissed his wife and new baby daughter and drove back to Toluca Lake and jumped right back into the charades, which were still going strong. He mimed an hourgla.s.s to signify it had been a girl and held up fingers to indicate her weight. It was early Sunday morning, Father's Day. It was the first time he had been in town for the birth of one of his children.

On the next day, June 21, 1948, at a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, the Columbia Recording Corporation announced, with great fanfare, a startling technological innovation: the long-playing 33-rpm phonograph record. At a simultaneous dealer conference in Atlantic City, a Columbia executive gave a speech lauding the new invention to the accompaniment of an entire movement of The Nutcracker Suite The Nutcracker Suite. The record played on a phonograph with a mirror mounted overhead so the audience could see there was no trickery. At the end of the eighteen-minute side-four times as long as one side of a 78-rpm disc-the a.s.sembled record dealers leaped to their feet applauding. The future had arrived.

The LP was the brainchild of Columbia's president, Ted Wallerstein, who had first conceived of it a decade earlier as the ideal medium for cla.s.sical music. In addition to Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, one of the label's first pressings was a ten-inch LP reissue of 1946's The Voice of Frank Sinatra The Voice of Frank Sinatra. The alb.u.m sold well, but not nearly as well as the original: for one thing, few people had the equipment to play it. In October, Columbia brought out a Sinatra Christmas alb.u.m that did a little better: it lasted a week on the charts, rising just to number 7.

His next hit alb.u.m wouldn't come for five years-an eternity.

Four months after the Simon interview, one week after Tina's birth, Frank stood at the radio microphone at CBS and, with disbelief in his voice, introduced the latest addition to the hit parade: "The Woody Woodp.e.c.k.e.r Song." As the show's vocal group, the Hit Paraders, went into the supremely annoying number, which revolved around the cartoon character's supremely annoying laugh, Frank could be heard in the background, telling the studio audience: "I just couldn't do it!"

Meaning, he couldn't bring himself to sing it. That was June 26. On July 10, he no longer had any choice.

"Well, I guess I better keep my hat on, 'cause look who's here in spot number one," Sinatra told Mr. and Mrs. America-and then, as though he had lost a bet, unbelievably went into that Woody Woodp.e.c.k.e.r laugh: "Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh! Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!"

It's a perfectly ghastly sound. To call it a desecration of Frank Sinatra's voice is no exaggeration. He got through the rest of the song as quickly as possible. He tossed the thing off, as it should have been tossed off, but also because he felt deeply humiliated. It was only the beginning.

Given the state of Sinatra's movie career, MGM decided the safest thing would be to put him back together with Gene Kelly. The new vehicle was to be a lighthearted turn-of-the-century musical called Take Me Out to the Ball Game Take Me Out to the Ball Game. But much as Frank loved Gene, he had his own plans for resuscitating his film fortunes: he lobbied hard that summer to be loaned out to Columbia for a serious role in a Bogart picture, Knock on Any Door Knock on Any Door. If he got the role, Sinatra would not only get to act opposite Bogart; he would play a young Italian-American murder suspect, a street guy-a part he felt he could really bring to life. The producers took one look at Frank's hairline and hired twenty-two-year-old John Derek to play the role. Shooting on Take Me Out to the Ball Game Take Me Out to the Ball Game began on July 28. began on July 28.

His memory for names and faces was phenomenal, as was his ability to hold on to grudges, slights, disappointments. Throughout the filming of Take Me Out to the Ball Game Take Me Out to the Ball Game, as he danced and mugged for the camera, he couldn't get the disappointment of Knock on Any Door Knock on Any Door off his mind. Frank took it out on off his mind. Frank took it out on Ball Game Ball Game's veteran director, Busby Berkeley, showing up late, m.u.f.fing lines and dance sequences, wasting hours. Berkeley, on what would be his last picture, consoled himself with the bottle. Kelly and his young a.s.sistant Stanley Donen wound up directing much of the movie.

One day during lunch on the set, Frank got a call from Mayer's office, saying his presence was requested. Expecting a rebuke, he was surprised to find the boss smiling thinly. He wanted to ask Frank a little favor.

The favor was to sing that evening at a Sacramento meeting of the National Conference of State Governors. Frank would be the only entertainer, the studio chief explained, and everything would be taken care of: Governor Warren would have Sinatra flown to and from the event on his private plane. The reward was implicit-at a moment when HUAC had established a Hollywood beachhead, doing this solid for Republicans Earl Warren and Louis B. Mayer would polish up Frank's tarnished image a good bit.

Sinatra smiled. Of course, Louis.

Later that afternoon Jack Keller and Frank's accompanist d.i.c.k Jones came to his dressing room to collect him. No Frank. The studio lot was searched: Frank's car was in his parking spot, but he himself was nowhere to be found. Heart sinking, Keller phoned Mayer's office and got the expected earful. Eventually, Mayer, furious and humiliated, had to wire the governor's office that Sinatra had fallen ill.

And where was Frank? Home-having sneaked off the MGM lot under a pile of boxes on the back of a pickup truck.

A few days later, Sinatra's agent Lew Wa.s.serman got a message from Mayer's office: as per Frank's contract with MGM, the studio was once more exercising its yearly option to loan his services out to another studio. In November he would be reporting back to RKO, to film a quickie comedy called It's Only Money It's Only Money with Jane Russell and Groucho Marx. with Jane Russell and Groucho Marx.

Sinatra's theme that fall was escape. He was going to Palm Springs more and more often, not so much as a retreat from hard work, of which there wasn't much in late 1948, as to get away from everyone and everything. One weekend in late September, batching it with Jimmy Van Heusen-his increasingly present Falstaff, pilot, pimp, and fixer-he stopped by a party at David O. Selznick's place. Sipping a dry martini, Sinatra looked across the room and got a jolt more powerful than any gin could've given him: it was Ava, smiling at the tall, homely producer.

She felt Frank's look, turned, and flashed him a dazzling smile. He raised his gla.s.s and walked over.

They greeted each other, and Ava introduced their host. Frank gave the man a curt nod-he knew that it had been Selznick who had landed John Derek, the producer's protege, the plum role in Knock on Any Door Knock on Any Door. Knowing that Sinatra knew, and glancing back and forth between the two of them, Selznick excused himself.

"It's been a long time," Frank said, when they were alone.

"Sure has," Ava said.

"I suppose we were rus.h.i.+ng things a little the last time we met."

"You were rus.h.i.+ng things a little." were rus.h.i.+ng things a little."

"Let's start again," Frank said. "What are you doing now?"

"Making pictures as usual." She had just finished shooting The Bribe The Bribe, at Metro, with Bob Taylor. "How about you?"

"Trying to pick myself up off my a.s.s."

She nodded sympathetically. "Though I knew all about Frank's problems," Ava wrote years later, "I wasn't about to ask him about them that night. And, honey, I didn't bring up Nancy, either. This night was too special for that."

They slipped easily back to their earlier, alcoholic mode. Both of them could hold a lot of liquor. After a couple of hours, they walked out in the crisp desert night, under an inky black sky strewn with more stars than either of them had ever seen.

He offered to take her home.

Ava smiled. It was very gallant of him, but she had to tell him that she wasn't staying alone-she was renting a little place with her big sister Bappie.

Frank shrugged. Did she feel like taking a drive?

Her smile grew broader. Sure she did.

After he went back into the house and gave the bartender a $100 bill for a fifth of Beefeater, they got in his Cadillac and set off. The top was down, despite the evening chill, and they rode under the river of stars, her hair flowing in the wind. She s.h.i.+vered and clutched her mink stole around her bare shoulders. He pa.s.sed her the bottle; she took a long drink and pa.s.sed it back.

Frank navigated out to a two-lane blacktop, Palm Canyon Drive, that led out of town, and they drove southeast, through sleepy villages separated by long black stretches of nothing: Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells. Each of the towns had a few streetlights, a couple of stores, a blinking traffic signal. Then it was black again. Once they pa.s.sed a little graveyard whose gates fronted onto the highway. She s.h.i.+vered.

After a half hour, another pocket of light approached. A city-limits sign read: Indio. The two of them were singing, loudly, as they headed into the darkened town. She had a nice, tuneful voice; she could even do harmony. Frank looked impressed. She sang pretty good!

The gin bottle had gone back and forth a number of times, and the Cadillac was weaving when Frank pulled off the road and into a Texaco station. The car fishtailed as he put on the brakes. He cut the engine. A blinking traffic light hanging over the main drag swayed in the wind. It was two thirty in the morning, and Indio was out cold.

Ava looked around. It sure was a one-horse town. But where the h.e.l.l was the horse?

He laughed, then kissed her. They kissed for a long time. She was still holding the bottle.

Then he got an idea: how about they liven the G.o.dd.a.m.n place up?

Frank reached across her, almost falling in her lap, and, after fumbling with the latch for a second, opened the glove compartment. He handed her a dark, heavy metal thing that smelled of machine oil. Ava cradled it in her hand, looked at it in wonderment. It was a snub-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 Chief's Special. Frank took out another pistol just like it and, squinting, aimed it at the traffic light.

An hour later, the phone rang in Jack Keller's bedroom. Though he had been deeply asleep, Keller knew exactly who was on the other end before he picked it up.

"Jack, we're in trouble," Sinatra said.

It was his one phone call. He and Ava were in the Indio police station, feeling much soberer than they had an hour before, when, whooping and hollering, they had both emptied their pistols, then reloaded and emptied them again, shattering streetlights and several store windows. Then there was the town's single unfortunate pa.s.serby, drunk as the shooters, whose s.h.i.+rtfront and belly had been creased by an errant .38 slug.

Keller shook his head. Sinatra always knew how to up the ante. Still, there was only one thing that concerned the publicist.

"Have you been booked? Do the papers know anything?"

Frank looked at the police chief, who was smiling expectantly at his famous guest, secure in the knowledge that for whatever unknown reason, the G.o.ds of chance had dealt him one h.e.l.l of a payday. Sinatra told Keller that n.o.body knew nothin', but that Jack had better get down fast, with plenty of money.

And so, legend has it, Jack did just that. Gardner, in her memoir, denies the episode ever happened, but Keller taped a reminiscence of it before his untimely death-he was a four-pack-a-day smoker-at the age of fifty-nine in 1975; he also told the story to Peter Bogdanovich. In his account of that wild night in Indio, the publicist wakes up a pal, the manager of the Hollywood Knickerbocker hotel, who happens to have $30,000 in his safe. Keller borrows all of the money, charters a plane, flies to Indio, and papers the town with high-denomination currency to keep everybody quiet.

Everybody certainly kept quiet. Whatever happened that night in the desert, no one ever talked, and the dead tell no tales-unless they happen to leave a taped oral history.

"A lot of silly stories have been written about what happened to us in Palm Springs, but the truth is both more and less exciting," Ava Gardner wrote in her autobiography, which, while entertainingly blunt in its language, is unfortunately euphemistic when it comes to her many exploits.

We drank, we laughed, we talked, and we fell in love. Frank gave me a lift back to our rented house. We did not kiss or make dates, but we knew, and I think it must have frightened both of us. I went in to wake Bappie up, which didn't appeal to her much, but I had to tell someone how much I liked Frank Sinatra. I just wasn't prepared to say that what I really meant by like was love.

Perhaps Frank and Ava really were as chaste as junior-prom sweethearts that night. Yet Keller's story, while too good to be true, is too irresistibly crazy not to be. Sinatra certainly carried guns-once Lee Mortimer dropped his a.s.sault charges, the suspended pistol permit was reinstated-and he certainly drank heavily, as did Ava. There are copious records of wild, booze-fueled behavior on the part of Sinatra and Gardner once they became a bona fide couple. Why should the night they fell in love not have set the pattern?

Frank fell as fast as she did. In a blinding flash, all his self-discontent-a combustible amalgam of artistic failure and disgrace with fortune and men's eyes-alchemized into the most powerful feeling he had ever known. He was deeply in love with Ava Gardner. He phoned her, dead sober, when he got back to town, and asked her out.

We met for dinner at a quiet place [Ava wrote], and we didn't do much drinking. This time I did ask him about Nancy. He said he'd left her physically, emotionally, and geographically years before, and there was no way he was going back. The kids, however, were something else; he was committed to them forever. I was to learn that that kind of deep loyalty-not faithfulness, but loyalty-was a critical part of his nature.We didn't say much more. Love is a wordless communion between two people. That night we went back to that little yellow house in Nichols Canyon and made love. And oh, G.o.d, it was magic. We became lovers forever-eternally. Big words, I know. But I truly felt that no matter what happened we would always be in love. And G.o.d almighty, things did happen.

Not surprisingly, Frank's fabled confidence was starting to crack. That autumn, vocal problems cropped up for the first time. In October, when Sinatra made a guest appearance on the bandleader Spike Jones's Spotlight Revue Spotlight Revue, Jones, famous for cutting up, asked him seriously, "How you feeling tonight, Frank? Is your voice all right?"

Frank tried to make a joke out of it. "Well, I think so-lemme see," he said. He blew a pitch pipe and let out a big off-key bellow, much to the audience's amus.e.m.e.nt. "I am majestically in voice!" he crowed-and then, ominously, as the orchestra played the intro to "Everybody Loves Somebody,"3 coughed. He then proceeded, on live national radio, to blow the first note of the song. coughed. He then proceeded, on live national radio, to blow the first note of the song.

In November, three days after The Kissing Bandit The Kissing Bandit opened to universal groans, mostly about its star ("Mr. Sinatra's performance...is not in that vein of skipping humor which more talented comics traverse," Bosley Crowther wrote, less unkindly than most), Frank started work on opened to universal groans, mostly about its star ("Mr. Sinatra's performance...is not in that vein of skipping humor which more talented comics traverse," Bosley Crowther wrote, less unkindly than most), Frank started work on It's Only Money It's Only Money at RKO. It seemed curious, and somehow ominous, that the studio's new chief, Howard Hughes, whose anti-Communist witch hunts had purged more than half of RKO's workforce, had decided to hire Sinatra. Remembering the time in Palm Springs when Ava had come to Chi Chi with Hughes, Frank wondered if the studio head simply wanted to humiliate him by sticking him in this silly piece of c.r.a.p. at RKO. It seemed curious, and somehow ominous, that the studio's new chief, Howard Hughes, whose anti-Communist witch hunts had purged more than half of RKO's workforce, had decided to hire Sinatra. Remembering the time in Palm Springs when Ava had come to Chi Chi with Hughes, Frank wondered if the studio head simply wanted to humiliate him by sticking him in this silly piece of c.r.a.p.

Since Frank could behave badly among movie collaborators he respected, it's easy to imagine how he conducted himself on a quickie comedy (the shooting schedule was just three weeks) at the off-brand studio he thought he'd outgrown, alongside the remote and distrustful Groucho Marx and the menacingly protuberant Jane Russell (whom the delighted b.o.o.b man Hughes had discovered a few years earlier-not working at his dentist's office, as the myth has it, but through his casting department). "Frank and my father did not get along at all," Groucho's son, Arthur, recalled. "Sinatra always showed up on the set like a real star, like two hours late, and my father would be fuming because he already knew his lines, which Sinatra usually did not know. So they weren't too compatible and the movie wasn't too good either."

Yet Frank got along swimmingly with Jane Russell, who, like him, was not especially happy to be working on It's Only Money It's Only Money. "It was nothing," she said. "It was not a very good picture. Frank and I certainly knew it." And he was a perfect gentleman with Russell. "Frank was always very polite and very sweet," she remembered. "There was no funny business at all."

For good reason. "Ava was sitting up in the sound booth most of the time while we made the picture," Russell said. "She certainly was a character. A raving character."

It's Only Money-such a stinker that RKO wouldn't release it until 1951 under the hokily lecherous new t.i.tle Double Dynamite- Double Dynamite-was the least of Frank's problems. His life was coming unmoored. His recording career was dead in the water; his one performing outlet, besides the occasional radio guest spot, was the reliably lousy Your Hit Parade Your Hit Parade. In December, a headline in the industry journal Modern Television & Radio Modern Television & Radio read, IS SINATRA FINISHED? Around that time Frank told Manie Sacks, according to Nancy junior, that "so many things were going wrong that he felt like he was washed up. Sacks replied that life is cyclical, and that he was too talented not to bounce back. 'In a few years,' he said, 'you'll be on top again.'" read, IS SINATRA FINISHED? Around that time Frank told Manie Sacks, according to Nancy junior, that "so many things were going wrong that he felt like he was washed up. Sacks replied that life is cyclical, and that he was too talented not to bounce back. 'In a few years,' he said, 'you'll be on top again.'"

In the meantime, though, he had fallen off the mountain. Down Beat Down Beat's end-of-the-year poll for Best Male Singer, which Sinatra had easily topped since 1943, found him in the number-four spot, beneath Billy Eckstine, the leather-lunged Frankie Laine ("Mule Train"), and Bob-not Bing-Crosby.

Frank was still making big money-MGM paid him $325,833 that year-but as always, he spent it faster than it came in. Taxes were for chumps. The IRS respectfully disagreed. In her year-end wrap-up for Silver Screen Silver Screen, the columnist Sheilah Graham estimated that Sinatra had made $11 million in the last six years, yet he "not only can't save anything but...is behind with his income tax."

Frank's solution was to buy a new house.

Holmby Hills, just north of Sunset and to the east of Beverly Glen, was a pricey enclave whose denizens included Loretta Young, Walt Disney, and Humphrey Bogart. Three-twenty North Carolwood Drive was a sprawling redbrick Mediterranean on three acres. There was no lake, but the summer heat didn't settle in the way it did in the Valley, and the drive to MGM was just fifteen minutes instead of forty-five. The house cost a fortune-a quarter of a million in 1948 dollars-but then, that's what movie stars had to pay for a house in those days.

Why the Sinatras moved just then is something of a mystery. They had paid a huge sum for the Palm Springs place not a year before, and Frank's career was on the downswing. What's more, he was in love. But as always, no matter his circ.u.mstances, he liked to have the best of everything. Still, however nice the new digs, the uprooting must have been difficult. Nancy junior, eight at the time of the move, writes that her father bought 320 North Carolwood "to be nearer his work so that he could spend more time at home." This sounds more hopeful than realistic. A photograph from the period shows Sinatra sitting in an armchair holding baby Tina as his adoring family surrounds him: Big Nancy at one shoulder; Little Nancy at the other, gazing at her sister; little Frank is resting his elbow on Dad's knee. Frank himself is directing a ghastly fake smile at his young son (maybe the needy Frankie was already starting to get on his nerves). He looks as if he can't wait to get the h.e.l.l out of there.

Tina, always more clear-eyed than her sister about her father's character, has a different take on the move to Holmby Hills: it was, she writes, a move "up in the world." This rings truer. If Frank couldn't act with Bogart, at least he could live across the street from him.

Yet he was restless and discontent. He was recording again, but not well. The yearlong layoff during the AFM strike, in combination with the weekly travesty of Your Hit Parade Your Hit Parade, had eroded not just his artistic confidence but his relations.h.i.+p with Axel Stordahl. The two men weren't making magic anymore; they were just making music, much of it not very good. The week before Christmas, in his first post-strike recording with Sibelius, the all too appropriately t.i.tled "Comme Ci Comme ca," Sinatra's voice seems utterly without conviction: And this was what he was leaving. The Sinatras at home, 1948. (photo credit 22.2) (photo credit 22.2) It seems my friends have been complaining, They say that I've been acting rude.

At this moment, unfortunately, the lyrics-filled with petulant world-weariness, the ennui that sets in when a grand pa.s.sion is absent-fit him like a glove.