Frank_ The Voice Part 33

On Monday, November 16, Mankiewicz and Schenck signed: Ava was to play the lead in The Barefoot Contessa The Barefoot Contessa. Mankiewicz would pay MGM $200,000 for her services; of this amount, Metro would pay Ava $60,000 for three months' work. It was well below her usual rate, but she didn't give a d.a.m.n. All the trade papers carried the news. They also carried the news that Elia Kazan had started shooting On the Waterfront On the Waterfront in Hoboken. Marlon Brando, wearing blue jeans and a red-and-black-checked hunting jacket, had slipped into town, listened attentively as Kazan explained the setup, done a couple hours' work, then slipped away in a black car. (He'd had it written into his contract that he could leave every afternoon to go see his psychiatrist in Manhattan.) in Hoboken. Marlon Brando, wearing blue jeans and a red-and-black-checked hunting jacket, had slipped into town, listened attentively as Kazan explained the setup, done a couple hours' work, then slipped away in a black car. (He'd had it written into his contract that he could leave every afternoon to go see his psychiatrist in Manhattan.) Across the river in Chester's place, Frank, still in his pajamas, sat and talked dully on the phone-to his agents, to Hank Sanicola. He had Sanicola read him the trades. Hank said he was sorry, about Ava, about Waterfront Waterfront. Frank didn't answer.

He was due in St. Louis the next day, to rehea.r.s.e for a week-before-Thanksgiving gig at the Chase Hotel. His bags still weren't packed. Chester looked at him. Would he please eat something, for f.u.c.k's sake? He looked like s.h.i.+t.

Frank stared into s.p.a.ce. He would try.

Chester told him he had to go out. Could he get Frank anything? Blonde? Redhead? Brown sugar?

Frank didn't answer-not even a smile. Van Heusen left, exhaling with relief the second he walked out the door. He had had it, and so had the rest of Sinatra's friends. Frank had committed the worst sin, one of which he'd previously been incapable: he had finally bored them all to tears.

Chester went home at 2:00 a.m. after attending another party at "21." It had been a gala occasion: he'd played the piano and sung, mostly his own songs, and he'd been a big hit. At forty, Jimmy Van Heusen wasn't anything like a good-looking man-tall, powerful, gravel voiced, he had a bullish presence enhanced by a thick neck and shaved head (he'd begun the ahead-of-his-time practice when he started losing his hair in his late twenties). "You would not pick him over Clark Gable any day," Angie d.i.c.kinson recalled. "But his magnetism was irresistible." He played piano beautifully, wrote gorgeously poignant songs about romance, and, quite straightforwardly if rather unromantically, loved to f.u.c.k. Women knew it at once by the look in his eye, the way he ran his fingers down a girl's arm-playing her like a piano!-and growled, in those W. C. Fieldsian tones, "Bee-yutiful." He had a fat wallet; he flew his own plane; he never went home alone.

Tonight, though, he did: he had a sick friend to tuck in. Van Heusen shook his head as he turned the key-and then stared at the spots of blood on the floor. He followed the red trail across the living room, his heart thudding. At the entrance to the kitchen, he saw Frank, his left pajama sleeve soaked deep scarlet, lying semiconscious on the linoleum.

Frantic when their star attraction failed to appear, the bookers at the Chase Hotel phoned everyone: Sinatra's agents, his lawyer, even Alan Livingston at Capitol Records. No one knew anything. Finally they called Morris Shenker. Shenker was a St. Louis defense attorney with a large and grateful clientele of men whose bona fides might not have stood up to scrutiny by the Kefauver Committee. An enormously powerful figure with ties to Vegas and the East Coast, the lawyer made it his business to know everyone and everything. And with one telephone call, he found out. Quickly and simply, he told the entertainment managers at the Chase Hotel that Sinatra had slit his wrists.

In truth, it had only been one wrist-his left. Van Heusen had paid his doorman $50 to get a cab fast and keep his mouth shut, then paid the cabbie $20 to run every red light on the way up to Mount Sinai Hospital. More money pa.s.sed hands, and with great haste Frank was attended to and checked into a suite under his own name. The cover story was to be that he was exhausted. This was true enough. His weight was down to 118 pounds from 132, and he hadn't really slept for weeks. Though no official announcement had been made yet, the flowers and telegrams started arriving in great quant.i.ties the next morning.

After a drugged sleep, Sinatra awoke alert and agitated. He had to get out of there now now, he kept repeating. Around his bed, his doctors, along with Van Heusen, Sacks, Styne, and Cahn (forgetting their feud), tried to reason with him. He was in no shape to move, let alone leave. Why not just put his feet up for a few days?

He had to get to California. Had to see her.

She was leaving him, he knew it. He'd tried to leave her, the only way he knew, but maybe he just didn't have the guts. Now he was pinning everything on looking her in the eye, holding her hand, and begging her to stay. He finally reached her on the phone-she'd returned to L.A. to go to the opera and see friends.

Oh Jesus, Francis.

She sounded both solicitous and slightly exasperated, but her voice was balm to his soul. He imagined her standing at his bedside, imagined the dimpled chin and lush lips and green eyes looking down at him.

His voice was weak. He was okay, but he had to see her right away.

She told him to just stay put until he was healthy. She wasn't going anywhere.

But he knew her: she probably had her bags packed already.

"Sinatra's father says he went to Mt. Sinai hosp for a checkup," wrote Winch.e.l.l, the All-Powerful. "But the rumors had it he tried to End It All."

Whenever Frank Sinatra taxed his patience to the utmost, Jimmy Van Heusen had to remind himself that this, after all, was Sinatra. A man who put his pants on one leg at a time, picked his nose, and told stupid jokes, but...Sinatra. As a songwriter of brilliance but not genius, Van Heusen was in an ideal position to understand what genius really was, and he recognized that Frank surely possessed it. It didn't excuse his excesses-only G.o.d could do that-but it began to explain them. Jimmy might bad-mouth Frank behind his back (and he meant it when he did), he might hate him at times and even fear him, yet he also loved him, as much as he could love anybody. And when the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d sang, Chester got more goose b.u.mps than anyone else.

"I would rather write songs than do anything else-even fly," Van Heusen once told an interviewer. And he loved flying. He loved f.u.c.king, too, but the sublime pleasure of songwriting trumped all other joys-and made them possible. He had written some good songs for Sinatra, and he hoped to write more. Staying as close as possible to Frank, Chester sensed, might just accelerate that process.

But Jimmy Van Heusen had another notable quality: he was a hypochondriac of the first order. He kept a Merck manual at his bedside, he injected himself with vitamins and painkillers, he had surgical procedures for ailments real and imagined. He was terrified of illness and death, and earlier that year, close to his fortieth birthday, he'd had what he'd felt might be a heart attack. The doctors weren't sure, but he was. Terrifyingly, over these last taxing weeks with Sinatra, Jimmy had begun to feel chest pains again.

Accordingly, while Frank got dressed in the hospital room, shooting his cuffs to cover the bandages (the doctor had just walked out, shaking his head, after warning Sinatra that he was leaving Against Medical Advice), Van Heusen looked his friend in the eye and told him he had to have a word with him.

The songwriter had already gone over in his mind what he wanted to say. If it meant the end of the friends.h.i.+p, so be it. But he'd come to the end of his rope. The two men looked at each other in the mirror as Frank looped his tie. And Jimmy, his voice serious, told Frank that he had to see a headshrinker when he got back to Los Angeles. He couldn't take this anymore.

Sinatra smiled a little. Why not?

Worried about their newly successful client's fragility, William Morris a.s.signed Sinatra a shadow, in the person of the New York agent George E. Wood, a dapper, slightly s.h.i.+fty-eyed fellow who prided himself on his wide acquaintances.h.i.+p among organized criminals of the top rank-many of whom functioned as a kind of show-business directorate. Wood relished the a.s.signment. "When Frank ate, I ate; when he slept, I slept," the agent recalled. "When he felt like walking, I walked with him. When he took a haircut, I took a haircut. I loved the guy."

Wood bribed a TWA gate agent at La Guardia to let him walk his charge through a hangar so Frank could get on his L.A.-bound flight unmolested by the pack of reporters. He rode cross-country with him, watching him as he slept a drugged sleep, now and then glancing at the bandage on his left wrist. And Wood did his best to fend off the reporters who met the plane at Los Angeles International the next morning. It wasn't easy. The whole country was tuned in to what looked like the final act in the Frank-and-Ava saga.

RUMOR MILL IS MUM ON FRANKIE'S ROCKY ROMANCE, read a November 21 headline, punning lightly on the name of his radio show. "Whether skinny, harried Frank Sinatra would win back luscious Ava Gardner today prepared to be a matter known only to the princ.i.p.als," began the wire-service story, datelined Hollywood.

Some of the couple's friends believed the crooner's estranged wife regarded their separation as "final." Others thought Sinatra's flying trip here from New York in defiance of his doctor's advice might "weaken" her stand.Several thought it was significant she did not meet him at the airport...Newsmen followed him to the baggage stand and again he growled:"Nothing. No comment."The crooner, down to 118 pounds from his normal 140, darted into a waiting limousine leaving still more questions unanswered.Will he follow Ava to Europe?Has she said she would talk to him?"No comment."

They'd made a plan to have dinner that night, at Bappie's place-Ava's big sister was now living with her husband, Charlie, in the Nichols Canyon cottage. Ava had insisted on a neutral location, with Bappie and Charlie present, so that Frank couldn't misconstrue the occasion.

She met him at the door, kissing him on the cheek and immediately noticing his bandaged wrist.

He deflected her concern, instantly sensing that vulnerability wouldn't play this time. It was nothing-a stupid accident. How was she?

Warm but cool at the same time, and nervous. He saw her hand shaking slightly as she held her cigarette. Frank was all charm, especially with Bappie, who'd once considered him an oily little dago (she didn't have much patience for Negroes or Jews, either) but now felt considerable warmth toward her brother-in-law.

It was too late, all of it. Ava had written him off. Not, of course, just for the one infidelity he'd boasted about, but for the hundreds he would never mention. Years later she would say, "I was happier married to Frank than ever before in my entire life. He was the most charming man I'd ever met-nothing but charm. Maybe, if I'd been willing to share him with other women we could have been happy."

She smiled at him now with a kind of relief: she'd worried before he came that she might not be able to resist him, that something would trigger her old susceptibilities. Nothing did. He looked like s.h.i.+t-that helped. Nor was she in the mood to mother him. She tapped her cigarette, she drank her drink, she looked at him and smiled, and all the while she was thinking of Rome, and Luis Miguel.

He saw it. He was endlessly intuitive-he could pick up a vibe from a room-service waiter or the second reporter from the left (though he didn't like the world to know what he knew), and he was, if anything, over-attuned to the love of his life. Early he had learned to watch Dolly closely, closely, to try to figure out whether she was going to hug him or hit him; early he'd learned to watch Ava closely, to see whether she was going to love him or leave him.

She was leaving him.

Her bags might as well have been sitting by the front door.

"F. Sinatra will spend Thanksgiving with Nancy and their tots," Winch.e.l.l wrote the next morning.

Meanwhile, Ava came up with her own way to spend the holiday. "Ava Gardner on Thanksgiving morning boards the plane from Los Angeles to Rome, obviously in the hope of catching reporters and cameramen more interested in a turkey drumstick than in the Sinatras," Dorothy Manners wrote in her column. "One thing came out of her 'talks' with Frank-or at least one talk-they haven't seen each other since. She will not file for divorce (if she does at all) until she returns to this country in the spring."

The photographers caught up with her at Idlewild as she was about to board her Rome-bound connecting flight. She was standing on the aluminum steps in her big sungla.s.ses, grinning in the November sun, holding a manila envelope containing a Barefoot Contessa Barefoot Contessa script (she hadn't gotten around to reading it just yet) in her right hand and, with her left, waving to the cameras, showing the whole world that she was no longer wearing her wedding ring. script (she hadn't gotten around to reading it just yet) in her right hand and, with her left, waving to the cameras, showing the whole world that she was no longer wearing her wedding ring.

That night Frank was back at the El Capitan Theatre, once again guest starring on The Colgate Comedy Hour The Colgate Comedy Hour, along with Eddie Fisher, no less. The host, Eddie Cantor, brought Fisher out first, to croon a medley of his. .h.i.ts (including "I'm Walking Behind You," the number that had aced out Frank's version in the charts); Fisher then invited Cantor to appear on his his TV show-the one with Axel Stordahl leading the band. A little later, as the great Harold Arlen himself suggestively tinkled the opening bars of "One for My Baby," Old Banjo Eyes said, "You know, Harold, there's one fella that sings your songs better than anyone else. Lately, he's become a dramatic actor-pretty good, too." TV show-the one with Axel Stordahl leading the band. A little later, as the great Harold Arlen himself suggestively tinkled the opening bars of "One for My Baby," Old Banjo Eyes said, "You know, Harold, there's one fella that sings your songs better than anyone else. Lately, he's become a dramatic actor-pretty good, too."

And out came Frank, to big From Here to Eternity From Here to Eternity applause, looking painfully thin in his tux. But if, as he walked onstage, he felt any hangover from the last ten terrible days, he lost it the instant he flared his nostrils and went into his own, all-Arlen medley: "Come Rain or Come s.h.i.+ne," "I've Got the World on a String," and Mercer and Arlen's "That Old Black Magic." This was, quite simply, a master cla.s.s in American popular song, and Fisher, the perpetrator of "Oh, My Papa"-who was always deferential to Sinatra's infinitely greater gift-stood openmouthed in the wings. Frank was in magnificent voice, and his pa.s.sion ("ev'ry time your lips meet mine, darling, down and down I go; round and round I go") was palpably, almost embarra.s.singly, real, blazing out sun-like from the little black-and-white screen. applause, looking painfully thin in his tux. But if, as he walked onstage, he felt any hangover from the last ten terrible days, he lost it the instant he flared his nostrils and went into his own, all-Arlen medley: "Come Rain or Come s.h.i.+ne," "I've Got the World on a String," and Mercer and Arlen's "That Old Black Magic." This was, quite simply, a master cla.s.s in American popular song, and Fisher, the perpetrator of "Oh, My Papa"-who was always deferential to Sinatra's infinitely greater gift-stood openmouthed in the wings. Frank was in magnificent voice, and his pa.s.sion ("ev'ry time your lips meet mine, darling, down and down I go; round and round I go") was palpably, almost embarra.s.singly, real, blazing out sun-like from the little black-and-white screen.

Watching the old, scratchy kinescope and taking note of the way he seemed to favor his left arm, holding it slightly awkwardly at times, one can't help but wonder: Was he still wearing the bandages? Was that long tux-s.h.i.+rt cuff taped to prevent his accidentally revealing them?

SINATRA ADMITS HURTING WRIST BUT LAUGHS OFF SUICIDE RUMOR, ran the wire-service headline.

Crooner Frank Sinatra admitted Tuesday he had "bruised and scratched" his wrist, but laughed off as gossip the rumors he had attempted suicide.The tempestuous singer, who recently reached a parting of ways with Ava Gardner, said he did not remember when or where the accident occurred.Rumors that Sinatra slashed his wrist started when a photograph taken during a conversation with Eddie Cantor revealed a mark on the singer's left wrist.Hollywood gossips immediately connected it with his recent hospitalization in New York.

Still feverishly plotting how he might win her back, he went into the Capitol studios again on two late nights in early December. For the first session, on the eighth, he recorded three swingers, trying to pick up the mood from the meditative note he'd ended on in November-and perhaps pick up his own mood as well. Most of all, though, he was trying to notch his first big hit for the label. But while Riddle's writing for the horns had all the wonderful lightness and sa.s.s of "World on a String," the songs themselves ("Take a Chance," "Ya Better Stop," and "Why Should I Cry over You?") were strictly grade-B stuff-a reminder to keepers of the pieties that Sinatra plus Riddle does not always equal magic.

The next night, though, singer and arranger returned to the studio with a string section and laid down three ballads, the second of which would turn into pure gold.

According to Nelson Riddle, Carolyn Leigh and Johnny Richards's "Young at Heart" had been floating around various record companies for a while without attracting a vocalist. Nat Cole had pa.s.sed on it. "I think it's a good song," Riddle told Sinatra, "but n.o.body wants to do it."

"Let's do it," Frank said-according to legend (his), not even asking to hear it first. In fact, he had asked Jimmy Van Heusen for his opinion, and Chester had responded in his most clinical fas.h.i.+on that he thought "Young at Heart" could be a hit for Frank.

And so, on the night of December 9, Frank recorded it.

Sinatra, Riddle, and Gilmore convened at the KHJ studios at 8:30 p.m. They wrapped up at 1:00 in the morning-ninety minutes overtime, by the rules of Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians. This meant that the costs for the studio time and the fees for the twenty-five players-costs that came out of Frank's pocket-doubled from $1,072.50 to $2,145 (some $17,000 today).

Clearly, Sinatra felt it was worth his while.

A great vocal recording of a popular song is an inseparable weave of words and melody, of the singer's work and the arranger's, and-of course-the musicians'. But also to be taken into account is the meaning meaning of the song, which is not always what the lyrics say. "Young at Heart" was a paean to rebirth, the ideal soundtrack to Frank Sinatra's matchless comeback: "Fairy tales can come true; it could happen to you" was the perfect rejoinder to Swifty Lazar's "Even Jesus couldn't get resurrected in this town." of the song, which is not always what the lyrics say. "Young at Heart" was a paean to rebirth, the ideal soundtrack to Frank Sinatra's matchless comeback: "Fairy tales can come true; it could happen to you" was the perfect rejoinder to Swifty Lazar's "Even Jesus couldn't get resurrected in this town."

And everything about this recording was perfect. New high-fidelity recording tape and microphones brilliantly brought out Sinatra's diction, phrasing, and pitch-perfect tone, not to mention the gorgeousness of the musical background and Nelson Riddle's arrangement. From the opening fillip-a string pa.s.sage announcing the melody in a quizzical, slightly off-kilter way that draws the listener in irresistibly-it was clear that a genius was at work. Riddle had brought impressionist sonorities to the American popular song for the first time, as well as a complexity of s.e.xual longing that would infuse the 1950s and provide an antidote to the conventional pieties of the Eisenhower years.

And most to the point, he had brought a new level of art to Frank Sinatra. Once the singer began, it was apparent that Riddle had completely understood Sinatra's lecture about overbusy orchestrations: the flutes and strings s.h.i.+mmer over the gorgeous glide of Frank's ever-deepening baritone; underneath lies the deep woof of the trumpetless bra.s.s section (featuring, for the first time, the ba.s.s trombonist George Roberts). It was vintage Riddle-only the vintage had just ripened.

All at once, Sinatra and Riddle were a team. Frank had never sung this way, and Nelson had never written this way. (The arrangements he'd done for Nat Cole, while superb, were colorless by comparison.) And what he and Frank were doing was inimitable: "Young at Heart" is a wonderful number, but it's more a great moment than a great song per se-it's difficult to imagine any other singer, no matter how skilled, ever bringing as much to it as Sinatra brought to it that night, three days from his thirty-eighth birthday.

As with Frank's acting in From Here to Eternity From Here to Eternity, his singing on "Young at Heart" told the world that he truly had returned from the dead. But as would be the case with the movie, the real fruits of the recording would be delayed until the new year.

The last song of the night, recorded in the wee small hours of December 10, never became nearly as well-known as "Young at Heart," but the Jimmy Van Heusen number, with lyrics by Carl Sigman, was ravis.h.i.+ng all the same-and, as with all Sinatra's great ballads, a little too close to home for comfort: I could have told you she'd hurt you...

But you were in love, and didn't want to know.

38.

Spain, May 1950. Jimmy Van Heusen shows Ava how to use his camera while Frank and an expatriate couple named Frank and Doreen Grant look on. Ava would take shelter with the Grants over the hard Christmas of 1953, as Sinatra futilely tried to win her back. (photo credit 38.1) (photo credit 38.1) The press was omnipresent in Sinatra's life: a third party in his marriage, a constant kibitzer on every aspect of his career. He could never completely tune it out, because the reporters and columnists were always checking in. Besides, he needed them as much as they needed him.

Yet even if he'd turned a corner in his professional life, even if he was behaving a little better than he used to, there were still those journalists who felt honor-bound to attack him. Like Maggio, he was an uppity wop, proud even when he'd been beaten to a pulp. It didn't sit well with much of America-especially Middle America. An early-November editorial in Michigan's Holland Evening Sentinel Holland Evening Sentinel read: read: The breakup of the sultry love affair of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner after only two years of what was euphemistically called marriage caused a critic to call the love affairs of the movie world "barnyard romance." The only trouble with that description is that it is insulting to the respectable domestic animals of the barnyard.

On the other hand, Edith Gwynn, in her Hollywood column, apostrophized rather feelingly: F. Sinatra is taking his usual beating from most of the press. He's often merited it in the past. But we don't dig how several reporters could chronicle as they did, when F.S. brushed 'em off at the airport here. Of him they front-paged, "he admitted he was upset"; "he said he is a sick man" (which he is!). They further itemed Frank was fresh out of a New York hospital, and then a few sentences later, beat his brains in because the guy wasn't all smiles, affable and gabby!Sinatra is on the verge of a whole new career-musically and dramatically. He is also on the verge of hysteria over "emotional problems." The fact that Ava Gardner is taking off for Europe again (to do "The Barefoot Contessa") won't be much help! Strikes us, The Voice rates at least half the break in print others in the spotlight might get!

That was certainly the way Frank felt. Christmas was coming and he wanted to spend it with his wife, but there was little evidence that his wife wanted to spend it with him. When he had talked to her in Rome over the f.u.c.king transatlantic phone line, she'd been infuriatingly breezy, chattering on about the magic of the Eternal City, her wonderful new apartment, and her funny Italian maid...

The moment he told her he loved her, the connection was mysteriously severed.

The holiday blues descended on him early and heavily. And so, as Van Heusen had demanded, Frank began seeing a psychiatrist: Dr. Ralph Greenson, whose sister happened to be married to Sinatra's new lawyer, Milton "Mickey" Rudin. Like so many pilgrims to the Golden State, Ralph Greenson was a reinvented character: born Romeo Greenschpoon in Brooklyn forty-two years before, he had gravitated to Los Angeles after serving as an Army doctor in the war and quickly built a practice composed of movie stars and Beverly Hills housewives. Appropriately to the territory and to his great benefit, the darkly handsome doctor looked the part: with his square jaw and ironic (though sympathetic) Jewish (but not too Jewish) features, his black mustache and closely cropped graying hair, Greenson could have played a psychiatrist in a movie. Funnily enough, he almost had: a close friend, the writer Leo Rosten, had based the t.i.tle character in Captain Newman, M.D Captain Newman, M.D., his novel about an Army psychiatrist-eventually adapted for the screen, with Gregory Peck in the t.i.tle role-directly on Greenson.

Ralph Greenson, who was to become Marilyn Monroe's psychoa.n.a.lyst, would later gain notoriety in the therapeutic community for violating doctor-patient boundaries: he treated Monroe in his home, where she became virtually a part of his family, and eventually more or less took control of her life. Sinatra was no Monroe, but there is evidence that Greenson may have overstepped the bounds with him in a similar way. Since Frank would certainly have attracted unwanted notice by going to Greenson's Beverly Hills office, the psychiatrist offered to see him in his Spanish Missionstyle house a stone's throw from the Brentwood Country Club.

The psychiatrist was t.i.tillated to be treating the most famous entertainer in the world. "Of all Greenson's interests," wrote Marilyn Monroe's biographer Donald Spoto, "it was the nature and burden of fame that seems to have most intrigued him and celebrities to whom he was most attracted. This was a recurring theme in his life's work." In a paper t.i.tled "Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous," Greenson wrote: "I have found the impatience of the budding star and the fading film stars to be the most difficult with whom I have tried to work."

All Frank would have wanted to talk about, of course, was Ava, and the doctor would have been very interested-maybe a little too interested for Sinatra's taste. But there was another subject that Greenson also would certainly have wanted to discuss, behind the closed but not altogether soundproof door of his home study-one that would've made Frank quite uncomfortable: namely, the first woman in his life.

As for Marilyn Monroe: December 1953 was the closest she and Frank would ever come to working together. But having ground out a half-dozen pictures for 20th Century Fox over the past couple of years (most recently and unpleasantly, River of No Return River of No Return and and There's No Business Like Show Business There's No Business Like Show Business), at what she considered wage-slave pay and always in the formulaic role of the Dumb Blonde, Monroe had decided to dig in her heels on Pink Tights Pink Tights. Her fame was rising; she wanted more money and better roles. She had seen the script, a silly remake of a silly 1943 Betty Grable movie called Coney Island: Coney Island: Monroe would play a turn-of-the-century cabaret singer, and Sinatra, a smooth-talking con man. It was a lark, but the only thing in it for her was the usual pouting and eye widening. To compound the insult, Fox had signed Sinatra for $5,000 a week, more than three times her $1,500 weekly salary as a contract player. Monroe would play a turn-of-the-century cabaret singer, and Sinatra, a smooth-talking con man. It was a lark, but the only thing in it for her was the usual pouting and eye widening. To compound the insult, Fox had signed Sinatra for $5,000 a week, more than three times her $1,500 weekly salary as a contract player.

She was due at the studio on December 15 for the commencement of princ.i.p.al photography. She stayed home. So did Frank. But in truth, he was in a hurry to get out of town.

In the meantime, it was Christmas shopping season, sunny and in the seventies in Beverly Hills, and Louella Parsons was gratified to note that Frank had been spotted making the rounds of local shops with thirteen-year-old Nancy Sandra-who, Earl Wilson noted with mild horror, already had beaux.

A few days later, Louella gushed: "It wouldn't surprise me one mite if Frank Sinatra moved home. He's there all the time to see the children and they are just crazy about him."

She was in high officious-biddy mode, lobbying, as always, for uprightness and solid family values amid the swirling Gomorrah of Hollywood. Frank's kids were lobbying too, fighting hard to hold on to him, since he was around anyway and Christmas was coming.

But the smile on Big Nancy's face whenever he stopped by reminded him of that chick in the painting by da Vinci.

To try to calm down, he spent some money. He went into Teitelbaum's on Rodeo Drive and bought a white mink coat to take with him to Rome. Three weeks on Pink Tights Pink Tights would pay for it. He had the furrier st.i.tch the initials AGS into the lining. would pay for it. He had the furrier st.i.tch the initials AGS into the lining.

Except Ava wasn't going to be in Rome on Christmas. When he phoned her on Tuesday morning, the twenty-second (having gotten up at eleven-the crack of dawn, for him-to try to catch her before she headed out for c.o.c.ktails at 8:00 p.m.), Ava informed him, somewhat testily, that she was going to Madrid for the holiday.

He responded just as testily. Who the f.u.c.k was in Madrid?

The Grants, if he must know. Frank and Doreen.

A long, pinging, staticky silence; the international operator straining to hear.

Ava finally spoke. She would be back in Rome on Sat.u.r.day or Sunday.

He protested. But Christmas was Friday. Her birthday the day before.

She really had to get going.

United Press reached her the following morning to ask if she and Frank might be planning a holiday reconciliation.

She wasn't sure if she would put it that way.

Had she spoken to him?