“Some help you are,” I said.
“She’s your friend.” He grinned.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, I slipped a copy of His Way, Kitty Kelley’s biography of Sinatra—in which Kelley reported Ava’s story of Frank’s impressive phallus—into my bag. I still had no idea how I was going to bring the subject up; but I was sure it would be after a few drinks.
Ava was in a mellow mood when I arrived. An opened bottle of red wine was on the table. A record of early Sinatra was playing softly.
“Is that the Dorsey band?” I said.
“He was great, wasn’t he? Frank sent me a few of his early recordings when I had the stroke,” she said.
“They must bring back a lot of memories,” I said.
“For both of us, honey.”
They had been divorced for more than thirty years but I stepped warily around the subject of Sinatra. She became defensive every time his name came up. She would treat the most well-meaning question about him as if it were the third degree. “What’s this? A fucking witch hunt?” she once turned on me when I asked a question that could not have been more innocuous. After that, I had decided not to get into their marriage and the Sinatra years until I had the rest of the story wrapped up.
Nevertheless she seemed to be in a good mood.
“Was that the last time you and Frank talked? When you had the stroke?” I asked as casually as I could.
“No, we talk, honey. Not all the time, but two or three times a year. He always calls at Christmas. He never forgets my birthday,” she said affably.
“He always calls on Christmas Eve?” I said.
“He’s a sentimental man,” she said in an amused voice.
“Do you ever call him?” I said.
“Never,” she said.
“Never?” I said, trying to keep a sense of interrogation out of my voice.
“He’s a married man, honey,” she said, straight-faced. She continued to listen to the track, nodding her head gently to the music. “I love this number. [It was “Stardust.”] I think Frank did some of his best work with Dorsey. They must have recorded it in the early forties. They didn’t have the equipment and technology they have today. Frank would have done it in one take. If the vocalist or a musician hit a bum note they had to start the track all over again. Frank never sang this one again after he left the Dorsey band. I think it was a copyright problem with Tommy. But they got on very well.”
She poured a glass of wine for me, and refreshed hers.
“Did you and Frank ever have a special song?” I asked offhandedly.
“You mean that we thought of as ‘our song’?”
“That sort of thing,” I said.
“Jesus, there could have been so many, honey. I can’t pick out just one—not for the book anyway. It would be too fucking schmaltzy. Too fucking…” There was a kind of amused contempt in the unfinished sentence. “Frank would hate it if I said that,” she said.
Her voice was still friendly. This was the first time she had talked with any ease about Sinatra and I felt the euphoria of being trusted. “Okay, can you remember the first words you exchanged when you first met Frank?” I went into interviewer mode.
“You sound like a fucking reporter.”
“I am a fucking reporter, Ava. Indulge me.”
She looked pensive, and sipped her drink. “I was with Mickey in the studio commissary. We had just gotten married. Frank came over to our table—Jesus, he was like a god in those days, if gods can be sexy. A cocky god, he reeked of sex—he said something banal, like: ‘If I had seen you first, honey, I’d have married you myself.’ I paid no attention to that. I knew he was married. He had a kid, fahcrissake! He was a terrible flirt. He couldn’t help it. That was the first time we met.
“The next time was when we had that famous Metro group picture taken. We were all congregated on Stage 29, the studio’s biggest stage, before a big lunch for the press and the theater owners of America. I was wedged in between Clark and Judy, which was pretty good company. All the Gs. Frank flirted with me then. We were leaving the studio in our cars; he overtook me, slowed to a crawl, I passed him, he passed me. That was Frank all over,” she said. “He could even flirt in a car.
“Another time, I met him at a party in Palm Springs. I hadn’t seen him for about a year. He was having a tough time. MGM had dropped his contract. He asked me what I was doing. I said, ‘The usual. Making pictures. You?’ He said, ‘The usual. Getting my ass in a sling.’
“He was kissing the bottle at that time. We went for a drive in the desert and a little woo-poo. We really tied one on. We started shooting up a little town—Indio, I think it was; I don’t know where the hell we were—with a couple of .38s Frank kept in the vanity compartment. We were both cockeyed. We shot out streetlights, store windows. God knows how we got away with it. I guess Frank knew somebody! Somebody with a badge. He usually did.”
She had really opened up. It was so unexpected I didn’t know what to say. “But you never had a song you thought of as ‘our song’?” I said inanely.
“Practically every song he recorded has a memory for me,” she said. “‘I’m a Fool to Want You,’ that’s one that stands out. He wrote some of the lyrics himself.”
She hummed the tune. “‘I’m a fool to want you/To want a love that can’t be true/A love that’s there for others too,’” she murmured the lyrics. “They were very personal,” she said. “He wrote it the year we married. It was a lousy year, wretched. Kicking our heels, waiting for his divorce from Nancy to come through, was hell. We were fighting all the time. Fighting and boozing. Breaking up, getting together again. It was madness.
“I dated other guys just to punish him. Frank was doing his share. He was seeing girls. I know he was seeing Marilyn Maxwell again. He’d been sweet on her for years. She was one of his regulars when he married Nancy. I wasn’t surprised that she was still hanging around.
“I took off for Spain to make a movie [Pandora and the Flying Dutchman]. I had a fling with the bullfighter [Mario Cabré] who played my lover in the picture. My mistake was telling Frank about it. He was always banging on at me about guys he suspected I’d slept with. I’d slept with Mario once. He was a handsome devil. It was a one-night stand.”
“A one-night stand?” I tried not to sound incredulous.
“For the book it was, honey.” She didn’t smile. “I was drunk. He was handsome. It was a terrible mistake, period,” she said.
“You mean telling Frank about it?”
“Doing it—telling Frank about it wasn’t too bright either. He followed me to Spain. He wanted to kill the poor bastard.”
“He has a temper,” I said.
“Bob Mitchum told me that he was afraid of only two things—and one of them was Frank Sinatra! I can’t remember what the other thing was, it could have been spiders, but he said Frank was the only man he wouldn’t ever want to cross.
“That was around the time I made a picture with Bob [My Forbidden Past, 1951]. I was dating him when my affair with Frank was starting to become serious. Bob was a tough guy. He had a bad-boy reputation. He’d been a hobo, a drifter, served time for marijuana possession. He did sixty days in the county slammer. He said it was like Palm Springs without the riffraff. He didn’t give a shit about anything. I adored him. He was outrageous. On the set, in front of reporters, he’d call to his makeup man: ‘Hey, bring me some of that good shit, man.’ He didn’t give a fuck.
“Out in the Valley working on location one day, he said, ‘Sugar, have you ever tried this stuff?’ He was smoking a joint. I said no, I never have. There was plenty of it around when I was with Artie but he wouldn’t let me touch it. He said I got high enough on booze. Anyway, Bob said, ‘I’ve got some great shit, really great. I want you to try it.’ So we went into this old van where they carried all the equipment. I smoked a couple of sticks. Bob taught me how. You take a little air with it, deep, deep down and you hold it and hold it and hold it—no wonder they now say joints are much worse for you than ordinary cigarettes.