That Old Black Magic

LEE SERVER: “As the 1940s drew to their end, a difficult and dramatic period in Frank Sinatra’s life was about to begin, a period of great professional losses and personal crises, of ecstasies and despair, of self-destruction and at last spectacular regeneration. He was about to fall in love with Ava Gardner.”

AVA GARDNER: “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.”

AVA GARDNER: “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.’”

NICK SEVANO: “I still remember when she made the cover of some magazine. Frank looked at it and said, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’”

RUTH ROSENTHAL: “Ava disliked Frank intensely. She kept saying that she found him conceited, arrogant, and overpowering. They had instant hostility. I guess you could say this instant hostility was a precursor of a sudden romantic interest.”

AVA GARDNER: “I damn well knew he was married, and married men were definitely not high on my hit parade.  But he was handsome, with his thin, boyish face, bright blue eyes, and an incredible grin.  And he was so enthusiastic and invigorated, clearly pleased with life… and, at that moment, me.”

LEE SERVER: “They had both been drinking for hours and were looped and giddy when they left the party, announcing that Frank was going to drive her home. They slipped away with a fresh bottle of something from Zanuck’s bar and got into Sinatra’s Cadillac. Frank didn’t know where Ava was staying and didn’t ask. They drove into the night, roaring out of town, headed into the desert flatlands. Frank pressed to accelerator to the floor, racing to nowhere with a crazed determination, Ava opening the bottle and drinking it straight, passing it back and forth to Frank behind the wheel.”

LEE SERVER: "They reached the small outpost of Indio, surrounded by nothing but dirt and black sky, and Sinatra careened up over a street corner and squealed to a stop. As Ava pulled back to take another drink, Sinatra opened his glove compartment and took out two .38 Smith & Wessons, extended one pistol in a vaguely vertical direction, and fired it three times until a sharp plink sounded and one of the streetlights went out and glass tinkled to the dusty ground below. Ava said, ‘Let me shoot something!’ And she took the other gun and fired it at random into the sky, at the ground, into a hardware store window.”

LEE SERVER: "Frank put the car in gear, screeched around back onto the street, and roared the car forward, steering with one hand, shooting at the streetlamps with the other. Ava turned around in the front seat and as the car accelerated she fired across the back of the car and let forth an ear-splitting rebel yell. They shot the .38s empty and then turned up a side street in a squeal of rubber, heading back for the main road.”

AVA GARDNER: “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.”

JAMES KAPLAN: “In Ava Gardner he had literally met his match. In a woman of spectacularly sensuous beauty he had found a soul whose turbulence equaled his own. Like Frank, Ava knew herself to be a kind of royalty, but still harbored profound feelings of worthlessness. In each, this duality fueled volcanic furies. Frank had found a true partner in the opera that was his life…Like Frank, she was infinitely restless and easily bored. Both had titanic appetites, for food, drink, cigarettes, diversion, companionship, and sex. Both loved jazz, and the men and women, black and white, who made it. Both were politically liberal. Both were fascinated with prostitution and perversity. Both knew the bottomless loneliness that stalks the deep watches of the night: both distrusted sleep—feared it, perhaps, as death’s mirror. Both hated being alone. And behind every move each of them made lay a fine and regal contempt for the banal established order of the world.”

LEE SERVER: “They were both creatures of the night, self-proclaimed insomniacs. For both the night held the promise of elation as well as sadness – Sinatra famously described himself as ‘an 18-carat manic-depressive’ – as the hours passed and the crowd all fell away and there was nothing left anywhere but sleep. Both often felt a painful sense of loneliness they would seek to deny in the brash public spectacle they so often made of their lives. They were too much alike, perhaps, too much for comfort, for survival, for in the bond they forged there was a devastating insight, one into the other, like an X-Ray into each one’s heart and soul, as it would happen an insight dangerous and destructive in its exposure of weakness, vanity, lies, and need.”

AVA GARDNER: “Our love was deep and true, even though the fact that we couldn’t live with each other any more than we couldn’t live without each other sometimes made it hard for outsiders to understand. All I know is that if Frank had lost me or I’d lost him during those months, our worlds would have been shattered.”

LEE SERVER: “In the peculiar way they both had of fanning the flames of an argument until there was a proper, all-consuming conflagration, Ava let it be known that Howard Hughes had in the past supplied her with proof of Frank’s philandering… It was too much. Frank told her he had had enough of fucking Howard Hughes and he was going to settle the fucker’s hash once and for all. Grabbing a bottle of Jack Daniels and a revolver he stormed off to find the billionaire and presumably shoot him dead. Sinatra drove around Los Angeles for much of the night, rushing in and out of various Hughes haunts with his .38 under his jacket, drunkenly ready and eager to bring down that Texas cazzone and his Mormon bodyguards in a blazing gunfight. Hughes, alas, was out of town.”

GRACE KELLY: “I remember a Christmastime in East Africa many years ago. We were all getting a bit glum and gloomy at being away from home at this time. Frank decided to take Christmas in hand. He disappeared into Nairobi and returned with just about every Christmas ornament the city contained—and one Santa Claus suit. He came back to the bush where we were all on safari [shooting Mogambo]. At Christmas Eve we gathered in a clearing under a starry African sky. There in the center was a huge mantelpiece with all the ornaments. Frank even talked John Ford into reciting ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas to us. And this wonderful evening ended with sixty Congolese Africans, barefooted and with their blankets wrapped around them, singing French Christmas carols to us. It was a wonderful Christmas.”

AVA GARDNER: “I remember bumping across the Africa plain with him one day in a jeep, feeling sick as the devil. Right on the spot, for the first and only time in our relationship, Frank decided to sing to me. I know people must think that he did that sort thing all the time, but the man was a professional and the voice was saved for the right occasions. This must have been one of them, because he sang to me, oh so beautifully, that lovely song, ‘When You Awake.’ It didn’t stop me from feeling sick, but I’ve always remembered that moment.”

AVA GARDNER: “I slept in Frank’s pajamas, at least the top half of them, and the next day we walked along the empty beach, me in the bottom half of my travel suit and Frank’s jacket. Naturally a photographer was lying in wait and snapped a shot of us, barefoot, holding hands. I’ve always thought it was a sad little photograph, a sad little commentary on our lives then. We were simply two young people so much in love, and the world wouldn’t leave us alone for a second.”

BETTY BURNS: “Bobby [Frank’s manager] and I had a house on the beach, and so Frank and Ava would be there all the time. We would be sitting in the living room and hear them upstairs in the bedroom quarreling and arguing. Ava would scream at Frank and he would slam the door and storm downstairs. Minutes later we’d smell a very sweet fragrance coming from the stairs. Ava had decided she wasn’t mad anymore, and so she sprayed the stairwell with her perfume. Frank would smell it and race back up to the bedroom. Then it would be hours before he’d come back down.”

AVA GARDNER: “He did a record with Harry James that was so bad, I cried when I heard it. Poor baby, I was the star in the ascendancy and he was on his ass. No matter what I did, his having to rely on a woman to foot some of the bills—most of them, actually—made it all so much worse…  You’re not listening to me, baby. Frank was flat broke when we tied the knot. I don’t know where those stories came from that the Mafia was taking care of him. They should have been. But the fucking so-called Family was nowhere to be seen when he needed them. It really ticks me when I read how generous the Mob was when he was on the skids. But I was the one paying the rent when he couldn’t get arrested. I was the one making the pot boil, baby. It was me!”

TINA SINATRA: “I was four when I met father’s new wife, and she made a fundamental impression on me; she seemed to stir all my senses at once. Though only five-six, she truly seemed bigger than life, a quality that can accrue to a person whose image is projected at thirty-two times life size. (Not every movie star had it, though my father did, too.) But like Dad, Ava was also gentle and accessible to children; she immediately knelt down to my level. I have never forgotten that gesture. When people talk about a natural beauty, I think of Ava, who had no use or need for coiffing or makeup. Her tousled brown hair was loose and soft. She had a long neck, and seemed freshly scrubbed, casual but impeccable. That first time she was wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a skirt that was softly gathered up, perfect for twirling. And I remember that she smelled of gardenias, and that she was barefoot—and soon Nancy and I were barefoot, too. Looking back, it was the first time I saw simplicity perfected.”

AVA GARDNER: “The trouble was Frank and I were too much alike. [My sister] Bappie said I was Frank in drag. There was a lot of truth in that. He was the only husband I had that Bappie didn’t approve of straight off the bat. I’m not saying she disliked him. On the contrary, she thought he was great—but not for me. I should have listened to her.”

PETER VIERTEL: “Let me tell you something, nobody handles Ava Gardner. Sinatra, the poor bastard, never stood a chance, and he loved her probably most of all. He was too possessive of her; that was the problem — no one’s ever going to possess Ava.”

BETTY GARRET: “We used to talk a lot between scenes and he always talked about ‘class.’ It seemed to be his favorite word. He said that one of the classiest things he’d ever seen in his life was Gene Tierney walking into a Broadway theater one night wearing a white mink jacket. Frank went on and on about how she looked and how she carried herself. He was like a little kid talking about the queen. ‘That’s class,’ he said. ‘Real class.’ It was sort of touching the way he described the scene as if it was almost unachievable for him. He also talked about Ava [Gardner] the same way, as if a woman like that was totally unobtainable for a man like him.”

JOAN COHN HARVEY: “We gave a party for the cast when it (the premiere for ‘From Here to Eternity’) was over, and I still remember Frank sitting there telling everyone that in sixteen more hours he would be with Ava. ‘She’s the most beautiful woman in the world. You know that, don’t you?’ he’d say. ‘Yes, Frank, we all know how beautiful Ava is,’ I’d say. ‘She’s not just one of the most beautiful women in the world; she’s the most beautiful,’ he’d insist. He thought that he was married to the most exquisite creature on the face of the earth and he was desperately in love with her. It was kind of sad because all the rest of us knew that the marriage was held together by mere threads at that point.”

AVA GARDNER: “You know, Frank’s eyes do the most incredible thing when he’s angry. They turn black. I swear to God, they become as black as the ace of spades. It’s frightening. It makes your blood creep the way he does that.”

AVA GARDNER: “Anyway, one night I heard this gun go off.  We’d been fighting, of course.  And drinking.  Every single night, we would have three or four martinis, big ones, in big champagne glasses, then wine with dinner, then go to a nightclub and start drinking scotch or bourbon.  It was another one of those nights I ended up refusing to sleep with Frank.  I was half asleep in my room across the suite and heard this gunshot.  It scared the bejesus out of me.  I didn’t know what I was going to find.  His brains blown out?  He was always threatening to do it.  Instead, he was sitting on the bed in his underpants, a smoking gun in his hand, grinning like a goddamn drunken schoolkid.  He’d fired the gun into the fucking pillow.  At least his overdoses were quieter.”

JAMES KAPLAN: “ Then Ava walked out onto center stage, wearing a black-satin strapless dress and a mink jacket, and smiled dazzlingly into the spotlight. The audience, filled with her peers, smiled back at her, knowing a great show when it saw one. She stepped to the microphone and waited for the applause to fade. “I can’t do anything myself,” Ava said, “but I can introduce a wonderful, wonderful man. I’m a great fan of his myself. Ladies and gentlemen, my husband, Frank Sinatra!” The roar that followed was more about them than about him and he knew it, but he smiled anyway as he stepped into the spotlight and put his arm around his wife’s shoulder. Frank looked like hell. He wore a big ADLAI button on the lapel of his dark suit, and as he stood with Ava, he spoke a few words about the candidate they both admired, but he might as well have been moving his lips soundlessly for all the audience cared. Here was a couple whose magnetism trumped that of all Hollywood couples before or since. Then Frank was kissing Ava, she was waving and stepping out of the spotlight, and the band struck up and he sang—first hard and swingingly on “The Birth of the Blues”; then soft and feelingly on “The House I Live In” —and the hushed crowd remembered, for a few minutes, just how great he had been.”

AVA GARDNER: “I didn’t intend to let my personal problems with Frank spoil any part of Mr. Stevenson’s night. So, I showed up as scheduled for the rally. I stood in the wings and – as always happened when I saw Frank – my heart melted and the battle was forgotten.”

MURRAY GARRETT: “She’d introduced Frank and he goes on stage and kisses her and they start playing ‘Birth of the Blues.’ Ava comes backstage now and every photographer and reporter there just gathered around her and started firing questions. And she wasn’t really paying attention, she was just looking toward the stage where Frank was singing, smiling to herself. And this one idiot guy, from Chicago, I think, he says to her, ‘Hey, Ava, Sinatra’s career is over, he can’t sing anymore… What do you see in this guy? He’s just a 119 pound has been.’ And Ava says, very demurely, no venom, just very cool, in the most perfect ladylike diction, ‘Well, I’ll tell you – 19 pounds is cock.’”

LAUREN BACALL: “For Frank, this was the first time someone else had done the leaving.”

HANK SANICOLA: “Ava loved Frank, but not the way he loved her. He needs a great deal of love. He wants it twenty-four hours a day, he must have people around—Frank is that kind of guy. Ava Gardner was very insecure. She feared she could not really hold a man… twice he went chasing her to Africa, wasting his own career…”

LEE SERVER: “He was a stricken, desperate man, sleepless, inconsolable. He couldn’t rid himself of her for a minute. She went round and round in his head till he thought it would explode. The siren in that Billy Strayhorn thing she loved so much. Now it was his fucking theme song. You came along… to tempt me to madness. He would sit, staring at her photograph, then in an angry outburst tear it to shreds, then crawl around on the floor putting the pieces together… so the legend says, he had reconstructed one prized now-shredded picture except for a single missing piece, and when a passing delivery boy discovered it, Sinatra gratefully took the gold watch from his wrist and gave it to him.”

FRANK SINATRA: “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I love her. There isn’t a building high enough for me to jump off. I’ve got problems, baby. That’s what happens when you get hung up on a chick. Man, if I could only get her out of my plasma!”

BETTY COMDEN: “One night we went to Frank’s for a dinner party. And we saw that one of the rooms was filled with pictures of Ava, and around the pictures were lit candles. It was like the altar of a little church.”

LEE SERVER: “Irving Lazar had come home very late one night and saw that Sinatra’s door was open and the lights on. Wondering if there was a problem, he stuck his head through the doorway and saw Sinatra by himself, evidently very drunk, slumped in an armchair, holding a gun. Cautiously, Lazar stepped inside and as he did he saw that Sinatra was aiming his gun – an air gun, it turned out to be – at three large portrait images of Ava he had propped up on the floor. The three faces of Ava were full of pellet holes where Sinatra had been shooting at them – all night long, as it appeared.”

MIA FARROW: “He looked so pained when he talked about her that it was a relief when he changed the subject.”

STEPHEN BIRMINGHAM: “They stayed very, very close. Every time I’d be with her, he would call at least once. And she would go up into her bedroom, close the door, and talk for half an hour. The only time I saw them together, she was staying at his suite at the Waldorf Towers. He was looking up an address in the phone book and he couldn’t read it without his glasses, which he didn’t have. And Ava, who had these funny little Ben Franklin-type half-glasses, said, ‘Here, try mine.’ And he put them on and he said, ‘Hey, they work for me! That’s another reason why you and I should get back together.’ Which I thought was kind of cute.”

AVA GARDNER: “We might have been in different cities, different countries, but we were never apart. And every once in a while, Frank would call me in Madrid, London, Rome, New York, wherever I happened to be, and say, “Ava, let’s try again.” And I’d say, “Okay!” and drop everything, sometimes even a part in a picture. And it would be heaven, but it wouldn’t last more than twenty-four hours. And I’d go running off again, literally running. We could never quite understand why it hadn’t and couldn’t work. Our phone bills were astronomical, and when I found the letters Frank wrote me the other day, the total could fill a suitcase. Every single day during our relationship, no matter where in the world I was, I’d get a telegram from Frank saying he loved me and missed me. He was a man who was desperate for companionship and love. Can you wonder that he always had mine!”

LEE SERVER: “She could never understand it. Love was supposed to be such a wonderful thing. How could it cause so much unhappiness? Why did love always have to mean a broken collarbone, 50 ccs of Phenobarbital, and somebody fleeing in the night?”