UNTIL HE WAS thirty-four years old and adversity gave him a taste of its medicine, Sinatra was a boy, by which I mean he was not just a big band boy singer, like Bob Eberly or Dick Haymes, but a boy in a man’s world, a golden boy to be sure, and one who was cruising for a comeuppance. The difference was Ava Gardner. Their love affair taught him how to sing a torch song and mean every word of it, to sing it with full belief and total credibility. “That’s how he learned,” Nelson Riddle told Kitty Kelley. “She was the greatest love of his life, and he lost her.”
“Hurricane Ava”—as gossip queen Louella Parsons put it—was the glorious femme fatale in the melodrama of Frank Sinatra’s life. “When Frank met Ava, it was like atomic fusion. There was a terrific explosion, tremendous damage and long-lasting fallout.”
Who was this magnificent creature who was capable of putting an end to the enduring partnership of a forgiving wife and a cheating husband? She was a sharecropper’s daughter from North Carolina whose dark beauty landed her a fifty-dollar-a-week contract with MGM in 1941 when she was eighteen. She went from rags to superstardom and was a tigress on and off the screen. When she played a dancer in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), MGM promoted her as “the world’s most beautiful animal.”
Courtship: one night in Palm Springs Frank and Ava got drunk and went on a rampage in his car, shooting out the streetlights in town and a bunch of shop windows with the two .38s he kept in his glove compartment.
Ava was reaching the height of her fame at the same time as Frank was losing his footing. Louella Parsons, whom Gore Vidal called “the Saint-Simon of San Simeon,” observes that “Frank wasn’t philandering now; he was deadly serious. A woman can . . . handle a dozen rivals, but I never knew a woman who could handle just one.” Nancy Barbato Sinatra threw in the towel and got her divorce on October 30, 1951. Then lady luck followed Nancy out the door. Sinatra was having voice problems. He faced an unsympathetic boss at Columbia Records. Worst of all, as Louella Parsons wrote, “he wasn’t Frank Sinatra anymore; he was Ava Gardner’s husband.”
“Frank was flat broke when we tied the knot,” Ava told author Peter Evans, approaching him to ghost her memoir even though she and Frank had vowed never to write their autobiographies. “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!”*
Ava once threw a glass of champagne at a cameraman, and even he thought she was “so bloody gorgeous” as the glass and its contents were flying at him. That was the effect Ava Gardner had. Like a hurricane, but beautiful, glamorous yet earthy, she could swear like a sailor; had a terrible temper; gravitated naturally to macho men, matadors, crooners, big band leaders, big-game-hunting American writers on safari. She was five foot six, a stunning brunette with a pleasing voice. In the movie Show Boat (1951) they dubbed in a professional singer to cover her musical numbers (a bad move; it sounds phony), but on the soundtrack album it’s all Ava. Her voice full of tequila cocktails was just right for Julie’s showstopper “Bill.” She posed for Man Ray, who found her “absolutely ravishing.” During the filming of The Barefoot Contessa in Rome, a sculptor got her to step out of her little two-piece, one piece at a time. He did inspired work. Though the posing and the sculpture were part of the plot, they used a statue in which the model is dressed, not the life-size nude, in the movie. (Damn it, it has tits, an executive roared.) Sinatra bought it, brought it to California, and eventually planted the statue in the garden of his house in Coldwater Canyon.
Ava commanded an unusual loyalty. Among her ex-husbands, Sinatra had hot nuts for her as for no other. The naked statue stood supreme until Frank’s fourth wife, Barbara Marx, made him take it down. When Ava fell ill in 1989, Frank paid all the bills. He called her “Angel.” But he didn’t attend the funeral when she died in January 1990. Neither did her two other ex-husbands, Mickey Rooney (a mistake when she was nineteen and breaking into the business) and clarinetist heartthrob Artie Shaw (who ruined her self-esteem by reminding her how uneducated she was). Mickey Rooney remembered that sex with her had been great. “Not for me,” she demurred. She was the same height as Catherine Deneuve (5 foot 6 inches); her eyebrows and mouth rivaled Vivien Leigh’s; her eyes gave Elizabeth Taylor’s a run for the money. (Liz Taylor is “not beautiful—she is pretty,” Ava told an influential publisher. “I was beautiful.”) On the sexuality scale, Ava ranked right up there with Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth, and Kim Novak. She was a Capricorn with Cancer rising, her moon and Mars in Pisces, Venus in Scorpio, and Mercury in Capricorn. In Chinese astrology, she was a water dog. She taught Frank heartbreak and the dark side of passion. Sinatra put all the misery of his relationship with Ava into “I’m a Fool to Want You” (which he recorded first with the Ray Charles Singers on March 27, 1951), a lonely masterpiece that came out of the nadir of his career. When, on later albums, he sings “I Get Along Without You Very Well” or “Angel Eyes” or “Blues in the Night,” you know he’s thinking of Ava.
As for Ava’s point of view, two songs state it directly. “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” (music, Harold Arlen; lyrics, Ted Koehler) presents the basic antithesis: “I don’t want you, / but I hate to lose you.” And these lines from “You Took Advantage of Me” (Rodgers and Hart) sum up precisely how she felt about her third husband: “I suffer something awful each time you go, / and much worse when you’re near.”