AVA AND FRANK became an item in 1949, the year that On the Town was filmed with Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Jules Munshin as the three navy sailors on twenty-four-hour shore leave in New York City. In the time-honored tradition of the Hollywood in-joke—as when Cary Grant refers to “Archie Leach,” or Tom Ewell is accused of harboring Marilyn Monroe behind a closed door—Ava is name-checked in the film: when a pretty girl floats by the three sailors like a melody and Kelly looks unimpressed, Munshin says, “Who you got waiting for you in New York, Ava Gardner?”
Ava and Frank tied the knot eight days after Nancy got her decree of divorce in 1951, but it was no honeymoon. The couple’s bitter quarrels added to the sexual intensity of the relationship. The pattern repeated itself with variations: he would pursue her, woo her; they would reconcile and have the world’s greatest makeup sex; and as soon as the postcoital cigarettes were stubbed out, the bickering would begin anew.
“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.”*
A Sinatra exit line during one of his fights with Ava: “Swell. You just go off with your sister, and I’ll be in Palm Springs fucking Lana Turner.”
From the start, people had warned Ava about Frank. Why didn’t she listen? “He was good in the feathers. You don’t pay much attention to what other people tell you when a guy’s good in the feathers,” she said. And, in the same vein, “We were always great in bed. The trouble usually started on the way to the bidet.”