Welcome to the first episode of Lovers Forever! This season tells the story of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra. Theirs was a Romance Of The Century--but before we get to that, we have to learn a little bit about their lives before they met, so that we have a strong sense of who each of these people were when they fell in love.
Welcome to the first episode of Lovers Forever! This season tells the story of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra. Theirs was a Romance Of The Century--but before we get to that, we have to learn a little bit about their lives before they met, so that we have a strong sense of who each of these people were when they fell in love.
Then you take it away from him.
Then you take away the dimpled chin and gold-green eyes, the haughty cheekbones and perfect lips. You take away the woman whose pure and talismanic beauty transforms her into a goddess. You take away the woman whose eyes hold all his secrets. The same kind of scorn he learned to fear from a mother who could either kiss or hit him with no warning. A heart that hurts the same as his, that breaks the same as his. The only woman he can never possess, rejecting him all the way to Rome, and quickly taking up with the greatest bullfighter alive. It takes him a few weeks to realize that she’s serious this time, that she’s walking out on him for good. By then, it’s much too late.
This loss will propel him into sublime art, the kind that seems almost holy, but he will never recover. No one else will know him as deeply, and he will never surrender his heart to another woman ever again. He will build shrines to her in his home, little altars with photographs and candles and old letters. He will have one of her photos enlarged into a ten-foot tall poster—and shoot bullets at her face all night long, until he passes out from exhaustion. The rest of his life he will search for what he had with her, gorging himself on earthly pleasures while painfully remembering the ambrosia of heaven. Other people didn’t observe heaven between them, but to the lovers, it was there.
It was there, but now it’s gone.
Or is it?
Years later, she sits in her apartment in Madrid and plays his records at top volume. This is where she goes to be with him, for in these songs time and space are suspended, dissolved, fractured, cracked like doorways. On the other side of the door shines once again the flicker of his eye, and she begins to speak to the records themselves, responding to his songs as if in conversation. “No, no, don’t say that.” Then, “yes, I know.” Then, “darling, you must forget…” All the while she seems on the verge of tears. Remembering, suffering. She lapses eventually into a wordless communion with him, staring out the window as if he is just across the plaza from her. Maybe he is, in that amorphous but tangible way that a former lover can be. Or perhaps the door is pushed further open. They lock eyes, and in this shared glance is greater intimacy and feeling than in any physical touch—or indeed, proximity. They lock eyes, and a tear falls down her face, its beauty decaying but undiminished.
A flash of blue, then he vanishes. “See you later, baby,” she says, and lights another cigarette. Her current lover emerges from the next room.
“I’m still here, my darling.”
“Yes, I know. That was Francis. He really had a lot to say tonight.”
This is the story of one of the Romances Of The Century. The last century, that is. It is a romance between two of the most prominent stars of the era; a musician and an actress. One is an icon of American music, and the other of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Theirs was a romance of outrageous highs and lows, and throughout it all, the press followed their every move. Celebrity gossip as a national pastime already existed when our lovers got together. But their courtship and marriage kicked it into overdrive.
It is a tale of gunshots and emeralds, gangsters and auteurs, ecstasy and despair, national scandal and private farce. It is the story of a man and a woman who were prepared to risk everything for each other, and sometimes did. It takes us from the canyons of Los Angeles to the windswept coast of Catalonia, to the Hampshire House in Manhattan, to the rivers of Kenya and back. It is, of course, a love story. But the more you learn of this story, the more contradictory and mysterious that love becomes.
This is, in other words, the story of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner.
Before I can tell the story of who they were together, we have to learn who they were before they met. So this episode will deal with their lives before their first meeting in 1941. We’ll start with Ava Gardner, and then Frank.
Ava Lavinia Gardner was born on December 24, 1922 in Grabtown, North Carolina. The youngest of six, she was born to a tobacco farmer, Jonas, and a homemaker, Molly. Ava had a mostly happy childhood. A beautiful green eyed child with golden curls, she was rambunctious and tomboyish, even fearless. Once when she was six, she climbed up to the top of the town’s water tower all by herself, terrifying the town. And as a child, she was already showing signs of the independent mindedness and defiant streak that would come to define her life. In her memoir she recalled a Black boy named Shine, whom she befriended even though she was told not to. The young Ava didn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to play with this boy, who had such a big smile and who was so much fun. She thought her parents and neighbors were just being weird and defied their instructions to stay away from Shine. In other words, Ava never bought into the racism endemic to the Jim Crow South. If she liked you, she liked you, and that was that.
Around the time Ava turned three, her family’s circumstances changed. Prices for “yellacured” tobacco had plummeted, and the family lost their land. In 1925, Ava’s mother Molly accepted a job at a Teacherage in the nearby town of Brogden. The Teacherage was a boarding house for all the teachers at Brogden School, who by law had to be unmarried. Molly cooked and cleaned for all the teachers who lived there, and the Gardners in turn got to live in the Teacherage. Jonas worked as a sharecropper, and then operated a sawmill behind the school, but never recovered from the loss of his land.
Ava’s father was a taciturn man, who called her “Daughter” instead of her name as a sign of affection. He was not particularly emotionally available. She adored him, and did whatever she could to be close to him, including sleeping in the barn next to him during the curing of the tobacco, when fires in the barn needed to be closely monitored around the clock.
But Ava thrived at the Teacherage--since she lived with the teachers, she trusted them and felt comfortable in the classroom. The Teacherage closed in 1935, when Ava was thirteen, because of the Great Depression. Ava and her parents--the rest of her siblings were grown by this point--moved to Newport News, Virginia, where Molly took a job at a boarding house for shipyard workers. What followed was a series of painful and permanent changes in Ava’s life.
In rural North Carolina, most of the kids at Ava’s school were just as poor as she was. There were fewer stratas of class to contend with. In a city like Newport News, however, Ava stuck out like a sore thumb. When she stood in front of the class on her first day at her new school, the teacher mocked her for saying that her daddy was a farmer. The other students mocked her for her drawling accent, and for her shabby clothes. She became deeply self-conscious and shy, and hated school. The fearless, friendly girl was no more. She internalized all of the teasing about her accent and believed that maybe they were right, maybe she was just a dumb hillbilly who would never amount to anything.
This was also the time that Jonas started developing a hacking cough that drugstore cough syrup wouldn’t quiet. Ava would come home from school and sit by his bedside as he coughed and coughed. She would read him the newspaper. He was obsessed with FDR and regarded him as a kind of god. In her memoir, she regretted being so self-absorbed at the time, thinking about her trials at school, instead of being present with him. He died of bronchial pneumonia when Ava was fifteen. Ava and her mother moved to Rock Ridge, North Carolina, shortly afterward.
At this age, Ava blossomed into an astonishingly beautiful young woman. Her thick, curly hair darkened to a chestnut brown color, and she developed a naturally hourglass figure (Seriously--she maintained a 22-inch waist into her forties). There’s a photo of Ava from around this period that showcases this transformation. Her hair hair is piled up on top of her head, and she’s wearing a sleeveless white chemise. Her almond eyes gaze at the camera above outrageously high cheekbones, full lips, and a delicately cleft chin. I’ve read a lot of books about Ava, and everyone--literally everyone--interviewed in them talks about how beautiful she was. Even as a teenager, her beauty was extraordinary. A friend of hers from her high school days remembered the reaction when she walked into a dance: “In those days there was a pavilion out at the lake, Holt Lake, where they had a jukebox...boys and girls were there, and when Ava walked in everybody just stopped dancing and just looked at her, she was so pretty. They just stopped, I remember, and then the music stopped and no one fed the jukebox right off, they just stood around looking at her.”
Molly Gardner was worried that her beautiful young daughter would be ruined by the first charmer who came along, so she instilled a great deal of shame in Ava about boys and sex. After one high school date ended in a chaste kiss on the doorstep, Molly chased the boy away and told Ava: “if you know a man before you’re married, I’ll see you in your grave.” Ava went to the bathroom and scrubbed at her face with soap where the boy had kissed her, feeling irredeemably tainted.
So here’s this young woman who has been mocked for her socioeconomic status and rural background, while also earning a lot of attention for her beauty. She’s lost her father and protector, and her mother is overcompensating for it. She’s learned that her beauty is shameful because it’s too tempting to boys and men, and she’s learned that maintaining her virginity is integral to keeping her mother’s love and approval. All of this will stay with her as her life takes its first of many extraordinary turns.
She went to secretarial school in North Carolina, expecting to graduate and find a husband and have babies. When she was eighteen, she went to visit her eldest sister Beatrice, nicknamed Bappie, in New York City. Bappie was eighteen years older than Ava, and worked at a department store beauty counter and had a photographer husband, Larry Tarr. Tarr jumped at the chance to take photos of gorgeous Ava, and he even displayed one of her photos in the window of his little shop on Fifth Avenue. This photo would alter the course of her life forever.
In the photo, she’s wearing a bonnet and a calico dress, every inch the Southern belle. Some time later, when Ava was back at secretarial school, a guy named Barney Duhan saw this photo. He was a clerk at Loews, MGM’s parent company. Duhan called the store, pretending to be the head talent scout at MGM, but it was all a ruse so he could get Ava’s phone number. Larry Tarr answered the phone. “Do you want her to come up from NC for an interview?” asked Larry excitedly. Duhan said “no just send some photos of her to my attention.” Somehow, though, these photos sent to Duhan resulted in a screen test for Ava at MGM, even though Ava had no acting experience.
Clips of it are available on YouTube, which I’ll include in the shownotes. It’s a silent screen test, because the screen test director decided her accent was too thick, and Ava doesn’t do much in it. She walks across a room and arranges some flowers in a vase. She seems stiff and wooden, because she’s really nervous. But in the close-up, something happens when her eyes meet the camera. A flash of light dances across her eyes--biographer Lee Server calls it ‘hypnotic fire’--and just as quickly, it is gone. It was this beguiling flash of defiance that sealed Ava’s fate. She was signed to a standard seven year MGM contract of $50 a week, and with her sister Bappie as chaperone, she set off on a train for Hollywood. Coincidentally, MGM star Hedy Lamarr was on the same train.
Francis Albert Sinatra was born on December 12, 1915 in Hoboken, New Jersey. As a newborn, he was literally larger-than-life, weighing in at (accounts differ) thirteen-and-a-half to fourteen pounds. It was a traumatic forceps birth, which left him with a punctured eardrum and significant scarring on his left cheek, neck, and ear. When Frank was born, he wasn’t breathing, and was turning blue. But his mother was in mortal danger, so the doctor essentially left Frank on the table to die. Someone--his grandmother, or an elderly neighbor who was present--had the good sense to take him to the sink and run him under the freezing tap water, which started him crying--and breathing.
Frank’s first moments were a near death experience, and I believe he carried this trauma with him forever. Dolly Sinatra was brilliant, charismatic, and no-nonsense. She was a midwife and sometimes abortionist herself. She also had a natural talent for languages, often serving as an interpreter, and if she had been born in a different era, she would have made an incredibly effective politician. Dolly became influential with the local Democratic Party as what we would today call a community organizer. Frank’s father Marty was an illiterate boxer who used a stage name, Marty O’Brien, because with his bright blue eyes he passed for Irish. Later he would serve as a firefighter. Like Ava’s father, he was a taciturn, withdrawn kind of man. But unlike Jonas Gardner, Marty doesn’t loom that large in Frank’s life.
Frank was an only child in a neighborhood full of big families, which was lonely. From a young age, he struggled to fit in. He also struggled a lot in his relationship with his mother. He confessed as an adult that he “never knew what she’d hate that I’d do”; he walked on tenterhooks around her. Sometimes she’d give him money to buy fancy clothes, and other times with no warning whatsoever she’d hit him with a billy club. She was smothering him with affection one minute, neglecting or abusing him the next. This gave him a fundamental sense of insecurity, especially in his relationships with women as he grew older. Frank also became an adult with what we might call a disorganized attachment style; like his mother he ran hot and cold, couldn’t be counted on, and vacillated between extremes of behavior and emotion.
He loved to sing, and was obsessed with Bing Crosby as a teenager. Dolly gave him sixty five dollars to buy a microphone at the height of the Depression, when sixty five dollars was a lot of money. Frank learned how to use the microphone to his advantage. He started playing school dances and Democratic Party meetings with his microphone. That same year in the summer, he met Nancy Barbato, a girl of seventeen. She was shy and pretty, from a big family, and her father was strict. Frank started dating her.
In 1935 he joined a local singing group in Hoboken called the Three Flashes. They mostly accepted him because he had a car and could drive them to gigs. Now the Hoboken Four, they auditioned for Major Bowes Amateur Hour, a radio show that’s basically the 1930s version of American Idol. They won the competition, and embarked on a six month tour around the country. Sinatra’s bandmates were annoyed that this pipsqueak upstart seemed to get all the girls. Frank was skinny, had bad acne, and was only 5’7”. But he sang with so much heat and conviction that every girl in the joint was convinced he was singing only to her. The jealousy over Frank’s star power resulted in the other three beating him up from time to time, and eventually forcing him to leave the band.
Frank started to go to the jazz clubs in Manhattan. There were truly great musicians playing in the clubs and hotels: Count Basie, Louis Prima, Tommy Dorsey, Fats Waller. But there were also great singers, chief among them Billie Holiday. Billie was only eight months older than Sinatra, but she had already lived a life, suffered a great deal. And as an artist she had a fully formed style, a way of singing that totally inhabited the lyrics in the songs. Billie suffused every word with her pain, and it captivated Sinatra to watch. It captivated everyone. He kissed her one night, in a doorway. In later years he would attribute some of his phrasing to Billie, but I personally don’t really hear that. I do believe that at his height, Frank brought the same kind of emotional intensity to his singing.
But he wasn’t there yet.
His friend Hank Sanicola slipped him some money for singing lessons; he had something to work with, and he knew how to calibrate his performances to get female attention, but he needed better training. Frank went to John Quinlan, who had sung tenor at the Metropolitan opera before getting kicked out for a drinking problem. Quinlan helped with Frank’s singing, pulling the voice from the throat down into the chest. He also smoothed the Hoboken out of his voice a little, so that Frank could sound more like the people in the movies or on the radio, transatlantic-style.
In 1938, Sinatra went on to become a singing waiter in a roadhouse called The Rustic Cabin in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The roadhouse was connected with the radio station WNEW in New York, and so Frank could sometimes be heard singing live on the radio. Frank was convinced this was his big break. And it would be. But first, he got arrested--twice--and then married.
The arrests were the result of him two-timing Nancy with an older gal named Toni. Nancy didn’t sleep with him, even though they’d dated for years. Maybe that’s why Frank proposed to Toni--with a cheap ring--so that they could go to a hotel room and have sex. He knew Nancy would never go for that, but this broad did. The problem arose when Nancy found out about Toni and the two girls had a brawling catfight at the roadhouse. A week after the fight, Frank was arrested in the middle of a show. Toni had charged him with seduction and getting her pregnant. Thus arises the famous mugshot of Frank. It’s an arresting image, a striking face. Frank wasn’t necessarily handsome, but he was brilliant, sensitive, proud, reckless--and all these qualities show up in his bright, wide spaced eyes.
Frank’s mother bailed him out, and the charges quickly disintegrated on the grounds that Toni was technically still married to someone else, and not actually pregnant. Details, details. Toni then got him arrested again on charges of adultery, but that didn’t stick either.
Nancy knew the score. There was a cultural expectation, an understanding, about Italian men at this time. Her father was the same. Nancy couldn’t expect faithfulness from Frank. All she wanted was for him to be discreet. It probably goes without saying at this point that he couldn’t even meet that low of a standard. But Nancy and Frank really did love each other. So shortly after his second arrest, on Valentine’s Day in 1939, they were married.
In June of 1939, Sinatra got his big break at last. Bandleader and trumpeter Harry James came to see him perform at the rustic cabin. Supposedly 23-year-old Frank sang the notoriously difficult Cole Porter Song “Begin the Beguine,” which seems doubtful, but whatever he sang, it was good enough for James to offer Sinatra a $75 a week contract on the spot. Frank was thrilled and accepted. James suggested that he should have a stage name; what about Frankie Satin? Frank was insulted, and interpreted the suggestion as a sign of disrespect. “You want the singer, take the name,” he said. And then he walked away. “Can you imagine?” Sinatra later said to friend Pete Hamill. “If I’d’ve [taken the stage name], I would be working cruise ships today.” Given that his father had boxed under a stage name, we can understand Sinatra’s defiance. He had endured a lot of racist insults for being Italian, and it wouldn’t end when he became famous. Still, we should note the similarity young Frank had with Ava. Both were mocked for their backgrounds; in Ava’s case it was cultural (being a ‘hillbilly’), and in Frank’s case it was ethnic. They responded to it in different ways, but it affected them deeply.
Harry James went after him, smoothed things over, and on June 30th, Frank joined the band on a weeklong engagement in Baltimore. Even then, there was hysteria from female audience members. His singing was met with shrieks from female fans, and he was so new to the band that his name hadn’t been added to the bill. He looked so thin, like he needed to be taken care of, and his singing made him seem so vulnerable. It was catnip.
And it was just the beginning.
Frank only stayed with Harry James and His Orchestra for six months. James was bad with money, and that summer he lost everything in a settlement over a car accident. He needed to pay 17 people, plus food and gas for the bus, and some nights they only brought in $350. There were lots of bands touring America at that point, and some of them had hit records. Harry James couldn’t catch a break; he was a critical darling whose style was ahead of his time. Frank learned a lot as they crisscrossed the country, heading West. But he knew that he needed to find work with another band if he wanted his career to take off.
Plus, by October Nancy was pregnant. She had joined him on the road at that point, to keep an eye on Frank and all the girls. Frank felt the pressure to provide for Nancy and the baby.
So, when he was in Chicago, he auditioned for Tommy Dorsey. Tommy had heard Frank singing in a recording of “All Or Nothing At All” and had been impressed. The audition sealed the deal. He offered Frank $75 a week to come sing with him. Frank went to James and broke the news. ‘I’d rather open a vein than tell you what I’m about to tell you,’ he said. James shook his hand, said he understood, and released Frank from his contract.
His first appearance with Tommy Dorsey was in January of 1940. There is no consensus as to where it happened--some say it was Minneapolis, some say Sheboygan, still others say Milwaukee--but it was the beginning of the true upward trajectory of Frank’s stardom. Tommy Dorsey was a tough son of a bitch with cold blue eyes and unrivaled discipline. He regularly drank himself into a stupor, slept for three hours, and was up and at ‘em by six AM the next day. He played a beautiful trombone, with a remarkable 32-bar legato. Sinatra learned a lot about breath control from Dorsey, who would take little cheating breaths out of the very corners of his mouth, and still keep playing the trombone. Dorsey had no time for bullshit from anyone. He ran his outfit like an army sergeant. There were uniforms. You were fined if you showed up late to rehearsal. It was a benign despotism. Sinatra didn’t like this; he wasn’t a deadlines and curfews kind of guy, and he refused to tamp down his natural swagger or slick back his hair. In the words of Sinatra biographer James Kaplan, Dorsey used a combination of “kindness and menace” to keep his new singer in line. Once when Frank had tested Dorsey’s patience, the bandleader left a rival singer’s jacket on Frank’s chair as a veiled threat to replace him. Frank famously said that the only people he ever feared were his mother and Tommy Dorsey, which is funny but also deeply true. In Tommy Dorsey, Frank found the strong, powerful father figure he never had. Whether subconsciously or on purpose, Frank would imitate Tommy Dorsey for the rest of his life.
The problem came when Frank, the boy singer, eclipsed Tommy Dorsey’s own star power. And this was the ultimate conflict between the two men, both geniuses in their own way. It was just so obvious to everyone in the band that Sinatra had greater ambitions, was destined for stardom, and wouldn’t remain under Dorsey’s control for very long.
Sinatra in 1940 was a totally new sound. At that time, Bing Crosby was the most dominant male singer in America, and his persona was totally, utterly cool. Bing Crosby never sang songs that contained the words “I love you.” He was always at a remove, even as his more conversational style of singing had been a marked change from the operatic style of the 1920s. Sinatra wasn’t cool. He was warm, hot, on fire. There is real yearning in his voice, real vulnerability. His raised profile and actual records with Tommy Dorsey meant that Americans--especially young girls--were hearing him on the radio, on the record player, and he just didn’t sound like anyone else. It was totally new. Frank would kill me for this comparison, but think of Elvis (he hated Elvis.) Or the Beatles. (Frank also hated the Beatles.) Frank was the original teenage heartthrob. You can draw a straight line from Frank to Harry Styles. The phenomenon of a male musician inspiring hysterical lust and obsession in his teenage girl fans, it starts with Frank. He was the first. No neighborhood boy in 1940s America could sing to you like that.
Sinatra’s first number 1 on the Billboard chart just so happened to be the first number 1 on the very first ever Billboard chart. It was called “I’ll Never Smile Again,” recorded in May of 1940 with Tommy Dorsey and the singing group the Pied Pipers, and it stayed at number 1 for twelve weeks, making Sinatra a national star at last. Dorsey started giving Frank more solo songs to sing on stage and to record as singles.
Meanwhile, Frank became a father. His daughter Nancy was born on June 8, 1940. He wasn’t there when she was born; he was playing a show at the Astor in New York. Indeed he would be absent for much of Little Nancy’s infancy--much to Big Nancy’s chagrin. The band was spending more time in Los Angeles, performing at the Hollywood Palladium. And that year, the Tommy Dorsey band got hired to fill out the musical numbers in a Paramount B movie, Las Vegas Nights. Throughout 1940 and 1941, Frank made more movie appearances.
Which is how it came to be that one autumn day in 1941, walking between sound stages in Culver City, he ran into an old friend from the Major Bowes Amateur Hour Days, a pianist named Skitch Henderson. Skitch was walking with a beautiful, beautiful girl. Her eyes sleepy and green, her lips outrageously full, her movements distinctly feline.
After he and Frank exchanged niceties, Skitch said, “Frank, this is Ava Gardner.”
She smiled at him, with a teasing kind of directness in her eyes. But she said little. She was still very shy. She’d arrived in Hollywood in August, and had to take three buses everyday from the tiny apartment she shared with Bappie to the MGM lot in Culver City. On her first day, being shown around the MGM lot, she met a short, cocky man dressed in drag as Carmen Miranda on one of the soundstages. It was Mickey Rooney, at the time one of Hollywood’s brightest stars. He’d been giving Ava the hard sell ever since to go out with him, called her every day, but she kept rejecting him. She wasn’t sure she liked him, and besides, he was a wolf. Her mother wouldn’t be happy with her if she went on a date with someone like that.
Frank, of course, knew none of this. He just knew that Ava was without parallel the most beautiful woman he had ever beheld, and that he wanted her.
As they parted, she gave him another inquisitive look, and it made his stomach turn over. A strange feeling. It was as if she were taunting him, as if she could see inside his head. It unsettled him, but it only lasted a second, and then she was gone.
Hm. That was funny. Now, he’d heard Lana Turner--who’d been married to Artie Shaw for like a week--wasn’t acting all that married. Maybe she wasn’t so keen on clarinet players. Maybe she liked singers better….
And that is where we’ll leave them.