This episode details Frank and Ava's lives leading up to their first real date in 1948/1949. She's flying high as a newly minted movie star, a twice-divorced party girl who believes love has led her astray. At the same time, Frank's on the outs--his records aren't selling, the FBI may be watching him, and the American public has started to turn on him. Then they meet in Palm Springs, and drive off into the desert together, beneath the stars. After this night together, their lives will never be the same again.
This episode details Frank and Ava's lives leading up to their first real date in 1948/1949. She's flying high as a newly minted movie star, a twice-divorced party girl who believes love has led her astray. At the same time, Frank's on the outs--his records aren't selling, the FBI may be watching him, and the American public has started to turn on him. Then they meet in Palm Springs, and drive off into the desert together, beneath the stars. After this night together, their lives will never be the same again.
Welcome to Lovers Forever. This is a podcast about legendary Hollywood romances.
In the last episode, we met Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner for the first time, and tracked their lives up to their first meeting in 1941. They don’t start dating in earnest until the fall of either 1948 or 1949--I honestly haven’t been able to confirm this one way or another. Throughout this time, they kept bumping into each other, but they had a long journey before the romance started in earnest. In this episode, we’re going to briefly look at what happens to them in the roughly eight years between their first meeting, and their first date. What happens to each of them in this time period greatly affects the dynamics, parameters, and consequences of their affair. It’s context that we will need to understand their story together. If you’re interested in learning more about Frank and Ava, I’ll include resources in the show notes for further reading.
By December of 1941, Mickey Rooney had finally worn Ava down. She had started going out with him a few months before, at first bringing her sister Bappie as a chaperone. Mickey Rooney was only 21, but he was in ways much older. He’d been a vaudeville performer starting from age two, and he’d become a child movie actor by age six. He became a full-fledged star with the Andy Hardy series of movies and was a valuable property for MGM, which prided itself on its family-friendly, Main Street values. Andy Hardy was a wholesome, aw-shucks boy, a soda parlor boy, a kiss-on-the-cheek character. But Mickey Rooney was a wolf and a half. It had given studio chief Louis B Mayer a near heart attack when he discovered that Rooney was having an affair with 38-year-old Norma Shearer, having sex with her in her trailer on the set of the movie Marie Antoinette. He’d been with everyone, it seemed. Mickey’s own mother came all the way to Mayer’s office once to complain that her son was spending all of his money on hookers.
And though Ava started going with him to the Mocambo and the Beachcomber and Chasen’s, she wouldn’t sleep with him. She was still a virgin, and she would remain that way until she got married. So Mickey started proposing, and she turned him down. And he asked again, and she said no again. Over and over, by his count twenty five times. It infuriated him. But it was also--though Ava didn’t mean for it to be--its own form of seduction.
Her refusal was a challenge to the young man who could have everything. Her beauty was enthralling enough, but the more she turned him down, the more desperately he wanted her. Ava wasn’t really sure how she felt about him. He was fun, but he was always on. And he was so short. With her heels on, dressed to go out, he barely came up to her breasts. Ava was still only eighteen, and too young to even know who she was, let alone get married. Sid Luft, a friend of Rooney’s, said: “she was a very beautiful girl but very, very naive. She seemed like she had just walked in out of the woods.”
But finally, two days after the Pearl Harbor bombings, he had proposed again, and she said yes. They had to get married in secret, because Louis B Mayer was concerned that the marriage would detract from Andy Hardy’s wholesome image. They were married on january 28, 1942, and they had a happy honeymoon. Ava liked having sex, though her mother had taught her to fear it. But the marriage, as you might imagine, was doomed from the start.
Mickey more or less continued to live as he had done before, always out and about, at the golf club, out to dinner, at the races. He’d buy Ava jewelry, but she never bothered wearing it. He’d have to pawn it the next week because of his gambling losses. Ava at that time was something of a homebody; she liked to laze around for hours listening to records, have long lingering dinners. Ava was wary of strangers; Mickey preferred to be surrounded by them. He didn’t want her home-cooked meals, he wanted the noise and the smoke of dinner at Romanoff’s. She didn’t have a meaningful role in his life. One night, she needed an emergency appendectomy, and was rushed to the hospital. He came to visit her, gave her presents, but when she returned, she found evidence that he had been entertaining other women in her absence. He denied it, but she could never shake the feeling. It was a betrayal from which the marriage would not recover.
Ava asked him for a formal separation on January 15, 1943.
Meanwhile, Howard Hughes read about their split in the newspaper. He looked at the picture of the two of them; glorious Ava, tiny Mickey. He laughed to himself, “the little runt couldn’t satisfy her.”
Hughes was one of the richest men in America, a businessman, aviation daredevil, and independent filmmaker. He was an inventor, the majority owner of Trans World Airlines, and had already had a string of famous girlfriends, including Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn. He was by this point a sort of collector of Hollywood beauties, if you will. He had a type, and Ava fit it to the letter: dark haired, bosomy, young, and preferably recently separated or divorced and therefore--he presumed--in a state of sexual voraciousness. He referred to such women as “wet decks,” which is pretty gross.
Ava agreed to go on a date with him under the mistaken presumption that he was the film director Howard Hawks (honestly, this is pretty endearing. It’s the kind of thing I would do). She liked his company, but wasn’t attracted to him. For a while, Howard Hughes pursued her patiently, lavishing her with gifts. He gave her a fully trained German shepherd when she mentioned wanting a dog. And when Ava learned that her mother’s health was deteriorating, Hughes paid for Molly to see good doctors.
But eventually, he started proposing to her. Hughes proposed to women all the time; once he proposed, simultaneously, to Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine, who were sisters. Ava said no. Once again she was engaged in this kind of dance with a man, except her feelings for him had no potential to turn into love as they had with Mickey. One night Hughes broke into Ava’s house, and demanded that she marry him. When she said no, he hit her, so she grabbed the first thing she could find--either an obsidian ash tray or a brass bell--and knocked out his front teeth.
You messed with Ava at your peril.
She would continue to be in contact with Hughes off and on for nearly two decades after that. But then she met bandleader Artie Shaw, and fell madly in love.
Artie was a prick. I don’t even feel bad for saying this. He had already been married four times, including to Lana Turner, who called him “the most conceited, unpleasant man I ever met”. Artie was an incredibly talented clarinet player, but he was verbally abusive and condescending to Ava, particularly after they got married. She hadn’t had that great of an education, and was still quite naive when they married, only 23. Artie would berate her, even in front of their friends, for being barefoot (Ava always preferred to be barefoot.) “What are you doing?” he’d sneer. “Do you think you’re still in a tobacco field?” Friends of the couple said that Ava would often cry when he did this. She was head over heels for him, in too deep to realize that she deserved better. And all of the shame about her background she’d first felt back in Newport News? Artie activated it again.
Once she begged for an intelligence test from a doctor, who assured her that she had high above average intelligence, but just hadn’t been very educated. She started taking extension courses at UCLA, trying to prove to Artie that he hadn’t married an idiot. But it was too little, too late. The marriage deteriorated. She often felt the need to vomit and started losing weight. They constantly argued. And Ava turned to alcohol seriously for the first time, because it eased her pain.
Meanwhile, Ava had been in Hollywood since 1941 and had been getting nothing but uncredited bit parts. Her first major role was in a B movie called Whistle Stop, where she played George Raft’s love interest. The movie is on YouTube, I’ll link it in the show notes. It’s a totally unremarkable picture, a sleazy midwestern noir, and Ava doesn’t yet have control of her voice as a performer. But she holds her own, and is lit and filmed to striking effect. It was this performance in Whistle Stop that caught the attention of producer Mark Hellinger. Hellinger was developing a movie adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway story The Killers.
The original story is a conversation between two hitmen on their way to kill a man. John Huston wrote the screenplay, uncredited because he was under contract to a different studio. The story was expanded--a life insurance investigator tracks down the dead man’s friends, and in extended flashbacks, we learn why Ole Anderson--nicknamed the Swede--was murdered. It turns out that he was a washed up prizefighter who got mixed up with the wrong people, and participated in a payroll robbery. And it turns out that a woman is at the center of it all, a beautiful, treacherous woman named Kitty Collins, who executes a complicated triple-cross on Swede in the aftermath of said robbery. Hellinger had already found Burt Lancaster for the role of Swede (it was Lancaster’s film debut). He was looking for an actress so beautiful that audiences would believe that Lancaster would do anything for her, including dying or going to prison.
And 24-year-old Ava was that beautiful. She was loaned out from MGM to Universal for the shoot.
German-born Robert Siodmak directed the picture. On the first day of test shoots, Ava came out of the dressing room in full MGM glam. Siodmak said, “Ava! What is all this face? You are going back and washing off and bringing face back alone!” Ava shrugged and washed off her makeup.
In The Killers, Ava gives her first very good performance; she has comparatively little screen time for top billing, but her presence haunts the movie, and she pulls focus even in the background. The romance between Kitty and Swede is one of frustration--they know if they hadn’t gotten involved in a life of crime, they would have had a good life together. But because of their circumstances, the relationship is fundamentally doomed. Ava, already on her second divorce, could relate to that.
The Killers was a massive critical and box office hit, and it made stars out of both Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. After the divorce from Artie, Ava went through something of a wild period. She returned to nightlife, going out three or four nights a week. Actress Candy Toxton lived in the same apartment building as Ava in the summer of 1946. This is how Candy remembers Ava from that time:
“We’d borrow a cup of sugar from each other now and then. And she knew some of the men I was dating, and I knew some of the men she was dating. But we were neighbors, not best friends, and I did not know any of her inner thoughts...I never sensed any great unhappiness about her. She was not embarrassed about anything. If a man stayed overnight with her she didn’t try to hide it; she would just say, oh he stayed overnight...she was so beautiful that every man wanted her...but I felt she didn’t really care what they thought...she didn’t take them seriously, all these men.”
After her heartbreak with Artie, it makes sense that Ava would be emotionally unavailable. It was also perhaps meant to provoke, like her habit of booking two dates in one night. Sometimes her two suitors crossed paths in the hallway. Ava started seeing Howard Hughes again around this time, and eventually had something of a serious relationship with actor Howard Duff. Other flings from 1946 to 1949 included Mel Torme, Turhan Bey, David Niven, Kirk Douglas, JFK, Robert Taylor, Bob Mitchum, and Vinicius de Moraes, the Brazilian vice consul to Los Angeles. One night Ava turned to Moraes and said, apropos of nothing: “yes, I am very beautiful, but morally, I stink.”
Of all these attachments, the most serious--at least to Ava--was Bob Mitchum. But he was married to his childhood sweetheart, and he always went back to Dorothy. Ava even called Dorothy once and asked what they were going to do about the situation. Hadn’t Dorothy had him long enough? Wasn’t it time to give another gal a chance? According to Bob Mitchum’s account, Dorothy answered “no” to both questions and hung up on Ava. Mitchum drifted away after the film they were working on together wrapped. Ava was devastated. She had thought, for a moment, that he really loved her, that they were going somewhere, that it was real.
In May of 1949, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wrote in her column in the Los Angeles Times:
Ava Gardner, the torchiest thing we have in Hollywood today, admits she’s man hungry...she’s had the nightclubs and the glamour romeos and the parties...and she’d trade it all any day for a man who would give her a home, a family, and all the other things in the good, old-fashioned concept of what’s really worthwhile.
“There is just one thing missing,” she says, “that would make the whole picture perfect for me.”
We know what she means. But stop pushing, fellows. She swears she’ll know him when she sees him. Number 3 is her lucky number, and Number 3’s coming up.
Meanwhile.
A lot happened to Frank between the years of 1941 and 1949, but we will focus primarily on his career trajectory, because that was his primary focus in these years. We will also touch on his connections to the mob, and some of his family life.
The Music/the movies:
Soon after meeting young Ava, Frank became determined to leave Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra behind. This was a big deal. In 1941, there really was no such thing as being just a singer (unless your name was Bing Crosby.) Singers were attached to bands, and didn’t often record on their own. But Frank convinced Tommy to let him record some solo tracks accompanied by string instruments, and they turned out good enough--and sold well enough--that Frank had the confidence to leave the band. Thus began the complicated process of abandoning his most formative musical relationship. He tried to get out of his three year contract three months early. Dorsey wouldn’t admit it to Frank, but he felt deeply betrayed. He had given so much artistic nurturing to this boy, made him a national star! After protracted months of standoffs and silent treatments, Frank was able to get out of his contract by signing a paper that made Dorsey his manager. In exchange for an advance of $17,000, Dorsey would get 33.3 percent of Sinatra’s gross earnings either for ten years or perpetuity. This was quite obviously an agreement that would backfire on Frank. But later in 1942, Frank played a show at the Paramount Theater in New York, with Benny Goodman and his orchestra. He was fourth billed as an extra added attraction. Still, Frank’s appearance on stage created such a commotion that the building shook. The audience was going wild for Sinatra, screaming “Frankieeee!” It was unlike anything Bob Weitman, the manager of the Paramount, had ever seen. An employee said to him, “the balcony’s rocking. What do we do?”
Frank established a sort of short term residency at the Paramount theater, playing there for four straight weeks. Frank also got a new publicist at this time, George Evans. Evans shrewdly realized how to capitalize on the fervor of Frank’s mostly teenage girl fans. He had plants in the audience who he coached to say or do certain things in response to Frank’s singing, including fainting in the aisles, or moaning loudly in unison. He had ambulances stationed outside the theater at Frank’s shows, in case an audience member swooned. It was all brilliant PR, and also what we might call astro-turfing today. The Paramount Theater already had a thousand extra people in it every day because girls were so frenzied about Frank. The grassroots phenomena would have reached a fever pitch on its own. George Evans’ carefully staged theatrics just accelerated that process.
Evans also capitalized on Frank’s image as a family man--a masterstroke of PR, but also a ticking time bomb in terms of liability. Frank had never really been a family man, and as his fame increased, so did the number of women who wanted to sleep with him. Frank seemed willing to oblige as many of them as possible. He also started an affair with the movie actress Marilyn Maxwell. But Evans knew that in 1943, a man determined to become a public figure had to present to the world as a family man. Frank had publicity photos taken of him washing the car, mowing the lawn, teaching Little Nancy how to play the piano. Big Nancy was suffering as a result of his chronic infidelity, but Frank was too wrapped up in his career and the other women to notice.
This is an aspect of his character that shows up again and again, a fundamental selfishness that at times makes him hard to root for. Like I said, a ticking time bomb. Some day, Big Nancy wouldn’t sit stoically by and play along with the image George Evans had created of a happy suburban family. Nancy would eventually find the frontier of her tolerance for embarrassment. The dignity she had always possessed, that had been pushed underground so she could stay in the marriage, would come roaring back, and Frank would greatly underestimate its power.
But later. For now, George Evans took her to Bonwit Teller for some fancy new clothes, and had her teeth capped.
In 1943, Frank signed a seven year contract with RKO and appeared in a movie called Higher and Higher. In it, he’s strikingly beautiful and appealing. It’s worth seeking out clips of it especially if you only know Sinatra as the Chairman of the Board. This was the Sinatra that first came on the scene, young, spit-curled, and achingly vulnerable. Also at some point in 1943, he was able to get out of his insufferable new contract with Tommy Dorsey.
This is supposedly the inspiration for The Godfather; there are multiple accounts of exactly what happened, but in 1986, Frank himself said this:
“The man who straightened it out was named Saul Jaffe. He’s a lawyer who is now retired. Mr. Jaffe was the secretary of the American Federation of Radio Artists...I told Jaffe the whole story, and he went to Mr. Dorsey and he said to him, I represent Frank Sinatra in this case that you and he are involved in. He said, I think we can come to a settlement quite simply. Tom said, No, no. I want one third of his salary for the rest of his life. So Jaffe said to him, do you enjoy playing music in hotel ballrooms and having the nation hear you on the radio? Dorsey said sure I do. Jaffe said, not anymore you won’t.”
In essence, in Sinatra’s telling, Jaffe threatened to take Dorsey’s music off the airwaves. But Jerry Lewis said that four mobsters, including Frank Costello and Willi Moretti, went to Dorsey to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Still another version of the story, from Tommy Dorsey’s daughter , alleges that Dorsey got a threatening phone call from an anonymous caller. The caller implied that bad things would happen to Dorsey’s children if he didn’t let Sinatra out of his contract. Dorsey responded by putting up barbed wire around his house.
In the end, Mob or no Mob, the agency MCA brokered the deal. Dorsey got sixty thousand dollars to let Frank go, and Frank was signed to MCA and got a deal with Columbia Records.
In the midst of all of this, there was also a war on. Sinatra avoided being drafted because he was classified 4F. His punctured eardrum, his skinny frame, and his neuroses--claustrophobia, fear of crowds, bouts of anxiety--meant he wasn’t fit to serve. But he was also a heartthrob whose fan base at this point was largely young women. This meant that he became, in the words of historian William Manchester, the most hated man in the armed forces, perhaps in America. While the men of America were overseas, Frank was home--keeping their women company. Singing to them in person, singing to them on the radio, and doing God knows what else behind closed doors.
In October 1944, there were riots at his return engagement at the Paramount theater. There were already five thousand people inside the theater, which had 3500 seats. But after the first show, only 200 people left. The rest, almost all girls, settled in for the next show. Meanwhile, outside, 30 to 35 thousand people had been waiting in line, some as early as 3AM. When they couldn’t get in, a riot broke out in Times Square. Several girls fainted and had to be transported to the hospital--lucky that George Evans always kept those ambulances on hand. It was a tremendously important touchstone in the history of American popular culture: the first time a teenage heartthrob had caused an actual riot.
In 1946, Frank followed that up with another first: the first pop album as we know it today. Back then, there was no such thing as a nationally available thematic album of popular music. It had all been singles before this. But Frank released four discs, eight songs in total, in a wide, heavy box with his picture on the front. It was called The Voice Of Frank Sinatra, and it sold for $2.50--the equivalent of $36 today. Of the eight songs, six are basically masterpieces of the Great American Songbook, among them: Someone to Watch Over me, Why Shouldn’t I, Try A Little Tenderness, I Don’t Stand A Ghost Of A Chance. It entered the Billboard Top 5 chart two weeks after its release and stayed at number 1 for seven weeks. The album, with its relatively expensive price and its high-quality, mature songs, helped Sinatra win over adults, not just teens. It cemented his place as the dominant singer of his time, and was an artistic statement of great integrity and uniqueness--he had fully come into his own as a singer.
This high point was short lived. After the war ended, popular songwriting started to decline. The ballads Frank sang through the war years embodied the longing and loneliness of those times. But in 1946, people wanted to forget all of that and enjoy goofy novelty numbers. Irving Berlin and Cole Porter were mostly writing for Broadway instead of popular music. Frank had his friend Sammy Cahn scouting good songs for him, and he had songwriters like Jimmy Van Heusen who created lovely songs for him too. But he also had to start singing mediocre or bad songs more and more, since that’s what was popular.
He also had to sing them while he was a host on the radio show Your Hit Parade--that’s how the program worked. He had to sing the best-selling songs of the week, even when they weren’t his--and by 1947, most of them weren’t. He had to suffer through singing songs like “Too Fat to Polka” and “The Woody Woodpecker Song.” The latter had him mimic a woodpecker laughing. He complained to journalist George T Simon, “the popular songs of the day, they’ve become so bloodless. As a singer of popular songs, I’ve been looking for wonderful pieces of music in the popular vein--what they call Tin Pan Alley songs. You cannot find any...I don’t think the few extra bucks in a song that becomes a fast hit make a difference in the existence of a big recording company or a big publishing firm. If they turned them down, it would do music some good.” He was not wrong. But as public tastes shifted away from Sinatra’s own inclinations as an artist, he lost much of his creative control.
In 1944 he had switched movie studios and was signed to MGM, a major upgrade from RKO. His first film at MGM was Anchors Aweigh, a technicolor musical co-starring Gene Kelly. Frank quickly earned the nickname “One Take Charlie” on movie sets because he didn’t like having to do multiple takes. Frank worked hard for Gene Kelly, because he respected the man. Anchors Aweigh is good fun, and Frank convincingly plays a sailor on shore leave who’s too shy to really talk to women. Gene Kelly’s character gets to play the ladykiller. It earned 7.5 million at the box office, which was a big success at the time. But most of the rest of Frank’s movies in the 1940s were either mediocre (It Happened In Brooklyn) or just bad (The Miracle of the Bells and The Kissing Bandit). It was a combination of poor source material, bad casting, and Frank’s own unease in front of the camera. Acting wasn’t like being in the studio, where Frank himself had a lot of control over the finished product and the process of making it. He grew restless in between takes and would sometimes disappear--especially if Lana Turner happened to be around. So as his on-set behavior deteriorated, the MGM bosses got back at him by giving him worse parts. Sinatra could act well, given the right material and the right co-stars. But his 1949 film The Kissing Bandit lost 2.6 million dollars at the box office, making it one of the worst performing musicals in MGM’s history.
the FBI, the Mob, the Press:
Aside from his perceived draft-dodging, Frank had accumulated some goodwill throughout the 1940s by championing progressive causes. He starred in a short film, The House I Live In, where he intercedes on behalf of a young Jewish boy whose peers are bullying him. It came out in 1945, and honestly watching it now makes you realize how far we still have to go as a country, because it’s still relevant. It is very well done, and it won a special Oscar.
He also went on thirty speaking engagements in 1945, many of them at high schools around the country. He spoke about the importance of tolerance--in Gary, Indiana, he talked to white students who were striking in response to their school being integrated. “Cut it out, kids. Go back to school,” he said. “You’ve got to go because you don’t want to be ashamed of your student body, your city, your country.” As a result of this work, Frank started to win awards from organizations like the Bureau of Intercultural Education, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and more. There’s no doubt it was a strategic PR move, but Sinatra’s commitment to progressive causes was also very genuine. He made a point of including Black performers as supporting acts during his live shows, which helped make Sammy Davis Jr a star, and he paid them the same rates that white performers would get. Frank knew what it felt like to be discriminated against as an Italian-American. When he met FDR, the president made a crack to Sinatra’s face that “back in my day, one of your kind wouldn’t be able to win over the ladies.”
His progressivism would also catch the attention of the FBI, and in 1946, Gerald L.K. Smith testified before HUAC that Sinatra was acting as “a front” for Communist groups. The FBI would start compiling a dossier on Sinatra, despite the fact that he had never been a Communist or involved with any Communist groups. He was involved with another maligned organization, however.
In February of 1947, Frank made a major error in judgement. He went to a Mafia summit at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, Cuba. If his publicist George Evans didn’t have ulcers before, well, he probably did after this. It’s hard to imagine a celebrity behaving so recklessly in 1947--openly travelling to a summit of organized crime. Frank was supposedly there just to sing for everybody, which he did. There are also rumors he acted as courier, with a suitcase full of two million dollars--business proceeds the mobster Lucky Luciano had been thus far unable to collect. Frank had known a lot of mobsters through the years, because they owned a lot of the nightclubs and venues he sang in. These were often fronts for their illegitimate businesses like prostitution and narcotics trafficking. Between Sinatra and the Mob, there was a current of mutual respect and fascination. But in 1947, being photographed toting a large suitcase into a gangster’s ball in Havana--it was a profoundly stupid thing to do.
He had also left his home life on incredibly shaky ground. Shortly before he left for Havana, Nancy had threatened to commit an unimaginable act, at least back then. She was currently pregnant. But she was so angry at him for his flagrant affair with Lana Turner that she threatened to abort the pregnancy. He had been photographed dancing with Lana, grinning like a boy in a candy store, his wedding ring clearly visible in the photo. Everybody in Los Angeles knew about the affair. All of it humiliated Nancy. She had endured so much embarrassment before this, put up with so much cheating and lying. The fact that Frank went to this Mafia summit, essentially gambling with his reputation and by extension the family’s, proved the final straw for her. Reunited with him in Acapulco, she revealed that she had in fact terminated the pregnancy.
Remember how I said that she wouldn’t stay compliant forever?
This vengeful power play by Nancy caused Frank to recommit to the marriage, at least by his standards, and Nancy was pregnant again shortly after. Their third child, Tina, was born in June of 1948.
As Frank’s star grew, he also racked up enemies in the press, particularly a journalist known as Lee Mortimer. Mortimer had antagonized Sinatra for the fervor of his fans and his draft-dodging. Enmity between the two men steadily built up through the war years and after. But in April 1947, the feud came to a head (1947 was a bad year for Frank). Accounts of exactly what occurred are confused, to say the least, but we do know that Frank punched Lee Mortimer in the face outside Ciro’s nightclub, and Mortimer promptly went to the police station to file a complaint.
Lee Mortimer was not exactly all that well-liked, and he had been antagonizing Sinatra for years. But the press rallied around one of their own anyway. Frank embellished the story to make himself look more sympathetic, claiming that Mortimer had called him a racial slur, and that started the fight. But it was a PR nightmare. Frank had to go to court, and lost at least $24,000 in lawyer’s fees and the eventual settlement. Shortly thereafter Frank was fired from his Old Gold-sponsored radio show.
And Mortimer made a call to the FBI and requested an audience with J. Edgar Hoover.
Throughout this entire period, Ava and Frank ran into each other multiple times. Once she came up for a cup of coffee--and nothing more--when he was staying in a suite at the Sunset Tower. Shortly after her marriage to Mickey, Frank met the couple at a nightclub and said to Ava, “it’s too bad I didn’t meet you first.” They saw each other at New Year’s Eve parties. When Frank was on a Palm Springs getaway with Lana Turner, who should he run into dancing at the Chi Chi but Ava, with Howard Hughes. They switched partners on the dance floor and Ava gave him the same challenging, knowing look as before. Once they even went on a date after running into each other on the street, and they went back to a borrowed apartment Frank used for such situations and started kissing. But Ava resolved not to sleep with him. He was married, and she felt too vulnerable around him, like if she were to sleep with him now, she’d be in the same disadvantaged place she’d been with Artie, and she wouldn’t have any power. Francis, she said, urging him to stop. It was the first time anyone had called him by his given name. She got up off the couch and left shortly thereafter. Frank must have been surprised. He wasn’t used to women saying no to him.
But finally, now, we come to their first date, such as it was. Ava was twice-divorced, a newly minted star who believed that love had led her astray. Frank was down on his luck, not selling any records, probably being tailed by the FBI, his movies were failing, and he just wanted to escape from reality.
When their first date happened is the first of many inconsistencies in the lore surrounding Frank and Ava. Frank’s most recent biographer James Kaplan puts the date of their romance at the autumn of 1948. Ava in her memoir places it in early 1949. Lee Server, Ava’s biographer, claims it is autumn 1949. Mearene Jordan, who was employed as Ava’s maid for decades and her close friend, also claims in her memoir that the year was 1949. I can’t find any newspaper reports of the couple from before 1950. Whenever it happened--and I personally lean toward 1949--it happened in Palm Springs.
They saw each other at a party at David O Selznick’s place. Frank went over to her. Ava recalls their conversation thusly in her memoir:
“Good to see you again,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Sure has,” I answered.
“I suppose we were rushing things a little the last time we met.”
“You were rushing things a little.”
“Let’s start again,” said Frank. “What are you doing now?”
“Making pictures as usual. How about you?”
“Trying to pick myself up off my ass.”
They talked and drank for a couple of hours. He offered to drive her home. She smiled, demurred. She was staying with her sister out here. Frank said, “how about we take a drive?”
So they got in his Cadillac convertible and off they went into the night. They were headed for the desert flatlands, and Ava opened the fifth of Beefeater they’d brought with them from the party. They passed each other the bottle as he drove. As they zoomed through long stretches of open road, they started singing together, and Frank was impressed--she had a nice voice. She could even harmonize.
Finally they reached the town of Indio. Frank pulled into a Texaco station with drunken sloppiness and stopped the car, and they started making out. Nearby a blinking traffic light swayed in the wind. It was quiet, about two in the morning. Ava pulled back for a moment to take another drink, and then Sinatra got an idea. Why not liven up the fucking place, huh? He opened his glove compartment and took out two .38 Smith and Wesson pistols and fired one in the approximate direction of “up.” He knocked out one street light, then another. Then Ava wanted a turn, naturally. So she took the other gun and fired at random, into the sky, at the ground, into a hardware store window. Both of them were whooping and hollering.
It wasn’t long before the police found them.
Ava slept on a bench in the police station while Frank negotiated with the cop in charge. Frank was allowed to make a phone call, so he called his west coast publicist Jack Keller, who of course was willing to do whatever he could to keep Frank’s name out of the papers. The police chief named a sum that would make it all go away. So Keller went to his friend, who happened to manage the Knickerbocker hotel, who had thirty grand in his safe. Keller borrowed all of the money, chartered a private plane, and before daybreak, he arrived with a suitcase full of cash to keep everyone quiet. And to this day, Keller is the only person who’s ever confirmed the story on the record, on tape--and he also told the story to Peter Bogdonavich. Ava denies it happened in her memoir, and says it’s all made up. But as first dates go, it’s just too good of a story not to be true.
Ava does say this: “We knew, and I think it must have frightened both of us.”
Suddenly, in a flash, Frank was deeply in love with Ava Gardner.
And Ava Gardner was deeply in love with Frank.
And it was the most powerful feeling that either of them had ever known.
That’s where we’ll leave them, for now.
Thanks for listening to Lovers Forever. This episode was written, narrated, and edited by me, Amber Nelson. All the music is from Epidemic Sound. The logo was designed by Abby Shiell. If you like Lovers Forever, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts. You can find us online at lovers forever podcast on instagram.