Frank_ The Voice Part 34

She had. She proceeded to recount the conversation, in slightly different form. It had been entirely amicable, and she had arranged to cut her visit to Madrid short so she could meet Frank in Rome on Sat.u.r.day or Sunday.

The reporter was scrawling, fast, in his notebook. So we could still say a holiday reconciliation.

"I'll be so happy to see him again," Ava said.

Frank had left Tuesday night, checking the two huge white suitcases that he took everywhere, but carrying the presents-an armful, including the big white Teitelbaum's box: he didn't want to risk some baggage handler s.n.a.t.c.hing that that. It was an overnight flight from Los Angeles to New York, a three-hour layover, then another ten-hour leg from Idlewild to Heathrow. Another layover, then three hours to Rome. These were the pre-jet days, propellers droning on the big Constellation, b.u.mping along with the weather in the lower stratosphere, four hundred miles an hour tops, even with a tailwind. A lot of time to read, to try to sleep, to smoke and drink and worry. He chewed gum, he stared out the window, he drummed his fingers on the armrest. A lot of time to be impatient.

And to change his mind: he'd bought a ticket to Rome, but he had decided to go to Madrid.

The reporters were waiting at Heathrow.

"I'm going to spend Christmas with my wife," he said, walking fast toward customs as two redcaps laden with bags did their best to keep up. The pack of newsmen walked with him.

"I never talk about my personal affairs, but yes, my wife is expecting me."

The cheeky chap from News of the World News of the World chased him. Frank chewed his gum and walked straight ahead. A BOAC representative, tall with gray brushed-back hair and a large triangular nose, caught up with him. chased him. Frank chewed his gum and walked straight ahead. A BOAC representative, tall with gray brushed-back hair and a large triangular nose, caught up with him.

"I gotta get to Madrid," Frank said. "The first flight, even if I have to stand all the way."

But he was ticketed to Rome, and the flights to Madrid were full.

While the customs people looked through his bags, he paced the terrazzo floor of the hall, back and forth, back and forth, for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. He sent a cable to Ava in Madrid, saying he would be there by evening. He was standing with his hands on his hips, tapping his foot, when the BOAC man finally returned. The flights were full.

Croydon Airport was fifteen miles away.

Chartering a twin-engine plane to Madrid would cost 160 pounds-about $440, a month's wages for a fairly well-off English office worker. Frank took out a thick wad of bills, pointed at one of the redcaps.

He grabbed a cab to Croydon.

Ava had spent her first couple of weeks in Rome preparing for The Barefoot Contessa: The Barefoot Contessa: being fitted for costumes, finding an apartment, hiring a maid and an a.s.sistant, socializing with Bogart and Mankiewicz, making a splash on the Via Veneto. She even read that script-which, she was surprised to find, she loved. Not only was Mankiewicz a superbly witty writer, but her part was wonderful: she was to play Maria Vargas, an international woman of mystery who goes from dancing in a sleazy Madrid cabaret to marrying one of the richest men in the world. She would get to wear peasant costumes and ball gowns and seduce every man in sight. being fitted for costumes, finding an apartment, hiring a maid and an a.s.sistant, socializing with Bogart and Mankiewicz, making a splash on the Via Veneto. She even read that script-which, she was surprised to find, she loved. Not only was Mankiewicz a superbly witty writer, but her part was wonderful: she was to play Maria Vargas, an international woman of mystery who goes from dancing in a sleazy Madrid cabaret to marrying one of the richest men in the world. She would get to wear peasant costumes and ball gowns and seduce every man in sight.

The bit about Madrid caught her eye. It was as if Mankiewicz had been reading her mind. Spain was the place she now knew she loved most in the world, and she hadn't been able to stop thinking about the handsome bullfighter Dominguin since she'd met him in January. And so, since shooting wasn't to start till after the holidays, she made a beeline for the Spanish capital, to soak up some sun while she stayed at the villa of her expat friends Frank and Doreen Grant, but primarily to find Dominguin.

There was an urgency about Ava's actions over Christmas that year. She was about to turn thirty-one-then a far more advanced age for a woman (and especially a movie star) than now; also, as her biographer has written, she had been without a s.e.xual partner for months. Frank's cable had come at a most unwelcome moment. "She was," Lee Server writes, "not a little distressed over Frank's pursuit, could not trust her resolve in the face of his determination, and so felt a pressing need to affirm a new romantic alliance right then, before anyone could do anything to stop it." She had edged out Dominguin's beautiful young girlfriend within hours of arriving in town-child's play-and in short order ("just hours before Sinatra's arrival," according to Server) had shacked up with the torero at the Hotel Wellington.

The newspapers always delighted in noting when Frank and Ava failed to meet each other at this or that airport, but her absence when Frank's chartered plane landed in Madrid on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, her birthday, had nothing to do with pique: she was making love with Dominguin in their hotel suite at the time. The inopportune arrival of a lady's old beau just as she has taken up with a new one may seem like the stuff of commedia dell'arte or a farce by Feydeau, but the next few days were characterized less by romantic intrigue than by anger and sadness between the two former lovers, combined with the low-grade misery of keeping up appearances.

That night the two sat on the floor in the Grants' living room, exchanging presents and singing carols, Frank glancing at Ava, Ava avoiding Frank's glance. Right in the middle of the festivities United Press phoned. Frank gritted his teeth and took the call. "I hope to spend Christmas with my wife the same way millions of people [do] all over the world," he told the reporter.

Was he going back to Rome with Ava?

He couldn't say.

Did that mean Frank didn't know, or he wouldn't talk about it?

He couldn't say.

So great was the strain that he came down with a miserable cold the next morning. And she, in her fury at him for descending on her, fell ill, too.

She shouted an obscenity, sneezing and smashing her fist into the pillow. Dominguin didn't need a translation. And he understood when she explained she would have to go back to Rome with Sinatra. She would make sure he returned to America as soon as possible, then she would call for Luis Miguel to join her.

AVA GARDNER, SINATRA SILENT ON RECONCILIATION, read the December 30 wire-service headline, datelined Rome.

Actress Ava Gardner, in bed with the flu shortly after resuming housekeeping with husband Frank Sinatra, was reported "feeling much better today."A doctor said she probably would be able to leave her apartment to keep several appointments later today.Miss Gardner went to bed yesterday several hours after she and Sinatra arrived in Rome from Madrid. He flew from the United States and followed her to Spain for Christmas, giving rise to reports of a reconciliation.On arrival here, they went straight to the actress' luxurious apartment on the fashionable Corso d'Italia, but neither would comment on whether she is abandoning her previously announced plans to get a divorce.Reached by telephone, Sinatra gave no hint of love or romance. Asked about a reconciliation, he snapped:"This doesn't concern anyone but us. This is n.o.body's business but our own."

Twentieth Century Fox was frantically trying to keep Pink Tights Pink Tights alive. Monroe's and Sinatra's salaries were being paid week after week, but nothing was happening. Darryl F. Zanuck was struggling to keep the film on track, but both stars were out of town and preoccupied: Marilyn holed up in San Francisco with the man she was about to marry, Joe DiMaggio; Frank in Rome, "trying to work things out" with his wife, as he kept cabling Fox. alive. Monroe's and Sinatra's salaries were being paid week after week, but nothing was happening. Darryl F. Zanuck was struggling to keep the film on track, but both stars were out of town and preoccupied: Marilyn holed up in San Francisco with the man she was about to marry, Joe DiMaggio; Frank in Rome, "trying to work things out" with his wife, as he kept cabling Fox.

With the press camped outside, Frank and Ava spent three days sequestered in her apartment, drinking, talking, shouting (not quite as loudly as they used to), even taking a shot at making up, without much success. She told him apologetically that she still felt like s.h.i.t-but they both knew her health had nothing to do with it.

Rome, December 29, 1953. Sick, miserable, and about to be a couple no more. (photo credit 38.2) (photo credit 38.2) They threw a New Year's Eve party-Ava's idea-at the Via Veneto cabaret run by Cole Porter's legendary muse Bricktop. Getting out of the apartment was a relief, as was being around other people-even if they barely knew the other guests: Eddie O'Brien and Rossano Brazzi plus some of the crew from her movie, dissolute Roman society n.o.bs and equally dissolute expatriates and a few people from the emba.s.sy. Loud music, close quarters, lots of smoke; the usual requests for Frank to sing. He shook his head sadly. Sitting on his lap, Ava tried to cheer him up, amid the forced gaiety and phony sentimentality (1954! who knew what it would bring?). But when she and Frank kissed at the stroke of midnight, the tears running down her cheeks were quite real.

On Monday morning he sneaked off to the airport, leaving by a service entrance to avoid the reporters, and flew back to America alone.

39.

Humphrey Bogart and Ava at a c.o.c.ktail party for their film The Barefoot Contessa The Barefoot Contessa, Rome, early 1954. Frank was in Hollywood, 7,000 miles away, still pining for her. (photo credit 39.1) (photo credit 39.1) While Frank was in the air, on Monday, January 4, Capitol released Songs for Young Lovers Songs for Young Lovers as a ten-inch LP, containing the eight songs from the November 5 and 6 sessions: "My Funny Valentine," "The Girl Next Door," "A Foggy Day," and "Like Someone in Love" on side one; "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Little Girl Blue," "They Can't Take That Away from Me," and "Violets for Your Furs" on side two. It was Frank's first alb.u.m since as a ten-inch LP, containing the eight songs from the November 5 and 6 sessions: "My Funny Valentine," "The Girl Next Door," "A Foggy Day," and "Like Someone in Love" on side one; "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Little Girl Blue," "They Can't Take That Away from Me," and "Violets for Your Furs" on side two. It was Frank's first alb.u.m since Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra Sing and Dance with Frank Sinatra on Columbia over three years earlier. on Columbia over three years earlier.

The cover of Sing and Dance Sing and Dance had shown a hatless Frank (with a full head of hair), looking neat and collegiate in a striped necktie and light-colored jacket, smiling amiably against a bouncy pink background, complete with a couple's dancing feet. The cover of had shown a hatless Frank (with a full head of hair), looking neat and collegiate in a striped necktie and light-colored jacket, smiling amiably against a bouncy pink background, complete with a couple's dancing feet. The cover of Young Lovers Young Lovers established a new, infinitely moodier Sinatra: against a dark background, the singer, in a dark suit and fedora, stood under a lamppost, a lonely figure with a cigarette, looking meditative while a pair of couples promenaded by. Sinatra and the young lovers were in separate universes-he was their serenader, not their friend. established a new, infinitely moodier Sinatra: against a dark background, the singer, in a dark suit and fedora, stood under a lamppost, a lonely figure with a cigarette, looking meditative while a pair of couples promenaded by. Sinatra and the young lovers were in separate universes-he was their serenader, not their friend.

George Siravo had arranged seven of the eight songs, but Nelson Riddle, the arranger of "Like Someone in Love"-a master at expressing emotional complexity and s.e.xual tension-was poised to carry the baton forward.

Frank was living the reality of that figure on the alb.u.m cover. Arriving back at his Los Angeles apartment, he found he couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, didn't feel like singing, and had little to do with his days besides see his headshrinker and do the radio show ("You may have heard it-if you've got a car," he told a television audience, which, like most of America, wasn't gathering around the radio in the living room anymore). On the movie front, Zanuck had suspended Monroe for noncompliance, and apart from pre-recording a couple of songs for Pink Tights Pink Tights, Frank didn't have much to do besides collect his paycheck. If he picked up a newspaper, he could read reports that Ava, who'd told him that she wasn't feeling well enough to see him off at the airport in Rome, had that very afternoon gone to the atelier of the sculptor a.s.sen Peikov to begin posing, "in a chilly studio without much on," for a statue to be used in The Barefoot Contessa The Barefoot Contessa. Oh, and by the way, other reports said that she'd taken up with Sh.e.l.ley Winters's soon-to-be ex-husband, Vittorio Ga.s.sman.

Frank needed company, and fast, so he went to extreme measures: he moved Jule Styne into his apartment. "He literally literally moved me in," Styne recalled. Sinatra simply went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the recently divorced composer was renting a bungalow, and had Styne's belongings packed up and carted over to Beverly Glen. moved me in," Styne recalled. Sinatra simply went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the recently divorced composer was renting a bungalow, and had Styne's belongings packed up and carted over to Beverly Glen.

The affable and energetic Styne was flattered-at first. The odd-couple arrangement would last for eight months in all, but it was a trial from the beginning. Frank thought and talked of little but Ava through the long days and nights. "I come home at night and the apartment is all dark," Styne remembered.

I yell "Frank!" and he doesn't answer. I walk into the living room and it's like a funeral parlor. There are three pictures of Ava in the room and the only lights are three dim ones on the pictures. Sitting in front of them is Frank with a bottle of brandy. I say to him, "Frank, pull yourself together." And he says, "Go 'way. Leave me alone." Then all night he paces up and down and says, "I can't sleep, I can't sleep." At four o'clock in the morning I hear him calling someone on the telephone. It's his first wife, Nancy. His voice is soft and quiet and I hear him say, "You're the only one who understands me." Then he paces up and down some more and maybe he reads, and he doesn't fall asleep until the sun's up. Big deal. You can have it.

Frank was in a sleep-deprived daze. Driving his Cadillac convertible through Beverly Hills one afternoon, he crashed into a small English sports car at an intersection. It was a mismatch. The collision threw the other driver, one Mrs. Myrna McClees, out of her vehicle and onto the pavement: she was taken to the hospital unconscious, with a fractured skull and lacerations. Frank swore he had come to a full stop and looked both ways before proceeding. The woman recovered; Frank stumbled on.

His ex-wife, too, felt his pain. "Nancy Sinatra's pals are worried about the thin, drawn look that's replaced the bright, happy air sported by the crooner's ex for the last few years," Erskine Johnson wrote in his column. "They blame it on Nancy's involvement, through her kiddies, in Frank's current mental depression."

Maybe it also had something to do with those 4:00 a.m. phone calls. She was not only exhausted, but furious: She was propping him up, and for what? So he could make up for the thousandth time with that bimbo?

There had been times when the membrane between his private sorrows and his onstage persona was porous: when his depression undermined his timing, his presence, his voice itself. Lately, though, the stage was more and more a refuge. On January 17 he returned to The Colgate Comedy Hour The Colgate Comedy Hour, singing "Young at Heart" and "The Birth of the Blues" in fine style and bantering easily with the audience about the romantic elopement of Joltin' Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe-which, unfortunately, had held up the movie Frank was supposed to be starring in with Miss Monroe, over at 20th Century Fox. He made a comically resigned face.

In the meantime, his new joke on Rocky Fortune Rocky Fortune was working the phrase "from here to eternity" into every episode, at least once, and often several times. Sometimes he wondered if anyone was listening. was working the phrase "from here to eternity" into every episode, at least once, and often several times. Sometimes he wondered if anyone was listening.

Then, in the last week of the month, things began to pick up. Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, hearing the Oscar drumbeat grow louder for From Here to Eternity From Here to Eternity, called Frank in to discuss a multipicture deal. Louis Mayer's son-in-law Bill Goetz, who was leaving his job as production chief at Universal International to become an independent producer (and trying to get out of the long shadow of his brother-in-law David O. Selznick), called Frank in to talk about playing one of the leads in a screen adaptation of the hit musical Guys and Dolls Guys and Dolls.

Far more important than either of these calls was a talk Frank had with Ava.

He'd been phoning her every few days, not as often as he wanted, but more than her cool responses seemed to indicate he should. Then, one morning (Los Angeles time, just after the end of the workday in Rome), he caught her in a different mood: uncertain, agitated, needy. Mankiewicz and Bogart were giving her fits, she told him. She and the writer-director had been oil and water from the beginning: it turned out his witty script read better than it spoke, and Ava, having grown no less insecure about her acting ability, couldn't make it work. She needed to be propped up; the sharp-minded, sharp-tongued Mankiewicz wasn't a coddler. Early in the shoot, the cameraman, Jack Cardiff, asked Ava to perch on the arm of a sofa while he took measurements for lighting a close-up. Mankiewicz, happening to walk by, saw her there and griped, "You're the sittin'-est G.o.dd.a.m.n actress I've ever worked with."

"I was so surprised I couldn't even get my mouth open in time to say 'Go f.u.c.k yourself' to his departing back," Gardner later recalled. "And the truth is I was never able to give him my complete trust after that."

Unlike Mogambo Mogambo's John Ford, Mankiewicz was an intellectual; Ava felt she'd already failed that test with Artie Shaw. She couldn't win this filmmaker over with tough talk, and she was too mad to try to seduce him.

But Bogart was a bigger problem. Ava was intimidated in the first place by the fifty-four-year-old screen legend, and Bogie, who'd become pals with Sinatra over the past year, and was a world-cla.s.s needler to boot ("I like a little agitation now and then," he said; "keeps things lively"), decided to give it to this broad, but good. "On the morning of the first day of shooting, Bogie came by his costar's dressing room to say h.e.l.lo," writes Lee Server.

Stuffed into the tiny room were Ava, a makeup man, Ava's Italian secretary/translator..., Luis Miguel, and Bappie (who had recently arrived from California with an emergency replenishment of Ava's Larder: Hershey chocolate bars, chewing gum, marshmallows, popcorn, and Jack Daniel's whiskey). Bogart remarked that it looked like the circus was in town, and when introduced to Dominguin, he made a crack...

"I'll never figure you broads out," Bogart said. "Half the world's female population would throw themselves at Frank's feet, and here you are flouncing around with guys who wear capes and little ballerina slippers."

As Dominguin looked puzzled, Ava said, "Oh, mind your own G.o.dd.a.m.n business, Bogie." She wasn't smiling.

"It was to be the beginning of a rocky relationship," Server continues.

Their rapport did not improve on the set. Ava's "stage fright" was still in place, and she found her confidence shriveling when confronted with Bogart's chronic irritability and what she perceived as his deliberate disruptions of her concentration with his complaints. Shooting one of their first scenes together, Bogie turned away from her during a take and shouted, "Hey, Mankiewicz, can you tell this dame to speak up? I can't hear a G.o.dd.a.m.n word she says!" To others he grumbled, "She's giving me nothing to work with." When not complaining, the sad fact was that Bogart ruined countless otherwise good takes with his racking coughs-warning heralds of the cancer that would kill him three years later.

The movie was a disaster, she told Frank. He listened carefully, then rea.s.sured her: Mankiewicz was puffed up with all those Oscars. She should just let him strut around a little bit, then look him in the eye and let him know she was the star of his movie. He'd change his tune. As for Bogie, he was probably p.i.s.sed off that Ava's salary was twice as much as his.

But he was getting his whole salary, and Metro wasn't giving her s.h.i.t.

Frank's tone was calm. It didn't matter. Bogie's pride was hurt. Ava should give him time. He was a good Joe.

They talked awhile longer, then she thanked Frank for the pep talk. She'd needed it.

It was easy. He loved her.

She loved him too. It was the first time she'd said it in weeks.

"I saw Frankie at Chasen's a few nights ago," Louella Parsons wrote at the end of January. "He looks so well these days, so everything must be okay with Ava Gardner. When he's unhappy he's a boy who shows it in his face."

Frank had started spending time with Bogart and Betty Bacall the year before, soon after he moved to the apartment on Beverly Glen. It was just one of those Hollywood things: Betty, driving by Holmby Park in her woody station wagon one afternoon, had spotted Sinatra taking one of his walks, head down, and called cheekily out the car window. There was a fella who looked like he could use a drink!

Frank looked up, smiling with surprise.

Betty smiled back. He should come on over sometime. The door was always open. And she drove off.

So he went over. The Bogarts lived just up the road, in a sprawling white-brick house on South Mapleton, and the door literally was open. There were small children and boxer dogs and shy Mexican maids: It was almost bourgeois, except that it wasn't. It was Hollywood. Frank had first met Betty and Bogie ten years before, when she was a girl of twenty and she and the married Bogart were seeing each other on the sly. Now they were the most glamorous couple in Hollywood, with a little boy and a little girl, a Holmby Hills mansion filled with a witty, glittering cast of characters who stopped by to drink and eat, but mostly drink, at all hours of the day and night: Spencer Tracy, Ira Gershwin, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, Judy Garland and her husband Sid Luft, the David Nivens, Oscar Levant and Mike Romanoff and, of course, Bogart's agent, Swifty Lazar.

Bogart loved liquor ("The whole world is three drinks behind," he often said) and he loved company, but he didn't like to go out, and so the world came to him. Sinatra, who as George Jacobs said, "craved cla.s.s like a junkie craves the needle," was agog at the Tinseltown aristocracy that gathered at Betty and Bogie's, but mostly he was agog at Bogart himself. "Sinatra was like a starstruck kid, in awe of Bogart, and watching his every move," Jacobs recalled.

With all the people around, it was hard to be alone with Bogart, but Sinatra tended to shadow him, following him into the kitchen or out into the garden, hanging on everything he said. Sinatra saw Bogart as his mentor...[and] learned his lessons with straight A's. The two men had a lot of natural attributes in common. They were about the same size, short and skinny, and both men were losing their hair...Bogart had fabulous clothes, cashmere jackets, Italian shirts, and velvet slippers, and a certain cool and grace in the way he'd smoke, in the way he'd put away the Jack Daniel's, eventually a trademark taste Sinatra acquired from Bogart. Bogart had an effortless physical grace, which Sinatra only had when he sang. Otherwise, Sinatra was tense and jumpy, and remarkably insecure for someone used to playing to screaming fans. That they had stopped screaming was probably what made him this way. The Jack Daniel's definitely helped loosen him up. I noticed that he was much more "on" around Bogart than he was when I saw him at other gatherings.

To Frank, Bogart was that most magnetic of creatures: a great star who hated the phoniness of Hollywood but loved Sinatra. Bogie was also a genuine aristocrat, a Manhattan rich boy who'd flunked out of prep school, chucked it all, and had been spoiling for a fight ever since. He had a thing for strong women, just like Frank. Like Frank, he had a lifelong dislike of being touched by strangers. And he could wear a fedora like n.o.body else.

And then there was Betty. Now twenty-nine and the mother of two, Lauren Bacall was, if anything, even s.e.xier than she'd been at twenty, her perfect skin still tawny, her blue feline eyes more insinuating. She was tall and long legged and, while not as heart-stoppingly beautiful as Ava, equally arresting. Also like Ava, she came from a humble background-the Bronx, in Betty's case-but she was watchful and quick-witted, and her modest beginnings didn't get in her way as much. Under the close tutelage of the director Howard Hawks, she'd found a character for her first film with Bogart, To Have and Have Not- To Have and Have Not-slyly self-possessed, smoky voiced, tart tongued-and held on to it.

Nowadays she was spending more time at home with the kids than acting, and sometimes it frustrated her. She wouldn't have minded going out to kick up her heels every once in a while: the only place Bogie ever wanted to go was his G.o.dd.a.m.n sailboat, which made her seasick. She was crazy about Bogie, but like the rest of Hollywood she'd heard the whispers about him and his wig maker, Verita Peterson: since she refused to stoop to the role of jealous wife, though, she was trapped. And so now and then, when Frank was over, he would give Betty an appreciative look, and she didn't mind it a bit. She liked talking to him, too: they were much closer in age than she and her husband.

She was delighted to hear Sinatra's voice when he phoned her in New York. Betty was on her way to Rome, to join Bogie-and to make sure he was behaving himself. She and Frank chitchatted for a moment, then he paused and turned serious. Would she mind taking something to Ava for him?

Now it was her turn to pause. She was ever so slightly disappointed-and sorry for him, too.

Of course not. A little something from Cartier?

Not quite. He would have it delivered.

An hour later she opened her door to a small man holding a large white box: it was an orange-and-coconut cake, from Greenberg's Bakery on Madison Avenue. Frank had thought long and hard about the gift. The cake was Ava's favorite. And he had to consolidate his gains, so he'd decided to send something that would remind her of their sweetness together.

Betty took the cake with her in the car to Idlewild, carried the big box onto the plane, and parked it on the seat next to her. As she bounced over the dark Atlantic, every once in a while she adjusted the cake to keep it secure. "I stayed a night in London, and then Bogie was at the Rome airport to greet me," Bacall remembered.

He took me and my cake box to the Excelsior Hotel and I asked him to tell Ava Gardner I had brought it. He told her-she did nothing about it-so two days later I decided to take it to her before it rotted. I didn't know her and felt very awkward about it-who knows what has happened between a man and a woman when it goes sour? Bogie had told me the picture was going well and that Ava had many people with her all the time, including her sister and a bullfighter named Luis Miguel Dominguin, with whom she was in love. I took the d.a.m.n cake to the studio and knocked on her dressing-room door. After I had identified myself, the door opened. I felt like an idiot standing there with the b.l.o.o.d.y box-there were a.s.sorted people in the room and I was introduced to none of them. I said, "I brought this cake for you-Frank sent it to me in New York, he thought you'd like it." She couldn't have cared less. She wanted me to put it down on some table she indicated-not a thank-you, nothing.

Bacall was justifiably furious. With time, though, she realized that Ava's "reaction had only to do with Frank-she was clearly through with him, but it wasn't that way on his side. I never told Frank the coconut-cake saga, he would have been too hurt. Bogie always said the girls at MGM were so pampered, so catered to, that they were totally spoiled and self-indulgent. But she was professional about her work, and that's all he cared about."

Of course Ava was spoiled. She'd always admitted it. Frank, a prince since childhood, was spoiled too: it was a big difference between the two of them and the Bogarts, who tried to embody their tough screen personae in everyday life.

But Ava had rediscovered her professionalism. In a scene shot in an olive grove in Tivoli Gardens, she recalled, "I had to perform a flamenco-style dance wearing a tight sweater and a cheap satin skirt, enticing my partner, luring him closer, swirling out of his grasp, taunting him with my body." Her specialty. And she didn't have to say a word.

It came off splendidly. Mankiewicz was happy, Bogart was happy, Ava was happy. Back in California, Frank was finding it hard to get her on the phone again.

On Valentine's Day, a gloomy Sunday, Frank sent Ava a cable. He loved her and missed her and hoped she'd be coming back to him soon.

Then he went home and got drunk.

He'd called in a group of friends to play cards. "When we got there he was on the phone to Nancy," one of them recalled.

But this time she was mad at him. She wouldn't talk to him.By the time we got the game started, he didn't even want to play anymore. He went into the den, opened a bottle, and started drinking alone. Okay. So we keep the game going awhile, and then Sammy Cahn gets up and he goes in to try to get Frank to join us. So what does he see?There's Frank drinking a toast to a picture of Ava with a tear running down his face. So Sammy comes back and we start playing again. All of a sudden we hear a crash. We all get up and run into the den, and there's Frank. He had taken the picture of Ava, frame and all, and smashed it. Then he had picked up the picture, ripped it into little pieces, and thrown it on the floor. So we tell him, "Come on, Frank, you've got to forget about all that. Come on and play some cards with us." He says, "I'm through with her. I never want to see her again. I'm all right. I've just been drinking too much."So we go back to the game and a little while later Sammy goes back to Frank, and there he is on his hands and knees picking up the torn pieces of the picture and trying to put it back together again. Well, he gets all the pieces together except the one for the nose. He becomes frantic looking for it, and we all get down on our hands and knees and try to help him.All of a sudden the doorbell rings. It's a delivery boy with more liquor. So Frank goes to the back door to let him in, but when he opens it, the missing piece flutters out. Well, Frank is so happy, he takes off his gold wrist watch and gives it to the delivery boy.

The next day, the nominations for the 1953 Academy Awards were announced.