Sinatra: The Life by Robbyn Swan & Anthony Summers

Author:Robbyn Swan & Anthony Summers [Swan, Robbyn & Summers, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Non-Fiction, Music, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307427762
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2005-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

AFTER SIX MONTHS during which Frank and Juliet Prowse had not even spoken, he had met her at Los Angeles Airport, produced a diamond ring, and popped the question yet again. Juliet had said yes, but they called it off a little over a month later.

Frank’s insistence that Juliet should give up her work had contributed to the final break. So had his adamant refusal to fly to South Africa again, to discuss the marriage plans with his future in-laws. “He was the master of control, and he saw that as Juliet wanting to get her parents’ approval,” Shirley MacLaine remembered. “He wouldn’t even discuss it, wouldn’t even call her. He walked away, and Juliet didn’t pursue it anymore—because it was all so insane.”

During the brief engagement, Ava had sent Frank a telegram of congratulations. That anguished connection persisted, as the author Stephen Birmingham realized in 1963 in Mexico during the shooting of The Night of the Iguana. She and Frank, he learned, “stayed very, very close. Every time I’d be with her, he would call at least once . . . she would go up into her bedroom, close the door, and talk for half an hour.”

Even now, their occasional meetings were ruined by jealousy. “If a pretty girl came up and spoke to him,” Birmingham noted, “Ava would get furious. And Ava’s eyes liked to travel around the room; she’d fix on this one and that one, and the next thing you’d know the person would be over at the table and Frank would get furious.”

In 1964 they were both in Italy, where Ava was making The Bible with George C. Scott and Frank was shooting Von Ryan’s Express. She was involved with Scott. “Frank and I were living in a villa on the Via Appia,” Brad Dexter recalled. “The three of us would have dinner together, and she’d get drunk and stagger off upstairs. It was really sad. Frank turned to me one night and said, ‘She’s the only woman I’ve ever been in love with in my whole life, and look at her. She’s turned into a falling-down drunk.’ ”

Ava was forty-two. In October, while in Los Angeles shooting interior scenes for Von Ryan’s Express, Frank took up with a nineteen-year-old.

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