Sex, Sinatra and the women who fell for him

Venturi contributed to the legend that Sinatra was hugely well endowed sexually. “There’s only ten pounds of Frank, but there’s 110 pounds of cock,” Ava Gardner once told a British diplomat at a social function.

In February 1939, Sinatra married a young New Jersey woman named Nancy Barbato — but realised within 18 months that he should not have got married at all. “What I had mistaken for love,” he admitted later, “was only the warm friendship Nancy had brought me.”

Working with the band leader Tommy Dorsey, the 24-year-old singer was on America’s musical radar. He set himself up in a luxury suite, charging the bill to Dorsey, and installed a blonde actress, Alora Gooding. Their affair continued for some time. Nancy found out about the other woman, and had special reason to feel betrayed. Four months earlier she had given birth to a daughter, named Nancy after her mother.

Joe Bushkin, who liked Frank, watched him play the field from the vantage point of his piano. “Frank would tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Check the action out!’ Some gal with a lot of booze in her would be shaking it up on the dance floor . . . Whenever he could take a shot at a woman, he would.”

Taking a shot cannot have been difficult. “I used to stand there on the bandstand so amazed I’d almost forget to take my solos,” Dorsey said. “You could feel the excitement coming out of the crowds when that kid stood up to sing. He was no matinée idol. He was a skinny kid with big ears. Yet what he did to women was something awful.”

“I can have every dame I want,” Frank told his friend D’Orazio. “I just can’t help myself. I don’t want to hurt Nancy. I just don’t want to sleep with her no more.”

One of the women was to be Lana Turner, Warner Brothers’ Sweater Girl and then screen star. They met in Hollywood in 1940 and intimacy probably came later in 1946 when they began a dalliance at the MGM studio. “They used to smooch in his car parked on the lot,” an MGM executive said. “Kind of funny, considering they both had dressing rooms to go to.”

Four months later the troubled Sinatra marriage became national news. Frank left home, walking out on his wife just 24 hours after “dancing many times” with Lana at a Hollywood party — with the press looking on. Under pressure from the studio, after 17 days Frank was back with his wife.

But it was not all over. “Frank was shuttling backward and forward between her (Lana’s) bedroom and Nancy’s,” Ava Gardner recalled Lana telling her, “trying to equate obedience to Catholic doctrines with indulgence in his natural inclinations . . . she felt like she’d been on the verge of marrying Frank.” The Sinatras’ marriage was to wobble on for four more years.

The singer and actress Marilyn Maxwell is most often identified as having been Frank’s lover at the time his marriage began to fail but he and Marlene Dietrich also had an involvement. Dietrich was 44, 14 years Frank’s senior. One of her diary entries suggests that they knew each other as early as 1942, and they were evidently close two years later. “I know they had a thing going,” said Frank’s songwriter Sammy Cahn. “She would have been difficult to resist. She had powers as a lover that were spoken of behind people’s hands — not least because she was supposedly the champion in the oral sex department.”

By early 1950, though, he had a new and very serious interest. There was a flurry of rumours about a hard-drinking, hard-living actress on her way to stardom.

Ava Gardner had long known that Sinatra was “a terrible flirt”. Years earlier, when she was married to Mickey Rooney, Frank had come over to their table at the Hollywood Palladium and joked that he wished he had found her first. She told a friend she thought Frank “conceited, arrogant, overpowering”. Even so, there came an evening when they got together and “drank quite a bit”. And at some point after that there was another date, one she remembered as special, when “we drank, we talked, and fell in love”.

“We became lovers for ever — eternally,” she recalled in later life. “Big words . . . But I truly felt that no matter what happened we would always be in love.” After months of subterfuge, the couple began to push the limits of propriety. They attended a Broadway premiere together and Ava turned up at Frank’s birthday party in New York, then joined him when he appeared in Houston, Texas. A photographer there tried to take their picture, Frank threatened him, and the story made news. In California, Nancy at last lost patience. She filed for a legal separation.

Frank, too, was increasingly troubled. It was not only the break-up of his family that was bringing him low. All was not well with Ava. Both of them were insecure, consumed with jealousy. Frank was run-down and drinking and smoking too much. “Every single night,” Ava recalled, “we would have three or four martinis, big ones in champagne glasses, then wine with dinner, then go to a nightclub and start drinking Scotch or bourbon. I don’t know how we did it.

”

Ava’s jealousy and distrust added to their difficulties. Soon after their marriage, when Frank appeared at the Riviera nightclub on a night when Marilyn Maxwell was in the audience, Ava claimed that her husband was making “cute little gestures” toward her. She stormed out, flew to California, and returned her wedding ring to Frank by mail. He lost it.

Whether or not Frank was guilty of infidelity this early in the marriage, Ava was. “I hate cheating,” she told one interviewer years later. “I won’t put up with it. I don’t do it myself.” Yet in the late summer of 1952, while in Utah filming Ride, Vaquero!, she had an affair with the movie’s director, John Farrow. The source is Farrow’s daughter Mia, who would one day become Frank’s third wife.

Though his love life was hardly a secret, during the Gardner saga Frank issued what the press dubbed “Sinatra’s law,” an edict that held that his private affairs were off-limits. In late 1954, he made a play for Grace Kelly. Though involved with another man, and in spite of the lasting friendship she had forged with Ava, she agreed to see him. Their date reportedly went badly, in part because he was already drunk when he picked her up, in part because he spent a good deal of the evening weeping about Ava. “He held no attraction for her,” said Celeste Holm, who later worked with them both on the movie High Society. “Grace regarded Frank as a street kid . . . She was on a different level. She was a princess long before she married Prince Rainier.”

His valet, George Jacobs, thought Frank “craved class” in women. Socially, no one could have been classier than the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Thirty-one when she and Frank got together in late 1954, she had come into a fortune — some $27 million in today’s dollars — and had for years been married to a man 42 years her senior, the conductor Leopold Stokowski. When Frank got word to Vanderbilt that he wanted to meet her, she recalled in 1988 in a journal-style memoir, she wanted to tell herself “Stop!” — but didn’t. Vanderbilt stepped out with Frank within days. Then she moved out of the sumptuous home she shared with Stokowski, taking their two small sons with her. After Christmas, having told the press her marriage was over, she arrived for a Broadway premiere on Frank’s arm. Yet, as Vanderbilt wrote in her journal, she could not “imagine a long tomorrow with F. and me in it”. The doubt was well founded, for their affair lasted only a few weeks.

Later, Humphrey Bogart fretted about his wife Lauren Bacall’s relationship with Frank. When Frank arranged a birthday party for Bacall in Las Vegas, in September 1956, her husband stayed away. He was “edgy and resentful” when she got home and she soon found out why. “He was somewhat jealous of Frank,” Bacall remembered, “. . . partly because he thought Frank was in love with me, partly because our physical life together, which has always ranked high, had less than flourished with his illness.”

After Bogart’s death, by the spring of 1957 Frank and Bacall were going out together. They were cruising off the coast of California aboard a rented yacht the day Frank’s divorce from Ava became final. At Christmas Frank asked Bacall to marry him but then, two days into the new year, he got drunk and behaved “like a maniac”. For more than a month the couple had no contact. In March Frank went to see her. He seemed contrite and proposed again. Bacall remembered:

“ . . . he was very convincing . . . all my barriers fell . . . I said, ‘OK’.”

Just days later, on March 12, newspapers trumpeted: “Sinatra to Wed Lauren Bacall”. It was leaked either by the agent Swifty Lazar, or by Bacall herself. When a reporter got to Frank to ask if the marriage was on he got a brutal reply. “What for? Just so I have to come home earlier every night? Nuts!” Bacall had phoned Frank as soon as the story broke, and he had not seemed angry. Then, a few days later, Frank called accusing her of having leaked the proposal. Then he simply cut off all contact. Frank had behaved “like a complete shit”, Bacall remembered, and for years to come they did not speak at all.

As Frank ran through woman after woman, the one who ruled his heart remained a chimera. For the moment there was no more talk of Ava divorcing Frank. But, whenever the two of them got together, it was clear that nothing had changed. During his World Tour for Children, he made a detour to see her in Madrid. It was not a happy visit. She had lived there for six years now, and had become known as a beautiful, pathetic drunk. When Ava came to the States, Frank put his plane at her disposal.

It ferried her to and from Palm Springs and Las Vegas and, to dry out, to the Elizabeth Arden spa in Arizona. “Can you imagine?” Frank said to the singer and entertainer Sonny King. “The way I used to chase Ava! And now she’s my patient.” Yet he was still chasing her.

He also constantly pursued other women. Frank might date a celebrity, or a hatcheck girl, or pay for sex with a whore. The liaisons were usually brief, and left the non-professionals puzzled. “First, there were the incessant calls,” a young actress told the journalist Richard Gehman. “Funny calls, jokey, kookie calls . . . Then the nights at his favourite restaurant.” Then “all of a sudden he just stopped . . . just didn’t call.”

He met the dancer Juliet Prowse on the set of Can-Can in 1959. She was 23 to his 44, a tall, intelligent, brilliant dancer. Frank seemed “amazingly kind and gentle”. Maybe it was because she was close to his daughter’s age. There were times, Juliet said, when they sat quietly by the pool while she knitted socks for him. She tended the garden and he painted. “She smothers me, and I love that,” Frank told Shirley MacLaine.

Frank proposed to Juliet. She resisted, however, and continued to do so even after five proposals. Though Frank was good to her, she did not like what happened when he got drunk. He tore into good friends for no reason, or would “throw things on the floor if the service was not as he wanted it to be”. For six months, from the summer of 1961, they did not see each other. Frank did, however, see Marilyn Monroe.

Sinatra and Monroe. Here were stars who shone with equal brilliance. It seems clear that there was some sort of affair, at a time when Marilyn was an emotional basket case. Frank had become solicitous during the collapse of her marriage to Arthur Miller. He presented her with a white poodle that she christened Maf, as in Mafia. In February 1961, when she was released after a spell in New York’s Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, Frank allowed her to use his house in Coldwater Canyon. The following year, during the last miserable months of her life, Marilyn would see a good deal of Frank. In late July 1962, he photographed her in a state of distress at the Cal-Neva Lodge. Days later, at 36, Marilyn would be dead.

In 1964 Frank and Ava 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,” the actor 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 42. In October, while in Los Angeles shooting interior scenes for Von Ryan’s Express, Frank took up with a 19-year-old.

Mia Farrow met Frank in 1964 at 20th Century Fox, when she was playing the lovelorn daughter in the TV version of the novel Peyton Place. She was no stranger to the ways of Hollywood and New York but looked the part of the innocent waif. Press speculation about the couple began less than a year into the relationship, when Frank took Mia and a group of his older friends on a yacht cruise along the eastern seaboard. She bristled when people made cracks about their age difference — Dean Martin’s was that he had a bottle of Scotch older than Mia. Later, after a brief estrangement, Frank asked her to marry him, and she accepted. He bought an $85,000 diamond engagement ring and he presented it to her — in a cake box — during a transcontinental flight.

Yet Frank doubted his decision to marry, and still saw Ava whenever they were in the same city at the same time. George Jacobs, Frank’s valet, thought Frank still hoped to win her back.

Frank referred to Mia as “my child bride” during their honeymoon, sat her on a stool and sang September Song to her in front of fellow house guests. It all felt, Mia has said, “a little bit like an adoption”. By early 1967, when they were away from each other making movies, it was evident that the marriage was in trouble. The actress Tiffany Bolling said she had a dalliance with Frank while on location with him in Florida for Tony Rome, a detective movie. He seemed to her to be sad and lonely, and he was drinking too much.

The terminal rift was over Mia’s career. She insisted in honouring her commitment to finish her work on Rosemary’s Baby, rather than join her husband to work on another movie.

One afternoon, without prior warning, Frank’s principal attorney, Mickey Rudin, showed up on the set of Rosemary’s Baby with separation documents drawn up and ready for signature. Mia signed where required and set off soon after for India, there to engage in meditation with the fashionable Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Frank had her flown to Mexico a few months later for the divorce. They had been married just over two years.

In 1976, 16 years after their first meeting, Frank proposed to Barbara Marx, the ex-wife of Zeppo, the youngest of the Marx Brothers. The marriage, on July 11, was a grandiose affair at the home of the former ambassador Walter Annenberg. The guests included Ronald Reagan — he interrupted his presidential campaign to attend. Frank’s wedding gift was a peacock-blue Rolls-Royce. She gave him a green Jaguar. Frank had had his doubts about marrying Barbara as he had before marrying Mia. Just minutes before the ceremony, Frank told his daughters that he had been hoping to reconcile with Nancy — 25 years after their divorce. He had also been clinging, as ever, to the fantasy that he and Ava could make a fresh start.

Yet being married, Frank said nine months later, gave him a “kind of wonderful tranquillity”. It also seemed to have renewed his appetite for work. He made 92 concert appearances in those nine months alone. There would be well over 1,000 live performances between 1976 and 1990. Barbara greatly changed the Palm Springs compound, and her husband’s coterie no longer had the same access. No one talked now of Frank having extramarital affairs. Frank was reported to have moderated his drinking, to be sleeping better, to have calmed down. Here at last was a woman who could challenge Frank’s authority and, much of the time, get away with it.