How ‘cold as steel’ Sinatra to try to kill

THOUGHT you knew all about Old Blue Eyes and his women? So did author J. Randy Taraborrelli until the star’s confidantes came forward with a host of new revelations, 18 years after his original biography of Sinatra. Today, in our second extract from Taraborrelli’s definitive account, he tells the stormiest story of all . . .

HE’D bumped into Ava Gardner a few times, on film sets and at nightclubs. But it was a magazine cover that launched one of Hollywood’s most tempestuous love affairs. Under a caption that read ‘ She’s sexational!’, the December 1944 issue of Photoplay showed the movie star at her most alluring: bare- shouldered and wearing an emerald necklace that matched her flashing eyes.

Frank Sinatra was instantly smitten. ‘You wanna know something?’ he told a friend. ‘I’m gonna marry that girl.’ At the time, he was still very much married to Nancy Barbato, his supportive and uncomplicated sweetheart from back home in New Jersey. She’d borne him two children and tolerated his numerous infidelities, reasoning that they were nothing but meaningless flings.

And for the next four years, they were — until he bumped into Ava once again and, this time, asked her out to dinner.

Afterwards they ended up at a flat that Sinatra had secretly rented for his illicit flings. Both took off all their clothes — but Ava suddenly changed her mind about having sex.

‘I decided I didn’t want to just give it all away on the first date,’ she admitted later. ‘It’s better to keep ’em wanting more.’

Sinatra later told friends that he was so drawn to Ava, then aged 26, that it was almost as if she’d slipped a drug into his drink.

They didn’t bump into each other again for another year, by which time Nancy had given birth to a third child and 32- year- old Sinatra’s career was on the slide.

His concert appearances were no longer selling out, his record sales were slowing and the movies he’d appeared in had been largely slated. Even though his scandalous personal life was at least partly to blame, he simply didn’t care.

He now had only one thing on his mind: Ava.

They’d met again at a party in Palm Springs, and he’d told her he wanted to start again. That night, they made love, and as Ava remembered it: ‘Oh, God, it was magic. We became lovers forever — eternally.’

Fancy-free at the time, she’d had two brief and unhappy marriages — to the actor Mickey Rooney and the bandleader Artie Shaw — as well as a turbulent relationship with the billionaire Howard Hughes.

By the end of 1949, the new romance was in full bloom. ‘All of my life, being a singer was the most important thing in the world,’ Sinatra told Ava. ‘Now you’re all I want.’

At the beginning of the affair, he was wildly romantic. Once, when they were out driving, he pulled up to serenade her under a palm tree.

Another time, he encouraged her to shoot bullets in the air from their car — resulting in several damaged street-lights and shop windows. It would cost nearly $20,000 for Sinatra to keep the incident out of the news.

Meanwhile, Nancy had decided not to make a fuss. Exhausted from looking after three children — one of them a baby — she kept silent and hoped that this affair would burn out, like all the others.

It didn’t. By 1950, Sinatra’s publicist was warning him he’d be ruined if the Press got wind of the affair. ‘I’m already ruined, so what do I care?’ said Sinatra.

He had every reason to think so, not least because his film contract with MGM had just been terminated a year early. Ava, he believed, was the only truly stabilising force in his life; he might be losing everything else, but at least he had her.

As for Ava herself, her long-term intentions were unclear. ‘She was saying what Frank needed to hear when he needed to hear it,’ said Sinatra’s friend Peter Lawford.

‘Very quickly, he lost himself in her. But if Ava was capable of true love, I never saw it — and I dated her, too, before Frank. She was cold as steel.’

Inevitably, the couple were one day photographed in a restaurant together. Sinatra angrily ploughed into the photographer, knocking him over — thus guaranteeing coast-tocoast coverage.

At least this brought matters to a head: on Valentine’s Day 1950 — perhaps not the best timing — Sinatra asked his wife for a divorce.

She was so angry that she slapped her husband hard across the face, kicked him out of the house and had all the locks changed. The public sympathised, with most viewing Sinatra as a cheater and Ava as a home-breaker.

‘The s*** really hit the fan,’ Ava admitted years later. ‘I received scores of letters accusing me of being a scarlet woman, and worse. I didn’t understand then, and still don’t, why there should be this prurient mass hysteria about a male and a female climbing into bed and doing what comes naturally.’

Nor did she see any reason to feel guilty. ‘If he was happy with Nancy, he would have stayed with her. But he wasn’t, which is how I got him,’ she said breezily.

When it came to passion, whether in bed or out of it, the couple seemed evenly matched. One night, Ava had a huge row with Sinatra in front of other diners, accusing him of flirting with a girl at the Copacabana nightclub.

It was a typical Frank-Ava spat until she crossed the line. ‘I don’t know what Nancy even sees in you,’ she spat.

According to witnesses, Sinatra almost jumped across the table and looked as if he was about to strangle her. ‘That name — Nancy — should never come out of your mouth again,

‘She’s all I want. I don’t care if the affair ruins me’ ‘I can’t stand it any more. I’m gonna kill myself’