Ava Gardner drove himself ... TWICE
Two abortions. A smoking gun. Told for the first time, the full inside story of Old Blue Eyes’ greatest — and almost fatal — obsession
because if it does, you’re gonna end up with a fat lip,’ he shouted.
Ava stormed off, phoned her exhusband, Artie shaw, and arranged to see him at his flat. Before leaving, she provocatively left her address book open at the page containing his address.
nothing, she knew, was more likely to inflame sinatra’s jealousy. And, sure enough, 20 minutes after she’d arrived at Artie’s, her lover showed up. As Ava told it afterwards, he looked like a hoodlum in his raincoat and trilby, with his hands deep in his pockets as though clutching a revolver.
His eyes swept the room and found Ava sitting in a chair with a drink in her hand, looking smug.
suddenly deflated, he turned around and walked out of the door, without saying a word.
Half an hour later, Ava returned to the hotel suite she was sharing with sinatra, kicked off her heels and began to drift off. suddenly, she was awakened by the phone: it was her lover calling from the other bedroom.
‘i can’t stand it any more,’ he said, sounding desperate. ‘i’m gonna kill myself. right now.’
There were two loud shots. Ava screamed and ran into his bedroom. sinatra was lying on the floor with his eyes closed, a gun smoking in his hand.
‘oh my god.’ Ava threw herself on to Frank’s body and began to cry. ‘my mind sort of exploded in a great wave of panic, terror, and shocked disbelief,’ she remembered.
Then his eyes opened. For a moment, the lovers just stared at one another. Then Ava noticed a gaping hole in his mattress — into which he’d fired the bullets.
‘ You son of a bitch!’ she exclaimed.
soon afterwards, she left to make a film, pandora And The Flying dutchman, in spain. This provided both a welcome breather from sinatra’s theatrics and a rather dashing spanish matador-turnedactor, mario Cabré, who was playing her bullfighter-lover.
‘After one of those romantic, starfilled, dance- filled, booze- filled spanish nights, i woke up to find myself in bed with him,’ she would later confess.
of course, the fling with mario wasn’t serious — but the exbullfighter used it to generate pub- licity for his career. ‘i am in love with her,’ he said in a prepared statement. ‘This is pure love.’
Back in the U.s., the press reports drove sinatra, now aged 34, to the brink of despair.
one thing was clear: sinatra needed Ava more than she needed him.
in more ways than one. Back in the U.s., nancy had gone to court and been awarded $2,750 a month in temporary support — a sum that sinatra often found it hard to pay. The man who’d once topped all the charts had to humble himself and borrow $19,000 from Ava.
At the end of August, the couple took a break at the Cal-neva lodge in lake Tahoe, a casino- hotel where he often performed. First they went yachting on the lake, where they consumed copious amounts of champagne.
later that evening, they had a row about the definition of commitment. ‘if you ever treat me the way you’ve treated nancy,’ Ava warned him, ‘i’ll kill you.’
sinatra told Ava she was ‘nothing but a whore’. in response, she ran barefoot out into the dark night.
Her maid, rene, found her later, sobbing and about to wade into the lake. After being escorted back to her room, Ava decided to leave: she ended up driving at 100mph all the way to her home in los Angeles.
she’d been there only 15 minutes when the phone rang. it was sinatra’s manager. ‘Frank took an over-
‘If you treat me as bad as Nancy, I’ll murder you’
dose of sleeping pills,’ he told her. ‘The doctor’s here. He doesn’t think he’ll make it.’
Apparently, when Frank realised that Ava had left, he’d swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Fortunately, he’d been found by his valet a few hours later.
Was this another faked suicide attempt? giving him the benefit of the doubt, Ava boarded a plane back to lake Tahoe. A couple of hours later, she entered sinatra’s room and found him lying on the bed.
‘ oh, Ava,’ he said weakly. ‘i thought you’d left.’
later, Ava confided to rene: ‘You can be sure he counted how many sleeping pills he took. i could have kicked the c*** out of him. instead, i forgave him in about 25 seconds.’
A few weeks later, sinatra was back in new York, staying with a friend. one evening, he came back to the flat drunk, popped a few pills and then turned on all the burners on the gas stove. After inhaling deeply, he sat down in front of the stove — and drifted off.
The next thing he knew, he was being jostled frantically back to life. This was no phoney suicide attempt: had his friend arrived just a few minutes later, it would have been too late.
some time afterwards, sinatra told his friend sammy davis Jr that he’d wanted to kill himself because
Ava didn’t love him. ‘ He said he could see it in her eyes: she pitied him more than she loved him,’ Sammy recalled.
Was Ava scared of what Sinatra might do if she left him? If so, it boded ill for their marriage, which took place on November 7, 1951, just a few days after his divorce was finalised.
Even the wedding was tainted by a last-minute drama. The day before, Ava had received a letter from a prostitute who claimed she’d been sleeping with Sinatra for months.
‘God! I almost threw up,’ Ava recalled later. In a fury, she hurled her six-carat emerald and diamond engagement ring out of the window. (It was never found.)
Sinatra swore that the prostitute was lying. But it was only after Ava’s sister stayed up with her all night that the actress was eventually talked into letting the ceremony go ahead.
Afterwards, Sinatra was ecstatic. As he’d explain later: ‘When it was good between us, it was so good that nothing else mattered. It was like it was just us two, me and Ava, in the world. I felt like I could do anything if she was at my side.’
Ava was more circumspect. When a friend called her on her honeymoon in Cuba and asked if she was happy, she replied: ‘Well, let’s just say I’m not unhappy.’
How was the honeymoon going? Fine, said Ava, even though ‘I paid for the whole goddamn thing’, and there’d already been 15 fights that day alone.
She continued to be the chief breadwinner, and Sinatra accompanied her to Africa, the location of her next film, Mogambo. According to eyewitnesses, he read novels most of the time — when he wasn’t fetching and carrying for his demanding wife.
Certainly everyone noticed that this defeated-looking man had nothing in common with the tough guy the Press had been writing about for so many years.
Then Ava discovered she was pregnant. Sinatra was elated — but she had grave doubts about bringing a child into their volatile marriage.
In fact, she’d already had an abortion earlier in their relationship without telling Sinatra, and was now determined to do so again.
Fortuitously, he had to return to the U.S. because he’d just landed a role in From Here To Eternity — unaware that Ava had secretly begged the producer to give him a screen test. ‘If you don’t give him this role, he’ll kill himself,’ she’d told him bluntly.
After he’d left, she slipped off to London, where she had another abortion. Then she told him.
Sinatra was utterly devastated. Aware that she’d terminally damaged their relationship, Ava sobbed as she told a friend: ‘I’m afraid there’s no coming back from this. What I’ve done is so monstrous.’
Ironically, her husband’s career had suddenly taken a turn for the better. His voice had strengthened, he’d landed a new record deal, and From Here To Eternity had opened in August 1953 to rapturous reviews — and would win him an Oscar.
That October, he was hired to sing at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Before long, rumours reached Ava that he was sleeping with a showgirl. In high dudgeon, she phoned him at 3am, and heard what she thought was a woman’s voice in the background.
‘If it had been a major star, then fine,’ Ava reasoned later. ‘I could deal with it. I could even compete with it if I chose to. But a showgirl?’
She made up her mind then and there that the marriage was over, and concluded the call by saying she was filing for divorce.
Four months after their separation had been announced, Sinatra flew on impulse to Madrid, where Ava was staying with a friend. But when he said that he wanted to give their marriage another chance, she told him she was dating another bullfighter.
Sinatra’s response was to throw a TV set out of the window. Then shatter all the crystal in the room, throw lamps against the walls and overturn tables.
Ava genuinely thought he was about to kill her.
Instead, as he left, he threw a large number of $100 bills at her — ‘There’s the $19,000 you lent me,’ he said bitterly.
Ava never remarried. Just before she died in London of pneumonia at the age of 67, she told a close friend: ‘I feel like it was just yesterday when I was giving Francis hell. Goddamn it, I really loved him, didn’t I? Where did the time go?’
During her final stay in hospital in 1990, she kept only one picture by her bedside: a photograph of them kissing each other.
When news of her death reached Sinatra, he wept uncontrollably. A member of his staff heard him muttering over and over again: ‘I should have been there for her.’
ADAPTED by Corinna Honan from Sinatra: Behind The Legend by J. Randy Taraborrelli, published by Sidgwick & Jackson on August 13 at £20. © J Randy Taraborrelli 2015. To pre-order a copy for £16, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Offer until August 8, p&p is free.
‘What I’ve done is so utterly monstrous’ ‘I gave him hell, but goddamn it, I loved him’