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Frank's income whooshed up from $750 to $3,500 a week, and kept on going. In 1943 he made more than $1,500,000. In 1944, while Governor Dewey, the Republican candidate for the presidency, was greeting a crowd gathered in front of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Democrat Sinatra made a point of passing by. Two minutes later the governor was facing a handful of hard-core Republicans, while almost everybody else was following Frankie Boy down Park Avenue.
And what did Frankie do while the wine of fame was flowing free? He bought a $250,000 home in Holmsby Hills, then a place in Palm Springs, for $162,000. He gave away gold Dunhill lighters ($250 apiece) by the gross. He threw champagne parties day after day. And night after night, there were the women. When Frankie came back to his hotel he almost always found some mixed-up youngster hiding under his bed or in the closet; sometimes it was not a girl but a grown-up woman. One night a well-known society belle walked up and asked him for his autograph—on her brassiere. On another occasion a woman walked into his room wearing a mink coat—and nothing underneath. Frank Sinatra coped with each situation as best he could.
What Did He Have? Frankie's name was linked with a succession of famous women: Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Marilyn Maxwell, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anita Ekberg. One movie queen was said to have flown thousands of miles on several occasions, just to spend a couple of hours with Frankie. On another actress he is said to have rained at least $100,000 worth of gifts in only six months.
All these goings-on were naturally not calculated to please Mrs. Nancy Sinatra, the pretty girl from Hoboken whom Frank had married back in the Rustic Cabin days, and with whom he has three children—Nancy, 15, Frankie, 11, and Christina, 7. But somehow the Sinatras managed to keep the home fires sputtering along—until Frank one day met up with Ava Gardner.
Below the Salt. The barefoot Venus of Smithfield, N.C. was in some respects an excellent match for the Little Lord Fauntleroy of Hoboken. They had come from well below the salt, and they loved the high life at the head of the table. Ava, who had been chastened in two marriages and on the analytic couch as well, saw through her martini glass more darkly than did Frank. "If I were a man," she told him, "I wouldn't like me." But Frank liked her very much indeed, left home to keep her stormy, full-time company, finally persuaded Nancy, a steadfast Roman Catholic, to give him a divorce, and married Ava on Nov. 7, 1951.
Even before the wedding, Frank was worn down pretty fine. One night, in Reno, he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. And after two years of Ava he was admitted to a New York hospital one night with several scratches on his lower arm. The decisive moment, however, came one night in 1952 when Frank threw her out of his house in Palm Springs. Since then, Ava has flirted with both Frankie and a divorce, but gotten together with neither of them.