Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Tuesday musings...

Of course you remember this scene:

Tom Hayden goes to Hollywood to convince a movie producer to give Johnny Fontaine a specific part in one of his movies. Woltz tells Tom: "I know the story about the band leader".

Flash back to the opening scene of the movie - Connie's wedding. Michael is telling Kay the story of his father putting a gun to a bandleaders head to get his godson Johnny released form his contract. Remember the line: "He made him an offer he couldn't refuse"

Okay - where we going with this?

On this day - July 30, 1943 -

Frank Sinatra was 'released' from his contract with Tommy Dorsey.

I understand if you were raised in a corn field in Ohidaho or Wisconsigan you probably wouldn't know this story but here it is. Edumicate yerself:

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Do you know that Sinatra was hated by the GI's overseas during the war?

Yeah - they're over there getting their heads shot off and he's home singing to their girlfriends and wives. You figure it out.

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At the height of his career in the early 60's with the Rat Pack. Man, what a life these guys had!

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Did you know he tried to kill himself a whole buncha times?

Here's one of the reasons:

Ava Gardner - a major league babe.

He dumped his first wife for her and then she dumped him like a hot rock for being 'too controlling'.

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Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner first met in the mid forties, though allegedly on this first instance, Sinatra limited himself to simply admiring the starlet’s distinctively beautiful green eyes. However, a friend of the actress at the time stated that Gardner initially detested him upon meeting him at MGM, finding him to be “conceited, arrogant and overpowering”.

When they may again in 1948, she was about 23, but despite her young age had already picked up a reputation as a wild cat, and divorced twice – the first time from Mickey Rooney while in her teens, the second time from bandleader Artie Shaw. Sinatra, on the other hand, had been married to Nancy Barbato since 1939, and they had three children together. But with his fame came hoards of women who made themselves readily available to him, thus it was no secret that he wasn’t the most faithful of husbands. Coincidentally, one of his most notable affairs was with Lana Turner, who had also previously been married to Artie Shaw.

Gardner and Sinatra started spending a lot of time together from 1948, while living close to one another in Hollywood. They seemed to love many of the same things. They liked to drink, they loved jazz and both were extremely sexual. But they also shared a common flaw – both were very insecure and dreaded being alone. The origin of Sinatra’s insecurity came right from his birth, when he had to be pulled out with forceps that left a visible scar on his face. Gardner’s lack of confidence led her to constantly drown her sorrows in alcohol. From early on, they were known in their circle of friends as being able to erupt in the most spectacular of fights over nothing at all.

Despite this, there was an obvious attraction that kept them together, and as time went on they became more and more careless about the repercussions their affair might have in the public’s eye. When they were finally caught in 1950 at the London Palladium, their picture was printed on magazines and newspapers.

Sinatra certainly was the one that took the biggest blow, and fell out of favour with some of his more conservative audience, who not only criticized him for being unfaithful to his wife, but also saw his image essentially altered by his romance with a woman who was considered in and out of the screen a morally questionable femme fatale. The negative publicity led him to a downward spiral that would leave him without a recording or film contract shortly thereafter. It is possible that the unfavourable situation Sinatra experienced in his career also affected the psychology of the couple, and his hurt pride would ache even more in thinking his wife as the couple’s breadwinner.

Nevertheless, soon after the affair came public, it was announced that Sinatra had divorced from Nancy, and by 1951, despite the continuous outrageous fighting, he had married Gardner. Nancy had initially refused to grant the divorce, but was eventually granted one in Nevada in October 1951, and subsequently obtained a marriage license in Pennsylvania, marrying Gardner in a small ceremony.

The day before the wedding, she had received a letter that would possibly mark the way in which Gardner would treat Sinatra from there on. It was from a prostitute who claimed she had been sleeping with her sweetheart for months. Gardner would later painfully recall how that day she felt so sick that she almost threw up, but in the end, let Sinatra off with a warning – “if you treat me the way you treated Nancy, I’ll kill you!”.

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Drifting sideways...