Even though they were only married between 1951 and 1957, the actress and the singer never lost contact during their lives. The streets of Madrid witnessed their complicated relationship better than anyone.
By chance, Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra ended up being neighbors in 1946 at the Sunset Tower in West Hollywood. She had just divorced her second husband, musician Artie Shaw. He, as on so many other occasions, had run away from the house he shared with his wife, Nancy Barbato, with whom he had three children. By then everyone was aware of the latent marital crisis that Frank and Nancy were dragging. Although officially it would not be until three years later that the actress and the one nicknamed "The Voice" would start a movie relationship.
The beginning of his passionate story began in the fall of 1949. After a crazy night in Palm Springs, our protagonists got into a Cadillac. Sinatra couldn't think of anything better when he entered Indio, California than to take a revolver from the glove compartment and start shooting like crazy. Several shop windows and lampposts were blown up, and even he ended up accidentally injuring a man who was passing by. By paying $30,000 they were released on bail and, once in Los Angeles, they continued to see each other secretly. As Marcos Ordonez pointed out in the essential drink life: Ava Gardner, “They were both passionate, insecure, and fickle. They both liked the night, alcohol, and chain cigarettes, and they wanted to turn their lives into a non-stop party. They had the same energy, the same devilish character, and an insatiable craving for stimulation.” They were such for what.
It would not be until such an important date as Valentine's Day in 1950 that Nancy would take the step of filing for divorce. However, happiness would not last long for them to say. A month later, Artie Shaw invited Sinatra and Ava to one of his concerts at the Bop City in San Francisco. Eaten by jealousy, Frank suggested to his beloved not to go. As expected, he ignored her. Suddenly the phone in Shaw's apartment rang. “I was just calling to say goodbye to you,” he said. "Where are you going, Frank?" Gardner replied. “I'm going somewhere you can't come with me, baby,” she replied. Two shots were immediately heard. Fearing the worst, Ava went looking for her and found him sitting on the bed smiling with a book in his hands. That was what prompted her to head to Spain to participate in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. At the age of 28, in mid-April, the actress arrived in Sea Cough. Thus she began her long-standing idyll with our country.
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman was not only an event on the Costa Brava, but also the first Hollywood production recorded entirely on Spanish soil. It was certainly a box office flop, but the filming itself left endless anecdotes for posterity. Without going any further, the press of the time fed an alleged romance between Ava and the bullfighter, as well as a poet, Mario Cabré. There is no doubt that he fell in love with the star and that, at least, one morning they woke up under the same sheets. But from there to when they were together there is a big difference. You can already imagine what happened when the journalist Cecilia Ager echoed the news in Variety. On May 13, Frank arrived at the Barcelona airport with a grim face. He did not exactly come empty-handed: apart from several boxes of Coca-Cola, in one of his suitcases, he wore an emerald necklace valued at $10,000. The next day, Gardner proudly wore the jewel before the photographers gathered in Catalonia. Back in the United States, Frank denied the gift because his divorce had not yet materialized.
As Ava herself recounted in her 1988 memoir of her affair with Cabré: “Frank said he would never forgive me. And he never forgave me ”. Despite their constant fights and their scenes motivated mainly by jealousy, on November 7, 1951, they were married. His was predestined to be a time bomb. Being one of the most popular faces of the Metro, and he a singer come down to less (in those days, of course), at the end of 1952 Ava excused herself for a few days from the filming of Mogambo to have an abortion. A few months later she did it again for the second time. He longed to have a child with her; Gardner no. In the summer of 1953, after a well-known fight in London, the Americans put land in the middle and flew to Madrid. Sinatra did not accompany her, since she had to return to the United States to promote her role in From Here to Eternity. They had no contact for months.
Ava temporarily settled in a suite at the Castellana Hilton because neither the Palace nor the Ritz looked kindly on show business people. In August 1953, in one of her habitual nocturnal and ethylic outings around the capital, she met in Chicote who would be months later one of her most famous lovers: the also bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín. In fact, the three of them spent Christmas together that year in Madrid. The night of December 26 ended at the table of Villa Rosa. “As soon as Sinatra left Villa Rosa, Ava began to rant against him and everything, mixing insults in English and Spanish. There was no way to silence her until Luis Miguel got up from her and slapped her a couple of times. One of the diamond earrings she was wearing was thrown from her and was impossible to find. It was six o'clock in the morning. Many left, but Ava wanted to continue the party. And we ended up at my house, on Calle de Povedilla, where my data prepared garlic soups for everyone”, collect the memories of Lola Flores El volcán y la Brisa written by Juan Ignacio García Garzón. Sinatra knew full well that his wife was disloyal to him, but he wasn't exactly a saint. On March 25, 1954, when he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for From Here to Eternity, Ava simply congratulated him with a telegram.
After ending his relationship with Dominguín in the summer of 1954, Gardner began decorating a farm in The Morale, named The Witch, which he had bought for $66,000. In 1955 he finally settled there. She had previously seriously considered divorcing Frank, but what she did not count on is that in 1956 her still-husband would return to Spain to participate in Stanley Kramer's Pride and Passion. Her goal was clear: he wanted to be as close to Ava as possible to win her back for the umpteenth time, even though she was seeing the Italian actor Walter Chiari. As usual, her incendiary fights marked those weeks. Obviously, it did not help much that we say that the interpreter of My Way arrived in Madrid on the arm of the singer Peggy Connolly. Neither did her attitude during filming. “Sinatra was permanently pissed off and didn't give a damn about everything. He did not get his Cadillac brought from the United States, and Luis Merino Sr. joined heaven and earth to fix that. In production, they had an authentic fleet of the house Mercedes. They had a dozen wonderful cars, and Sinatra wrecked them one after the other. They were shooting in the mountains, and Sinatra would drive the Mercedes off-road and smash them. In half an hour the crankcase would break or whatever it was”, narrated the producer Teddy Villalba in the aforementioned book by Marcos Ordóñez.
During the recording, specifically at the Felipe II hotel in El Escorial, one of the couple's most memorable episodes took place. At dawn, sitting at the bar, Sinatra discovered that there was a piano in a corner. As soon as he saw him, he began to hum a song and asked those present for a telephone and a conference call to Madrid. “Hey, honey,” he was heard to say. Indeed, he was calling the actress's house. He began to sing very softly, never letting go of the phone in his hand, head down and thinking that she was listening to him attentively. However, it wasn't until a little over an hour later that Ava inadvertently walked through the bar door dressed only in a white mink coat. She was not wearing anything under her. She hugged him from behind, hung up the receiver and, without saying a word, they went to her room. The next morning he woke up with several scratches on his face.
Although they divorced in 1957, they were always in contact. Those who attended her spectacular sprees in the apartment that she bought at the beginning of the sixties at number 11 of Doctor Arce, without a doubt, attest to this. “She always ended up running away from her parties, because of alcohol or loneliness. She went upstairs, where her dressing room was, her bedroom, and that wonderful terrace that overlooked the pool. Many nights she and I end up talking for hours, on the edge of the pool. On other nights I remember her staying alone, talking to Sinatra on the phone, also for many hours. That is my memory: she was upstairs, alone, or with one or two friends, and downstairs 40 people dancing. She spent fortunes on those conferences. She continued to have a great dependence on that love as if she were a strong alcoholic. It didn't take me long to realize that Ava and Sinatra were very alike. They had the same ups and downs, the same rage to live, and that wild mix of generosity and possession. And I understood that their relationship had failed. It couldn't go well. They were two electrified biorhythms. When they met at the same point it was wonderful. When not, sparks flew. They wanted each other, and they needed each other, but the chemistry was impossible. ‘Neither with you nor without you’, as in the couplet. I think it was Perico Vidal who told me a very accurate phrase one day: "Frank would die for Ava, but not with Ava,"
In the summer of 1965, when journalist Jimmie Davies asked Ava if Sinatra could have made him happy, her response was: “Frankie is too much like me. A madman without peace. Fragile like me And, ultimately, a mistake like so many others”. The singer rebuilt his life by marrying Mia Farrow on July 19, 1966 (“I always knew that Frank would end up in bed with a boy”, were his words), but two years later he would divorce again. The date coincided with Gardner's departure from Madrid since she since then lived her last years in London.
Before moving to the British capital, she spent a few days with him in Miami, since just after breaking up with her, Farrow suffered pneumonia. She did not hesitate to call her ex-wife, who came with her maid, her secretary, and thirty trunks. “Ava and I are spending a few days together. We're not rebuilding any old love. We've said a lot of nasty things to each other, but deep down we've always remained great friends. Our friendship is indissoluble, and a part of our relationship can never die. I have been sick and she has come to see me: that is what matters. Ava has been a fundamental woman in my life. Knowing her gave a new course to my existence as a man and as an artist. With her, I reached the highest peaks of happiness and also of misfortune. We both have the same sense of humor, we know how to look things in the face and call them by her name. For the moment we keep each other company, like two old men. We dust off the past. We tell each other old stories and drink the odd Coca-Cola," Sinatra confessed about the reunion. When Gardner died on January 25, 1990, at age 67 from pneumonia, he was unable to attend her funeral. He sent a large bouquet of flowers with a card that sums it up perfectly: "With my eternal love, Francis."
