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How 'cold as steel' Ava Gardner drove Sinatra to try and kill himself... TWICE: Two abortions. A smoking gun. Told for the first time, the full story of Old Blue Eyes' greatest - and almost fatal - obsession

By Adapted From A Book By J Randy Taraborrelli

Published: 19:59 EST, 2 August 2015 | Updated: 01:51 EST, 3 August 2015

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It was a magazine cover that launched one of Hollywood’s most tempestuous love affairs between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner

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.’

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

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.

Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra board plane in 1951

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

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-to-coast 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.

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'

‘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, because if it does, you’re gonna end up with a fat lip,’ he shouted.

Ava stormed off, phoned her ex-husband, 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-turned-actor, Mario Cabré, who was playing her bullfighter-lover.

‘After one of those romantic, star-filled, 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 ex-bullfighter used it to generate publicity 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.

Fancy-free at the time, Ava Gardner 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

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 overdose 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.

The marriage of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner lasted for six years

‘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.

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?’

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.

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.