Louis went to work on everybody who was close to Frank, pressuring them to persuade him that the honor of Metro—and the ambitions of Louis—demanded his presence at Sacramento. Frank, for once, seemed reasonable about it. Be glad to go, he said.
Louis was delighted. He gave orders that the picture was to be closed down at two o’clock on the auspicious afternoon. That would give Frank plenty of time to clean up and change out of his baseball suit to catch the governor’s plane, which would be waiting for a three o’clock take-off. “Get a picnic basket made up,” Frank told Jack Keller, his press agent, “with cold chicken and wine, silver and napkins and everything, so we can eat on the plane.”
Keller and Dick Jones, Frank’s accompanist, were ready early, waiting with the basket in his dressing room. Two-thirty came, but no Frank. Three o’clock; not a sign of him. A worried call to Dick Hanley, Mayer’s secretary, established that work on the picture had stopped punctually at 2 P.M. A check of all the gates showed that Frank hadn’t left; his car was parked outside the dressing room.
“He’s probably up in some dame’s dressing room having a little party,” somebody suggested. So a squad of security guards, standing on no ceremony, went bursting in on the stars and starlets, searching for him. Not a trace. By four-thirty Louis was having apoplexy. By five o’clock all hope of delivering Frank to Sacramento had vanished. An hour later Louis was swallowing his rage and his pride, to call Governor Warren and explain that Frank had suddenly and inexplicably taken sick.
The following morning the mystery was solved. Sinatra, in make-up and uniform, had decided at two o’clock that Sacramento wasn’t for him. So he hid in the back of a workman’s truck and rode unseen through the studio gates, hopped off at a stop light, and flagged down a cab to take him home.
After The Miracle of the Bells, which he made for RKO on loan from Metro, he was ordered to San Francisco for a charity opening of that hunk of religious baloney. Frank, who harbors an almost fanatical resentment against being told what to do, went to Jesse Lasky, the producer, whom he admired, and asked: “You won’t be paying the bills?”
“Not I. RKO.”
“That’s all I want to know. I’ll go for you.”
Frank hadn’t taken off his hat and coat after checking into his four-bedroom suite at the Fairmont Hotel before he called room service. “Bring up eighty-eight manhattans right away.” Jack Keller, manager George Evans, and composer Jimmy Van Heusen, who’d all gone along on the trip, were determined not to ask Frank why he’d ordered the cocktails, and he never explained. Four days later, when they checked out, the eighty-eight manhattans stood untouched on the waiter’s wagon.
Meantime, he’d taken the three of them on a shopping spree in the most expensive men’s shop in San Francisco, to buy them alpaca sweaters, $15 neckties, and socks by the box, while the cash register clicked up a score of $2800 for one member of the party alone within forty-five minutes. “Send the lot up to the Fairmont and have ’em put it on my bill,” Frank said.