Fog covered the city the morning they were due to leave, and every air liner was grounded. Mad as a caged bear, Frank tried to argue Jimmy, who is a trained pilot, into chartering a private plane. “You think I’m nuts? Take a look outside,” Jimmy said.
“Forget it then,” Frank snarled. “I know what to do.”
He had one of his favorite picnic baskets assembled by the Blue Fox restaurant, then hired a car and chauffeur to drive Jimmy and himself to Palm Springs, five hundred miles away. But the limousine got stuck in the mountain snows and Frank and party were marooned in a farmhouse for three days. Jack Keller and George Evans caught a noontime plane when the fog lifted and were home in Los Angeles by mid-afternoon.
The car-hire bill by itself ran to $795. Like everything else in the trip, it was charged to RKO.
* * * * *
When Frank originally moved out to California, he picked up his own bills. They ran high. He had a weakness for showering his friends and hangers-on with such trinkets as gold cigarette lighters lovingly inscribed. He imagined that every thousand dollars of salary was worth that much money in the bank, never realizing that in his tax bracket, and with his agents’ cuts, a thousand dollars probably gave him no more than ninety to spend. The more he made, the more he owed the government, until the total tab ran to nearly $110,000. It took his switch from Columbia to Capitol Records to settle the tax score. That was part of the price Capitol paid out for him.
His first full-length picture, Higher and Higher for RKO, brought him out to live in the Sunset Towers apartments as a grass widower, leading a life as respectable as a church warden’s. No girls, no drinking except an occasional beer. When his wife, Nancy, arrived and they bought the house at Toluca Lake that Mary Astor once owned, they kept up the same, small-town ways. Their wildest parties were devoted to gin rummy at half a cent a point. Frank was as happy with Nancy as he could be with anybody for long.
Fireworks usually start to sizzle in a marriage when the husband pulls himself ahead and the wife lags behind. But Nancy, the plasterer’s daughter from Jersey City, kept pace with Frank’s growth as an entertainer. She’s maintained her patience and her dignity over the years, saying not a malicious word about any of the women who’ve cluttered up Frank’s life.
The first feet of film in which he appeared were actually shot for Columbia Pictures in a little low-budget item entitled Reveille for Beverly. Harry Cohn, boss of Columbia, thought so poorly of him that he let him escape without optioning him. Frank couldn’t let him forget that.
At the Toluca Lake house, Frank, Nancy, and their friends used to stage little Christmas Eve revues, running for an hour and more, complete with scenery, costumes, props, original score by Sammy Cahn and Julie Stein, sketches and performances by anybody with a mind to pitch in and work. The jokes were all “inside” humor, drawing a bead on the members of the group.