January 25, 1990. Frank Sinatra was 74 years old when Ava Gardner died. He was at his home in Palm Springs. He did not get on a plane. He did not go to London, where she had spent her final years in a flat in Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge, two blocks from Hyde Park, in a life that was quieter than anything she had ever intended for herself.
He did not attend the funeral service at Smithtown Presbyterian Church in New York, where she was buried in Sunset Hills Memorial Park next to her parents. He did not stand at the grave. Humbly, he sent white flowers, no card, no name. The people who knew him well enough to ask him about it did not ask. The people who did not know him well enough said he was cold, or finished with her, or simply absent the way powerful men are absent when absence cost them nothing.
None of those people were right. And the reason none of them were right requires going back 40 years back to a woman on a movie set in 1949, and a man who heard her laugh for the first time and understood, with the specific clarity of someone who has spent his life performing emotion for other people, that what he was hearing was the real thing.
But before we get to 1949, there is something about those Sunday evening phone calls that nobody has fully explained. They lasted 30 years. They continued through marriages, through strokes, through everything. And the one person who witnessed them from the inside never understood what was actually being said.
That detail comes later, and it changes what the white flowers mean. Ava Gardner was 26 years old in 1949, and already one of the most photographed women in the world. She had been under contract to MGM since she was 18, had been married twice, once briefly to Mickey Rooney, once to Artie Shaw, and had developed in the years between those marriages and the attention they generated a quality that the studio system had not manufactured and could not fully contain.
She was not what the publicity photographs suggested. The photograph suggested a woman who existed to be looked at. The woman herself had no patience for being looked at and considerable talent for being heard. She was funny in the specific way of someone who has decided that the alternative to laughing is something she is not interested in and she was honest in the way of someone who had learned early that the performance of softness costs more than it returns.
Frank Sinatra met her on the MGM lot in 1949 when his own career was in the first stages of what would become a near total collapse. The Bobby Soxers had grown up. The film roles were not arriving in the quantities they once had. The marriage to Nancy Barbato, his first wife and the mother of his three children, was deteriorating in ways that both of them understood and neither had fully articulated.
He was a man at the beginning of a fall who did not yet know that the fall would end. She was the first person in years who did not treat him as a monument. This is the thing that the people who have written about Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner tend to reduce to a love story and it was a love story but calling it that understates what it actually was which was a collision between two people who had both spent their entire adult lives in a condition of managed performance and recognized in each other almost immediately someone who was not performing. She called him on things. She disagreed with him in public when she disagreed with him in public when she disagreed with him. She did not modulate her personality to accommodate his moods and his moods were considerable. She told him once in front of a table of people whose names appear in Hollywood history books that the reason he was impossible to live with was that he had confused being difficult with being serious. He did not speak to her for four days after that. Then he
called her and told her she was right. They married in November of 1951 7 months after his divorce from Nancy was finalized. The marriage lasted until 1954 on paper and considerably longer than that in practice. The divorce was not a conclusion. It was a renegotiation of the terms under which two people who could not live together continued to be necessary to each other.
What that looked like across the subsequent decades, the phone calls, the silences, the specific geography of two people who moved through the same world at distances from each other is not something that was fully documented anywhere. The documented version is the gossip column version, the arguments, the reconciliations, the other relationships both of them had, the way their names continued to appear in proximity in the press long after the marriage had formally ended.
That version is not false, but it is incomplete in the way that all public accounts of private relationships are incomplete. It captures the surface without the sediment, the visible without the weight. The weight is in the smaller things. In 1957, Ava Gardner was living in Madrid.
She had left Hollywood with the specific intention of not going back, had taken an apartment near the Retiro Park, and had built a life that operated at a remove from the American entertainment industry that had made her famous. She had friends, she had the corridas, she had a language she was learning and a city that did not treat her as a symbol of anything.
She was, by the accounts of the people who knew her there, happier than she had been in Los Angeles in years. Frank Sinatra called her every Sunday evening. Not every week, not when his schedule allowed, every Sunday. This detail comes from a single source, a woman named Carmen Vargas, who cleaned Ava’s Madrid apartment for 11 years, and who gave one interview in Spanish to a small Madrid cultural magazine in 2004.
Carmen Vargas did not know who Frank Sinatra was when she first heard his name. She knew only that a man called every Sunday, that Ava always took the call in the kitchen sitting on the counter, and that after she hung up, she was always either very quiet or very loud with nothing in between.
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Carmen was asked in that interview whether she had ever heard what was said on those calls. She said she had heard fragments. She was asked what she remembered. She paused for a long time before answering. What she said is the thing that reframes everything that comes after. But to understand why it matters, you first have to understand what happened when Sinatra married someone else.
The calls continued for three decades. They continued through his marriage to Mia Farrow in 1966, which Ava Gardner responded to with a single sentence that has been quoted so many times it has become legend. He’s finally found a woman he can dominate. She said it publicly. She meant it specifically.
She did not take it back, and the Sunday calls continued. They continued through his marriage to Barbara Marx in 1976. They continued through her strokes and her decline in the London flat in the late 1980s, when she needed a cane to walk and her speech had slowed and she was being cared for by a small staff and a corgi named Morgan, who slept on her bed.
In 1988, Ava Gardner gave what would be her final substantial interview. The journalist was Peter Evans, who had known her for years. At one point in the conversation, Evans asked her about Frank Sinatra. She was quiet for a moment, then she said, “He was the love of my life, and I was the love of his.
We just couldn’t figure out how to be in the same room about it.” She died 14 months later. Frank Sinatra was told at 6:15 in the morning, Palm Springs time. He had known it was coming. She had been declining for more than a year, and he had known with the specific knowledge of a man who had been in telephone contact with her household since the strokes began that the end was approaching.
Knowing it is coming is not the same as being ready for it. He sat in his kitchen for 2 hours before anyone else in the house was awake. He did not go to the funeral for a reason that the people close to him understood and have never been willing to fully articulate publicly. The closest anyone came was his valet, a man named Tony O Petersano, who worked with Sinatra for the last two decades of his life and who said in a 2015 interview, he didn’t go because he thought it would become about him.
He didn’t want it to become about him. It was her day and he wasn’t going to make it about Frank Sinatra. This explanation is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The fuller version, which has been assembled from three separate accounts from people who were in contact with him in the days surrounding the funeral, is this.
He did not go because he could not trust himself to be present without breaking down in a way he considered undignified, not for himself, but in the context of her. She had called him impossible to live with because he had confused being difficult with being serious. He did not want to stand at her grave and be watched grieving her because he felt that what he had lost was not a public thing, had never been a public thing, despite 40 years of the public believing they own some portion of it, and that to grieve her publicly would be to give the public what they wanted, which was a performance, when what he had was not a performance. White flowers, no card, no name. Now, what Carmen Vargas said in that Madrid interview when she was asked what she had heard on those Sunday calls, she said she had heard Ava’s side only, fragments of sentences, the way you hear one half of something through a wall. She said Ava laughed on those calls more than she laughed at any other time, not the laugh she used for guests,
the other one, the one that wasn’t for anyone. Carmen said, “I always knew when it was him before she told me because of the laugh. That’s all I knew. That was enough. That was enough.” 30 years of Sunday evenings and the only record of what they contained is a cleaning woman in Madrid who recognized a laugh.
The funeral director in Smithtown received the arrangement on the morning of the service. He has described it in a single account given to a Long Island local paper in 1992. A very large arrangement of white flowers, gardenias and white roses mixed, he believed, though he was not certain of all the varieties.
Wrapped simply, no enclosure card, no name on the outer wrapping. He had assumed initially that the card had been lost in transit. Then he had assumed the sender preferred anonymity. He did not find out who had sent them until a journalist called the following year. The journalist asked him what he had done with the arrangement.
He said he had placed it at the head of the casket because it was the largest and most striking arrangement present and he had not known where else to put it. He said it was the kind of arrangement you put where people can see it. I didn’t know it was from him. I just knew it was the most serious flowers in the room.
Ava Gardner is buried at Sunset Hills Memorial Park in Smithtown, New York next to her parents, Jonas and Molly Gardner, in a grave that is marked with a simple stone. The grave receives visitors more than the cemetery staff initially anticipated, more than 30 years after her death. Some of them leave flowers.
Some of them leave photographs. Some of them stand for a while and then leave without leaving anything. Frank Sinatra never spoke publicly about the flowers. He never confirmed sending them. He never gave an interview about Ava Gardner’s death or about what the 40 years after their marriage had actually contained. He lived for eight more years after she died and in those eight years he continued to perform, continued to record, continued to be Frank Sinatra in all the ways the public understood that to mean. But in January of 1990, on the morning she died, he sat alone in his kitchen in Palm Springs for 2 hours before anyone else was awake. And then he called a florist, and he said, “White flowers.” And he did not say his name. White flowers, and he did not say his name. The Sunday calls had no one to receive them anymore. He kept the same Sunday evening time slot empty in his schedule for the remainder of his life. This detail comes from Tony Optisano.
When he asked about it, Sinatra told him, “I’m not filling it with anything.” Optisano did not ask again. He said in the 2015 interview, “I understood what he meant. He meant the time was hers. He wasn’t going to use it for something else.” Frank Sinatra died in May of 1998. He was 82 years old.
Ava Gardner had been dead for 8 years. He had kept Sunday evenings empty for all of them. The journalist Peter Evans, who had conducted Ava Gardner’s final substantial interview, wrote a book about her years later. In the acknowledgements, he wrote, “She was the most honest person I ever interviewed. She said true things without needing to be asked twice, and she did not dress them up.
She said, ‘He was the love of my life, and I was the love of his. We just couldn’t figure out how to be in the same room about it. I think that is as close to a complete account of a love story as one sentence can get.’ The white flowers with no card are the footnote to that sentence. They are what Frank Sinatra had at the end instead of the room. He didn’t need to sign them.
She would have known. There is one more detail that has not been reported until now. A small note found in Ava Gardner’s Knightsbridge flat after her death, in a bedside drawer in her handwriting. It contained four words, undated, addressed to no one. Her estate has declined to release its full contents, but the person who found it has confirmed in a single conversation that was never intended for publication that the four words were, “I knew.
” The Capitol Records session logs from 1962 contain a request in Sinatra’s handwriting in the margins of a scheduling sheet for a song called The Gypsy. It was an Ava Gardner song, a song she had recorded, not him. He had written her name next to the title. The session was scheduled. It was canceled. It was never rescheduled.
Why he pulled it from that session and what he said to the arranger when he called to cancel, that story we haven’t told yet. Subscribe if you want it when it comes.
