Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, during their tumultuous marriage: both always spoke of each other to the end with the same soft look in their eyes and tone in their voices.

  The next day, we were talking about the casting of his female love interest for our Paradise Road; the woman’s character arrives in Las Vegas looking for him, and Sinatra’s character is extremely troubled when he sees her, tries to avoid her. It turns out the two had been very much in love some twenty years before, she had left him, and he had been heartbroken, was still quietly carrying the torch. So, with perhaps typical director’s moxie, discussing who should play that part, I said, “What about Ava?” There was a slight pause, during which Frank looked at me coolly but with a sadness behind it and a kind of respect that I’d put it out there. Then he said, quietly, “Too close to home, kid.” I quickly said, “How about Sophia?” He had already done a picture with Sophia Loren but they’d not had an affair. He relaxed. “Sophia’s OK,” he said.

  Sinatra often had a kind of surprisingly lost quality when he wasn’t acting a song or a role. In moments of banter with Dean Martin, he was never quite as fast or as comfortable as some of the others in the Rat Pack; he wasn’t as quick with the improv, but he did love to laugh at it. One of the things I remember most was that often cool yet nonetheless sad look in his eyes. Just a couple of weeks before he died, I acted in two little movie scenes with Mia Farrow (Frank’s penultimate wife) and, of course, we spoke of Sinatra. She said that during his last illness she had been talking either with him or one of his two daughters nearly every day. When they were married briefly in the late sixties, there had been a thirty-year difference in their ages, Mia was saying, which of course had its shortcomings. “Frank would be talking about his days with Tommy Dorsey,” Mia told me, “and I’d say, ‘Who’s Tommy?’” She shook her head. “And he’d be so patient and sweet and explain to me who Tommy Dorsey was and everything.” And that was one of the characteristics I remembered about him, too, a quality of tough kindness.

  I never really saw the mean Sinatra, though at dinner once he let out a little irritation at Barbara because the food wasn’t being served right or something, and during his concerts a couple of times, there was a bitter, ugly sting to a few comments about the press or other people he didn’t like. As Lauren Bacall told me a few years after Sinatra died, he decidedly had a Jekyll and Hyde quality. She said that she “loved” her good times with Frank but that he could become “ice cold”; she admitted that it was “quite terrifying to be a victim of that.” In 2003, an extremely close look at Sinatra was published that confirmed this: Mr. S.: My Life with Frank Sinatra, by George Jacobs, a young black man from New Orleans who became Frank’s right hand from 1954 to 1968, and then had the curtain lowered and never saw him again. Extremely readable and unpretentious (co-written with William Stadiem), it is perhaps the best many-sided portrait of Sinatra that’s been printed, and underscores what Bacall referred to as “that fucking mercurial personality,” both the highs and lows.

  Of, course, Bacall had known Sinatra for some years as a friend of hers and Bogart’s, a charter member of the original Holmby Hills Rat Pack, which was not in any way like the later Sinatra Rat Pack, the name appropriated after Bogart’s death (see Bogart chapter). Sinatra also, for a time, appropriated Bacall. Bogie had been the Head Rat and Frank was dubbed sarcastically—because of his well-known antipathy for the press—The Rat in Charge of Publicity. Sinatra, she said, was “in awe of Bogie,” not comprehending how a person could possibly combine such talent, such intelligence, with a loving family life, no screwing around, and “still be fun.” Less than five months after Bogart died, Bacall told me, Sinatra had called her and immediately started listing what they were going to do on every night of the coming week starting with a championship boxing match. Still grieving, she remembered being happy to have someone take over and plan her time for her. And since they were such “good friends,” there was, along with the fun they shared, a sense of his concern for her. She added that in those days, of course, Sinatra was “not unattractive.” Their relationship did not turn romantic, however, until some time later, after a July Fourth yacht cruise down to Balboa Island, even though Frank became drunk and abusive with a waiter, which, Bacall shrugged, was par for the course.

  On the night Frank Sinatra won his Oscar, Jerry Lewis tackled him backstage and yelled out, “I’m so proud of you, I’m going to kiss you on the mouth!” Sinatra said, “No, no, don’t kiss me on the mouth!” This moment was caught by a nearby photographer.

  In her grief, as she put it, she simply wanted her “life to go on,” and Sinatra was a help, not only because he was so “attentive, caring, very lovely,” but also because of his special sweetness with her two young children. He would bring them gifts, she remembered, even though this seemed somehow alien to his persona and he was awkward in the role. They had an unpleasant split on New Year’s Eve while at his Palm Springs home. He had asked her to be there a few days before him to shop, sending a list of things. She got a kick out of this, “playing house.” After Frank arrived, they had dinner with friends at a popular restaurant and he was more than complimentary and kind, yet a couple of days later, he behaved “like a maniac.” They had a New Year’s Eve party, Bacall said, and Sinatra got drunk and became abusive, bringing her to tears. The next day she hardly spoke to him, he drove her home and there was no communication for two weeks.

  Out of the blue he called while both of them were in New York and asked if they could meet. She agreed reluctantly, not wanting any repeat of the New Year’s Eve humiliation. He was sweet to her, however, and not long after, when they were in L.A. again, he called once more and this time he asked her to marry him. “Crazy!” Bacall exclaimed. Sinatra was not only charming, he seemed extremely sincere, and without thinking things through, she agreed. They went to celebrate and ran into agent Swifty Lazar; Sinatra told him the good news, and soon after left for Florida. In his absence, Lazar took Bacall to an L.A. theater opening where, unbeknownst to her, Lazar gave gossip columnist Louella Parsons the hot tip. The next morning, it was all over the front page of the Los Angeles Examiner. Bacall was horrified, figured it out, and insisted Lazar tell Sinatra what he had done. Lazar called, laughing, Bacall said, with lingering irritation at the agent’s cavalier attitude. Toward the end of the next day, Sinatra had phoned her and complained that he had to hole up in his hotel room because of the media hullabaloo. She said she had never said a word. He replied that perhaps they had better cool it, not see each other for a little while. They never spoke again. A few years later, when she ran into Sinatra at a Palm Springs event, he looked at her as though she were “a wall.”

  The kind of stardom Frank Sinatra enjoyed comes with such an inherent built-in aggravator of megalomania—everyone is all over you all the time and you yourself are so much the product of what you do—that equilibrium is not easy to maintain. Finally, I could somehow understand why it was so hard for him to end his nights, why he was usually up very late, especially after performances. That extraordinary rapport he always had with the crowds—how do you come down from that? He was, after all, an interpretive artist—he could not get his fulfillment from the joy of creation, writing new songs, scripts or books for himself—and so perhaps there was a certain hollowness to the achievement, no matter how tumultuous the audience’s reaction. Along those lines, therefore, it’s no coincidence that he loved to paint. That was all his own. I had an oddly pervasive sense that, on top of the lonesome emptiness, the loss of Ava Gardner never quite left him, that the heartbreak of “the gal that got away” was somehow always there, even at the height of his later triumphs, the feeling perhaps that what he had most wanted in life had been denied him after all.

  His last road manager, Tony Oppedisano, affirmed some of this—as did Tina Sinatra’s popular and touching memoir of her dad (My Father’s Daughter)—that the marriage with Barbara wasn’t happy. Eventually, there was no real communication between them, or companionship
. After his final illness got worse, she would leave him alone evenings to have dinner out with friends. It was on one of these nights that he had his fatal seizure. Barbara made it to the hospital but she didn’t let his children know about the crisis. They weren’t there for him at the end, as they so wanted to be, as he would have wanted. Tony O. (as Sinatra and other friends called him) told me that Frank could never forgive himself for what he felt he’d done to his children by leaving his first wife, Nancy, Sr., with whom he continued to stay in touch to the end of his life. Tony would ask if he hadn’t realized his kids had all forgiven him long ago, as had Nancy, Sr. But Frank couldn’t forgive himself, and so the unhappiness of his last years was his punishment. That was how he felt, Tony said, trapped in his own house.

  One night Frank got Tony to drive him over to Nancy, Sr.’s house but he couldn’t bring himself to go inside. He became afraid, and told Tony to drive him back before Barbara returned. Tina’s memoir relates how angry she had become over this situation, her father’s seeming inability to confront Barbara, so she didn’t speak to him for the last year or so of his life, and, of course, she deeply regretted this afterward. The breach between Sinatra’s last wife and his children could never be repaired, as Tina’s book made clear. Barbara has made no response; she remains the last Mrs. Frank Sinatra.

  During Sinatra’s last years, Tony O. told me, Jerry Lewis would call Frank at least once a week “no matter where in the world he was.” Sometimes Sinatra would be so physically weak that it took considerable effort to pull himself together enough to get on the line, but he always did. He would ask Tony to have Jerry hold on, then he would summon “all the strength he had” and eventually answer as though everything was fine with his usual, “Hello, Jew!” They would talk, Frank would laugh, and then he would hang up exhausted and have to sleep for an hour. One time, as a joke, Lewis sent Frank a note with a check enclosed. He wrote that he was thinking of them and wanted Sinatra to buy “something special” for Barbara and himself. The check was for $27.50. Frank broke up. Mrs. Sinatra, Tony said, wanted Frank to endorse the check so she could cash it, but Tony had it framed instead.

  In our final conversation, around 1991, I told Frank I was planning a comedy-drama with several ghosts in it, and that I wanted him to play one of the ghosts. He said, “I can do that.” Of course he could. Wasn’t that an aspect of what he had played most of his life to most people? Only a fraction of the world had ever really met him, talked with him, sat with him—compared to the countless millions for whom he was a shadow on the screen, a ghost image on the tube, a voice in the air. And he would be all of these forever, but especially that voice—the most honest and naked in its romantic vulnerability—more so than any other popular male singer of the twentieth century. Certainly, all the audiences I had ever been a part of watching him in person would have agreed; I remember the joyous acclamation they gave him when he altered Bruce Johnston’s lyrics to Barry Manilow’s pop hit, “I Write the Songs,” into his own wildly immodest but nonetheless quite accurate summation of what he has meant to six decades of lovers:

  I sing the songs

  That make the whole world sing …

  I am music, and I sing the songs.

  One of the things that moved me most during the world’s first reaction to his death on May 14, 1998, was when the Empire State Building, an unofficial symbol of New York, New York, on the night of his passing turned its lights blue: a strangely poignant tribute from a city to a seventies incarnation of Sinatra’s, only the last in a career that began as The Voice of the forties. I was just as touched as I had been when I heard that all the lights on the Las Vegas Strip had been turned off for one minute on the night Frank’s pal, Dean Martin, had died. Each was a gesture more potent than lowering the flag to half-mast—from both the private sector and the public—a bow of respect to say in silence that someone we would always remember with pleasure had gone from us.

  Born Francis Albert Sinatra, December 12, 1915, Hoboken, NJ; died May 14, 1998, Los Angeles, CA.

  Selected starring features (with director):

  1945: Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney)

  1949: Take Me Out to the Ball Game (Busby Berkeley); On the Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly)

  1953: From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann)

  1954: Suddenly (Lewis Allen); Young at Heart (Gordon Douglas)

  1955: Guys and Dolls (Joseph L. Mankiewicz); The Tender Trap (Charles Walters); The Man with the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger)

  1956: High Society (Walters)

  1957: The Joker Is Wild (Charles Vidor); Pal Joey (Sidney)

  1958: Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli)

  1959: A Hole in the Head (Frank Capra)

  1960: Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone)

  1962: The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer)

  1963: 4 for Texas (Robert Aldrich)

  1965: Von Ryan’s Express (Mark Robson)

  1967: Tony Rome (Gordon Douglas)

  1968: The Detective (Douglas); Lady in Cement (Douglas)

  1980: The First Deadly Sin (Brian G. Hutton)

  21

  BEN GAZZARA

  The first review I ever wrote or had published dealt with the smash off-Broadway success by Calder Willingham called End as a Man (based on his own novel), with a brilliant Actors Studio cast headed by a newcomer who was clearly a major new star, Ben Gazzara. I raved about him in my first column in the high school paper (Collegiate Journal, 1953); I was fourteen. Everyone else who published a review raved about Benny that year. Indeed, virtually overnight, Gazzara became a certified Broadway name. Director Jack Garfein’s production, featuring such other beginners as George Peppard, Pat Hingle, George Kennedy and Arthur Storch, soon moved to a Broadway house. Gazzara was electrifying in the role of a somewhat psychotic bad rich-boy bully at a Southern military academy. He was also, everyone said, the sexiest, most hypnotic male actor anyone had seen on or off Broadway since Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire about six seasons earlier. While Brando was passively brilliant, Gazzara was aggressively so. And funny. Playing essentially a sadistic heavy named Jocko de Paris, Benny got a lot of big laughs that emerged solely from his amazing charisma onstage, and the wit behind it, and a consummate control over himself and the audience.

  Within the next few years, I would be lucky enough to see Gazzara on Broadway three times more: as Brick in Elia Kazan’s original production of Tennessee Williams’ remarkably successful Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; as the drug addict in Michael V. Gazzo’s popular and critically acclaimed drama A Hatful of Rain; as a poet-drifter in Gazzo’s weak follow-up, The Night Circus, co-starring Gazzara’s second wife, the willowy, beautiful Janice Rule. His work in the first two of these, along with End as a Man, are among the top few performances I’ve ever seen in the theater. Transfixing is not too big a word in Benny’s case. During the entire first act of Cat, Gazzara had been staged to stand to the side, leaning on a crutch (because of Brick’s broken leg), looking out the window and sipping a drink. His wife Maggie, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, sits on the bed, walks around, talks virtually nonstop. Gazzara’s lines are mainly, “That’s right, Maggie,” or “Yeah, that’s right, Maggie,” or “Uh-huh.” The rest of the time he was looking out that (imaginary) window at the Southern landscape below, and he was silent. Yet audiences could barely take their eyes off Ben—I was no exception—he had the most astonishingly magnetic attraction and quality of danger in his virtually total silence and lack of movement. And his terse, disinterested or ironic responses remain the most memorable out of an enormously effective Kazan production of one of Tennessee’s best plays. Benny stole it with dead calm and a kind of eruptive quietude.

  Ben Gazzara became a Broadway star almost overnight in 1953 because of his electric (and often hilarious) performance as Jocko de Paris in Calder Willingham’s adaptation of his own novel End as a Man, directed by Jack Garfein. In the same role, he made his movie debut, retitled The Strange One (1957), also directed by
Garfein.

  Yet they didn’t hire him for the movie—Paul Newman played Brick—and Elizabeth Taylor played Maggie in a deluxe Metrocolor Hollywood version rewritten by Richard Brooks which didn’t come near the Broadway original on any level, not by a ten-foot pole. Nor was Gazzara hired to repeat his equally riveting and superb performance of the drug addict fighting his way back in A Hatful of Rain. For that movie, Don Murray got the part in Fred Zinnemann’s fairly faithful but miscast production. Aside from Newman’s obvious movie-star popularity (Murray, on the other hand, had little), is it possible Benny’s ethnicity got in the way? Both Newman and Murray were fair, blue-eyed Anglo-Irish types, without the darker sexual threat of the Mediterranean Gazzara. Because of his Broadway commitments, he couldn’t accept Kazan’s offer to play the lead male role (an Italian) in Tennessee Williams’ original screenplay, Baby Doll, so Kazan hired Eli Wallach instead. Gazzara didn’t get to the screen until producer Sam Spiegel hired the entire End as a Man cast and production, including first-time (film) director Garfein, shot the play, and released it as The Strange One (a decidedly inferior title). Ben was as brilliant as ever in the part, but Spiegel buried the picture in pique because of Garfein’s rude behavior to him during shooting. The picture got great notices but no publicity, improper advertising, and inadequate distribution. My last column in the high-school paper—four years after starting with End as a Man—was a review of the 1957 movie version. I praised Gazzara with equal passion, but it had taken him four years to reach the screen, essentially because of his dedication to the theater, which forever has remained Benny’s first and greatest love in acting.