by James Kaplan
Frank’s first thought would have been the terrible memory of Nancy’s abortion. His second would have been the big family he had proclaimed he and Ava would have. His Italian procreative pride had finally collided with his wife’s skittishness about childbearing—not to mention her own physical and professional pride.
The two of them had much in common, but too much of it was negative. And in each, the capacity for intimacy was stunted. The story Ava told on herself about her fury at Frank for interrupting her in her bath, and her general shyness about appearing naked in front of her husbands, clashes tellingly with all the accounts about her fascination with prostitution and anonymous sex, the dalliances with propmen, the naked parading in front of native bearers on Mogambo. If she could see a man as an inferior, her own shaky self-worth wasn’t challenged. She was drawn to strong men but ultimately threatened by them.
For his part, Frank had briefly known, and quickly fled, the confinements of conventional marriage. Jersey City, Hasbrouck Heights—he could still remember that tight feeling in his chest … Nancy had ruled those small households and, during the couple’s tenure in them, ruled him as well. And the big households in Toluca Lake and Holmby Hills cohered around Nancy, not him. He was gone.
He would keep returning for the rest of his life, would be an inveterate dropper-in. He would always be wedded to Nancy; she knew him as no one else did. He craved this intimacy as he craved all intimacy, but with Nancy, as with almost everyone else, the rules were the same: he must be able to leave the second he got bored. And he was too intelligent not to realize that almost nobody in the world defined intimacy his way. The one exception was Ava, who played by the same rules he did. Which made it impossible for them to stay together. The contradictions would torment him till the end of his days.
“Fred Zinnemann … has gone to New York to test stage players for ‘From Here to Eternity,’ ” Hedda Hopper wrote in her syndicated column on December 3, 1952.
The picture will have seven top roles; but Columbia figures with that set-up a Broadway actor or actress can be built into a movie star and put under contract as was Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday.” Seems that every rugged actor in town, including Humphrey Bogart, wants to play the part of Sgt. Warden. Bogie is due to go to Europe for “Beat the Devil” with John Huston. But I hear that picture may be postponed if he lands “Eternity.” Frank Sinatra has already tested for the role of Maggio. From the reports I’ve been getting from those who’ve seen the test I’d wager he’s in.
“Frank’s still in there pitching for the magic [sic] role in ‘From Here to Eternity’; and I think he’s just right for the part,” the columnist noted a week later.
His manager assured me that, despite the printed report, Sinatra was not gumming up the deal by holding out for too much do-re-mi. When he wants a part badly, as he does this one, Frank considers money of secondary importance. If memory serves me correctly, he gave at least a bulk of his salary for playing the priest in “The Miracle of the Bells” to charity. And, besides, the “Eternity” role could open up a completely new phase to Sinatra’s acting career.
Nobody knew this better than Sinatra, but casting for Eternity was in flux, as casting frequently is for big movies. As were Frank’s nerves. He distracted himself by organizing a Christmas show for the Mogambo company: he sang carols, native choirs performed, Ford recited “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Christmas passed, then New Year’s, and there was still no word from Columbia. He could exert only so much influence on Harry Cohn, and being thirteen thousand miles removed from the action didn’t boost his confidence. Since Frank was currently without a press agent—he could no longer afford the weekly retainer he’d been paying Nat Shapiro, and had precious little to publicize anyway—he did what he could. He worked the phones from Nairobi, kept Sanicola jumping, spun the columnists. At least one of those positive reports about Frank’s screen test came straight from Frank himself. And it was sheer genius to convert his desperation—his offer to Cohn to play Maggio for next to nothing—into largesse. (Who was keeping exact track of how much of his Miracle of the Bells pay he’d tithed? It had to have been “at least a bulk,” whatever that meant.)
To a certain extent, a publicist was unnecessary. To an extent, by sheer virtue of his continued notoriety and his connection to Ava, Sinatra’s name stayed in the news. This cut two ways, though. Ava was now the star; Frank, the consort. Those who knew something about the pathetic but plucky character of Maggio from the novel (as Hedda Hopper clearly did) appreciated the delicious appropriateness of Sinatra’s seeking the role, but they were in the minority. Most of the world had had it with him. Even Earl Wilson. “When Frank Sinatra was flying to Africa and then back to play a nightclub date in Boston, nobody in the press was interested,” the columnist recalled. “Even I wasn’t much interested. I noted that when he arrived at the airport, Frank needed a haircut.”
Ava and John Ford on the set of Mogambo, early 1953. Two tough characters who clashed at first, then grew deeply fond of each other. (photo credit 32.2)
Act Five
THE PHOENIX
33
Montgomery Clift and Frank shoot From Here to Eternity, Hawaii, April 1953. Sinatra, ordinarily a prima donna on movie shoots, “was very, very good—all the time,” director Fred Zinnemann recalled. “No histrionics, no bad behavior.” He knew the film was his last best chance. (photo credit 33.1)
The second week of 1953 brought a welcome distraction—welcome to Frank, at any rate: Ava was pregnant again. For her part, Ava felt doubly miserable, for she was sick as a dog and she knew the baby wasn’t his.
It might have been Bunny Allen’s; it might have belonged to any one of two or three different propmen, she wasn’t sure. Once she tied one on after work, anything could happen, and frequently did. But she knew it wasn’t Frank’s: the numbers didn’t add up. Conception would have occurred in early December, right around the time he was playing the French Casino. Maybe even as late as the tenth or twelfth. Happy Birthday, Frank.
She couldn’t bear to tell him that she would have to get rid of this one too, and he mistook her misery for mere physical discomfort. “He was delighted,” she recalled.
I remember bumping across the African plain with him one day in a jeep, feeling sick as the devil. Right on the spot, for the first and only time in our relationship, Frank decided to sing to me. I know people must think that he did that sort of thing all the time, but the man was a professional and the voice was saved for the right occasions. This must have been one of them, because he sang to me, oh so beautifully, that lovely song, “When You Awake.” It didn’t stop me from feeling sick, but I’ve always remembered that moment.
A week later he was gone again.
Had his plane gone down on this trip—as, for example, would the plane of the great young classical pianist William Kapell, later that year—Frank Sinatra’s legend would no doubt have grown over the decades to come. He would not have been forgotten like the two-dimensional Russ Columbo or Buddy Clark; rather, he would have left a large, tragic, stunted legacy, that of a great talent cut short at a low ebb (like Hank Williams, who had died of an overdose that New Year’s Day). The grand and troubled relationship with Ava, never resolved, would have been remembered and romanticized; the dozens of great recordings he had already made would have grown in stature. Even the few slight but charming movies would have taken on a nostalgic glow. His career decline near the end would have given the saga an extra fillip. Sinatra would have been recalled not only as an important figure of the mid-twentieth century but also as a great should-have-been. Who knew what he might have become?
But his plane didn’t go down (nor, for all his abject fear of heights and flying, would any of the thousands of flights he would take over six decades). Instead, he arrived, unheralded, at Idlewild on a chilly afternoon in late January 1953.
“Frank Sinatra, needing a haircut, got into town from Africa and Ava and headed for Boston …” This was the full ext
ent of Earl Wilson’s item on Sinatra, final ellipses and all, in his column of Friday, January 23. In fact, Frank had landed in New York on Monday the nineteenth, but he was such old news at this point that Wilson could wait awhile to take note of his arrival. All but incognito, Sinatra was on his way to do two weeks at Lou Walters’s Latin Quarter (where Lou’s daughter Barbara, aged twenty-three, was director of publicity). From there he would fly to Canada and play a week at the Chez Paree in Montreal. As promised, he was touring the provinces. The gigs were all he could get, and he was glad for them.
The next day—it was Eisenhower’s inauguration—Frank got that haircut, flew to Boston, checked in at the Ritz-Carlton, and went over to the Latin Quarter to rehearse. Young Barbara Walters greeted him eagerly, telling him proudly of the newspaper interviews she had lined up. Frank smiled wearily, imagining the line of bullshit he would have to spin for the gentlemen of the press. He took the band through its paces, liked what he heard, and went back to the hotel alone. A little bit after eight, the phone rang. It was Bert Allenberg, calling from the Morris office in L.A. Was Frank sitting down?
Sinatra poured himself a tumblerful of Jack Daniel’s after he hung up. He drank the whiskey, refilled the glass, and drank that one off too. He paced the living room of his suite, fast, talking to himself. “I wanted to tell somebody but there was nobody around to tell it to!” he later recalled. “I thought I’d go off my rocker.”
The shock of finally getting what he had wanted so badly was so great that at first he wasn’t sure how to feel. One of his first emotions, irrationally enough, was sharp regret at having agreed to work for so little. A thousand dollars a week … It was not only less than pocket change;1 it could brand him for life as cut-rate. A couple of nights after opening at the Quarter, he went over to George Wein’s Storyville club in the Hotel Buckminster to hear Duke Ellington, and got to talking with Pearl Bailey, who was also on the bill.
She asked Frank what he was up to. Another movie? Bailey turned to her husband, Ellington’s drummer, Louie Bellson, and gave him a wink. She just loved to see Frankie in those sailor suits. Bellson gave her a mock scowl.
Frank shook his head. No more sailor suits. “Pearl, they’ve offered me a movie called From Here to Eternity. They’re paying me a thousand bucks a week, which is nothing.”
Bailey looked impressed. From Here to Eternity? That big book?
That was the one.
“Take it and don’t look back,” Bailey told him.
He took it. And he’d brought it off without having to put a horse’s head in Harry Cohn’s bed. Mario Puzo was the one who did that, fifteen years later. The famous scene in The Godfather has a Sinatra-like singer named Johnny Fontane beg his padrone Don Corleone to help him land a career-changing movie role in the face of strong opposition from a Cohn-like studio chief named Jack Woltz. The novelist knew that Sicilian criminals frequently used dead animals as warning signs to their enemies, and he knew that Harry Cohn was an avid horseplayer (though he never owned a racehorse). Puzo was also aware that Cohn had had close gangland ties since the beginning of his career, that he fancied himself a tough guy—he even wore a gold-and-ruby friendship ring given to him by a smooth mafioso named Johnny Rosselli, Frank Costello’s West Coast representative.
Puzo, who was of southern-Italian ancestry, was steeped in his subject. Yet he was also a writer of considerable imagination, a novelist, not a journalist. And while the lecherous and tyrannical Woltz bore a strong similarity to Harry Cohn, comparisons could also be drawn to other studio heads and producers.
But strong narratives seduce us: we want them to be true. And while The Godfather was a powerful novel, the movie version (whose screenplay Puzo also wrote) was even stronger. The sum of the film’s parts—the dark and haunting beauty of Gordon Willis’s cinematography, Nino Rota’s score, and Dean Tavoularis’s production design; the majesty of Francis Ford Coppola’s direction and the actors’ performances—all the components, taken together, had a great and somber force that made the world feel absolute faith in its truth, whatever the messy and ambiguous facts of real life.
Numerous writers and would-be authorities have put considerable effort into cobbling up a case that the Mob really was behind Frank Sinatra’s getting the role of Maggio. Various commentators have constructed elaborate scenarios based on the second-and third-and fourth-hand testimony of unreliable witnesses, many of them definitively unreliable career crooks. And all the mass of speculation rests on two simple assumptions, as neatly expressed in All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story, a work taken as gospel by many in the Mob-conspiracy-hunting business: “Cohn hated Sinatra, and felt he was wrong for the part to boot.”
Or, as fictionally expressed by Jack Woltz (as played by John Marley) to Don Corleone’s consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) in The Godfather: “Now listen to me, you smooth-talking son-of-a-bitch! Let me lay it on the line for you and your boss, whoever he is. Johnny Fontane will never get that movie! I don’t care how many dago guinea wop greaseball gumbahs come out of the woodwork!”2
Harry Cohn, no shrinking violet, was certainly capable of such an explosion. But Jack Woltz is a fictional character and Harry Cohn was not. And Harry Cohn did not hate Sinatra. In fact, as Cohn’s biographer Bob Thomas wrote, “Frank Sinatra and Harry Cohn became good friends during the years when Sinatra was enjoying his initial burst of fame in Hollywood.” And the friendship had legs. In the fall of 1949, after Frank allowed the premiere of Miss Grant Takes Richmond to occur during his stint at the Capitol, Sinatra came down with strep throat so severe that an oxygen tent had to be set up in Manie Sacks’s apartment. “It was the first time since his rise to fame that he had been seriously ill, and he was surprised to learn how few of his so-called friends responded with offers of sympathy and aid,” Thomas writes.
A singular exception was Harry Cohn. Cohn flew to New York and spent the morning with Sinatra from 10 o’clock to 1:30. Cohn went off to business appointments and returned at 5 in the afternoon. He remained with Sinatra until his time for sleep at 9:30. Cohn read to the patient, reminisced of his early days in films, told jokes, and delivered numbers recalled from his early days as a song plugger. Cohn continued the daily routine until Sinatra recovered.
Cohn’s parting remark was in character: “You tell anybody about this, you son of a bitch, and I’ll kill you!”
Cohn was a businessman with a soft heart and a hard head. He had flown to New York on business, and gone to Frank’s bedside less out of love than gratitude: Sinatra’s box office at the Capitol had buoyed the take of Columbia’s minor comedy to such an extent that Cohn was able to take out an ad in the trade papers bragging about it. He certainly didn’t hate Sinatra—quite the opposite. But in 1949 and now in 1953, the studio chief was nothing if not a pragmatist. From Here to Eternity was a big-budget production, to be shot on location with a star-heavy cast. The budget was creeping up. All the parts had been set except Maggio, and Eli Wallach’s agent was digging in his heels on the actor’s high fee.
Harry Cohn had agonized over the decision. He had met with Wallach, had even provoked him in order to test his mettle. (“He doesn’t look like an Italian—he looks like a Hebe,” Cohn said when the actor entered his office. Understandably, Wallach exploded, and Cohn was impressed: the man had fire and presence.) What’s more, Wallach had done a terrific screen test—as had Frank. Cohn kept running the two back-to-back, feeling uncustomarily indecisive. Finally he asked his wife’s advice. Joan Cohn watched the two tests and said of Wallach, “He’s a brilliant actor, no question about it. But he looks too good. He’s not skinny and he’s not pathetic and he’s not Italian. Frank is just Maggio to me.”
Cohn nodded. He had to admit it: the little putz really could act. And (just as important) Sinatra could save the studio some serious money. But there was one more practical consideration. If Frank’s name went above the title along with the other stars’, would people assume Eternity was a musical?
F
uck it. Time was wasting. Leave it to the lawyers to hash out the billing. Cohn told Adler to call Sinatra’s agent, then patted himself on the back.
“Frank Sinatra has been notified to report to Columbia in ten days to start ‘From Here to Eternity,’ ” Louella Parsons noted in her February 2 column. Two days later, Parsons elaborated: “Talked to Frank Sinatra, who arrived in New York from Boston. He told me Ava Gardner has been in Rome and goes on to London to make another picture.
“ ‘This separation,’ he said, ’is difficult for both of us. I go to California in ten days for ‘From Here to Eternity,’ so I won’t be able to see Ava for at least two months.’ ”
Frank had been ordered to report to Columbia in ten days; opportunity of a lifetime or not, however, he would take a good deal longer to get there. He was booked in Montreal from February 6 to 15; rehearsals for Eternity were set to start on the twenty-third. During the intervening week, a nervous Harry Cohn wanted his least experienced and most temperamental star doing everything necessary to prepare—but mostly showing he was ready to be a good soldier. Frank had every intention of complying. Then he received an even more urgent summons.
Louella had been wrong about Ava’s new picture. That movie, a Robert Taylor historical clunker called Knights of the Round Table, wouldn’t start shooting till June. In fact, Mogambo was still in process: location work had wound up at the end of January, but there were still interiors to film, at MGM’s Boreham Wood Studios northwest of London. Before that, however, she had some crucial personal business to attend to.
