by James Kaplan
Still, the team had delivered for Sinatra. And he would soon give them the chance for far more profitable occupation.
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At the end of the month, Frank began a new daily commute, to RKO Studios in Culver City, to start shooting his fifth feature film of 1955, The Man with the Golden Arm, loosely adapted (by Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer, and an uncredited Ben Hecht) from the 1949 Nelson Algren novel of the same name. Remarkably for that overdrive year, Sinatra worked on no other movies, television shows, or radio broadcasts during the six weeks of the shoot. He did do two nighttime recording sessions, only one of them a standard three-song date with Riddle; the other, with Elmer Bernstein, was to lay down the pretty corny Cahn–Van Heusen title song, which wound up not being used in the picture—a wise choice, given the movie’s terrific jazz score by Bernstein, played by the trumpeter/bandleader Shorty Rogers and His Giants.
From the start, Frank’s focus on The Man with the Golden Arm was absolute. The story was straight up his alley: the protagonist was the portentously named Frankie Machine, a hotshot Chicago card dealer and recovering heroin addict who comes back from a six-month prison term for drug possession and tries, against all odds, to stay on the straight and narrow. Like From Here to Eternity’s Angelo Maggio, Frankie Machine is a little man struggling to maintain his dignity; unlike Maggio, however, Frankie isn’t a wiseacre but a figure of pure pathos, set against an unrelievedly gritty urban background.
The director Otto Preminger originally considered both Marlon Brando and Sinatra for the role, sending their agents about a third of the not yet completed script. Frank both desperately wanted the role and desperately wanted to beat out Brando. “I got a call the next day from Sinatra’s agent, who said, ‘He likes it very much,’ ” Preminger recalled. “I said, ‘All right, I’ll send him the rest of the script as soon as I have it.’ He said, ‘No, no. He wants to do it without reading the script.’ ”
He had beaten out Brando at last.
As we’ve seen (and will continue to see), Frank’s commitment to a given film project depended not only on his connection to the material but on his respect for the director. If Sinatra smelled blood in the water—that is, if a filmmaker displayed any sign of weakness—he either absented himself (sometimes literally) or took over. With Otto Preminger at the helm of The Man with the Golden Arm, neither was a possibility.
Preminger was an Austro-Hungarian with a shaved head who, beginning in the 1940s, had made a lucrative sideline of playing sadistic Nazis in films. The fact that he was a Jew made this ironic, but his personality as a director was not dissonant with his movie roles: he was renowned for exerting a Prussian discipline on his sets. “I do not welcome advice from actors,” he said. “They are here to act.”
Yet if Hollywood expected an explosion between the whip-cracking director and his temperamental star, the town was to be disappointed. Tom Santopietro writes, “Although Preminger publicly stated that Sinatra ‘has a chip on his shoulders all the time. He can be small in little things,’ the director came to admire Sinatra’s talent greatly. Each man had respect for the other, knowing that together they had the chance to create a uniquely powerful film within the controlled and controlling studio atmosphere of the mid-1950s.”
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Customarily impatient and demanding on movie shoots, Sinatra gave Otto Preminger his full cooperation on The Man with the Golden Arm. The result was one of his three best performances. (Credit 4.3)
Frank’s admiration for Preminger and his commitment to the role of Frankie Machine put him back in a frame of mind he hadn’t experienced since working with Fred Zinnemann on From Here to Eternity. “Sinatra arrived for work each day at 8 a.m. on the dot,” Daniel O’Brien writes in The Frank Sinatra Film Guide, “rarely departing until the previous day’s rushes had been screened nearly twelve hours later…[his] energies entirely consumed by the Golden Arm production.” Preminger recalled in his memoir that Sinatra “was surprised to discover that he loved rehearsals. He could not get enough. When I wanted to quit, he would ask, ‘Let’s do it again, just once, please!’ ”
The director also remembered Frank’s solicitude to his inexperienced twenty-two-year-old co-star, Kim Novak: “She was terrified, and…sometimes we had to do even very short scenes as often as thirty-five times. Throughout the ordeal, Sinatra never complained and never made her feel that he was losing patience.” At one point, the filming became too much for Novak, and she had to take a brief break. Frank sent her the complete works of Thomas Wolfe.
Of course he wasn’t just thinking with his head. But the complete Wolfe, not to mention thirty-five takes, an amazing gesture for him, speaks well of his tenderness to a new lover—a kindness he later undercut by noting rather caddishly to his valet that Novak’s “legs were too heavy for him, but her face more than made up for it.”
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Around that time, the trombonist Paul Tanner recalled, he got a phone call at close to 11:00 on a weeknight. It was Nelson Riddle, asking him if he could come down to the Capitol recording studios at 11:30. “What in the world for?” Tanner asked incredulously.
“Frank wants me to get the orchestra together,” Riddle said.
“That means paying triple scale, you know,” Tanner told him.
“Don’t worry, you know he’s good for it,” the arranger said.
Tanner showed up at Capitol at the appointed time to find twenty-four other musicians, including Harry “Sweets” Edison. “There was no producer in the booth, but there was an engineer handling the microphones and the control panel,” the trombonist recalled.
We ran down about eight to ten tunes, but nothing was ever recorded. Kim Novak, his lady of the moment, was sitting in the rear of the studio with [the music publisher and Sinatra friend] Frank Military. Sinatra merely wanted to serenade her. At the end, he thanked everybody and told us we’d all get paid for our efforts. Then he took Kim’s hand and with Military walked out the door and into the night.
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Sinatra was enormously effective as Frankie Machine, a part that seemed to have been made for him and one that finally established him as a major dramatic star, against all logic and expectation. The movie holds up—despite the kitchen-sink creakiness of its black-and-white staging and the patent phoniness of its urban exteriors*5—on the strength of his performance: you simply can’t take your eyes off Sinatra.
It’s hard to know what Brando would have done with Frankie Machine, but the great actor’s physique and commanding presence would surely have turned the character into something other than a little man. Frank was powerfully drawn to the role not just because of the unforgettable withdrawal sequence, done in one take (in preparing for the part, he surreptitiously observed a heroin addict in withdrawal at a clinic and was shattered by the experience), but also because Frankie Machine’s desperation spoke to Frank Sinatra in a deeper way than he might have been willing to let on. For all his bigness and all his greatness, he would always be a little man at heart.
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“Frank Sinatra reports that he will take only a few days’ rest at his Palm Springs home after finishing ‘The Man With the Golden Arm,’ ” the Hollywood columnist Harrison Carroll reported on October 18. “Then he’ll go to work on his own production, ‘Johnny Concho.’ ” Frank, who had a way of ping-ponging between the sublime and the ridiculous, had decided to eschew recording for the rest of the year and—why not?—make a Western. His company, Kent Productions, would produce the picture; United Artists would distribute it; a member of his entourage, Don McGuire, would direct. In his characteristic slam-bang scheduling style of 1955, Frank would proceed more or less straight from Otto Preminger’s Culver City set to Melrose Avenue’s California Studios (where a new TV show called Gunsmoke was also shooting at the time) and jump on a horse. After that few days’ rest.
It is doubtful that Frank rested alone, although it is certain that he didn’t rest with Gloria Vanderbilt, with whom his relations had suddenly
grown frosty. The announcement that Kent Productions had signed Vanderbilt to co-star in Johnny Concho (in which, Frank said, she would be “perfect for the romantic lead”) hit the newspapers in late October, but in fact the signing had taken place earlier in the year, before Frank discovered that Vanderbilt had moved in with the director Sidney Lumet, whom she’d met in New York soon after Sinatra left town for Australia.*6 Vanderbilt and Lumet, who would eventually marry, had also begun working together—her romantic dream—on a summer-stock production of Picnic and a television play.
On November 12, Vanderbilt arrived in Los Angeles, her two young sons and their nanny in tow, to start work on Sinatra’s Western. The trip was a fiasco from start to finish. First, Frank failed to meet Vanderbilt at the airport—never a good sign with Frank—and though he did send flowers to her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he was “very cool” on the phone, she recalled. On the night of the fourteenth, Sinatra went to the Hollywood premiere of Guys and Dolls—with Deborah Kerr as his date. But the sensitive and patrician Vanderbilt’s unpleasant interactions with Johnny Concho’s first-time director, the tough-talking Don McGuire, were what sealed the deal.
“I had sort of thought it was going to be a High Noon kind of movie,” Vanderbilt remembered. “I mean, I was an intense, serious Method actress.” But McGuire, a sometime actor and the not-so-stellar screenwriter of Sinatra’s 1952 flop Meet Danny Wilson (as well as two Martin and Lewis movies, 3 Ring Circus and Artists and Models, and the noir Western Bad Day at Black Rock), treated her like an heiress rather than an actress.
“Don McGuire said, ‘Now, when you come out here it’s blue-jean time.’ And, ‘When you come to rehearsals you don’t have to dress up’—this kind of thing,” Vanderbilt recalled. She returned to New York on November 17, five days after she’d arrived.
When Vanderbilt complained to Frank about McGuire, she recalled, “He said, ‘I will deal with him in my own way.’ ” In truth, though, Sinatra dealt with Vanderbilt in his own way. After an approved spinmeister painted her to the press as a spoiled rich girl (“Heiress Gloria Vanderbilt pulled out of a costarring role in Frank Sinatra’s first Western because her part wasn’t big enough,” the Associated Press reported), the part of Mary Dark, the town storekeeper’s daughter who falls in love with Johnny Concho, quickly went to Phyllis Kirk, and Sinatra’s first Western—though regrettably not his last—was shot in a fast five weeks. Gloria Vanderbilt wouldn’t see Frank again for ten years.
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Officially, Frank Sinatra celebrated his fortieth birthday on the set of Johnny Concho, cutting a cake while Don McGuire and Phyllis Kirk (and a wire-service photographer) looked on and the cast and crew sang him the Birthday Song. “He bowed and thanked the group, but shyly admitted he’s getting to a point where he wants to forget birthdays,” wrote the Hollywood columnist Jim Mahoney, who would later become Frank’s publicist.
He told me later in the day he’s shopping around the Beverly Hills area for a piece of property on which to build a home.
“I won’t be able to do much about it until next year,” he said, “since I’ve got another picture to do right after the first of the year and then another in Europe after that.”
As usual, Frank wasn’t letting the grass grow under his feet. The two pictures were High Society, which he would shoot in January in Newport, Rhode Island, with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, and The Pride and the Passion, with Cary Grant, which would start production in Spain in April. He was also scheduled to star in a biopic about the comedian Joe E. Lewis in the fall.
The newspapers seemed in a festive mood about Sinatra’s big birthday. His old antagonists Westbrook Pegler and Lee Mortimer stayed mum. “Nothing has seemed impossible to Sinatra in his first two-score of years,” the Associated Press’s Bob Thomas bubbled. “He is now working on plans that extend to 1960.” In expansive spirits between scenes on the Johnny Concho set, he told Thomas about his pet project, an international goodwill tour:
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” he said…“I’m trying to arrange it now so I’ll have three weeks off between my next two pictures. I’d like to go out with two typically American stars—a name they all recognize like Gary Cooper and a girl like Marilyn Monroe. We’d put on a show in each of the world capitals for the benefit of children in that country. If it can be arranged, I’d like to do it in Moscow, too.”
Taking advantage of the star’s good mood, Thomas went for the big question. Since Frank was headed to Spain next year, would he be seeing Ava? There had been rumors that they might try to resume their rocky marriage.
Frank shook his head. “I don’t know about that situation,” he said.
He knew more than he was saying. Though Ava was now an expatriate and frequently filming overseas, there is evidence that Frank, an inveterate and free-spending long-distance dialer in the days when long-distance really meant something, had been in touch with her continually. “No matter what you read about his dates with Gloria Vanderbilt,” columnist Erskine Johnson had written in March, “Frank Sinatra is still long-distancing Ava Gardner all over Europe. Night-after-night phone calls to the beauty who’s still Mrs. Sinatra.”
Over the spring and summer, Ava had returned to MGM to shoot interiors for her latest film, Bhowani Junction, and she and Sinatra were occasionally even seen in public together. According to her press agent Dave Hanna,
Being in Hollywood reminded her of things about [Frank] she wanted to remember affectionately…She played his records constantly, and proclaimed to all and sundry that he was the greatest of the great…despite the split, the one dependable person in her life. Frank seemed to enjoy their new free-wheeling relationship and occasional displays of her dependence on him; he was known to instruct operators to get “Mrs. Sinatra” on the phone.
On the other hand, by November, according to Louella Parsons, Sinatra had told The Pride and the Passion’s director, Stanley Kramer (who had changed his mind about never working with Frank again), that if Kramer persisted in trying to get Mrs. Sinatra to play the female lead in the picture, he would quit. Parsons wrote,
Considering that there has been talk that Frank and Ava were in communication about warming up their cold marriage, this comes as a bit of a surprise.
It was believed that Ava was the one holding out against appearing with her ex-husband who is due in Madrid in April for the Kramer picture.
They fought when they were together, now they were fighting when they were apart: What else was new?
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Otto Preminger had sped up the production schedule of The Man with the Golden Arm so that the film and its star would be eligible to contend in the 1955 Academy Awards. The picture opened in New York on December 15. The Times’s Bosley Crowther, who just a month earlier had been so gaga for Sinatra in The Tender Trap, was underwhelmed. Having noted that Preminger’s movie had been denied a Production Code seal because of its controversial content, the critic went on to say that “for all the delicacy of the subject and for all the pathological shivers in a couple of scenes, there is nothing very surprising or exciting about ‘The Man With the Golden Arm.’ It is a pretty plain and unimaginative looksee at a lower-depths character with a perilous weakness for narcotics that he miraculously overcomes in the end.” As for Sinatra’s performance, “plausible” was as far as the hard-to-please Mr. Crowther was willing to go.
But in truth, “plausible” spoke volumes where Frank’s fast-growing ability as a dramatic actor was concerned. And remarkably, the critical acclaim for his performance was nearly universal this time around, despite a certain distaste for the movie itself. SINATRA’S ACTING REDEEMS SORDID FILM ON DRUG HABIT, read the headline in the then-staid Los Angeles Times. And the Saturday Review’s Arthur Knight was eloquent, referring to Frank as the
thin, unhandsome one-time crooner who has an incredible instinct for the look, the gesture, the shading of the voice that suggests tenderness, uncertainty, weakness, fatigue, despair. He brings to t
he character much that has not been written into the script, a shade of sweetness, a sense of edgy indestructibility that actually creates the appeal and intrinsic interest of the role…a truly virtuoso performance…he is an actor of rare ability.
The only off note was calling Sinatra a “one-time crooner.” Maybe Knight was referring to the change in Frank’s singing style. Still, the fact that the man who had won both the Down Beat and the Metronome year-end polls as top male vocalist and the man who was Hollywood’s newest dramatic star were one and the same was nothing short of miraculous. The fact that the same man had made Johnny Concho was, well, nothing short of Frank.
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The Rat Pack was born in the middle of the 1950s, not the end, and Dean, Sammy, Joey, and Peter were nowhere near it. Frank was present at the creation. It all began in Holmby Hills, an exclusive enclave of West Los Angeles just off Sunset Boulevard, in the big white-brick house on South Mapleton Drive that belonged to the fifty-five-year-old Humphrey Bogart and his young wife, Lauren Bacall.
Bogart was a legendary consumer of alcohol (“I think the whole world is three drinks behind,” he used to say, “and it’s high time it caught up”) and a notorious rebel when it came to all things Hollywood. Unlike most movie stars, he didn’t like to go out, couldn’t stand all the seeing-and-being-seen malarkey of Tinseltown, and so the world came to him—or at least that part of the world he considered amusing: such glittering old-Hollywood luminaries as Judy Garland and her husband, Sid Luft, the David Nivens, Spencer Tracy, Ira Gershwin, the Rodeo Drive restaurateur Mike Romanoff and his wife, Gloria, Bogart’s agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, and Sinatra.
