Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  “Frank and Dean joked around and loosened up the show and made the whole night a lot easier,” Robert Wagner recalled. “They had great camaraderie and wonderful material, and they loved Judy.”

  Was it material? Had it been sketched out beforehand? “I don’t think so,” Wagner said. “I wasn’t aware that it was a setup; it was all very impromptu. The heckling bit—that was all very new then.” As was Dean’s drunk act. Shirley MacLaine writes that soon after Martin and Lewis broke up and Dean was singing in small clubs with little success, a comedy writer named Ed Simmons (who’d written for Dean and Jerry on The Colgate Comedy Hour) called and offered his services. Dean refused at first—“I’m just gonna sing,” he said—but Simmons insisted: “You’ve gotta find a character out there on that stage, you know that.”

  Dean knew that. (“He was as sharp as a shit-house rat, and he understood every move he ever made,” Jerry Lewis once said.) And so the character of “Dean the Drunkie” was born, with bits written by Simmons. This was the Dean Martin who swayed onto the stage, glass of amber liquid in hand, looked blearily out at the audience, and asked, “How long I been on?” The Dean Martin who told the nightclub patrons, “I don’t drink anymore. I don’t drink any less, either.” The Dean Martin who could barely finish a song without turning it into a parody (for “It Happened in Monterey”: “It happened in Martha Raye, a long time ago”). Joe E. Lewis had pioneered the shtick, but with Joe E. the chemistry was different. Lewis was a rascally old uncle with a face only a mother could love. Dean Martin was a supremely handsome and charismatic man’s man whom men and women alike were ready to love unconditionally, especially if he avoided even the slightest hint of vanity.

  In the fall of 1958, Dean’s drunk act was still nightclub rather than television material, and Judy Garland might never have seen it before that evening at the Sands. But whether she was in on the joke or not, she was a wily enough trouper to understand instantly what worked, and this worked. Frank’s playing along certified it.

  Still, what was happening onstage in the Copa Room was complex. Was Garland annoyed, even momentarily, at being heckled? At being, even briefly, upstaged? Was she needy enough at this moment in her career to feel she had to play along, to yield to Sinatra on his home turf? The evening had all the hallmarks of the Rat Pack era to come: genial sadism and coerciveness, combined with boozily uncertain entertainment value that shimmered away the morning after, leaving only the dull ache of a you-had-to-be-there hangover. And Sinatra was always in charge.

  —

  At sixty-one, Frank Capra was a former great, the director who had defined American optimism from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s with movies like It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe, the filmmaker who had buoyed the country’s spirits during World War II with his “Why We Fight” propaganda series and then created a final masterpiece with 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

  Despite its eventual status as an American classic, It’s a Wonderful Life was a commercial flop when it was released, and its failure took the wind out of Capra’s sails. After turning in a couple of undistinguished follow-ups to that picture, he spent the mid-1950s making educational films for television—until Frank Sinatra decided, in the summer of 1957, that he wanted Capra, and only Capra, to direct A Hole in the Head. The project was a package deal, put together by Bert Allenberg of the William Morris Agency: Sinatra, Capra, and Arnold Schulman, the playwright who’d written the original material for Broadway, were all WMA clients. But what Capra had failed to fully realize in the years since he’d left Hollywood was the extent to which movie stars had come to dominate the business formerly controlled by the studios and a few major filmmakers, including, once upon a time, Frank Capra himself. Sinatra, of course, being the biggest star of all.

  When it came time to put together the deal for A Hole in the Head, the great director, sitting with Allenberg, found himself being directed: the production company for the project was to be called SinCap, the beginnings of the star’s and the director’s names in that order; moreover, Sinatra’s company would own two-thirds of the picture, and Capra’s company, one-third. These were the take-them-or-leave-them terms.

  “Does Sinatra know I make my own films, make all the decisions?” Capra asked Allenberg. It was a purely reflexive question. Sinatra knew that had once been the case. What he knew now was that Capra made unapologetically sentimental movies—Capra-corn, as they called them—and that the director might have some greatness left in him but that only one Frank would truly be in charge.

  All that said, Capra seems to have gone into the project in an admirably flexible state of mind, with his sense of humor intact and with a keen eye for the strengths and foibles of the man who was his star and—in effect—his boss. “Sinatra is a great singer…and he knows it,” the director wrote in his autobiography, poignantly called The Name Above the Title.

  He has total command of his performances; selects his own songs, songwriters, orchestras, audiences. Sinatra is also a great actor, and he knows that, too.

  But in films he is not Sinatra doing Sinatra’s thing with song…He performs for a never-changing audience of busy, dispassionate cameramen, sound men, script girls, make-up people, dead-pan electricians who have “seen it all before,” and other actors who don’t bewitch easily—if at all.

  Nor is Sinatra in total command of the shooting of a film. There are budgets and schedules to confine, and directors to heed. But Sinatra “heeds” very badly.

  Still, Capra came up with some creative ways to preserve a certain degree of autonomy while managing to keep his star from storming off the set. In Miami early in the shoot, the director—who appears never to have gotten the memo about One-Take Charlie—noticed Frank getting into a funk as a scene (featuring Sinatra, Keenan Wynn, and Joi Lansing) at a dog-racing track was rehearsed and shot. “First rehearsal: Sinatra great, others need straightening out,” Capra recalled. “Second rehearsal: Sinatra cools off, others improve. First photographic take: Sinatra cold, others fine.”

  In that moment, the director realized that Frank was “a performer first, actor second. He never repeats a song to the same audience.” Capra took Wynn and Lansing aside and told them to change their cues, mix up their lines, interrupt Sinatra during his speeches. He even shuffled around the extras in the scene so Frank wouldn’t have to look at the same faces. Taken aback at first, Frank lit up, ad-libbed along with Wynn and Lansing, and Capra got the fresh performance he wanted from all three actors.

  A Hole in the Head, the director’s second-to-last feature, has many charms, not the least of them Sinatra’s graceful performance as Tony Manetta and his rapport with the terrific Eddie Hodges, as Tony’s twelve-year-old son, Ally. As Tom Santopietro points out, “Frank always worked well with children on film, his gentle quality coming to the fore as their innocence relaxed him.” “He really didn’t treat me like a kid; he treated me like a friend,” Eddie Hodges recalled. “Somebody on his level. If people would talk down to me, he’d dart his eyes at ’em and say, ‘Hey. Watch it.’ ” Sinatra gave the young Hodges acting tips, spoke to him of the value of single takes in keeping a performance fresh. Their winning, slightly bumbling duet on Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen’s Oscar-winning “High Hopes”—they’d had only half an hour to learn the song from the songwriters themselves, who were sitting just off camera with a small upright piano—is practically worth the price of admission.

  And Edward G. Robinson and Thelma Ritter as Tony’s stuffy brother and fretful sister-in-law are perfect. But in essence the picture is The Tender Trap redux, except with Capra at the helm instead of Charles Walters. The comedy mostly flows, the sentiment is affecting, and you see remnants of Capra’s former greatness, but much of the film feels merely stagy, and the whole thing is a poignant reminder that this was a directorial career that didn’t survive the transition from black and white to color, from great themes to lesser ones. The 1950s themselves were inimic
al to Frank Capra’s sensibility, that of a grateful Sicilian immigrant who had fallen in love with America. Television and the bomb had diminished the world.

  —

  Some Came Running premiered in mid-December. It was a big, soapy, CinemaScope and Technicolor mishmash with too many subplots: the critics hated it, but late-1950s audiences loved it. That was then; Some Came Running holds up poorly. Unlike From Here to Eternity, which brilliantly crystallizes a last moment of pre–World War II peace and innocence in Hawaii, James Jones’s second novel strives too hard for great themes amid heartland America and loses itself in the cornfields. The adaptation founders amid the book’s overreach.

  Still, the movie has its pleasures. Sinatra and Martin click wonderfully in their first of nine pictures together, and the very young Shirley MacLaine is effective if over-the-top in her first major film part: her performance as the sexual doormat Ginny Moorehead is a kind of rough draft for her role, two years later, as the exploited elevator operator Fran Kubelik in Billy Wilder’s Apartment.

  Sinatra is effective, too, as the bitter ex-GI and failed writer Dave Hirsh, though it feels as if we’ve seen him do this before (see Young at Heart). The movie’s real star is Martin, in perhaps the best performance of his career. Implausibly tan and photogenic, he somehow manages, in quick succession, to ooze charm, convey convincing vulnerability, and be mean as a snake (his reptile-skin luggage is a great character cue). Bama Dillert is a dark character—self-destructive, evasive, and cruel (especially when it comes to Ginny)—and Dean clearly found he had something to work with in creating him.

  As did Frank in creating Dave Hirsh. In a harrowing sequence toward the end of the film, he viciously lays into the calflike Ginny, telling her she’s too dumb to understand the story he’s just published in the Atlantic—and, by the way, she’s a tramp, too. When she protests weakly that he shouldn’t say such things to her, he takes her in his arms and apologizes (by far the weakest piece of acting in the movie, by a man who in real life never apologized), then, by way of reparation, asks if she’d like to clean up the house he shares with Bama. She acts as if he’d just handed her a sack of gold.

  But the torment isn’t through. In the next scene, Dave reads Ginny his story, then quizzes her on it. Her enthusiasm strikes him as uncomprehending. “What’d you like about it, Ginny?” he asks coldly, and his pointed cruelty, so much more chilling than any he was able to project as the would-be presidential assassin in Suddenly, feels too close to the bone for comfort. As do Dave’s whipsaw emotions. When Ginny bursts into tears, he asks her to marry him, even though he doesn’t love her. Of course the poor, dumb girl is over the moon. Then Bama walks in.

  When Dave tells his pal that he and Ginny are to be married, the gambler first thinks it’s a joke, then he’s horrified. “I got nothin’ agin Ginny—nothin’ at all,” Bama drawls. “But even she knows she’s a pig.”

  The wheel has turned too many times for postfeminist audiences to hear these lines with anything but revulsion. And there’s an extratextual shudder, too, at the sight of these two middle-aged men verbally brutalizing this very young woman, who so longs to be with them. It smacks of Rat Pack abuses to come. When Shirley MacLaine writes in her memoir about being “Mascot to the Clan,” it’s with the wisdom—but also the self-protective veneer—of hindsight. It’s clear how strongly she desired Frank and Dean’s company. There’s a certain discomfort in reading that on location in Indiana she

  was the only woman they allowed in the house, but that was because there had been a kind of communal decision made that I wasn’t really a girl—I was a pal, maybe even one of the boys.

  It would come as a shock (but a predictable one) to me later when gently and separately both Dean and Frank visited my hotel room when no one else was looking. I wouldn’t classify either of their approaches as a pass, nor was I offended in any way. As a matter of fact, their visits helped alter the sagging image I had of myself as a not very sensual woman.

  This suggests, though it doesn’t say directly, that she didn’t feel free to turn either man away. The message is mixed: “visited” suggests entry; “approaches,” rebuff. But if the visits/approaches weren’t passes, what were they but tokens of entitlement on the part of the new kings of ring-a-ding-ding?

  —

  A few days before Christmas, Life’s U.S. Entertainment issue featured a picture-spread coronation of Dean—“the biggest new blue-chip star in entertainment”—titled “Make-a-Million Martin.” The piece was packed with charming images of the infinitely photographable Dino at work and at play (really, for him the two seemed to be more or less the same thing) and at home with his charmingly huge family: his blond wife, Jeanne, and their three cute kids, plus the four handsome older children from his first marriage. On the face of it, Dean was perfect, straight-down-the-middle Life material: just an easygoing knockabout guy who could sing a little bit and act a little bit, who pretended to be drunk onstage and generally couldn’t believe his good fortune. Significantly, the non-bylined piece lacked an interview with its subject.

  But the article that followed, titled “The ‘Clan’ Is the Most” (“Led by Sinatra and Martin, it hoots at Hollywood’s names and old traditions”), muddied the issue. Paul O’Neil’s arch and labored sociological analysis of Sinatra and his crowd tried to be inside and outside at once, its breezy tone both hinting at familiarity with the players and smelling of jargony Time-Life-speak. “The uninitiated sometimes refer to the clan as the rat pack,” O’Neil wrote. But, he continued,

  The rat pack is no more; it died with Bogie. Today there is no Frank but Frank, [who]…personifies [the Clan’s] nonconformist attitude: a public and aggressive indifference, not only to what the customers expect of their movie stars but also to what Hollywood expects of its own citizens. He is known, variously, among the faithful as The Pope, The General or The Dago. Dean Martin, who is next in influence (and who also calls meetings), is known as The Admiral.

  With the ham-handed certainty of an FBI report, the piece went on to identify the other key players. Besides Sinatra and Martin, O’Neil asserted, “the hard core of the clan…sometimes referred to as the cell” included Eddie Fisher, Peter Lawford, Tony Curtis, and Sammy Davis Jr. Positioned on the cell’s immediate periphery, the writer claimed, were the actor-comedian Ernie Kovacs, David Niven, Milton Berle, Sammy Cahn, and Jimmy Van Heusen. Judy Garland, Debbie Reynolds, and “a new young actress,” Shirley MacLaine, were “the females whose talent the clan admires most.”

  Uncomfortably, O’Neil tried to make a connection between the group’s putative outsider status and the money it took to maintain it. “Most members of this group are at least 40 years old and either live or aspire to live in $250,000 houses,” he wrote, adding, with thumping obviousness, “Their nonconformity must obviously be of an especially tailored type.” Tailored, that is, by the Hollywood clothier Sy Devore, “who will produce a seersucker jacket for $125 (New Yorkers can buy a seersucker jacket, with pants, at high-style Brooks Brothers for $28.75).” To blend in with these nonconformists, O’Neil wrote, it also helped to drive a Dual-Ghia like Frank’s (“a hot-looking automobile with an Italian body and a Dodge engine”); both Fisher (who could afford it) and Lawford (whose wife could) eagerly emulated him. Dean, on the other hand, was “perfectly content with a Thunderbird and a Cadillac.”

  The piece’s breathless inanity wasn’t helped by the substantial contribution of the man who appeared to be O’Neil’s single inside source, Sammy Davis Jr. Davis—to the delight of comedians and imitators then and since—was a tap dancer of a talker, with a hip style all his own and a Sodium Pentothal disinclination to censor himself. “As soon as I go out the front door of my house in the morning, I’m on, Daddy, I’m on!” he crowed.

  But when I’m with the group I can relax. We trust each other. We admire each other’s talent. People think we’re troublemakers. But only two of us have escapades—Frank and I…You gotta know about Frank to know about us. Frank is the
most generous man in the world. He’s restless. He can’t sleep. He says what he thinks. But he’s pertinent! There’s nobody, absolutely nobody, who won’t like Frank if Frank wants them to. Frank has a lot of chicks, but nobody is more gentlemanly around women. And if you’re his friend, that’s IT. If you need him, DADDY, HE…IS…THERE!

  The piece’s first glaring flaw was positioning a group of wealthy, middle-aged entertainers as nonconformists. The word had a sociological sound to it; it smacked of rebellion, when what was essentially being talked about was the heedlessness of the spoiled and domineering genius who stood at the group’s center, one for whom rules were made to be broken.

  But the second problem was the definition of the group itself. Who really was in it? How did it cohere? Bogart’s Rat Pack, with its tongue-in-cheek assignment of club offices, had really been an elaborate put-on, the ultimate jab at the Hollywood press and panting movie fans by its central figure, a man who arguably was a kind of nonconformist: one at ease in his craft but deeply uncomfortable in his profession and the polymorphous phoniness that surrounded it. Bogart’s Rat Pack was a cult of personality that grew around a man who disdained cults and personalities. When Bogart died, the group faded like a dream.

  Sinatra’s Clan—soon the only Rat Pack that later generations would remember—was a cult that grew around a man who welcomed worship and demanded fealty. Its—his—gravity at any moment waxed and waned according to the enchantment or disenchantment of the worshippers. And woe betide the acolyte who, even momentarily, assumed the solidity of the ground he stood on. Or worst of all, questioned his own faith.