by James Kaplan
Another FBI report claimed that Joseph Bonanno was also present at the party, making it a Mafia mini-summit of sorts. Not to mention a party that might have challenged the imaginations of Visconti, Kubrick, and Scorsese.
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In early August, Frank went to work on the film he had agreed to do for 20th Century Fox in return for having walked off Carousel in August 1955—except that after four years he had become so powerful that instead of repaying the studio for his dereliction (he’d taken a fee of $150,000 for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical), he could now dictate far more lucrative terms: for the new picture, the musical Can-Can, he would receive a fee of $200,000 plus a huge 25 percent of the picture’s gross profits (as opposed to the net, which Hollywood accountants could always make vanish). A neat trick, and one that only the Frank Sinatra of 1959 could pull off.
An adaptation of Can-Can, the hit Broadway musical with songs by Cole Porter and book by Abe Burrows, seemed like a good idea at the time. Though there was ample evidence by the late 1950s that movie musicals were a dying genre, 1958’s Gigi—with an Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe score and direction by Vincente Minnelli, just before he made Some Came Running—had been a monster hit, winning Academy Awards in all nine categories for which it was nominated and generating huge box-office profits for MGM. The folks at 20th Century Fox had high hopes that another musical set in fin de siècle Paris, not to mention one starring Sinatra, with a score by the great Porter and arrangements by Nelson Riddle, could make lightning strike a second time. As insurance, the studio borrowed two of Gigi’s French stars, Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan.
Unfortunately, Fox had the merely competent Walter Lang (The King and I) as director, rather than the great (with musicals) Minnelli. But what made matters even worse was the degree of control Frank exerted over the project. As we’ve seen, he was a far better movie actor when under the guidance of a strong director; when he had a strong director and something to prove, as was the case with From Here to Eternity and The Man with the Golden Arm, magic could occur.
Yet by 1959, he had gathered a degree of virtually unchecked power never seen before in show business. As Can-Can’s co-producer (under yet another pseudo-British company name, Suffolk), star, and eight-hundred-pound gorilla, he had a whip hand over the project, and one of his first demands was that Fox hire Shirley MacLaine as his co-star, even though she was under contract to Columbia to make another film, and an expensive buyout was required to dislodge her.
The buyout wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was that MacLaine, with her wide-open American features, broad comedic acting, and disinclination to feign the slightest hint of a French accent, would wind up looking glaringly miscast as the proprietress of a racy Parisian dance hall. But Sinatra’s portrayal of the Paris attorney François Durnais would go beyond miscasting. Feeling—not without justification—that what movie audiences really wanted in a Frank Sinatra musical was Frank Sinatra, he made not the slightest attempt to subsume himself into the role. Like MacLaine (and no doubt stung by the bad experience of The Pride and the Passion, in which his Spanish accent and his luxuriant wig had vied for awfulness), he spoke Americanese—except that more disconcertingly, in Frank’s case, it was Hobokenese. His entire presentation was unapologetically Sinatra-esque. In a crucial court scene, “defense attorney François arrives in court sporting a rakishly tilted Cavanaugh [sic] hat,” Tom Santopietro writes.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the wardrobe of a Parisian lawyer in 1890, and the disconnect is made worse when a very French prison guard interacts with the very American Sinatra and MacLaine. Sinatra is not even trying; his performance is all thumbs in his waistcoat, as if he prepared for playing a lawyer by looking at political cartoons. The slipshod work is a very long way from the meticulous preparation found in From Here to Eternity and The Man with the Golden Arm.
Still more egregiously, Frank, who in asserting his artistic prerogative as a singer was wont to alter the lyrics of even the greats, slips a coy “ring-a-ding-ding-ding” into the coda of Cole Porter’s “C’est Magnifique” and, with five short syllables, lays waste to the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Porter wasn’t present on the shoot—though one can imagine the smoke coming out of his ears when he heard the line—and the director, Lang, might have simply lacked the courage to correct Sinatra’s supremely presumptuous ad-lib. “Alas, this one phrase instantly yanks the viewer out of Paris and back to Las Vegas,” Santopietro writes.
It may just be one ring-a-ding-ding, but it is a significant moment in Sinatra’s film career, because after appearing in forty films, it’s the first time Frank doesn’t bother to try…He is, in effect, saying, “Hey, I’m Frank Sinatra—I’ll coast along here on my charm…” Such an attitude can be charming in a nightclub, but on film it’s disconcerting at best, and deadly at worst.
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She looked like an optical illusion walking across the 20th Century Fox back lot: five feet eleven, voluptuous, and red-haired, with legs that went on forever—thirty-nine inches, to be exact. “Everywhere she goes on the lot, jaded studio personnel stop cold in their tracks to ogle the leggy newcomer,” UPI’s Hollywood correspondent Vernon Scott wrote in early July. “The brass is convinced 22-year-old Juliet Prowse will be the biggest star developed at the studio in many a year.”
The choreographer Hermes Pan had discovered the South African dancer in Europe and persuaded Fox to sign her to a seven-year contract and a co-starring role in Can-Can. Frank took notice. Immediately.
Her face and body alone would have stopped him in his tracks. But she was a terrific dancer, she could act and sing, and with that odd accent—kind of British, kind of not—she had a presence about her. Though she was very young, she was thoughtful and a little serious. Kept her own counsel. “Naturally, I hope to become a star,” she’d told Vernon Scott. “It’s something I’ve always wanted. But I’m not counting on it. Too many people come to this town with high hopes only to see them dashed out. I am not going to build myself up to a letdown.”
She was flattered—very flattered—at Sinatra’s instant focus on her, the mesmerizing pinion of those blue, blue eyes. He was the biggest star in the world! She had a pile of his records back home in Johannesburg: she listened to them, but quietly. She didn’t squeal like the silly teenagers she’d heard about.
He liked her reserve. So she didn’t have round heels like every other starlet in town; he liked the challenge. Not to mention her height: she towered over him. And that accent—the whole package was classy.
Frank with Juliet Prowse at the SHARE Boomtown benefit. The South African actress-dancer was strong-minded and independent—a little too much so for Sinatra’s liking. (Credit 12.2)
He began to take her places, giving her his entire attention. Though unsurprisingly, their conversations always came back to him.
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On August 27, Frank had recorded for the first time in over three months—but at 20th Century Fox, not the detested Capitol. This was a soundtrack session, with Nelson, for Can-Can, the resulting songs to be dubbed into the film afterward; on set, he would lip-synch to a playback—right down to that “ring-a-ding-ding-ding” on “C’est Magnifique.” And while his heart wasn’t quite in that song—the lyric was artificially gay; the thrown-in French words seemed to make him self-conscious—he gave an exquisitely tender reading of Porter’s great “It’s All Right with Me,” which Frank’s character François Durnais sings to Prowse’s character, the dancer Claudine.
On the Fox soundstage, of course, Sinatra was just acting with sad eyes while moving his lips (and if the truth be told, not doing the greatest job at the latter; though perhaps the stage business of singing while taking a puff of the cigarette that Prowse lit for him in between syllables was too much even for him); in the recording studio, though, he was summoning something meaningful and doing it magnificently:
There’s someone I’m trying so hard to forget,
Don’t you wan
t to forget someone, too?
Her memory was always right there, on tap whenever he needed it.
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After completing On the Beach, Ava drifted through the summer of 1959. “No plan, no itinerary,” Lee Server writes. “She would stay somewhere for days or weeks. One morning she would head for the airport again. She went to San Francisco, Palm Springs, Florida, and Haiti.” And Cuba.
In Havana, she had an audience with the newly triumphant Fidel Castro, whom she found unexpectedly tall and very magnetic. She asked him if it was true he hated all Americans. Only Richard Nixon, Castro told her. Apparently, he said it with a smile, because the leader’s beautiful nineteen-year-old translator-mistress, Ilona Marita Lorenz, quickly came to feel something was going on between the “middle-aged woman” and Fidel. “The two rivals at last came face to face in the lobby of the Hilton, and it was an ugly scene,” Server writes.
Ava was staggeringly drunk, said Marita, and called the girl “a little bitch” for hiding Fidel from her. Ava followed her into the elevator and then, said Marita, slapped her hard in the face. A Castro bodyguard named Captain Pupo, also in the elevator, drew his pistol from its holster and told everybody to cool it.
From there, the Ava Show headed for points north. “Movie actress Ava Gardner made a brief stopover at Miami International Airport Wednesday night en route to New York,” a wire-service item of September 17 noted.
It required 45 minutes for custom agents to process the 36-year-old former wife of Frank Sinatra, a maid, secretary, two small caged dogs, 19 pieces of luggage, a hi-fi set and a hand-carved bongo drum.
Miss Gardner told newsmen she was going to New York for talks about a new motion picture, “A Fair Bride.”
The project, like a number of others Ava discussed during that period, came to naught.
While she was in Manhattan, Frank lent her his two-bedroom pied-à-terre in the Hampshire House on Central Park South. It was an astonishing time for jazz in New York—giants like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk were not only making great albums but playing in clubs where you could go and see them up close—and Ava loved jazz. But as great as they were, Trane and Monk possessed no sexual charge; Miles, with his high cheekbones, satiny skin, and piercing malevolent eyes, was right up her street. And at that moment, Davis, who was the hottest thing around (his masterpiece LP Kind of Blue had just come out in August), was playing at Birdland, at Broadway and Fifty-Second. She went to see him. Often. “Pee Wee Marquette, the famous midget emcee, who was the mascot at Birdland, was introducing Ava Gardner from the bandstand every night, and she was throwing kisses and coming backstage and kissing me back there,” Davis wrote in his autobiography. Ava, he wrote,
was a stunningly beautiful woman, dark and sensuous with a beautiful full mouth that was soft as a motherfucker. Man, she was a hot number…We didn’t get down or nothing like that. She was a nice person, though, real nice, and if I would have wanted to we could have had a thing. I just don’t know why it didn’t happen, but it didn’t, even though a lot of people swear that it did.
Castro, Miles…She could keep up with Frank and his gangsters any day of the week.
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On the third Saturday in September, an astonishing spectacle took place at 20th Century Fox’s elegant commissary, the Café de Paris: Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union and the face of world Communism, the man who had said of the capitalist West, “We will bury you,” sat down to lunch with the cream of Hollywood: four hundred movie executives and stars, including Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Gregory Peck, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Sammy Davis Jr., Eddie Fisher, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, Edward G. Robinson, Shelley Winters, Rita Hayworth, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Terror of Communism had been woven into the fabric of Hollywood since 1947, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities began its investigation of the movie industry. The blacklist was still going strong in 1959. But one thing Hollywood respected was star power, and that fall Nikita Khrushchev was a star. His impromptu debate with Vice President Richard Nixon in a model kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow that summer had led the Eisenhower administration to invite the Soviet premier to visit the United States; Los Angeles was the second stop on a thirteen-day tour that quickly became a media circus.
An invitation to the Fox luncheon had been the hottest ticket in Hollywood, which was infected with what the New York Times correspondent Murray Schumach called “Khrushchev fever.” “The ownership of a mansion at Bel Air, of impressionist paintings, or of a Rolls Royce or membership in an exclusive club could not console a producer who did not receive a telegram permitting him to sit in the Fox commissary with the Soviet Premier to eat shrimp, squab chicken and cantaloupe,” Schumach wrote. So select was the list of invitees that spouses of stars and talent agents were excluded.
Still, not everyone jumped at the chance to attend. Bing Crosby, Adolphe Menjou, Ronald Reagan, and Ward Bond all declined on political grounds. “I believe that to sit socially and break bread with someone denotes friendship,” Reagan said, “and I certainly feel no friendship for Mr. Khrushchev.”
Khrushchev sat at the head table, along with 20th Century Fox’s president, Spyros Skouras, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge. At an adjacent table, the tiny, potato-faced Mrs. Khrushchev sat sandwiched between Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra, seeming overwhelmed by the entire experience—though not by Hope or Sinatra, whom she didn’t appear to recognize.
The luncheon quickly turned into a kind of Kitchen Debate redux—perhaps an inevitability given the combative natures of the keynote speakers: the short, stocky sixty-six-year-old Skouras, who held forth in a thick Greek accent on his own up-by-the-bootstraps story and the virtues of capitalism, and the short, stocky sixty-five-year-old Khrushchev, who at first managed to charm and amuse the show-business crowd by throwing a few zingers at the Fox president but then gave a forty-five-minute speech, committing what the Associated Press called “the unpardonable sin to show business: staying on too long.”
In the end, it turned out that the premier was furious at being denied the chance to see Disneyland.
“What do you have, rocket launching pads there?” Khrushchev said, as his personal interpreter, Viktor Sukhodrev, translated. “And just listen to what reason I was told, ‘We cannot guarantee your security if you go there.’ What is there, an epidemic of cholera there, or have gangsters taken hold of the place that can destroy me? Your policemen are so tough they can lift a bull by the horn. Surely they can restore order if there are any gangsters around.”
The assembled luminaries cleared their throats. A star the premier might have been, but in Hollywood a star without charm might as well have been an extraterrestrial.
After the meal, on a Fox soundstage, the premier and his wife watched as Frank—who, it would have now been clear to them if it hadn’t been before, was the star of stars on hand—emceed a live presentation of musical highlights from Can-Can. Sinatra grinned suavely as he announced that the first number would be a song done by Louis Jourdan and Maurice Chevalier. “It is called ‘Live and Let Live,’ ” Frank said, “and I think it is a marvelous idea.” The scene in which the song occurred, he told the Russians, was in “a movie about a lot of pretty girls and the fellows who like pretty girls.”
As the translator spoke into his ear, Khrushchev’s mood seemed to soften. The premier grinned and applauded.
After Sinatra sang “C’est Magnifique,” he said he was turning the show over to the dancing girls, calling them “my nieces.” Shirley MacLaine, Juliet Prowse, and a dozen cancan girls exploded onto the stage and, shrieking and whirling their voluminous skirts to reveal pantaletted haunches, performed the dance number that had titillated and scandalized the world at the turn of the century.
After it was over, Mr. Khrushchev affably posed for pictures with the cast.
When a reporter asked him what he thought of the cancan, he replied, impenetrably, that this dance was obviously just for this picture and that he was not an expert on nightclubs.
By the time he formulated his official response, however, the grin had vanished from Khrushchev’s face. The cancan number was “lascivious, disgusting and immoral,” he declared. “The face of humanity is prettier than its backside.”
The Soviet premier’s critique would generate a huge advance ticket sale before Can-Can was released the following spring, with Newsweek commenting that “being condemned by Khrushchev may be an even bigger commercial asset than being banned in Boston.” But the reviews would prove poor, and ticket sales would drop off quickly. Frank’s impetuous “ring-a-ding-ding-ding,” though, was soon to find its true home.
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Without anything too demanding on his plate—by day he was traipsing through Can-Can; by night he was gazing into Juliet Prowse’s eyes—Sinatra did a lot of TV that fall. At the end of September, he was a guest, along with Louis Armstrong and Peggy Lee, on Bing Crosby’s Oldsmobile show on ABC: it was superbly assured, late-1950s, black-and-white musical television, with all four stars in fine voice and apparently high spirits. Frank did three numbers, including a beautiful “Willow Weep for Me,” and duetted charmingly with Bing on Irving Berlin’s “I Love a Piano,” backed by the keyboardists Joe Bushkin, George Shearing, and Paul Smith.
At the end of the hour, Sinatra and Crosby, in dueling toupees, parked themselves on clear Lucite chairs (“Pull up a glass and sit down,” Bing told Frank) for an odd, apparently impromptu conversation. The two then proceeded to have a winking tête-à-tête, mostly about their mutual weekend retreat, Palm Springs. The banter seemed to charm some viewers and annoy others. “Their colloquy may have relied too much on special, coterie humor,” wrote the syndicated critic Harriet Van Horne.
