by James Kaplan
And she was, sometimes. Then, in December, Frank and Ava flew to London, where Frank was to give a charity command performance before Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. While he was rehearsing—and yelling at his British horn section for playing too loud during the tender passages—a burglar climbed up to the Sinatras’ third-floor suite at the Hotel Washington and stole $17,000 worth of jewelry, including the diamond-and-emerald necklace Frank had taken to Ava in Spain. As if that weren’t trouble enough, after Ava reconsidered her plan to sing a duet with Frank (stage fright), the press reported they’d quarreled about it. Sinatra, furious at everything and everybody, gave a lackluster performance. The newspapers reported yawns among the star-studded audience.
Soon after Frank and Ava relocated to Hollywood, they sat down with Sinatra’s new West Coast press agent, Mack Millar, to figure out how to rehabilitate the singer’s image.
Millar, an old Hollywood hand, looked his client in the eye and gave him the bad news: Frank was going to have to end his feud with the press and woo the newspapers. Aggressively. Millar told his client that a writer at the New York Post, Fern Marja, was writing a six-part series on him. Why not call her and use that fabled charm and that fabled voice of his and woo the pants off of her? Sorry, Ava.
Sinatra thought about it: Maybe humility would work. Anything was worth a try at this point. He phoned Marja and, on his nickel, gave her an hour’s worth of honey. He explained, carefully and undefensively, how often he felt he’d been misquoted and mistreated by the press—but then, in the next breath, allowed that he’d sometimes mistreated them back. “I lost control of my temper and said things,” he told the young reporter. “They were said under great stress and pressure. I’m honestly sorry.”
While he spoke the last sentence, he made a hideous face, a face like a medieval gargoyle, for nobody’s benefit but his own.
Marja asked, over the scratchy connection, how Frank was feeling.
He was much better. Better all the time.
And his voice?
It had been a little rocky there for a while, but it was improving, too.
And he and Ava—?
They were extremely happy.
The articles appeared in the Post. Fern Marja, young but nobody’s fool, acknowledged her initial skepticism about Sinatra’s insistent niceness, but then admitted he had won her over. The Post called the series “The Angry Voice.”
Double Dynamite, with Frank billed third after Jane Russell and Groucho Marx, opened on Christmas Day. The movie had been sitting in the can for three full years while Howard Hughes tried to figure out what to do with it. There was nothing much to do with it—the picture was an out-and-out dog. But in December 1951, as RKO was divesting its theater chains and hemorrhaging money, it was time to get the thing out there and try to make a couple of dollars back.
Nobody was buying. “Even the most ardent devotees of Frank Sinatra, Jane Russell and Groucho Marx,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, “will find meager Christmas cheer in ‘Double Dynamite,’ yesterday’s arrival at the Paramount. Whatever that sizzling title is supposed to mean, this thin little comedy is strictly a wet firecracker.”
That sizzling title, to the puzzlement of nobody except Bosley Crowther, referred to Jane Russell’s size 38D breasts, a subject of endless fascination to Howard Hughes—and, to paraphrase Bob Hope, the two and only marketing gimmicks the sinking studio had for this crummy picture. (So low had Sinatra’s reputation sunk, and so complete was Hughes’s detestation of him, that Frank didn’t even appear on the poster, which—it was a simpler time—showed Groucho’s eyes popping after he got a load of Jane’s chest.)
The story, such as it was, concerned a meek bank clerk, Johnny Dalton—Sinatra, in his last Bashful Frankie role ever—who saves a gangster from being beaten up by rival thugs, thus earning the crook’s deepest gratitude. The crook, who runs a bookie joint, gives Johnny a thousand-dollar reward—and then, with a few phone calls, parlays Johnny’s thousand into sixty grand. Voilà—the timid little clerk now has enough money to marry his ladylove and fellow bank wage slave, the pneumatic, perpetually sneering, helium-voiced Russell. Except that his sudden wealth arouses everyone’s suspicions. Groucho, as the philosophical waiter in the couple’s favorite luncheonette, hijacks the picture.
It’s all kind of low-grade fun for a little while. Frank is charming and natural, despite the tiresomeness of the milquetoast act, and his scenes with Groucho are pretty good, their on-set enmity notwithstanding. The most surreally delightful touch is Nestor Paiva’s energetic turn as the sunglasses-wearing bookie: with his bald dome and dark round lenses, he bears an eerie resemblance to 1960s photos of Sinatra’s great and good friend Sam Giancana.
Then comes the world’s cheesiest process shot (even Robert De Grasse couldn’t make this dog look good) as Frank and Groucho skip down a soundstage sidewalk with a street scene shakily projected behind them, singing “It’s Only Money,” the lousy would-be title song (one of the two mediocre tunes Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne dashed off for the occasion), and your heart sinks for just how bad movies can be sometimes.
Double Dynamite fizzled, like the dud it was.
Frank kept reading. His nose was always in some tome or other, especially when he was flying (which was often). And there were a lot of good books to read in late 1951. There was John Hersey’s Hiroshima and The Diary of Anne Frank and John Gunther’s big book about the United States and Churchill’s and Eisenhower’s memoirs and Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl and The Caine Mutiny. Then somebody gave him a great big doorstop of a novel called From Here to Eternity, James Jones’s scathing postwar portrait of the prewar U.S. Army. Once Frank started reading it, he couldn’t put it down.
Early in the novel, there was a character Frank couldn’t stop thinking about. His name was Angelo Maggio, and he was a buck private from Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, “a tiny curly-headed Italian with narrow bony shoulders jutting from his undershirt.” A fast-talking, wisecracking, no-shit street guy who liked to drink and play cards and craps and pool and cared little about Army discipline. Frank read all the Maggio parts raptly, speaking his dialogue along with him. He knew this guy. More than that. He was this guy.
The book had come out in February and immediately shot to the top of the best-seller lists. In March, Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures bought the screen rights for $85,000—a fortune in those days, especially for a novel that was critical of the Army in an era of fear and conformity. Soon cynics were calling the project “Cohn’s Folly.”
But from the moment Frank laid his eyes on Maggio, he was obsessed with wanting to play him. Fuck Double Dynamite. It was forgotten anyway. All he needed to turn his career around, Frank began to tell everyone around him over and over and over, was one good role. This was that role. (And it was better than good. As Tom Santopietro wrote in Sinatra in Hollywood: “No wonder Sinatra felt desperate to play Maggio—the character is ingratiating, complex, a bit dim-witted, vulnerable, and ultimately doomed. It was a role that had Oscar written all over it.”) That he was the last person on anyone’s mind to play Maggio was a mere technicality.
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The Empress Club, London, December 1951. When nothing else got in the way—which was seldom—they cared deeply for each other. (photo credit 30.1)
Ava Gardner writes in her autobiography that Frank was once again having voice troubles soon after their marriage, but she doesn’t say why. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why. In early 1952, Sinatra’s matchless instrument was undergoing unusual physical and emotional stress, for a whole gamut of reasons. One of the new ones was his marriage itself.
Sammy Cahn’s then wife, Gloria Franks, recalled a dinner she and Cahn had early on with Frank and Ava and the Axel Stordahls. “It was like we were sitting on cracked eggs,” Franks said. “You never quite knew if it was going to be pleasant or there were going to be verbal daggers, or if she was not in a good mood. And Frank was so subservient to her. He was insane ab
out that woman. I thought, ‘My God, look at him.’ He’d hold the door, pull the chair out, that kind of thing. I used to think, ‘God, I don’t remember seeing him do that with Nancy.’ It was a whole other Frank. He was a different person around Ava. And she was … Ava.”
It was hard work being married to Ava Gardner. It was hard work being married to Frank Sinatra, too, but there is evidence that he did the heavy lifting in the relationship. “Neither gave an inch, though I must say Frank worked harder on the marriage than she did,” a friend of Ava’s once said. “She’s a very selfish girl.”
Well, she was a movie star. And classically, show-business marriages involve one high-maintenance partner, usually the better-known spouse, and one maintainer. Frank was being pushed into the latter role. God knows he could be high-handed with friends and lovers and underlings, but Ava had a unique power over him—and all the more so as his own power waned. As a foulmouthed and dominant facsimile of Dolly (certified by Dolly), she wielded the metaphorical baton. (Jimmy Van Heusen, who when out of Frank’s earshot could be scathing about all things Sinatra, took to calling her “The Man.”) As a sexual volcano, she ruled him in bed. And to top it all off, she was paying the bills.
The combination was corrosive. Sinatra’s voice was delicate in the best of circumstances, and now he was spending sleepless nights worrying about his career, taking downers and uppers, reading obsessively at From Here to Eternity, dog-earing pages, marking up the Maggio sections. He was ragged and irritable during the day, and when he snapped at Ava, she snapped right back. At a point when even getting to make love with his wife involved a lot of preliminary yelling, it was a wonder he could sing a note at all.
Yet just a week into the new year, he went into Columbia’s Hollywood studio and recorded three songs in gorgeous voice and high style. Axel Stordahl arranged and conducted, and for the first time Bill Miller was sitting at the piano. The first number, Rodgers and Hart’s “I Could Write a Book,” marked a new artistic peak. Singing with beautiful simplicity and perfect diction, Frank sounded like the artist he was fated to become after he had crossed the valley of the shadow of death. He made a great song sound so believably brand-new (it had debuted on Broadway in Pal Joey in 1940) it practically glistened with dew. Then, after the forgettable “I Hear a Rhapsody” (schmaltzily written, beautifully sung), he belted out the utterly charming (and little-known) “Walkin’ in the Sunshine,” a romping, brassy, bluesy jump, growling and winking his way through in a wham-bam style that looks ahead to the best of his late-1950s collaborations with Billy May:
Just so you know, dear, I’m gonna tell ya
Your smile’s my golden umbrella.
Unfortunately, the world outside the studio wasn’t listening. Frank urgently needed to get something going. He was, according to his old pal, the Paramount Theater manager Bob Weitman, “knockin’ on doors.”
It was February; Weitman was down in Miami, getting a tan. Someone handed him a poolside phone. The voice on the line was unmistakable. Frank wanted to know when Bob was coming back. He was in trouble.
Meet Danny Wilson, which had premiered in L.A. and San Francisco in early February, was to open in New York in late March, Sinatra told Weitman; maybe it could premiere at the joint, with him singing onstage?
Weitman shook his head. It wasn’t a Paramount picture.
Frank knew, but couldn’t Bob make an exception this one time? It was a nice movie—it had a lot of nice songs and a pretty good story. And it’d been getting pretty good write-ups. Frank thought it, and he, could do business.
Weitman put the question to Paramount’s chairman, Barney Balaban. A long silence on the phone line. Then old Balaban growled: “What are you starting up with that guy again for?”
Weitman mulled it over and decided to go ahead anyway. “Frank was a friend and we knew he had talent,” he told Earl Wilson years later. “We took a chance on him for two weeks with Frank Fontaine, June Hutton and Buddy Rich.”
Ava, though, had plans of her own.
Metro had loaned her to 20th Century Fox for one picture,1 an adaptation of the Hemingway short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” “Adaptation” is putting it extremely loosely. The script, as conceived by the producer Darryl F. Zanuck and the screenwriter Casey Robinson, took the downbeat, stream-of-consciousness tale of a writer dying of an infected wound in the shadow of the African mountain and turned it into a Hemingway extravaganza, replete with grafted-on characters and story elements from The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” (“I sold Fox a short story, not my complete works,” the author later complained.) In addition, the movie’s writer-hero and Hemingway surrogate, Harry Street, played by Gregory Peck, would live, rather than die, at the end of the story. But then, that was big-studio moviemaking in the 1950s.
Legend has it that Papa Hemingway himself, who apparently had seen Ava in The Killers and liked what he’d seen, nominated her to play the love of Harry’s life, “Cynthia, from Montparnasse, a model with green-gray eyes and legs like a colt, who lit a fire in Harry Street that could only be quenched by … The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” as the hard-breathing ad copy put it. The whole Technicolor mess was shot on the Fox back lot—a gigantic cyclorama painting of snowcapped Kilimanjaro was erected on Stage 8—and not in Kenya, as some Sinatra books have reported. However, it might as well have been Africa as far as Frank was concerned: production on the movie was scheduled to run from mid-February through the third week in April, and he badly wanted his wife with him for his Paramount premiere on March 26, about which he was much more nervous than he was letting on.
At first Frank refused, explosively, to let Ava do the movie at all. She told him to fuck himself. Complicated negotiations ensued. In the end, Zanuck, Robinson, and the director, Henry King, worked out a formula by which all her scenes could be shot in ten days, freeing her to get to New York in time for Frank’s big show.
It didn’t work out. On her tenth day of shooting, technical problems developed during a big Spanish civil war scene, outdoors, involving hundreds of extras. Rather than go into costly overtime, King approached Ava, hat in hand, and asked: Could she possibly give him one more day of work?
Ava burst into tears. Frank had been phoning her every day from New York, worrying that she wouldn’t finish shooting in time. She’d kept reassuring him: Everything was going fine. What was she supposed to tell him now? Finally she worked up the courage to call Frank—who promptly blew up at her. She blew up right back. Three thousand miles apart, they couldn’t even make up properly.
Later that week, in a report headlined SINATRA SCRAMBLES TO RECOVER FRIENDLY PUBLIC HE ONCE HAD, the old Hollywood hand Wood Soanes wrote that Danny Wilson had flopped so badly at its San Francisco premiere that exhibitors had demoted it to the second half of a double-feature bill in Oakland. Frank’s troubles were beginning to snowball. Universal International elected not to proceed with the second film in Sinatra’s two-picture deal. “And the crowning blow,” Soanes wrote, “came in a decision of Music Corporation of America to withdraw as his agent.”
Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman, long irritated at Sinatra in general, and long embroiled with him in a dispute over $40,000 in back commissions the agency said he owed, finally decided to cut their losses. And not quietly: MCA took out full-page ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter to trumpet the divorce.
Frank was devastated. (He wouldn’t speak to Wasserman for years.) On the advice of his publicists, he had gone to New York ten days in advance of the Paramount premiere to try to mend fences with the press. But by this point he couldn’t even manage a good entrance. Stepping off the plane, he obligingly offered to pose for pictures—and then, when Joan Blondell came down the stairs right after him, the photographers ditched him en masse. Two of them, though, paused for a moment in front of Sinatra. “Fuck you,” they told him in unison.
On the advice of his New York PR men, Frank agreed to suck it up. H
e sent a note to the National Press Photographers Association. “I’ll always be made up and ready in case you want to take any pictures of me,” he wrote, rather pathetically. He got no takers. He even lowered himself to a practice he had abandoned long ago, dropping in on disc jockeys to sweet-talk them into spinning his latest record—in this case, “I Hear a Rhapsody,” with “I Could Write a Book” on the flip side, from the January session.
In Sinatra’s new upside-down world, all journalists were welcome. When the jazz columnist George Frazier, freelancing for Cosmopolitan, interviewed him backstage during rehearsals at the Paramount, the writer had the nerve—and the leverage at that point—to inform Frank that he might not write a completely complimentary piece. Frank’s first reaction came straight from the heart: he winced, then gave Frazier a long, angry stare. Then he remembered the fix he was in. “Nodding, he became amiable again,” Frazier wrote.
“Look,” he said, “I won’t mind if it pans me just as long as it helps me correct the things I’ve been doing wrong” … It was the first time I ever heard him concede that Sinatra is only human. For the first time, he seems skeptical of his own infallibility … He no longer takes the view that he is a law unto himself. His sullenness has given way to an authentic eagerness to be pleasant and cooperative.
Earl Wilson did all he could, up to and including papering the house, to try to ensure a successful Paramount premiere for Frank. “As one of his surviving and loyal friends in the press, I tried to create excitement for him,” Wilson recalled.