by James Kaplan
playing a sassy, tough-talking playgirl who whistles at men, drinks whiskey straight from the bottle, and says about wine, “Any year, any model, they all bring out my better nature,” was a gift from the gods. I never felt looser or more comfortable in a part before or since, and I was even allowed to improvise some of my dialogue.
Ava sparkled in Mogambo. At the peak of her charm and beauty and wry elusiveness, she seemed, for the first time in her movie career, like the best possible version of herself on-screen. Even by her own account, she would never again be quite as good. No doubt the slightly sadomasochistic waltz she did with Ford—tension and release—helped her achieve that ease. It also didn’t hurt that the director was more than a little in love with her.
She was well aware of Ford’s devotion. But that didn’t make it any easier to tell him she wanted to leave the shoot after less than three weeks and have an abortion. He was a devout, if highly conflicted, Catholic; and this was, after all, the early 1950s. “Jack Ford tried quite desperately to talk me out of it,” she wrote.
“Ava,” he said, “you are married to a Catholic, and this is going to hurt Frank tremendously when he finds out about it.”
“He isn’t going to find out about it, and if he does, it’s my decision.”
“Ava, you’re giving yourself too hard a time. I’ll protect you if the fact that you’re having a baby starts to show. I’ll arrange the scenes, I’ll arrange the shots. We’ll wrap your part up as quickly as we can. Nothing will show. Please go ahead and have the child.”
I said, “No, this is not the time, and I’m not ready.”
What she couldn’t tell Ford—and couldn’t tell the world when it came time to write her memoirs—was that she was no longer certain that she loved Frank, and that throughout the fall she had often detested him. Even now, when his heart’s desire seemed within reach, when he might actually be able to turn things around for himself, he had to leave her for a month, and she knew what that meant. He hated being alone every bit as much as she hated it, and he would find company. He always did.
Frank had to cool his heels for most of Thursday the twentieth while Columbia ran other screen tests on Stage 16 of the Sunset-Gower lot: not all were for Eternity, but one was of the actor and comedian Harvey Lembeck, who was also trying out for Maggio (and had already acted in a service role in Stalag 17—and would wind up in Sergeant Bilko’s squad on The Phil Silvers Show). When Sinatra finally walked into Buddy Adler’s office, he was in a state. The handsome, prematurely silver-haired producer handed him a script, and Frank waved it aside. “I don’t need this,” he said. “I’ve read it many times.”
“I didn’t think he had a chance, anyway,” Adler recalled. “So I said, ‘Well, okay.’ ”
For his test, Frank was to play two drunk scenes: In the first, Maggio interrupts a heart-to-heart talk in a bar between the bugler Prewitt and the prostitute Lorene (to be played by Montgomery Clift and Donna Reed in the movie), amusing them by pretending to shoot craps with cocktail olives. In the second, drunker still, he goads a pair of MPs outside the Royal Hawaiian Hotel into beating him up. Both scenes embody perfectly what Prewitt says of Maggio: “He’s such a comical little guy and yet somehow he makes me always want to cry while I’m laughin’ at him.”
The role, in other words, was an actor’s dream—a softball teed up to be knocked out of the park. Yet as Sinatra walked onto the soundstage, it wasn’t quite as an actor. “Frank had never been that crazy about acting,” Ava said. “[B]ut he knew he was Maggio and besides, he was dying to do a straight dramatic part and escape from the typecasting he’d been subjected to in musicals.”
Maggio would be redemption; Maggio would be vindication. After all, the typecasting of the 1940s was based on unquestioned American stereotypes: an Italian’s role (much like a black’s) was to sing and entertain. Even the downturn in Sinatra’s career could be tied to the country’s accumulated indignation at his hubris—the nerve of the little wop, trying to stand on the national stage! Small wonder that, as Frank remembered, he was “scared to death” when the camera started rolling. Thirteen thousand miles and endless delays, all for one chance, ten minutes of film …
Reports on the result conflict. “The [screen] test was all right but not great,” said the Eternity screenwriter, Daniel Taradash. “We’d tested Eli Wallach, and in terms of acting his test was much better. We’d all settled on Wallach.”
But the man who would direct the movie—and who was conducting Sinatra’s screen test—felt differently. At forty-five, Fred Zinnemann was a filmmaking veteran of more than twenty years’ experience, a Viennese Jew who’d come to Hollywood from Europe as a young man, and now, as the director of The Member of the Wedding and High Noon, had gained a reputation as a meticulous, thoughtful craftsman for whom a film’s moral vision meant as much as the box-office receipts. Zinnemann gravitated to stories that set underdogs against overwhelming forces: High Noon, in which Gary Cooper’s sheriff had to face down a vengeful ex-con without the help of the fearful townsfolk, was seen by many as a parable for the McCarthy era.
Angelo Maggio is nothing if not an underdog, a cog in the great machine of the U.S. Army, in rebellion—much like his friend Prewitt—against that institution’s many strictures and inequities, as well as its bullies. Prewitt has his ethnicity, his white Americanness, on his side. But Maggio is a little man, an Italian, with no weapons except his Brooklyn chutzpah and his wits. His physical delicacy is part of his charm. Zinnemann had seen Eli Wallach’s screen test and been bowled over by his acting, but he had misgivings. Wallach was a physically powerful man. The minute the director saw Sinatra’s small frame and narrow shoulders and haunted eyes, he was intrigued. When Frank condensed all the pain of the last two years into ten minutes of screen test, Zinnemann was floored.
In his office, Buddy Adler was getting ready to go home. “Since [Sinatra’s] was the last test of the day, I didn’t intend going down on the stage,” the producer recalled.
But I got a call from Fred Zinnemann, “You’d better come down here. You’ll see something unbelievable. I already have it in the camera. I’m not using film this time. But I want you to see it.”
Frank thought he was making another take—and he was terrific. I thought to myself, if he’s like that in the movie, it’s a sure Academy Award. But we had to have Harry Cohn’s okay on casting and he was out of town. So Frank went back to Africa.
Adler’s recollection conveniently foreshadows Sinatra’s Oscar and elides all the complications surrounding Eli Wallach—leave it to a producer to spin a good yarn. Cohn was out of town, in New York talking to his moneymen. But it would be almost two months before final casting for Eternity was set, including Maggio. And Frank would not go back to Africa for three long weeks.
One thing he knew, though: he had nailed it, no matter what Harry Cohn wound up deciding.
Meanwhile, Ava’s pregnancy threw Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer into a tizzy. Once she had notified her MGM publicist and her agent of her intention to have an abortion, the front office fired off a vehement, if euphemistic, cable to John Ford:
CONFIDENTIAL: UNDERSTAND GARDNER CABLED AGENT SHE UNSETTLED AND NOT WELL AND PLANNING BRIEF TRIP TO LONDON FEEL THIS VERY UNWISE FOR MANY OBVIOUS REASONS UNLESS YOU DECIDE IT NECESSARY OTHERWISE SUGGEST YOU USE YOUR PERSUASIVENESS AND HAVE LADY STAY PUT.
But by this time, Ava and Ford were as thick as thieves. The director cabled back:
GARDNER GIVING SUPERB PERFORMANCE VERY CHARMING COOPERATIVE STOP HOWEVER REALLY QUITE ILL SINCE ARRIVAL AFRICA DEEM IT IMPERATIVE LONDON CONSULTATION OTHERWISE TRAGIC RESULTS STOP SHOULD NOT AFFECT SCHEDULE WEATHER HERE MISERABLE BUT WE’RE TRYING NO MOZEL BUT HARD WORK REPEAT BELIEVE TRIP IMPERATIVE.
Ford’s cable was a remarkable performance itself. In forty-three words, he established his faith in his star, the integrity of his shoot, and his winking solidarity with his Jewish corporate masters. A masterpiece of persuasion, and an undeniable call to action.
MGM made all the arrangements. Ava Gardner was an extremely valuable asset, and MGM was very good at making arrangements. Transportation had to be set up, a clinic in London contacted—abortion was legal in England—and publicity spun. The cover story was a tropical disease, painful but not too serious, although the Los Angeles Times’s page-one lead was attention-grabbingly dramatic:
AVA GARDNER STRICKEN ON SET IN AFRICA
LONDON, Nov. 24 (AP)—Doctors pumped powerful shots of antibiotics into Actress Ava Gardner tonight to beat down a tropical infection picked up while movie-making in Africa.
The Hollywood beauty—who made the mistake of drinking the local water in Kenya’s native country—lay in pain with stomach troubles.
But her doctors said it is not serious and promised to have her back on her feet again in a couple of days.
She was whisked to London by plane and rested this afternoon at the Savoy Hotel. Then, said a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer official, she went quietly to a nursing home tonight for treatment.
Strict privacy was ordered for the actress, wife of Crooner Frank Sinatra. There are neither visitors nor phone calls. Only a doctor saw her.
Filming continues in Kenya by shooting scenes in which Miss Gardner does not appear.
Frank got the news along with everyone else, and, at length, reached her by phone in London.
Her voice was weak. There was an echo on the line. God only knew who was listening in.
He’d been worried sick about her. Was she okay? What had happened?
What had happened was that like a moron, she’d eaten some fucking lettuce, which any sane white person in Africa knew you should never do in a million years … More important, though—what about his screen test?
He told her, and she was happy for him. Genuinely happy, even though she had just aborted their child … But she was so tired—would he understand if she slept a little?
Of course he would understand. She should get her rest, and he would call her when he got to New York.
The first thing he did when he hung up was drive to Billy Ruser’s jewelry store in Beverly Hills and pick out a present, for her birthday and Christmas—a pair of earrings, emeralds to go with her eyes. Ruser, an old pal, helped Frank himself.
They were gorgeous. “How much?”
“Twenty-two thousand.”
Frank exhaled and looked out the window, his eyes suddenly moist.
“Frank, give the earrings to Ava.”
“Billy, I can’t afford these.”
Ruser put them in a box and pushed it across the counter. “You pay me when you have it.”
Then he bought Christmas presents for the kids and Nancy—he would be far away at Christmas. Frank borrowed a couple of grand from Van Heusen, who was swimming in dough, still cranking out movie songs for Crosby. He and Chester made plans for later, a couple of girls, one black and one white …
He drove over to Holmby Hills. Nancy was holding the fort with the money he sent her, though the big house was still on the market. She simply didn’t need all that space, and she could bank a nice sum if she sized down.
She was practical. But Frank was also surprised to see, when she opened the front door, just how good she looked—as though, without him, she would have withered up and blown away, grown old overnight. She was wearing his pearls, and the smell of something delicious cooking in the kitchen somehow added to her allure. Ava couldn’t—wouldn’t—boil water … He kissed his ex-wife. On the mouth. She kissed back just a tiny bit, as if she’d momentarily forgotten everything—but then she was tapping him on the chest. Asking him what he was doing.
Then Nancy junior was there, in a sweater and blue jeans and saddle shoes. He noticed the little swellings underneath the sweater.
Tina, four, edged up under her mother’s arm, staring up at him; behind them, eight-year-old Frankie sat silently on the steps, his hair combed neatly, a scab from a playground accident on his forehead, his dark eyes suspicious.
Frank picked up the bags he’d brought. Christmas was early this year!
Nancy Sandra cheered. Her little sister smiled shyly; the boy raised his eyebrows. Frank’s ex-wife gave him a knowing look, but seemed pleased anyway.
He asked if he could come in. She nodded.
Her dignity was indestructible; she had begun to make a life without him. She cultivated the gossip columnists, many of them women; they naturally took her side. Hedda Hopper wrote in early November:
When I was on my lecture tour, a Nancy Sinatra fan wanted to know if she’d take Frank back. So I asked her.
“The idea is ridiculous,” she said. “Frank’s a married man now. He sees our children all the time, and he loves them. But as for anything else, it never enters my head.” Her friend Jim Henaghan brought an oil man to see her house, so maybe one of these days she’ll sell it and buy a smaller place. Nancy’s quite a gal.
Romances were hinted at, but her most steadfast companion outside the Barbato circle seemed to be the similarly single Barbara “Missy” Stanwyck. Mostly, though, the former Mrs. Sinatra took great care to stay busy. The columnist Edith Gwynn wrote (on the very day of Ava’s abortion): “Spent a pleasant evening at Nancy Sinatra’s where a dozen or so dined on fancy Italian dishes the gal herself cooked up, and looked at some movies later. Nancy is proud of her three kids—and well she might be. They’re dolls—and talented like crazy!”
Frank opened at the French Casino on Wednesday night, November 26, and though it wasn’t the Copa, the house was full and he was in good voice—and good spirits, even when a heckler called out, “Where’s your wife?”
“Where’s your wife?” Frank shot back.
After the show, he strolled over to his favorite Manhattan restaurant, Patsy’s, on West Fifty-sixth Street, for a late dinner. It was a cozy Italian joint run by the Scognamillo family, unpretentious and fiercely loyal to Sinatra. “At the end of the meal,” the New York Times reported in 2003, “Sinatra asked the owner what he was serving for Thanksgiving, which was the next day. Aware that Sinatra had not seen the ‘closed for Thanksgiving’ sign on the door, the elder Mr. Scognamillo replied, ‘Whatever you like.’ After Sinatra left, the owner took down the sign and announced to the staff: ‘Tomorrow we are open. Everyone, please come, and bring your family. I don’t want Mr. Sinatra to eat alone.’ ”
That night Frank went straight back to work at the Casino. Between songs he schmoozed the audience, turning his ordeal at customs into an amusing anecdote (“A funny thing happened to me on the way here from Africa …”) and even essaying a couple of slightly nervous Mogambo jokes. On Gable’s marksmanship: “Is he good! In one week, he shot six natives!” And on Ava: “It’s pretty lonesome here without my wife. After all, you know the dangers she’ll face making a movie in Africa—lions, tigers, crocodiles; Clark Gable …”
Gable wasn’t the danger. In early December, Ava returned to the Mogambo camp and, as always, managed to stir up some action right away. When she wanted to go out into the bush and get up close to some wild animals, the handsome white hunter Bunny Allen was happy to oblige her. They soon found themselves in the midst of a herd of elephants, where Ava, suddenly startled by a fire-hose-like splashing very close at hand, grabbed Allen’s arm. “It’s all right,” the hunter whispered coolly. “Elephant’s just gone to the bathroom.” Ava’s loud laughter sent the herd thundering off—but there she was, still holding on to Bunny …
It wasn’t a grand affair, just a couple of nights, then sweet, dry-eyed good-byes. They were alike, the two of them: good-looking and easily bored.
“Ava couldn’t be alone,” the production coordinator Eva Monley said. “That was, I think, why she had so many affairs. She’d say, ‘Hey, come on, have a drink with me, I’m bored all by myself,’ and she’d bring back a prop man or whoever [to her tent].”
Back in New York, the French Casino was asking Frank to extend his stay, but, Earl Wilson wrote, “he has a prior commitment—Ava.” On Friday the twelfth, his thirty-seventh birthday (
not his thirty-fifth, as he still led the world to believe, and as Wilson dutifully reported), he “was given a birthday cake by lady fans … [who] squealed just like they did at the Riobamba almost 10 years ago.”
Ten years … The girls were ladies now, and Frankie was verging on middle age. Many of the ladies were still willing to go to bed with him—and a few did—but road romance wasn’t the same as it had once been.
He really did miss his wife.
Frank arrived back on location the following week, bearing gifts for Ava’s big birthday, from himself and her family. Some accounts say he brought a diamond ring and a mink, the latter of which seems unlikely in darkest Africa, but then Sinatra and sensible gift giving never did go together. Ava is said to have made a scornful remark about who really paid for the gifts—but what of Billy Ruser’s layaway earrings? Reports are inconsistent. Ava insists it was a charmed period. “Frank came back to Africa in time for Christmas—and my thirtieth birthday—full of enthusiasm and joy,” she recalled.
But Frank wouldn’t know for weeks if he had clinched the Eternity role: Cohn was still horse-trading with Eli Wallach’s people, and Frank was on pins and needles, which wouldn’t have made him delightful company. “Then came the death wait,” he told Hedda Hopper in 1954, of his return to the Mogambo shoot.
I thought I’d collapse waiting for reaction to that test. My agent sent word that Columbia was testing six other fellows, among them some fine stage actors. My chin hit my knees and I gave up. Ava was wonderful at cheering me up, and said, “I wish you wouldn’t quit just because you got one stinking telegram.” Clark Gable … kept saying, “Relax, skipper. Have a little drink and everything will be all right.”
Drinking rarely made things all right where Frank and Ava were concerned. Given his tendency to prettify the past, his stark language (“thought I’d collapse … I gave up”) is striking. Then sometime while he was waiting to hear from Columbia, the alcohol loosened Ava’s tongue, and she told him about the abortion. The revelation could only have been devastating to him.