Frank

by James Kaplan

  After closing in Montreal, Frank made a flying visit to London, a trip so abrupt that he had to phone in a last-minute cancellation of an appearance on Martha Raye’s TV show, infuriating the writers and producers, who had to rip up the script and start from scratch. Some of the columns snickered that Sinatra was up to his old high-handed tricks, but Dorothy Kilgallen seemed to understand that this trip was necessary. “Chums say Frankie flew to London,” Kilgallen wrote on the twentieth, “because he hadn’t heard from Ava for a week.”

  He’d finally tracked her down in Rome, screwing Clark Gable, for all Frank knew.3 In truth, Ava being Ava, she was brothel-crawling with her new gal pal Grace Kelly. When Frank asked anxiously how she was feeling, her voice was husky from fatigue and edgy. It was a bad conversation. Just when he needed her by his side to share in his good fortune, she was a million miles away physically and emotionally.

  Then she’d gone off the radar screen.

  She had checked out of the Grand in Rome; Reenie Jordan and Benton Cole were vague about her whereabouts. Frank had Sanicola phone Metro’s production department in Culver City and extract her drop-dead date for arriving at Boreham Wood.

  But she still sounded remote when he reached her at the Savoy—all she would say was that there was some kind of medical problem. That was when he got on a plane.

  The newspaper accounts tell how Ava met Frank at Heathrow, minus her customary sunglasses, and didn’t recognize him at first because he was wearing a hat. The man whose icon status in the 1950s would be synonymous with a fedora clearly hadn’t worn one up to this point. The simple reason for the change was that his baldness was accelerating. And while Frank had begun wearing a hairpiece on film at least as early as 1948’s The Kissing Bandit, he wasn’t yet solvent (or shameless) enough to sport a toup in civilian life.

  If his wife didn’t recognize him, the public wouldn’t either: Sinatra’s trip to London was not only abrupt but furtive. He told one of the few reporters who tracked him down that he had come to make arrangements for a European tour he’d be doing in the late spring and early summer. This might have been true, but what he was mainly there for (he finally discovered after he landed) was to try to talk Ava out of having another abortion.

  Unsurprisingly, her memoir glosses the episode over. “I didn’t think that big expensive clinic [where she’d had the first abortion in November] was prepared for a second round of someone responding to their ever-so-correct questions with my incorrect answers,” she wrote,

  so I was checked into a small nursing home near Wimbledon where they didn’t ask any questions at all. I knew Frank was coming across to London to start a singing tour through Europe, but I wasn’t sure exactly when. But clearly someone told him about what I was doing, because as long as I live I’ll never forget waking up after the operation and seeing Frank sitting next to the bed with tears in his eyes.

  She’d probably avoided the big expensive clinic for secrecy’s sake—and because she could scarcely ask MGM, which had picked up the tab for the first procedure, to pay for another one three months later.

  And the procedure was in February, not in May as some accounts have it, and as Ava’s red herring about Frank’s coming over to start his European tour would indicate. A May abortion could have made the baby Frank’s for sure, but she can’t have it both ways. If her tender story about his singing to her as they bumped across the African plain in a jeep is true—and her memory in this instance has a solid ring of truth—then that second (or third4) pregnancy had commenced while she was still on location, which means no later than January, and specifically no later than mid-January, because that’s when Sinatra left for his Latin Quarter gig. (Nor could the jeep-bumping-over-the-plain story refer to the first African pregnancy: Frank had departed for his screen test in November before he knew she was with child.)

  She meets him at Heathrow; the next thing we know, he’s sitting by her bedside in tears after the procedure. Sometime after he took off his hat, Ava told him where she was going and what she was going for. He can’t have been happy about it. To put it mildly. Coming so soon after the November abortion, this one would have been unacceptable, unimaginable. And yet she was adamant—and of course could never, ever tell him the real reason: not only did she not want a child—not now, not ever—but she also wasn’t sure whose baby this was. (If one dalliance with a bullfighter had driven Frank crazy, an out-of-wedlock child would have ended the marriage for good.) The collision between them, irresistible force and immovable object, must have been terrible. And the tears on his face were surely from fury as much as sadness. Starting with Nancy’s 1947 abortion, this would have been (by his reckoning, anyway) the fourth child he had lost. “He never got over it, he never discussed it,” Hank Sanicola recalled. “The only thing he ever said to me about it was, ‘I shoulda beaten her fuckin’ brains out for what she did to me and the baby, but I loved her too much.’ ”

  Amid the angry bluster, he couldn’t admit to Sanicola that there had been two babies.

  Frank and Ava made it up somehow—it can’t have been the usual way—and flew to Paris for a few gloomy days. The cable from Harry Cohn, even with its where-the-hell-are-you subtext, could only have come as a relief:

  MONTGOMERY CLIFT ALREADY PROFICIENT IN ARMY DRILL STOP SINCE YOU MUST DO SAME ROUTINE, SUGGEST YOU GET BACK FEW DAYS EARLY STOP HARRY.

  Excited now, Frank dashed off an answer:

  DEAR HARRY, WILL COMPLY WITH REQUEST STOP DRILLING WITH FRENCH ARMY OVER WEEKEND STOP EVERYTHING OK STOP MAGGIO.

  Then, with the best possible excuse, he dashed off, period. They had spent a little over a week together, most of it fighting or in an abortion clinic. The marriage had become a travesty.

  Army drill was just the beginning of Montgomery Clift’s proficiency. Like Sinatra, he had been galvanized by From Here to Eternity from the moment the novel came out, knowing at once that he was born to play the role of Robert E. Lee Prewitt, Angelo Maggio’s best friend in G Company. It was almost as if James Jones had been thinking specifically of the actor when he described Prewitt: “a kind of intensity in the face … a sort of deep tragic fire in the eyes.” Also like Sinatra, Clift was not the first choice for his role: Harry Cohn wanted the Columbia contract player Aldo Ray—a raspy-voiced, muscle-bound former Navy frogman, whose slight air of vulnerability stemmed mainly from his inexperience as an actor. Ray hadn’t worked for a couple of months, his salary was mounting up, and as far as Cohn was concerned, that was that. But Fred Zinnemann, to his great credit, was firm on Clift—so firm that the director threatened to quit unless Clift was cast. Taken aback by the soft-voiced Austrian’s vehemence, the studio chief asked him why.

  “Because I want to make a good picture, and Montgomery Clift is the only actor who can play Prewitt,” Zinnemann said.

  He knew what he was talking about. Zinnemann had directed Clift in the actor’s second movie, The Search, in 1948, and was well aware of his gifts. The two had collaborated closely, the director even allowing the actor to rewrite his lines, much to the chagrin of the film’s producer. “His scenes bristled with life,” Zinnemann remembered. “And he filled the screen with reverberations above and beyond the movie itself.” The role of Prewitt—a sensitive outsider, a boxer who quit fighting because he accidentally blinded a friend in an Army boxing match—required an actor of depth and mystery, one who was himself a sensitive outsider. Montgomery Clift, a tortured homosexual and alcoholic, filled the bill in every respect.

  Clift was a brilliantly intuitive, groundbreaking actor, with a gift for vanishing into his roles. He believed in the souls of his characters more than the words they spoke. “Good dialogue simply isn’t enough to explain all the infinite gradations of a character,” he said. “It’s behavior—it’s what’s going on behind the lines.” And as one who instinctively looked beyond surface appearances, he understood Frank Sinatra’s potential. As early as the fall of 1952, when Sinatra was still a dark horse, Clift told a friend that Frank would be
perfect to play Maggio.

  Sinatra hit the ground running from the moment he landed in California. First came the week of rehearsals at the end of February, then five weeks of shooting interiors at Columbia. And remarkably, during this intense month and a half, the company and crew of From Here to Eternity saw not a trace of One-Take Charlie, the movie-set prima donna. Frank was thoroughly in gear, heeding Zinnemann and, especially, Clift as though his life depended on it. Which, in a real way, it did.

  The two actors hit it off instantly. Each man stared into the other’s remarkable blue eyes, recognizing not just the other’s brilliance but also the wounds. “We had a mutual admiration thing going on,” Frank said later, deflecting with characteristically tough talk his attraction to Clift’s looks and obvious classiness (the actor was related to Abraham Lincoln’s postmaster general and a secretary of the Treasury under Andrew Jackson)—not to mention the instant meeting of minds and sensibilities between Sinatra, the secretly sensitive genius, and Clift, the equally brilliant artist with the troubling sexuality. On the set of Clift’s first movie, Red River, John Wayne had ostracized the young actor, and burst into laughter when the director, Howard Hawks, first tried to rehearse the climactic fistfight between the two men. But remarkably, despite all Sinatra’s swaggering, no evidence exists that, even in the hypermasculine atmosphere of his coterie, he ever made a belittling remark about Clift. Rather, Frank seems to have understood at once that as deeply as he understood Maggio, he would need acting instruction from Clift on the order of the dancing instruction he’d received from Gene Kelly.

  “Monty really coached Sinatra in the part of Maggio,” said Clift’s close friend Jack Larson. “He spelled out every beat, every moment, and Sinatra was grateful.” The process began during rehearsals and continued throughout the shoot. After work was over for the day, the two men often went to the Naples Restaurant up the block, continuing their shoptalk over dinner.

  “By his intensity,” Zinnemann recalled, “[Clift] forced the other actors to come up to his standard of performance.” And he forced Sinatra to raise his game as an actor. As Frank later explained:

  As a singer … I rehearse and plan exactly where I’m going. But as an actor, no, I can’t do that. To me, acting is reacting. If you set it up right, you can almost go without knowing every line … If I rehearse to death, I lose the spontaneity I think works for me … With Montgomery, though, I had to be patient because I knew that if I watched this guy, I’d learn something.

  In his singing career Frank had gotten huge mileage out of communicating vulnerability, and in Montgomery Clift he recognized a fellow artist. Screen acting, though, involved considerably more than looking soulful and putting a catch in your voice. There was an intense subtlety to it, a poetry of minute gestures. It was Sinatra’s brilliance to understand this, and to observe, minutely, every move Clift made.

  As Tom Santopietro wrote:

  Sinatra here took on Clift’s hunched posture, allowing it to emphasize his own vulnerable, frail physique. It’s a physical approach that aided Sinatra immensely in conveying Maggio’s “doomed gaiety.” Maggio may have been a supporting role, but it made Frank Sinatra a top-drawer movie star. By blending small parts of Cagney’s toughness with Bogart’s jaded but vulnerable wiseguy, and overlaying the mix with his own distinctly Italian-American physicality—a lovable underdog with a chip on his shoulder—Sinatra arrived at an entirely original screen persona.

  The rhythms of Maggio’s Brooklynese were music to Frank’s ears: when Sinatra spoke Maggio’s lines, he might as well have been talking himself. He moved into the dialogue just as he inhabited the lyrics of a song, only in this case the words fit like a glove:

  This outfit they can give back to Custer.

  Or:

  Man, what I would not give to have this character in the corner poolroom in my hometown.

  That’s “would not,” not “ wouldn’t.” The difference is tiny but crucial: it instantly and sharply denotes the wised-up street-corner character, circa early-to-mid-twentieth-century Greater New York–New Jersey area, that Damon Runyon immortalized, James Jones humanized, and Frank Sinatra was and would ever more publicly show himself to be. There’s a poetry to this breaking up of contractions into their constituent parts that Sinatra would carry to the end of his life.5 Maggio freed him to become himself.

  As a singer, Frank seemed to have understood from the beginning that he could be nobody but himself. As awed as he might have been by Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday, he was remarkably free from influences. His voice, and the personality behind it, were unique. With acting it was a different story—he’d come to the art late. Singing is a form of acting, but a limited one. And the only persona Sinatra could come up with in his first films was a version of his early stage persona, which emphasized only his better angels—boyish charm, shy modesty.

  Now he wasn’t a boy anymore. The world had gotten more complicated, and so had he. His face and hair had thinned; his spirit had darkened. Wanting to update his image in 1948, he’d tried for the delinquent role in Knock on Any Door, but he was clearly too old to play a juvenile. Three years later, he’d attempted to bring somber tones to his performance in Meet Danny Wilson, but the movie came and went too fast for anyone to notice.

  From Here to Eternity was his big chance, in every possible way: not only because of the distinguished material and company and the huge conspicuousness of the project, but also because of where Frank was in his life. His first legitimate shot at a big dramatic role had arrived at a moment when he was truly old enough, and experienced enough, to give a complicated performance. The paradox was that he had come to dramatic acting late enough in the game that he needed to get up to speed very quickly. “He was scared,” said Ernest Borgnine, who played Fatso. “He had to prove himself again because he was right down to nothing.” But he was also canny enough (and humbled enough) to realize his great good fortune at playing opposite a master.

  An immediate bond between Frank and Monty was alcohol, though both were punctilious about not drinking during working hours. After hours was a different story. The author of From Here to Eternity, James Jones, a constant, starstruck presence on the shoot, was the third leg of the triangle. A little man with a big head and a tough scowl, Jones, like Sinatra and Clift, and like the author’s fictional surrogate, Prewitt, was a sufferer: a hypersensitive former boxer and combat soldier battling his own demons of conflicted sexuality and alcoholism. Jones was strongly attracted to Clift, and though the feeling wasn’t mutual, the actor, who was obsessed with dragging every possible bit of information about the military and his character out of the writer, stayed close. Frank, for his part, was awed to meet the author of a great book, and charmed to hear Jones’s stories about the real Maggio.

  “The three of them became inseparable during the filming of From Here to Eternity,” wrote Clift’s biographer Patricia Bosworth.

  “They were a motley trio,” a press agent said. “Jones looked like a nightclub bouncer with his thick neck and broken face. And there’s this edgy cocky little wop Sinatra always spoilin’ for a fight, and then Monty who managed to radiate class and high standards even when pissing in the gutter …”

  “We would get very, very loaded,” Jones said. “After dinner and a lot more drinks we would weave outside into the night and all sit down on the curb next to a lamppost. It became our lamppost and we’d mumble more nonsense to each other. We felt very close.”

  While Burt Lancaster rolled in the surf (and, off camera, the hay) with Deborah Kerr, and other company members engaged in the usual occupational amours, Sinatra, Clift, and Jones behaved like a trio of moony frat boys on spring break—the worst thing any of them got accused of was dropping beer cans out the windows of the Roosevelt Hotel. Lancaster, wrote his biographer Kate Buford, “got so used to carrying Sinatra and Clift, dead drunk, to their rooms each night, undressing them, and putting them to bed, that on his birthday for years afterward he would get a telegram from S
inatra with the message ‘Happy Birthday, Mom.’ ”

  Frank was also apparently being faithful. (Or just careful. “After we filmed the knife fight between Montgomery Clift and myself,” Ernest Borgnine recalled, “he said, ‘Oh, hell, you guys are going to get through early. Maybe I’ll come by and we’ll have a couple of drinks, and then some broads, and who knows?’ And he never showed up.”) The gossipmongers of the era must have felt keenly disappointed. They were watching him carefully for slipups—something with Lana Turner would have been nice, but Lana had gone to Spain on vacation. Marilyn Maxwell had finally given up on him. The only real piece of dirt that spring was his continuing tax problems, which were all over the newspapers, the IRS having just slapped a lien on his income. Never had that measly Eternity salary looked so good. The most striking item that March reveals is that sometime during the week of the ninth, while the company temporarily closed down so that Burt Lancaster (who’d been detained wrapping South Sea Woman at Warner’s) could rehearse, Frank slipped off to New York—and shopped for matching nutria trench coats for himself and Ava. The height of devotion, if not fiscal responsibility.

  The role of Maggio may have had Oscar written all over it, but Sinatra was going to have to work very hard to bring it off—and to convince the world he could. Frank felt defensive enough that March that he went even further into hock to buy full-page ads in the trade papers proclaiming himself “box office insurance.” The ads trumpeted that he’d been “a smash success at Riviera, Fort Lee; Chez Paree, Chicago; French Casino, N.Y.; Latin Quarter, Boston; and Chez Paree, Montreal,” and urged the public to “watch for him as Maggio in Columbia Pictures’ forthcoming production, ‘From Here to Eternity.’ ”

  Sinatra was talking not just to Hedda and Louella but also to such second-stringers of the Hollywood press as Frank Morriss, who had less than earthshaking business in mind. “We concocted a little joke, which I hope will work,” Morriss wrote in his column.