by James Kaplan
On the evening of Monday, April 6, Fred Zinnemann and the stars of From Here to Eternity flew to Hawaii for two weeks of location shooting. Burt Lancaster recalled the flight:
Deborah Kerr and me and Frank and Monty are sitting up in the front of the plane. And he and Monty are drunk. Monty, poor Monty, was this kind of a drinker—he’d chug-a-lug one martini and conk out. And Frank was, I believe, having a few problems, and so, when we arrived, these two bums were unconscious. They were gone! Deborah and I had to wake them up.
Harry Cohn, who had already taken up residence at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, met them at the airport, all but tapping his wristwatch. Perhaps, he told Zinnemann, one of the night scenes could be shot right away—maybe that thing with Burt and Deborah on the beach? Zinnemann took Cohn aside and told him gently that there were tides and other logistics involved; it wasn’t a scene that could just be dashed off. Besides, he asked (as Lancaster discreetly helped his two groggy co-stars into a car), mightn’t everyone do better with a day to get acclimated? Cohn grumbled. Zinnemann gave him a Viennese smile. Production began on Wednesday morning the eighth.
The work went fast and mostly smoothly. Frank was still completely engaged, but Zinnemann had stumbled upon an unusual challenge in shooting the scenes between Maggio and Prewitt:
Sinatra was at his best in the first or second take of a scene: in later takes he was apt to lose spontaneity, whereas Clift would use each take as a rehearsal to add more detail so that the scenes gained in depth as we went on. It was an interesting problem when they did a scene together: how to get the best performance from them both in the same take.
As the actor Robert Wagner recalled, “Frank was very conscious of his lack of [acting] training; he was never sure that he would be able to reproduce an effect more than once or twice because he had to rely on emotion more than craft.” But Zinnemann’s account shows that it wasn’t just about temperament: Sinatra knew what really worked for him.
He and Monty labored diligently during the day, but as had been the case the previous month, the evenings were another story. “Every night, after work, we would meet in Frank’s room,” Lancaster recalled.
He had a refrigerator and he would open it and there would be these iced glasses. He would prepare the martinis with some snacks while we were getting ready to go to an eight o’clock dinner. We’d sit and chat about the day’s work and he would try his nightly call to Ava, who was in Spain. In those days in Spain, if you lived next door to your friends you couldn’t get them on the telephone, let alone try to get them on the phone from Hawaii. He never got through. Not one night. When you finished your martini, he would take your glass from you, open up the icebox and get a fresh cold glass, and by eight o’clock he and Monty would be unconscious. I mean really unconscious. Every night. So Deborah and I would take Frank’s clothes off and put him to bed. Then I would take Monty on my shoulders and we would carry him down to his room, take his clothes off and dump him in bed. And then she and I and the Zinnemanns would go out and have dinner.
Ava was in Spain on vacation, after recuperating from the abortion and finally wrapping Mogambo, but she wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon: she had become an expatriate. She would remain one, more or less, for the rest of her life, having learned—Frank wasn’t the only one worried about taxes—that she could keep the bulk of her income out of the clutches of the goddamn IRS if she lived overseas. And Europe, with its wine and its siestas, its depressed economy and its relaxed attitudes about all kinds of things that upset puritanical, work-obsessed, Red-obsessed America, was more to her liking anyway.
She was investigating the many advantages of her new turf. Frank wouldn’t have been consoled to know that, as was her habit when he was far, far away, Ava was kicking up her heels. And not alone. As Dorothy Kilgallen noted provocatively in her column: “Frank Sinatra, who tossed Lana Turner out of his Palm Springs house when he found her visiting his wife a few months ago, may make more blow-top headlines before long. Despite his disapproval—to put it mildly—of their friendship, Lana and Ava have plans to do some vacation chumming in Europe.”
Then, in Ava’s case, there was another bullfighter.
This was a very different one, and this time she was the pursuer rather than the pursued. Mario Cabré had been a clown, a puffed-up poetaster, but Luis Miguel Dominguín was the real deal: the greatest matador in Spain, after the tragic death of Manolete. Tall, coolly humorous, devastatingly handsome, Dominguín was a great favorite of Ernest Hemingway, who would later write about him—calling him “a combination Don Juan and Hamlet”—in The Dangerous Summer. At twenty-six, he was also four years younger than Ava; he also had a gorgeous Portuguese-Thai girlfriend, which made him all the more intriguing. The movie star and the torero smiled, they flirted; he spoke no English. It was three glorious weeks of sun and fiestas, then Lana had to go home and Ava had to return to London to work on Knights of the Round Table.
Frank was luckier. In photos from the set, he was all business in his regulation khakis and Smokey the Bear campaign hat, looking as neat and trim as the soldier he never was, eyes wide with interest as he listened respectfully to Zinnemann. For weeks on end Sinatra channeled all his intensity into the role. “He was very, very good—all the time,” Zinnemann said years later. “No histrionics, no bad behavior … He played Maggio so spontaneously we almost never had to reshoot a scene.” Yet during the shooting of a climactic scene, he finally exploded. Zinnemann recalled:
One of the last location scenes to be shot in Hawaii was a night exterior—Maggio’s arrest by the military police. Maggio, blind drunk along with Prewitt in a Honolulu park, feels harassed beyond endurance; his rage boils over, he jumps up, berating the policemen, who are twice his size, and attacks them.
The afternoon’s rehearsal was excellent, but Cohn had heard about it and thought that we would be in trouble with the Army—Sinatra was just too provocative. He wanted us to tone things down; the actors and I disagreed with this view, although I felt the objection had come from someone outside, above Cohn.
For a few mad hours I believed that I could get away with shooting the scene as rehearsed and presenting Cohn with an accomplished fact. Night fell; lights and camera were ready. Cohn was not present, but his informers were. At the last moment, he roared up to the set, together with the garrison’s top echelon of officers. They had come ostensibly to watch us at work but it soon became clear that a confrontation could develop and lead to closing down the picture. We were, after all, on army territory. I knew that we could be jeopardizing the whole film; it was a situation I could not win. To quit was out of the question as far as I was concerned.
In Kitty Kelley’s rendition of the incident, “Frank and Monty had rehearsed the scene standing up, but, just before shooting, Frank decided that he wanted to do it sitting down. Zinnemann objected, but Frank insisted—loudly and profanely. Monty backed Zinnemann and remained standing to follow the script. This so angered Sinatra that he slapped Monty hard. The director tried to placate Sinatra by agreeing to film the scene with Frank sitting if he would also do one take standing. Frank refused and became extremely abusive.”
Zinnemann, Harry Cohn’s wife, Joan, and the unit publicist, Walter Shenson, each gave a different account, but none of them jibe with Kelley’s version, which feels off. Why would the kinetic and impatient Sinatra want to do any scene sitting rather than standing? What seems more likely is that Zinnemann rehearsed the scene as written, and that when Cohn came roaring up (memorably, in a military limousine, still dressed in the white dinner jacket he’d been wearing while dining with the general in command of U.S. Army forces in the Pacific), a Situation developed. Zinnemann chose the better part of valor, and Frank, who had believed passionately in the film from the beginning, but even more so now that he’d put in six weeks’ worth of hard work, simply blew. “His fervor, his anger, his bitterness had something to do with the character of Maggio,” Burt Lancaster said,
but also
with what he had gone through in the last number of years: a sense of defeat, and the whole world crashing in on him, his marriage to Ava going to pieces—all of those things caused this ferment in him, and they all came out in that performance. You knew this was a raging little man who was, at the same time, a good human being. Monty watched the filming of one of Frank’s close-ups and said, “He’s going to win the Academy Award.”
And now they—whoever they were—wanted to neuter his big scene. No wonder he lost it.
“I was on the sidelines watching but not hearing anything,” Shenson recalled.
I could just see the pantomime of Harry Cohn running up in his white dinner jacket, striding into the middle of the set and making some pronouncement. Then he turned around and walked out and got back into the limousine. The next morning was Sunday, and I was on the beach with the rest of the crew. Cohn spotted me and asked if I had been there last night.
“Did you see that son of a bitch, Sinatra?” he asked.
“Yeah, I saw him but I don’t know what was happening.”
“Well, that bastard guinea was trying to tell us what to do. You know where he is now? He’s on an airplane going back to the studio.”
“How could you send him back without seeing the rushes?” I asked.
“I don’t care,” said Cohn. “That dirty little dago is not going to tell me how to make my movies.”
In fact, he hadn’t. In the end, as Zinnemann said, “Sinatra delivered his speech while seated.” Frank had caved, not triumphed, and the resulting scene isn’t nearly as powerful as it would’ve been had Zinnemann been able to follow the script, and Sinatra, his artistic instincts. Remarkably, though, during the course of this long day Frank had both rehearsed and capitulated, two courtesies he would be less and less willing to grant his directors as his star began to rise again.
All too predictably, though, Sinatra blamed Zinnemann. (And in all likelihood, kept blaming him. In the seventy-plus linear feet of Fred Zinnemann’s papers in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, there is not a single piece of correspondence from Sinatra.) “I can’t blame him for being upset,” Zinnemann recalled, years after tempers had cooled—or his had, anyway—“but I wonder whether he ever understood what was at stake.”
In the director’s estimation, the movie itself had been at stake. Eternity was made with the cooperation of an all-powerful U.S. Army, not so long after that army had done nothing less than save the free world, and just three months after General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been elected president. It was not a time for tweaking authority. During the filming of From Here to Eternity, the accused atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sat on death row; Senator Joseph McCarthy was continuing to conduct hearings of accused subversives, many of them in the movie industry. Fred Zinnemann was a European Jew, with an acute sense of the unpredictability of power. Harry Cohn was a tough American Jew who, as the maker of a movie determinedly friendly to Army interests, could break bread with the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific.
And Frank Sinatra didn’t care about any of it. They had messed with his scene, and they could all screw themselves.
He’d had another reason to be tense. The afternoon before shooting that last scene, Frank had phoned Axel Stordahl. They had a recording date at Capitol set up for the Thursday after he got back from Hawaii, and Sinatra wanted to discuss the song list. But after a couple of moments of chitchat, the arranger fell silent. Frank asked him if anything was wrong.
Axel said he couldn’t be at the session. He was leaving for New York tomorrow.
He was what?
He was beginning a TV show. With Eddie Fisher.
The last three words might as well have been a carving knife plunged into Sinatra’s chest. There was a long silence.
Apparently, Axel hadn’t heard what Frank had said. They had a recording session at Capitol on Thursday night.
Stordahl said he couldn’t be there. He had a contract.
Another deep silence.
The arranger began to elaborate, but then he realized the line had gone dead.
Frank called Alan Livingston and let him have it. Livingston was ready for him. He listened patiently, counted to five, and then almost instantly defused Sinatra’s anger by telling him he’d secured Billy May to lead the session. May was a top-drawer bandleader, one of the hippest arrangers and conductors around (and also an old Livingston cohort who’d done the music for the Bozo the Clown records). A big, hearty guy, tough but cheerful. Livingston knew Frank couldn’t object, and he didn’t.
In fact, though, the executive was playing a shell game with the singer. Livingston had known for a while that Stordahl was leaving—he’d encouraged it. It was time for Sinatra to move on. Axel was wonderful, but those somnolent strings of his were a relic of Frank’s Columbia past. Livingston had made big hits with Nelson Riddle and Nat “King” Cole, and now he wanted to make more big hits with Riddle and Sinatra. Riddle wanted in, too, but Riddle was an arranger’s arranger, a studio man who’d never led a band or made a splash. Livingston would have to work a minor subterfuge.
The morning after his climactic scene, Frank was on an airplane back to Los Angeles. His movie work was done, his fate was in the hands of a thousand imponderables—Hollywood, in other words—and it was time to get back to what had made him great in the first place. To what he could, to a great degree, control.
Just after 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, an unseasonably cool and rainy day, Frank got out of his car, flicked his cigarette into the gutter, and strode into Capitol’s KHJ studios at 5515 Melrose Avenue. Studio C, down the hall on the first floor, was warm and pleasantly crowded, once again full of familiar faces—Skeets, Zarchy, Miller, Alvin Stoller, Conrad Gozzo—and a couple of unfamiliar ones. One was a sad-eyed trombonist with a jutting lower lip: his name was Milt Bernhart. Frank, who had specifically requested Bernhart after hearing his beautiful solo on a Stan Kenton number called “Salute,” looked right through the newcomer, more concerned with another stranger standing on the podium, right where Billy May should have been. Sinatra turned to a producer he knew, Alan Dell, and with a sideways jerk of his head indicated the serious-looking, chubby-cheeked, V-hairline character with the baton in his hand.
“Who’s this?” he said.
“He’s just conducting the band,” Dell said quickly. “We’ve got Billy’s arrangements.”
May, Dell explained (Livingston had prepped him), had had to leave town unexpectedly to do a gig in Florida. But his arrangements were golden, and what’s-his-name on the stand—Sinatra didn’t catch the name—was very capable.
Frank reviewed the song list: Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen’s “I’ve Got the World on a String,” Koehler and Rube Bloom’s “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me,” a bouncy old Harlan Thompson–Harry Archer tune, “I Love You” (not to be confused with the Grieg-inspired “I Love You” he’d recorded for Columbia, or the Cole Porter “I Love You” he wouldn’t get around to recording for a few more years), and his Dorsey standby “South of the Border.” He’d been singing the last one since he was a kid, and the second two for years. As for “String,” he’d only put it on his repertoire for club dates during the past year, partly in ironic tribute to his troubles, also from a sincere wish that things might actually go his way again, soon. In any case, it was a great song. He liked to perform it at medium tempo, a semi-ballad cadence: ballads were still his home base.
From the moment the nervous-faced guy on the podium signaled the downbeat, Frank knew something was up. Stoller clashed a pair of cymbals; the horns swirled a downward-spiraling cadenza; and then the second Frank sang, “got the string around my finger,” the brass kicked—BANG!—and the band was cooking. Frank was smiling as he sang, as the seventeen musicians swung along behind him—he even had a smile for the unsmiling guy on the stand, who was waving his arms for all he was worth.
It sure didn’t sound like Billy to Frank. It didn’t sound like anybody.
He loved it.
They did a take, and then another, got it just right. It was golden—but it wasn’t Billy May. “Who wrote that arrangement?” Frank asked Alan Dell.
“This guy,” Dell said, indicating Mr. Serious, who was distractedly leafing through pages of sheet music. “Nelson Riddle.”
The name registered for the first time. Sinatra made a surprised face. “Beautiful,” he said.
It was a serious compliment. Frank was generous with gifts and money but extremely stingy when it came to praise. If he said it, he meant it; if he didn’t mean it, he didn’t say anything.
He looked at Riddle and said it again. “Beautiful.” And Mr. Serious managed a quick, almost undetectable smile: more like a wince, really.
Nelson Smock Riddle (the unfortunate middle name was Dutch) may have been the most important man in Frank Sinatra’s life whom Sinatra never even tried to befriend. Unlike so many men in the popular-music business, the arranger never pretended to be a hail-fellow-well-met; rather, he was intimacy averse, a dour, caustic, buttoned-up Lutheran who happened—like the man he was meeting for the first time that Thursday evening in April 1953—to be a musical genius.
Like Sinatra, Nelson Riddle was a New Jersey–born only child of a domineering mother and a weak father, a man with powerful sexual urges and a fondness for alcohol. Like Sinatra, he was awash in conflicts; unlike Sinatra, Riddle buried his conflicts rather than acting them out. He was a solitary drinker, and he either sublimated his obsessions with women into his work or hid them in clandestine affairs. Although he would become moderately famous, his introverted nature and his preference for the more intellectual art of arranging over composition threw him into the shade. Later Riddle would feel desperate envy for the fame and wealth of such big-name show-offs as Henry Mancini and André Previn, men who could compose and arrange and smile for the television cameras. He would chew himself up inside as he created masterpieces for others.