Frank

by James Kaplan

  In the meantime, his new joke on Rocky Fortune was working the phrase “from here to eternity” into every episode, at least once, and often several times. Sometimes he wondered if anyone was listening.

  Then, in the last week of the month, things began to pick up. Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, hearing the Oscar drumbeat grow louder for From Here to Eternity, called Frank in to discuss a multipicture deal. Louis Mayer’s son-in-law Bill Goetz, who was leaving his job as production chief at Universal International to become an independent producer (and trying to get out of the long shadow of his brother-in-law David O. Selznick), called Frank in to talk about playing one of the leads in a screen adaptation of the hit musical Guys and Dolls.

  Far more important than either of these calls was a talk Frank had with Ava.

  He’d been phoning her every few days, not as often as he wanted, but more than her cool responses seemed to indicate he should. Then, one morning (Los Angeles time, just after the end of the workday in Rome), he caught her in a different mood: uncertain, agitated, needy. Mankiewicz and Bogart were giving her fits, she told him. She and the writer-director had been oil and water from the beginning: it turned out his witty script read better than it spoke, and Ava, having grown no less insecure about her acting ability, couldn’t make it work. She needed to be propped up; the sharp-minded, sharp-tongued Mankiewicz wasn’t a coddler. Early in the shoot, the cameraman, Jack Cardiff, asked Ava to perch on the arm of a sofa while he took measurements for lighting a close-up. Mankiewicz, happening to walk by, saw her there and griped, “You’re the sittin’-est goddamn actress I’ve ever worked with.”

  “I was so surprised I couldn’t even get my mouth open in time to say ‘Go fuck yourself’ to his departing back,” Gardner later recalled. “And the truth is I was never able to give him my complete trust after that.”

  Unlike Mogambo’s John Ford, Mankiewicz was an intellectual; Ava felt she’d already failed that test with Artie Shaw. She couldn’t win this filmmaker over with tough talk, and she was too mad to try to seduce him.

  But Bogart was a bigger problem. Ava was intimidated in the first place by the fifty-four-year-old screen legend, and Bogie, who’d become pals with Sinatra over the past year, and was a world-class needler to boot (“I like a little agitation now and then,” he said; “keeps things lively”), decided to give it to this broad, but good. “On the morning of the first day of shooting, Bogie came by his costar’s dressing room to say hello,” writes Lee Server.

  Stuffed into the tiny room were Ava, a makeup man, Ava’s Italian secretary/translator …, Luis Miguel, and Bappie (who had recently arrived from California with an emergency replenishment of Ava’s Larder: Hershey chocolate bars, chewing gum, marshmallows, popcorn, and Jack Daniel’s whiskey). Bogart remarked that it looked like the circus was in town, and when introduced to Dominguín, he made a crack …

  “I’ll never figure you broads out,” Bogart said. “Half the world’s female population would throw themselves at Frank’s feet, and here you are flouncing around with guys who wear capes and little ballerina slippers.”

  As Dominguín looked puzzled, Ava said, “Oh, mind your own goddamn business, Bogie.” She wasn’t smiling.

  “It was to be the beginning of a rocky relationship,” Server continues.

  Their rapport did not improve on the set. Ava’s “stage fright” was still in place, and she found her confidence shriveling when confronted with Bogart’s chronic irritability and what she perceived as his deliberate disruptions of her concentration with his complaints. Shooting one of their first scenes together, Bogie turned away from her during a take and shouted, “Hey, Mankiewicz, can you tell this dame to speak up? I can’t hear a goddamn word she says!” To others he grumbled, “She’s giving me nothing to work with.” When not complaining, the sad fact was that Bogart ruined countless otherwise good takes with his racking coughs—warning heralds of the cancer that would kill him three years later.

  The movie was a disaster, she told Frank. He listened carefully, then reassured her: Mankiewicz was puffed up with all those Oscars. She should just let him strut around a little bit, then look him in the eye and let him know she was the star of his movie. He’d change his tune. As for Bogie, he was probably pissed off that Ava’s salary was twice as much as his.

  But he was getting his whole salary, and Metro wasn’t giving her shit.

  Frank’s tone was calm. It didn’t matter. Bogie’s pride was hurt. Ava should give him time. He was a good Joe.

  They talked awhile longer, then she thanked Frank for the pep talk. She’d needed it.

  It was easy. He loved her.

  She loved him too. It was the first time she’d said it in weeks.

  “I saw Frankie at Chasen’s a few nights ago,” Louella Parsons wrote at the end of January. “He looks so well these days, so everything must be okay with Ava Gardner. When he’s unhappy he’s a boy who shows it in his face.”

  Frank had started spending time with Bogart and Betty Bacall the year before, soon after he moved to the apartment on Beverly Glen. It was just one of those Hollywood things: Betty, driving by Holmby Park in her woody station wagon one afternoon, had spotted Sinatra taking one of his walks, head down, and called cheekily out the car window. There was a fella who looked like he could use a drink!

  Frank looked up, smiling with surprise.

  Betty smiled back. He should come on over sometime. The door was always open. And she drove off.

  So he went over. The Bogarts lived just up the road, in a sprawling white-brick house on South Mapleton, and the door literally was open. There were small children and boxer dogs and shy Mexican maids: It was almost bourgeois, except that it wasn’t. It was Hollywood. Frank had first met Betty and Bogie ten years before, when she was a girl of twenty and she and the married Bogart were seeing each other on the sly. Now they were the most glamorous couple in Hollywood, with a little boy and a little girl, a Holmby Hills mansion filled with a witty, glittering cast of characters who stopped by to drink and eat, but mostly drink, at all hours of the day and night: Spencer Tracy, Ira Gershwin, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, Judy Garland and her husband Sid Luft, the David Nivens, Oscar Levant and Mike Romanoff and, of course, Bogart’s agent, Swifty Lazar.

  Bogart loved liquor (“The whole world is three drinks behind,” he often said) and he loved company, but he didn’t like to go out, and so the world came to him. Sinatra, who as George Jacobs said, “craved class like a junkie craves the needle,” was agog at the Tinseltown aristocracy that gathered at Betty and Bogie’s, but mostly he was agog at Bogart himself. “Sinatra was like a starstruck kid, in awe of Bogart, and watching his every move,” Jacobs recalled.

  With all the people around, it was hard to be alone with Bogart, but Sinatra tended to shadow him, following him into the kitchen or out into the garden, hanging on everything he said. Sinatra saw Bogart as his mentor … [and] learned his lessons with straight A’s. The two men had a lot of natural attributes in common. They were about the same size, short and skinny, and both men were losing their hair … Bogart had fabulous clothes, cashmere jackets, Italian shirts, and velvet slippers, and a certain cool and grace in the way he’d smoke, in the way he’d put away the Jack Daniel’s, eventually a trademark taste Sinatra acquired from Bogart. Bogart had an effortless physical grace, which Sinatra only had when he sang. Otherwise, Sinatra was tense and jumpy, and remarkably insecure for someone used to playing to screaming fans. That they had stopped screaming was probably what made him this way. The Jack Daniel’s definitely helped loosen him up. I noticed that he was much more “on” around Bogart than he was when I saw him at other gatherings.

  To Frank, Bogart was that most magnetic of creatures: a great star who hated the phoniness of Hollywood but loved Sinatra. Bogie was also a genuine aristocrat, a Manhattan rich boy who’d flunked out of prep school, chucked it all, and had been spoiling for a fight ever since. He had a thing for strong women, just like Frank. Like Frank, he had a l
ifelong dislike of being touched by strangers. And he could wear a fedora like nobody else.

  And then there was Betty. Now twenty-nine and the mother of two, Lauren Bacall was, if anything, even sexier than she’d been at twenty, her perfect skin still tawny, her blue feline eyes more insinuating. She was tall and long legged and, while not as heart-stoppingly beautiful as Ava, equally arresting. Also like Ava, she came from a humble background—the Bronx, in Betty’s case—but she was watchful and quick-witted, and her modest beginnings didn’t get in her way as much. Under the close tutelage of the director Howard Hawks, she’d found a character for her first film with Bogart, To Have and Have Not—slyly self-possessed, smoky voiced, tart tongued—and held on to it.

  Nowadays she was spending more time at home with the kids than acting, and sometimes it frustrated her. She wouldn’t have minded going out to kick up her heels every once in a while: the only place Bogie ever wanted to go was his goddamn sailboat, which made her seasick. She was crazy about Bogie, but like the rest of Hollywood she’d heard the whispers about him and his wig maker, Verita Peterson: since she refused to stoop to the role of jealous wife, though, she was trapped. And so now and then, when Frank was over, he would give Betty an appreciative look, and she didn’t mind it a bit. She liked talking to him, too: they were much closer in age than she and her husband.

  She was delighted to hear Sinatra’s voice when he phoned her in New York. Betty was on her way to Rome, to join Bogie—and to make sure he was behaving himself. She and Frank chitchatted for a moment, then he paused and turned serious. Would she mind taking something to Ava for him?

  Now it was her turn to pause. She was ever so slightly disappointed—and sorry for him, too.

  Of course not. A little something from Cartier?

  Not quite. He would have it delivered.

  An hour later she opened her door to a small man holding a large white box: it was an orange-and-coconut cake, from Greenberg’s Bakery on Madison Avenue. Frank had thought long and hard about the gift. The cake was Ava’s favorite. And he had to consolidate his gains, so he’d decided to send something that would remind her of their sweetness together.

  Betty took the cake with her in the car to Idlewild, carried the big box onto the plane, and parked it on the seat next to her. As she bounced over the dark Atlantic, every once in a while she adjusted the cake to keep it secure. “I stayed a night in London, and then Bogie was at the Rome airport to greet me,” Bacall remembered.

  He took me and my cake box to the Excelsior Hotel and I asked him to tell Ava Gardner I had brought it. He told her—she did nothing about it—so two days later I decided to take it to her before it rotted. I didn’t know her and felt very awkward about it—who knows what has happened between a man and a woman when it goes sour? Bogie had told me the picture was going well and that Ava had many people with her all the time, including her sister and a bullfighter named Luis Miguel Dominguin, with whom she was in love. I took the damn cake to the studio and knocked on her dressing-room door. After I had identified myself, the door opened. I felt like an idiot standing there with the bloody box—there were assorted people in the room and I was introduced to none of them. I said, “I brought this cake for you—Frank sent it to me in New York, he thought you’d like it.” She couldn’t have cared less. She wanted me to put it down on some table she indicated—not a thank-you, nothing.

  Bacall was justifiably furious. With time, though, she realized that Ava’s “reaction had only to do with Frank—she was clearly through with him, but it wasn’t that way on his side. I never told Frank the coconut-cake saga, he would have been too hurt. Bogie always said the girls at MGM were so pampered, so catered to, that they were totally spoiled and self-indulgent. But she was professional about her work, and that’s all he cared about.”

  Of course Ava was spoiled. She’d always admitted it. Frank, a prince since childhood, was spoiled too: it was a big difference between the two of them and the Bogarts, who tried to embody their tough screen personae in everyday life.

  But Ava had rediscovered her professionalism. In a scene shot in an olive grove in Tivoli Gardens, she recalled, “I had to perform a flamenco-style dance wearing a tight sweater and a cheap satin skirt, enticing my partner, luring him closer, swirling out of his grasp, taunting him with my body.” Her specialty. And she didn’t have to say a word.

  It came off splendidly. Mankiewicz was happy, Bogart was happy, Ava was happy. Back in California, Frank was finding it hard to get her on the phone again.

  On Valentine’s Day, a gloomy Sunday, Frank sent Ava a cable. He loved her and missed her and hoped she’d be coming back to him soon.

  Then he went home and got drunk.

  He’d called in a group of friends to play cards. “When we got there he was on the phone to Nancy,” one of them recalled.

  But this time she was mad at him. She wouldn’t talk to him.

  By the time we got the game started, he didn’t even want to play anymore. He went into the den, opened a bottle, and started drinking alone. Okay. So we keep the game going awhile, and then Sammy Cahn gets up and he goes in to try to get Frank to join us. So what does he see?

  There’s Frank drinking a toast to a picture of Ava with a tear running down his face. So Sammy comes back and we start playing again. All of a sudden we hear a crash. We all get up and run into the den, and there’s Frank. He had taken the picture of Ava, frame and all, and smashed it. Then he had picked up the picture, ripped it into little pieces, and thrown it on the floor. So we tell him, “Come on, Frank, you’ve got to forget about all that. Come on and play some cards with us.” He says, “I’m through with her. I never want to see her again. I’m all right. I’ve just been drinking too much.”

  So we go back to the game and a little while later Sammy goes back to Frank, and there he is on his hands and knees picking up the torn pieces of the picture and trying to put it back together again. Well, he gets all the pieces together except the one for the nose. He becomes frantic looking for it, and we all get down on our hands and knees and try to help him.

  All of a sudden the doorbell rings. It’s a delivery boy with more liquor. So Frank goes to the back door to let him in, but when he opens it, the missing piece flutters out. Well, Frank is so happy, he takes off his gold wrist watch and gives it to the delivery boy.

  The next day, the nominations for the 1953 Academy Awards were announced.

  From Here to Eternity got thirteen nominations: for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Deborah Kerr), Best Actor (both Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster), Best Supporting Actress (Donna Reed), Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design (Black-and-White), Best Sound Recording, Best Film Editing, Best Music Scoring. And, of course, Best Supporting Actor (Frank Sinatra).

  Ava was also nominated, as Best Actress in a Leading Role, for Mogambo. When she heard about it in Rome, she laughed out loud.

  Frank, however, began to pray. We know this; what he said was between him and God. He could barely remember the last time he’d set foot in a church—every once in a great while, when he was in New York, he stopped by St. Patrick’s and lit a candle for his sins (though he never dared to set foot in a confessional: where would he start?)—but that Monday afternoon, before going to the airport (and several times in the weeks that followed), he drove over to the Good Shepherd Catholic Church, a lovely, Spanish Mission–style complex on Bedford and Santa Monica in Beverly Hills, went inside, and knelt in a pew.

  The interior was cool and fragrant with the scents of incense and polished wood, the nave flanked with simple arches in smooth white stucco, the altar standing in a light-washed apse surrounded by tall stained-glass windows. He was alone in the sanctuary, except for one woman sitting a few rows ahead. Frank bowed his head.

  Joe DiMaggio was advising his new bride to face down 20th Century Fox the way he’d faced down the New York Yankees: the studio owed her a raise, he told Marilyn, and something a hell of a lot better to do
than Pink Tights. In the meantime, Zanuck looked for another female lead—maybe Jane Russell, maybe a sultry blond ingenue named Sheree North—and Sinatra consoled himself with the cash. “Frank Sinatra—who’s collecting $50,000 for not working in ‘Pink Tights’—grabs $23,000 for 9 nights at the Miami Beachcomber,” Earl Wilson wrote in early February. And, a few days later: “There’s a tug-of-war going on between La Vie en Rose and the Copacabana over Frank Sinatra’s next NY singing date. Monte Proser of La Vie says Frank promised to appear for him. ‘If he doesn’t,’ says Proser, ‘I’ll get out of the business.’ Frank’s also got a fat offer from the Copacabana, which has about twice the capacity of La Vie and could therefore pay him about twice as much.”

  Everybody wanted him except Ava. But everybody else wanted him a lot. All at once, he was hot as a pistol. There were nightclub dates, TV spots, and, most of all, all kinds of movie offers: Besides the role of Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls (for which a director had already been tapped—Joseph L. Mankiewicz), he’d been offered the title role in another adaptation of a Broadway musical, Pal Joey. And then there was a dark thriller, in which the lead role, a crazed presidential assassin, was a showpiece for a real actor. The script was called Suddenly, and Frank liked it a good deal.

  While he rehearsed at the Beachcomber, the wire services ran, next to reports of Marilyn Monroe’s spectacularly successful trip to entertain the U.S. Marines in Korea, a story picked up from New York’s Daily News. QUADRANGLE: ROME COMIC SINATRA’S TOP RIVAL was the headline; the piece was datelined Rome, February 16.