by James Kaplan
6
i guess i have finally reached the stage in life when work becomes a labor of you know what, and man this aint it.
—FRANK SINATRA TO ALEC WILDER, APRIL 1956
Frank Sinatra was now a legitimate movie star, and his compensation confirmed it: for making The Pride and the Passion, a period epic to be shot in Spain over the spring and summer of 1956, he would earn $250,000, the equivalent of some $2 million today. His contract reflected his lofty standing, stipulating that “no other artist is to receive better living accommodations than those provided for Sinatra; that he is to be paid ten thousand dollars per week and supplied with twenty-five dollars per day for tips and incidentals, plus reasonable baggage allowance.”
But the fame, the money, and the perks barely concealed one unchanging fact: no matter how big a movie star he became, motion pictures would never give Frank the kind of concentrated, almost fanatical control that he exerted over his music.
The Pride and the Passion was a misbegotten enterprise from the start; despite Sinatra’s big salary, he was just along for the ride. The $4 million epic, produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, was based on the C. S. Forester novel The Gun, about the struggle of Spanish peasant fighters to deploy a giant cannon against the French army during the Napoleonic Wars. The title of the novel gives you the root of the movie’s problems: the gun was the centerpiece of the story, making the doings of the three stars—Sinatra, Cary Grant, and, in her first American movie, the twenty-one-year-old Sophia Loren—pale by contrast. The film’s silly title—it sounded as if it should be accompanied by the strum of a gypsy guitar—was a Band-Aid, a lackluster attempt to lend human interest to a narrative that was fundamentally inert.
Frank, a careful and intelligent reader and an incisive student of song lyrics, would have understood this from the moment he read the script. As the rebel leader Miguel, he would get plenty of action: he would command peons and jump into rivers and butt heads with Grant’s character, the stodgy British navy commander Trumbull. Miguel and Trumbull would compete for the love of Loren’s character, the lusty peasant girl Juana. But always, always, front and center in almost every scene, there was the giant gun, having to be dragged over hill and dale in order to besiege the French in the walled city of Ávila. Sinatra had characteristic confidence in his ability to portray a Spanish guerrilla fighter: he engaged a Spanish guitarist (who turned out to be Argentinean) as a dialogue coach, saying somewhat puzzlingly, “I want to play this role like a Spaniard trying to speak English—not like an American trying to talk like a Spaniard trying to speak English.”
He could do the role, but did he want to? From the beginning, Frank’s participation in the movie was a matter of pride without passion. Even worse. SINATRA DREADS TRIP TO SPAIN FOR FILM, read the headline of Louella Parsons’s April 22 column. “Only Frank Sinatra’s most intimate friends know that he cabled Stanley Kramer trying to get out of ‘The Pride and the Passion’ in Spain,” Parsons wrote. But her take on Frank’s reluctance had nothing to do with the movie itself. Rather, Louella felt that “he dreads a head-on meeting with Ava Gardner, who lives there.”
She had a point. In going to Spain, Frank was sailing off into highly fraught, not to say incendiary, emotional territory. His companion on the trip (along with Jimmy Van Heusen) was Peggy Connelly. But as the newspapers had been pointing out delightedly for months, Spain was also the home of his not quite ex-wife. Despite the pronouncements both Frank and Ava had made to friends, columnists, and reporters, their feelings about each other continued to be volatile and unresolved. They talked on the phone every week, sometimes every day; they would continue to stay in close touch, as other lovers came and went, until the end of Gardner’s life.
Ava had fallen for Spain a couple of years before, as she and Frank were breaking up, “all its from-the-blood passion and authenticity looming before her as the antithesis of Hollywood phoniness,” her biographer Lee Server writes. “Her dream Spain overlooked the fears and treachery of a land under the yoke of the Franco fascists, but it was very real in her imagination.”
And her imagination was vivid. “It was so unspoiled in those days, so dramatic, so historic—and so goddamn cheap to live in that it was almost unbelievable,” Gardner wrote in her memoir.
But there was more than dollars and sense involved in my decision. I fell in love with classic Castilian—when you hear it spoken and can understand it, it’s so pure and musical that it’s a delight to the senses. And I felt emotionally close to Spain—who can really say why?—and the Spanish people responded in kind, accepting me without question. Which couldn’t have been easy for them. After all, I represented everything they disapproved of. I was a woman, living alone, divorced, a non-Catholic, and an actress.
With her characteristic creativity, Ava finalized the divorce that was still incomplete when she first moved to Spain. Nor was she alone at first. While shooting a movie there soon after Mogambo, her marital Waterloo with Sinatra, she had fallen in love with the great bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín, devilishly handsome and four years her junior. But that relationship soon fell victim to Ava’s boredom and impatience, and in the spring of 1956 she was between lovers, at loose ends, and dangerous.
On some level—maybe more than she was willing to admit to herself or anyone else—she was waiting for Frank’s arrival. She had bought a house in a suburb just outside Madrid; she was also driving a new convertible he had sent her after she’d casually mentioned to him in one of their periodic phone calls that she’d totaled her Mercedes while speeding to an appointment.
Sinatra, Van Heusen, and Connelly arrived in Madrid on April 18, the very day of Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier in Monaco. Though Frank had been invited to the ceremony, he gave it wide berth because he knew Ava would be there. Shooting on The Pride and the Passion was scheduled to start on the twenty-second in El Escorial, a hilly region thirty miles from Madrid, and after a warm-up quarrel with Stanley Kramer’s people about having a hi-fi system installed in his huge hotel suite—the system was installed—Frank settled into the initially pleasant business of relaxing for a couple of days and getting acclimated. In a slightly peculiar but apparently characteristic arrangement, Van Heusen stayed in Sinatra and Connelly’s suite, in a bedroom down the hall from Frank and Peggy’s. One morning, Connelly remembered, “We had just awakened, and we were under the covers planning the day, and Jimmy came in and said, ‘Please, please, there’ll be no fucking in my presence.’ It made Frank laugh.”
A party given by a Spanish movie magazine brought Sinatra together with his two co-stars, Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. Frank knew Grant well from the Hollywood party circuit, but he was meeting the gorgeous, voluptuous Loren for the first time. Sparks did not fly. Frank smiled appreciatively, but Loren was painfully shy, and her English was terrible. (And truth be told, if the Italian starlet had eyes for anyone, it was the still-astounding-looking fifty-two-year-old Grant.) With Connelly at his side, Sinatra minded his manners.
It was the calm before the storm. Everyone in the world seemed aware that Ava was just a couple of miles away and that she and Frank “had not lived in such close proximity for this long in nearly two years,” Lee Server writes. “But tempting as it was—grueling as it was—Sinatra stood his ground. In the end it was Ava who made the call, treating it as lightly as she might a ring-up to an uncle passing through from back home, though perhaps a bit less respectfully.”
According to Richard Condon, who would later become a novelist and the author of The Manchurian Candidate but was then working as a unit publicist on The Pride and the Passion, he and a few others were in Frank’s hotel suite when he took Ava’s call.
“You goddamned jerk,” she yelled so loudly that everyone in the room could hear. “You’ve been here how many days and you don’t even call me.”
“I’ve been busy,” said Frank.
“What’s happening?”
Peggy Connelly walked into the room and listened to Fran
k’s end of the conversation. A few minutes later he hung up.
“Was that Ava?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Are you going to see her?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, I won’t like it at all. I didn’t come here so you could see Ava.”
Frank looked at her for a few seconds and then very calmly told her to go back into the bedroom, pack her bags, and leave. Weeks later, he sent her a twenty-thousand-dollar grand piano and begged her to return.
The grand piano was the cherry on the sundae. Connelly might have been temporarily dismissed for insubordination, but as Dorothy Kilgallen noted in her column of May 30, Frank treated Peggy to stays in Paris and London on her way back to the States and, when she arrived in New York, put her up in an apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria and provided her “with two seats down front for all the best Broadway shows.”
Just before Sinatra began the sixteen-week shoot—a period that had come to feel like a jail term—he sat down and wrote a letter to Alec Wilder (“professor”) at the Algonquin Hotel, typing in his characteristic lowercase style and sounding as though he had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s close by his side.
It was a letter of complaint, pure and simple, in the key of self-pity. (“j. christ four and a half months…”) He’d never been accused of welshing, Frank wrote, but now he understood why some people ran out on deals. It was only his “dogged dago decency” that was keeping him from catching a plane home—and not just any plane but an overnight TWA flight, with a first-class sleeper berth and “some fine old cordon bleu” on hand.
“[S]eriously,” he continued, “i guess i have finally reached the stage in life when work becomes a labor of you know what, and man this aint it.”
He signed, in pencil: “Frank.”
There’s a strange hollowness to this longish letter: it’s not quite clear what Sinatra’s beef is. He knew well when he signed the deal for The Pride and the Passion that the shooting schedule called for sixteen weeks (not four and a half months) of location work; now he was acting as though the fact has been foisted on him, poor him, much like that two-camera switcheroo on Carousel. The self-righteous claim that only his innate (and Italian) sense of decorum is keeping him from a sybaritic perch in a first-class berth on a transatlantic TWA flight is decidedly unsympathetic, as jarring as a wrong note in a Riddle arrangement. One wonders what Wilder thought.
On the other hand, Frank’s realization that his work should be a labor of love packs true force. It was a principle that served him beautifully when he followed it, which he would continue to do only intermittently. He was only truly happy when he was singing—and not just singing, but singing well. But from the day he left for Spain, he wouldn’t sing onstage for almost four months and would not set foot in a recording studio again for almost six months: factors that might have contributed to a vocal crisis he would suffer at the end of the year.
He suffered mightily on the Spanish movie, and therefore so did everyone around him. Though some detected high spirits in Frank as the shoot began, Sinatra biographer Arnold Shaw wrote, “it was not long before he became impatient and restless. ‘This is something I can’t help,’ he once told director Vincente Minnelli. ‘I have to go. No one seems able to help me—doctors, no one. I have to move.’ ”
“Sixteen weeks!” he exclaimed to Kramer one day. “I can’t stay in one place sixteen weeks. I’ll kill myself.” And, “Let’s get this circus on the road. Forget rehearsals. Just keep the cameras turning.”
He was on a rolling boil. Frank’s makeup man Bernard “Beans” Ponedel recalled, “He was always yelling at Kramer, ‘Don’t tell me. Suggest. Don’t tell me. Suggest.’ ” One wonders whether Fred Zinnemann and Otto Preminger simply intuited that they needed to suggest, or whether Sinatra allowed them to tell him because he respected them more.
“When Sinatra walks into a room, tension walks in beside him,” Stanley Kramer later said.
You don’t always know why, but if he’s tense, he spreads it. When we were shooting in Spain, he was impatient…He didn’t want to rehearse. He didn’t want to wait around while crowd scenes were being set up. He wanted his work all done together. He was very unhappy. He couldn’t stand it, he wanted to break loose. Eventually, for the sake of harmony, we shot all his scenes together and he left early. The rest of the cast acquiesced because of the tension, which was horrific.
Kramer made it sound as though Sinatra’s impatience were some mysterious natural force—which to a great degree it was. What he was leaving out was the personality clash between himself and his star, the alpha-dog head butting. Not to mention the utter crappiness of The Pride and the Passion, a fact that would have become even more apparent as the mammoth production, with its production crew of four hundred and its ninety-four hundred extras, got under way.
Decades later, the grand epic, shot in VistaVision and Technicolor, fails as spectacle; it lacks even nostalgia value. There are many shots of the cannon being dragged across the gorgeous landscape of the Escorial while George Antheil’s bombastic score swells and pounds variations on “La Marseillaise” and “Rule, Britannia!” There is zero comic relief and no character development whatsoever. The sublime Cary Grant has to stand around looking stiff and annoyed, while Sinatra, who wears his most absurd wig to date—with bangs, yet—speaks terrible dialogue in a cheesy Spanish accent: “Chu vould like to see thees gun?” And, “Citizens of Delgado, I speet in your face.” “It’s no accident,” Tom Santopietro writes, “that Frank Sinatra did not attempt to change his speaking voice for another movie until the equally misbegotten Dirty Dingus Magee, thirteen years later.”
The one interesting note in Frank’s performance—besides the startling blueness of his eyes in Technicolor—is an air of street-kid insolence that doesn’t show up in his other movies and somehow feels true to life (and to his relationship with Stanley Kramer). Otherwise, this colossally dreadful, utterly charmless mess of a movie was a huge waste of the talents of Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra. At least Sophia Loren, looking improbably gussied up throughout—as though the peasant forces had included makeup artists and hairdressers—got to do a lusty flamenco dance.
While Stanley Kramer and his ten thousand lived in tents on the Escorial, Sinatra made the long, dusty commute to and from the location each day in a chauffeured Mercedes, building up a head of steam as he rode, stewing about the meaningless work he was doing and about Ava, who always tormented him but was now getting to do so at close range. He put off seeing her for as long as possible but finally went out to dinner with her one night, along with two beards, Richard Condon and a visiting Otto Preminger (whose presence must have been a sore reminder for Frank of what making a real movie was like).
“Throughout dinner Frank and Ava never spoke to us—not one word,” Condon recalled. “They were holding hands all night long and gazing sappily at each other, and when the last course was over, they stood up and left the room, leaving Otto and me with each other.”
Lee Server presents another version: “After dinner they parted respectfully,” he writes.
Later in the night Frank had returned to his suite, and as assorted cronies and guests lay about having a nightcap, Frank got her on the phone. They were talking and then Frank began singing softly to her through the phone, one tune after another, a regular concert in sotto voce. Twenty minutes later guests saw Ava Gardner come through the door of the suite, and then she and Frank disappeared. Ava was wearing a mink coat and a negligee.
It was a one-night stand, not a reconciliation.
But Server is probably conflating Condon’s story with another incident. Frank and Ava’s reunion seems to have been more than a one-night stand. Returning to Spain after a few weeks of luxurious exile, Peggy Connelly entered the suite at the Castellana Hilton and immediately realized she had come at an inopportune moment. “The first thing I saw was the unmade bed and the mess in the bedroom, and knew something had been going on,” she recalled. “Then I ca
ught a glimpse of Ava through the living room door. It was very obvious she had spent the night.”
Sheer youthful nerve made Connelly walk in instead of running the other way. The twenty-four-year-old wanted to establish her presence as well as size up her thirty-three-year-old rival. “I went in because mail had piled up for me from home, and I wanted my mail,” she said. “I didn’t have to go in, but I wanted to, just from contrariness. I said, ‘I’m sorry, this must be a very difficult situation.’ [Ava] looked at me from under her eyebrows, didn’t say anything. I just got my mail and walked out.”
From the hotel, she headed to the location to meet Sinatra for lunch. “He couldn’t have been cooler,” she recalled. “A kiss, then he asked me, ‘How were things at the hotel?’—a completely inane remark unless there was something wrong at the hotel. I said, just as cool, ‘Crowded.’ And he said, ‘Oh, was she still there?’ There was no drama.
“I agreed with people—I thought she was devastatingly beautiful,” Connelly recalled. Was she aware of the torch Frank carried for his second wife? “At times,” she said. “I didn’t resent it, but I regretted it. He never made it obvious; it was just in the air. But the fact that he kept her perfume—it was a wonderful perfume, Jungle Gardenia; it wasn’t expensive, but very exotic…” Her voice trailed off. “I used it in later years,” Connelly said.
By the end of June—even with side trips to the Prado to take in the great paintings of Goya and Velázquez, which fascinated him—Frank had had it with Spain. On July 1, he informed Kramer that he would be leaving on the twenty-fifth of the month, three weeks short of the sixteen for which he had contracted. “Hot or cold, Thursday I’m leaving,” Sinatra told the director.*1 Kramer told Frank that he needed him until at least August 1. Frank told Kramer that he’d give him three more days, until July 28. A barrage of transatlantic cables between production headquarters and Stateside lawyers and agents ensued. No agreement having been reached, Frank left on the twenty-eighth, daring Stanley Kramer and United Artists to suspend him—and leaving the cast and crew much relieved. With so much film already in the can, the moviemakers were over a barrel. Sinatra’s remaining scenes were shot months later at Universal Studios in Hollywood, “with potted palms,” as Kramer put it, producing a noticeably phony effect that detracted little from a film that was already too lousy to get much worse.