by James Kaplan
Sinatra proposed that the scene be shot in one continuous take, the camera gradually tracking in on the two men. “He said, ‘What if I just came over and we talked like this,’ ” Yorkin said. “I knew right away that it takes two setups out. Because he likes to go fast.” Yorkin’s concern was that if the single take didn’t go perfectly, “He’s got me screwed.” As a neophyte film director, he wanted coverage.
“I said, ‘Gee, I think we could track that way, too, but I’d like to do my first this way.’ We were all lit for him. Frank said, ‘There’s no reason to do it two ways. There’s only one right way.’ He said, ‘The old-fashioned directors would do all that coverage stuff; you don’t need all that.’ Being naive as I was, I said, ‘I kind of think I need this.’ I started to explain.” Frank cut him off. “Well, if you see it that way, then I guess everybody has their right,” he said, then went off, Yorkin thought, to makeup.
After a while—the scene was lit; Cobb was ready—Yorkin said, “Well, guys, let’s do it.” But Sinatra was nowhere in sight. “I said, ‘Guys, I’m sitting here. Let’s bring him out here.’ They said, ‘He’s gone.’
“I said, ‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’ They said, ‘He just drove off the lot.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it. My career is over before it started.’ I didn’t sleep all night.
“The next morning,” Yorkin recalled, “I came in, and one of his guys came over and said, ‘The boss wants to talk to you.’ ”
Yorkin went into Sinatra’s dressing room, petrified. “Frank said, ‘Sit down, Bud.’ He said, ‘Bud, let me ask you something. Did anyone ever tell you that I might be difficult to work with? Have you ever heard that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I heard that.’ He said, ‘Did anybody ever tell you that I don’t like to do a lot of takes and so forth? I don’t think you need a lot. Did you ever hear that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure. I’ve heard it said.’
“Then Frank said, ‘Have you ever heard that when five o’clock comes, it’s martini time? We could be right in the middle of a scene, but it’s over for me, because it’s martini time. Did you ever hear that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I heard that one.’ And he said, ‘Well, jeez, if you heard all that, why didn’t you get Howard Keel to play the role?’ ”
Yorkin broke up. Sinatra did, too. “He [clapped his hands and] said, ‘Come on, let’s go!’ He let me off the hook that way,” Yorkin recalled. And they went back to work, doing it mostly Frank’s way, but the resourceful young director came up with a surprising method for getting another take out of Sinatra when he really needed one.
“He was nobody’s fool,” Yorkin said. “He knew if a scene didn’t work or if he forgot a line or something, he obviously had to shoot it again. But if there were other kinds of subtleties that I thought were missed, you couldn’t say to him, ‘I’d like to get another take.’
“So what I did one time—we did this scene, and I said, ‘Gee, I think we can do it better.’ And he said, ‘Ah, I think it was pretty good.’ I said, ‘Hey, listen. I’ll tell you what. Your mother and my mother couldn’t care less as long as they spell our names right. My mother is going to love this scene, and I’m sure your mother would too. Billy Wilder will know we really fucked up.’ From that point on he would go, ‘All right, one for Billy Wilder; I’ll do it one time for Billy Wilder.’ We never had an argument after that point, literally.”
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Maybe they should have. Come Blow Your Horn is fun to look at, especially Frank’s character’s splendiferous bachelor pad, whose onyx bathroom and plush walk-in closet alone are worth the price of admission—and appear realistically Sinatra-esque, as do Alan’s many black-and-orange-accented outfits. But as a movie, it doesn’t move: it feels like an extended sitcom, which is unsurprising given the pedigrees of the filmmakers. There are funny bits, and Frank is loose and charming—he even does a neat Bogart imitation—but with his picturesquely grooved and pitted face, ravaged-looking practically no matter how it’s lit, he seems old for the character, and old to still be doing the bachelor bit. (Though age didn’t stop him from having a fling with the twenty-two-year-old Jill St. John, a starlet claiming a near-genius IQ, who played his sexy, airheaded upstairs neighbor.)
The Feydeau mechanics of different girlfriends arriving at inconvenient moments, already creaky in The Tender Trap, were well worn by now. But one appearance is especially attention getting: Phyllis McGuire, in the minor role of Mrs. Eckman, the buyer from Dallas who’s also a sometime squeeze of Alan’s. When she shows up at his door, mad at him for standing her up, and grinds her high heel into his toes to try to get him to confess his sins, she’s a scarily realistic dominatrix—an effect that’s enhanced by her height (she towers over Frank in those heels), her cruel-looking, flattened features and feline eyes, her wasp-waisted all-black ensemble (complete with elbow-length black-leather gloves), and a leopard coat slung over her shoulder. She’s a huntress, and Alan is a frightened rabbit in her clutches—it’s all he can do to sweet-talk her out of the apartment.
In real life, of course, McGuire was the scary Sam Giancana’s girlfriend, and Mooney proudly visited the set one day to watch her work, putting Frank into something of a tizzy, as Bud Yorkin recalled vividly: “He told me, ‘Listen—when we’re shooting, you’ve got to tell the crew, no jokes, let’s just shoot this thing and get it over with.’ ”
Giancana stuck around the whole day, on his best behavior. “He seemed very nice,” Yorkin said, remembering that Sinatra was as nervous as a schoolboy. “Frank was, ‘Hey, get him a director’s chair; let him sit right over here.’ We took a leather chair, and there he was, sitting just out of the scene.”
Maybe the fear on Sinatra’s face in the scene with Phyllis McGuire wasn’t a stretch. Shirley MacLaine, in her memoir, writes of a terrifying backstage encounter with Giancana at a Sammy Davis Jr. show: with no provocation, the mobster twisted her arm behind her back, and when Sammy asked him to let her go, Mooney punched Davis full force in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. “I was confused,” MacLaine writes.
Sammy was in pain. My arm was wrenched. This man seemed to be a monster…Years later I saw Giancana with a woman he loved. I was startled to observe how she operated with such a man. “Dominatrix” would be a mild description. To his face she referred to him as a “cock-sucking sleazeball who’s so chickenshit he loves to be whipped.” He ate it up. For some reason that made inverted sense to me. Those who dominate must love to be dominated. I understood him a little better.
Did Frank love to be dominated? He was certainly eager to accommodate Sam Giancana, and all the more so that fall, when, as an October FBI memo implied, he put the Christina, a car, and his Palm Springs house at the disposal of Giancana and his lady love. “At 3:16 AM, September 26, 1962,” the memo began, with Jack Webb portentousness, “PHYLLIS MCGUIRE was observed departing from a private plane at Palm Springs Airport and was met by three unknown males in a station wagon determined to be a 1962 Buick, bearing California License XDP318.”
McGuire got in the wagon, which was registered to Sinatra’s Essex Productions, and the car proceeded to the vicinity of the Tamarisk Country Club, where it was observed shortly afterward parked in the carport at Frank’s compound. It was the opinion of the surveilling agents at the airport that one of the men who had met McGuire’s plane was Sam Giancana.
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While Sam and Phyllis were relaxing (or doing whatever they did) in the desert, Frank was doing what he liked best, with some of the people he liked best. On the nights of October 2 and 3, he assembled with Neal Hefti and Count Basie and His Orchestra—which included, besides the majestic William J. Basie of Red Bank, New Jersey, such greats as the trumpeter Thad Jones, trombonist Benny Powell, saxophonists Frank Wess and Frank Foster, guitarist Freddie Green, bassist Buddy Catlett, and drummer Sonny Payne—and recorded ten numbers for his latest Reprise album.
The LP would be called Sinatra-Basie: An Historic Musical First, and the grand-sounding title was not an exaggera
tion. Frank had idolized the incomparable jazz pianist and swing-era pioneer (born in 1904) since the Count and his band had burst into prominence in the late 1930s, and he had known Basie himself since the 1940s. “I’ve waited twenty years for this moment,” Sinatra proclaimed at the beginning of the recording date.
Why had it taken so long? Sinatra archivist Ed O’Brien notes that some critics felt the collaboration “would be a bad musical marriage—the fear being that Sinatra’s lighter sound and Basie’s hard swing edge would be like oil and water.” But the truth of the matter seems to be more banal: contractual conflicts had prevented the singer and the bandleader from recording together until this moment. As it turned out, the two were made for each other.
A case in point is the album’s first tune, Johnny Burke and Arthur Johnston’s 1936 “Pennies from Heaven.” Frank had recorded the number six and a half years earlier, with a Nelson Riddle arrangement, for Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!: to listen to the two versions is to hear how much Sinatra has changed in the interim, both musically and as a man. The earlier recording swings, but lightly—at a lope—and Frank’s reading is full-voiced and wholehearted, capturing all the hopefulness of the Depression-era classic.
By contrast, the Sinatra-Basie “Pennies” (Bill Miller is at the piano)*4 is taut, clipped, tough: Sinatra is out to prove he can be a great jazz horn, and prove it he does. If the song’s sentimental meaning is lost in the transition, a new meaning is found; any doubt about whether Frank Sinatra is a true jazz singer is hereby resolved. Though the cognoscenti had known it for years: none other than Lester Young, who played tenor in Basie’s original band, told Nat Hentoff in 1956, “If I could put together exactly the kind of band I wanted, Frank Sinatra would be the singer. Really, my main man is Frank Sinatra.”
No one was hipper than Prez, and no praise could be higher.
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In late September, Earl Wilson reported, “Frank Sinatra, on a fast visit here with Mike Romanoff whom he shanghaied, dated model Joan Walker at Jilly’s, and went to the Copa where he told singer Tina Robin she’s the greatest.” Wilson then noted, parenthetically, “FS may have surgery for a golf injury.”
Golf had nothing to do with it. In fact, Frank had hurt his right hand badly early in the year, while filming a fight scene for The Manchurian Candidate. The martial arts sequence between Sinatra’s character, Bennett Marco, and Henry Silva’s Soviet agent, Chunjin, is shockingly effective for its sheer unexpectedness: Marco knocks at an apartment door, expecting Raymond Shaw; instead, Chunjin answers, and the violence begins instantly. The scene is also jarring for its realism. Modern moviegoers have become so accustomed to choreographed martial arts in motion pictures that to see two men looking as if they’re genuinely trying to kill each other is startling, upsetting, and, of course, thrilling.
“Using a double only for the shot where Marco is hurled across the room,” Daniel O’Brien writes, “Sinatra suffered for his art while shooting the sequence. Karate-chopping a wooden table, he broke both the furniture and his little finger, though the injury went unnoticed until shooting on the sequence was completed, the star having shown no sign of discomfort.”
But the injury triggered a condition called Dupuytren’s contracture, a tissue disorder in which the little finger and the ring finger bend toward the palm and can’t be fully extended. The ability to grip is compromised. Frank did many things with his right hand, including holding a microphone, and the condition would continue to plague him for years, despite several operations to try to correct it.
Sinatra’s commitment to making the fight sequence realistic reflected his complete dedication to The Manchurian Candidate. “I thought this might be something extraordinary—and it was,” recalled Angela Lansbury, herself extraordinary in the picture. Frank later said, “I remember a wonderful enthusiasm on the part of everyone involved in the film. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience—it only happens once in a performer’s life.” His work in the movie—coming more or less out of left field in between the heart-sinking inanity of Sergeants 3 and the sitcom cuteness of Come Blow Your Horn—is nothing less than the pinnacle of his considerable acting art, in a film whose power remains undiminished by the decades.
“Following his own acting mantra to listen intently and react spontaneously, Sinatra is completely convincing in delineating all the different aspects of Marco’s character,” Tom Santopietro writes. “Sinatra’s Bennett Marco stands as a perfectly wrought example of the disillusioned modern American male in post–World War II twentieth-century America.”
The famous sequence in which Marco meets Janet Leigh’s character, Rosie, begins as he sits in the lounge car of a train headed to New York, a twitching, sweaty wreck, struggling and failing to light a cigarette while Rosie looks on. She has no idea, of course, that he is on mental disability leave from the army: recurrent nightmares about his brainwashing in Korea have undone him. Finally exasperated, he bolts, knocking over a table as he goes, then pauses in the space between two cars, trying to gather himself. She follows him. In an act of stunning sexual directness, she lights a cigarette, takes it out of her mouth, and hands it to him. As he perspires and evades her eyes, the two proceed to have a surpassingly bizarre dialogue.
“Maryland’s a beautiful state,” she begins.
“This is Delaware,” Marco answers.
“I know,” she says. “I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch.”
The talk proceeds in similarly surreal fashion—she just as bright-eyed and animated as if it all made perfect sense, he dull-eyed and disconnected—until she abruptly changes course. After asking if he’s married, she volunteers, “I live at 53 West 54th Street. Apartment 3B. Can you remember that?”
“Yes,” he answers, all but inaudibly.
“Eldorado 5-9970,” she says. “Can you remember that?”
“Yes,” he whispers, looking guilty, haunted, exhausted—a shell of a man, like the broken prisoner of war he once was. Even Frank’s picturesque portrayal of a desperate drug addict in The Man with the Golden Arm, beautifully acted but Acted with a capital A, comes nowhere near the power of this emptiness. What could account for it? Who knew he had it in him?
The picture premiered on October 12 in Los Angeles, in New York on the twenty-fourth, and reviewers were appropriately awed. Variety’s Anby wrote, “Every once in a rare while a film comes along that ‘works’ in all departments, with story, production and performance so well blended that the end effect is one of nearly complete satisfaction. Such is The Manchurian Candidate.” Many of the notices singled out Frank for praise. The New Yorker raved, “The acting is all of a high order, and Sinatra, in his usual uncanny fashion, is simply terrific.”
Uncanny is appropriate. But there was nothing usual about this performance.
Nor about the movie itself. George Axelrod hewed closely to Richard Condon’s off-kilter dialogue (the train sequence between Marco and Rosie comes virtually straight from the novel), and John Frankenheimer deployed all his considerable skills: his intense psychological sensitivity, his effective use of strange camera angles (in one scene, we’re looking up from the point of view of a character lying on the floor), and an acute sense, brought straight from television, of how to mount scenes in a way that felt jarringly real and strange at the same time. (Shooting in black and white heightened the effect.) The press-conference sequence in which James Gregory’s Senator Iselin announces he has a list of known Communists in Congress is groundbreaking in its verisimilitude—with its cameras and cables and smoky atmosphere, it could have been created by no one but a TV veteran—and haunting in its depiction of the rot at the heart of American politics. Is it paranoid? Or realistic?
With its brutal scenes of brainwashing, cold-blooded murder, and diabolical conspiracies and its climactic presidential assassination plot—carried out by a rifleman with a telescopic sight—The Manchurian Candidate was both powerful enough to attract moviegoers and upsetting enough t
hat viewers needed to distance themselves from it. In his Los Angeles Times review, John L. Scott wrote, “The picture is really fascinating despite its rather far-fetched premise and wholesale slaughter during later passages, and if you’re looking for a wild-and-woolly horror film fare—with psychological sidelights and political background—this is it.”
At the moment he wrote the words, and for many months to come, political reality would trump any scenario even the most gifted filmmakers could create.
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Two days after the Los Angeles premiere of The Manchurian Candidate, a U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane obtained clear photographic evidence of what military intelligence had been telling President Kennedy for months and what Premier Khrushchev had been assuring him was not the case: that the Soviets had installed medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba in direct defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. Demanding an immediate dismantling of the missile sites, Kennedy instituted a military blockade of the waters and airspace around the island. In the meantime, the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged an all-out invasion of Cuba and an overthrow of Castro.
Sinatra in his greatest movie role, as the brainwashed captain Bennett Marco in The Manchurian Candidate. His scenes with Janet Leigh are both profoundly moving and deliciously surrealistic. (Credit 18.1)
For the next thirteen days, in the course of which Soviet ships attempted to run the blockade and a Russian missile shot down an American U-2, the world seemed to hover on the brink of nuclear annihilation. On Monday night, October 22, the president gave a nationally televised address announcing the discovery of the missiles, saying, “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”