by Kitty Kelley
Mrs. Cohn was stunned. It was absolutely unheard of for the wife of a star to come begging like this to the wife of a studio head, especially to the wife of Harry Cohn, who was renowned for being the nastiest man in Hollywood and who, until the war, had kept an autographed photo of Mussolini displayed in his office.
“Frank was at the bottom of the barrel then, and no one wanted him for anything, especially that role,” said Joan. “I knew that he’d been pleading with Harry for the part of Maggio, but Harry had completely dismissed him. He thought Frank was nothing but a washed-up song-and-dance man. A has-been crooner. It was pathetic, really. But I was so moved by Ava that night and her devotion to Frank that I promised to help her in any way I could. As soon as I got out of that sick bed, I went to work on Harry.”
14
Frank identified with Angelo Maggio, the tough little soldier in James Jones’s novel, From Here to Eternity, who grinned and boozed and fought his way through the pre-Pearl Harbor army. Ruled by violent pride, the gritty Italian-American GI dies rather than allow the brutality of the stockade to break his spirit. From the moment Frank came across the character in the book, he wanted the role. He knew that this was a once-in-a-lifetime part that could reignite his waning star.
“I just felt it—I just knew it,” he said, “and I just couldn’t get it out of my head.
“I knew that if a picture was ever made, I was the only actor to play Private Maggio, the funny and sour Italo-American. I knew Maggio. I went to school with him in Hoboken. I was beaten up with him. I might have been Maggio.… When I heard that Columbia bought the story, I got Harry Cohn on the phone and asked him for a date for lunch. After we ate, I said to him, ‘Harry, I’ve known you for a long time. You got something I want.’
“Harry said, ‘You want to play God?’ and I said, ‘No, not that. But I want to play Maggio.’ And then he looked at me funnylike and said, ‘Look, Frank, that’s an actor’s part, a stage actor’s part. You’re nothing but a fucking hoofer.’ ”
Frank pleaded with him for more than an hour, saying he could play Maggio better than he could sing and dance. But for Harry Cohn, the subject was closed. He remembered Frank’s nonsinging performance in The Miracle of the Bells, which was a box office failure for MGM, and he wanted no part of it.
“Please, Harry,” begged Frank. “I’ll pay you if you’ll let me play that role.”
“Sure, Frank,” said Cohn, who knew that Sinatra owed more than $109,000 in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. “Sure.”
Frank’s dreams outran his deficits. “I’m serious about the money, Harry,” he said.
“Who mentioned money? But what about the money?”
“I get one hundred fifty thousand a film …”
“You got one hundred fifty thousand. Not anymore.”
“Right,” said Frank, “I used to get it, and I don’t want anything near that much for Maggio.”
“I’m not buying at any price,” said Cohn, “but just for the record, what’s yours?”
“I’ll play Maggio for a thousand a week.”
“Jesus, Frank, you want it that bad?” said Cohn. “Well, we’ll see. I have some other actors to test first.”
Frank called Abe Lastfogel and Sam Weisbrod, his new agents at the William Morris Agency, and told them about his talk with Cohn. He begged them to get him the role even if they had to sign him for fifty dollars a week.
“I’ll do it for nothing” he said. “For nothing. You’ve just got to get it for me.”
Since taking Frank on as a client, both agents had been doggedly trying to arouse interest in him, but everyone knew of his long string of flops and backed off. “Frank smelled like a loser in those days,” said Abe Lastfogel, “but I promised him we’d start working on Fred Zinnemann [High Noon and Member of the Wedding], who was also our client, and had been named to direct From Here to Eternity. Fred didn’t want to cast Frank in the role of Maggio because he said that everyone would think that he’d bastardized the book and made it into a musical instead of portraying a stark and tragic drama. He preferred the Broadway actor Eli Wallach for the part.”
While Lastfogel and Weisbrod tried to persuade Fred Zinnemann, Frank called Buddy Adler, who was producing the picture for Columbia.
“It’s an acting part, Frankie,” said the producer.
“It’s me,” said Frank. “It’s me.”
Frank also called his friend Jack Entratter, who had left the Copa and was now in Las Vegas running the Sands Hotel for Frank Costello and Joey Adonis, the two men Entratter had fronted for at the Copacabana in New York. Jack was a close friend of Harry Cohn and went fishing with him every other weekend. Aware of this, Frank begged Jack to talk to Harry about the role. Jack promised to do so, and later told Cohn that Frank wanted to play Maggio. But Harry Cohn had already made up his mind about the casting. He wanted Columbia stars in the movie, and suggested Robert Mitchum to play Sgt. Milton Warden, a role that finally went to Burt Lancaster; Aldo Ray to play Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift won it); Joan Crawford to play the promiscuous wife of the captain (Deborah Kerr), and Eli Wallach to play Maggio.
Harry Cohn told his wife that he was being swamped with all sorts of appeals on Frank’s behalf, even from Hollywood columnists who were writing about Frank’s campaign to play the supporting character role with fifth billing in the credits.
Joan Cohn seized the moment to make good on her promise to Ava. “Why not consider Frank for the role?” she asked her husband. “He’s Italian and scrawny, so he’d be perfect in the scene where skinny little Maggio has to go up against that great big Sgt. ‘Fatso’ Judson (Ernest Borgnine).”
“You, too, huh?” said Cohn to his wife. “I just don’t think it would work. Besides, I’d have to test Frank, and you know he’d never lower himself for that.”
“I bet he would,” said Joan Cohn. “I’ll bet you anything you want to bet that Frank Sinatra will do a test. Just try him, Harry. A test can’t hurt, and then you’ll know for sure.”
Jonie Taps, a vice-president of Columbia Pictures and one of Cohn’s closest associates, also pushed for giving Frank a test. “Harry still didn’t like the idea,” said Taps. “He said, ‘Give me one good reason why I should put him in a picture?’ I said, ‘You may want Ava Gardner for a picture sometime. She loves Frank and she’ll appreciate it.’ Ava helped out, too, by giving Harry a call and asking him to cast Frank.”
Finally, Harry Cohn called Frank and said that he shouldn’t get his hopes up, but if he’d be willing to test for Maggio, he might be considered. Frank was ecstatic and agreed to the test. He waited weeks for Cohn to call him back, but he never heard a word. When Frank stopped by the studio to inquire, he was told that there was nothing definite to tell him yet. Then he read that Cohn and Fred Zinnemann were really interested in Eli Wallach for the role. In despair Frank left with Ava for Africa, telling his agents to cable him if there was any possible hope that he still might be tested. If so, he would fly back to Hollywood on a moment’s notice and at his own expense.
The Sinatras flew to Nairobi on November 7, 1952, and celebrated their first wedding anniversary on a stratocruiser ten thousand miles from home. “We felt kinda sorry for ourselves,” Frank later wrote in a letter, “but we exchanged our gifts and opened a not-too-chilled bottle of champagne to toast our first milestone.” He gave Ava a huge globe-shaped ring studded with diamonds, which he charged to her, and she gave him a thin platinum watch.
“It was quite an occasion for me,” she said later. “I had been married twice but never for a whole year.” They arrived the next day and were met at the airport by Clark Gable, who whisked them through Kenya’s crowded native districts to their bush site, where they lived in an opulent traveling tent complete with native servants and water carriers.
From the first day of shooting, Mogambo, a joint British and American production, was beset with unending difficulties. Temperatures soared to 130 degrees in the baked clay wastelands; alka
li dust covered everyone; sleep was impossible because of bellowing hippos and howling hyenas. Pregnant, Ava suffered miserable morning sickness and quarreled constantly with Frank, who was bored and restless and unable to think of anything else but the role of Maggio.
To make matters even more unbearable, Ava did not get along with the director, John Ford (The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road, How Green Was My Valley), who was gruff and harsh and refused to treat her like an MGM movie queen. She embarrassed him when he introduced her to the British governor and his wife.
“Ava, why don’t you tell the governor what you see in this one-hundred-twenty-pound runt you’re married to,” Ford said.
“Well,” said Ava, “there’s only ten pounds of Frank but there’s one hundred and ten pounds of cock!”
Ford wanted to kill her, but the governor and his wife roared with laughter. After a few such incidents the director developed a certain appreciation of his star and they soon became good friends. “She was a real trouper,” he said later. “She was unhappy over Sinatra, but she worked her ass off just the same. I loved her.”
Grace Kelly, too, was shocked at first by Ava’s total lack of restraint, her uninhibited swearing, and the way she and Frank would take out their anger toward each other on whoever was standing around. “Ava is such a mess, it’s unbelievable,” Grace wrote in a letter to a friend. “Right now they are putting up a new tent for her—she just didn’t like the other one because it was old—her tent is right next to mine—so I can hear all of the screaming and yelling.”
Five days later Frank received a cable from the From Here to Eternity producer, Buddy Adler, to appear for a screen test. There was no offer to pay his expenses from Africa to California, but Frank did not hesitate. Charging the round-trip flight to Ava’s MGM account, he left immediately for Hollywood.
“For the test, I played the saloon scene where Maggio shakes dice with the olives and the scene where he’s found drunk outside the Royal Hawaiian Hotel,” he said. “I was scared to death.”
Adler was surprised to see Frank less than thirty-six hours after cabling him. “I was a little startled when I gave him the script of the drunk scene and he handed it back. ‘I don’t need this,’ he said. ‘I’ve read it many times.’ I didn’t think he had a chance anyway, so I said, ‘Well, okay.’ Since his was the last test of the day, I didn’t intend going down on the stage. But I got a call from Fred Zinnemann, ‘You’d better come down here. You’ll see something unbelievable. I already have it in the camera. I’m not using film this time. But I want you to see it.’
“Frank thought he was making another take—and he was terrific. I thought to myself, if he’s like that in the movie, it’s a sure Academy Award. But we had to have Harry Cohn’s okay on casting, and he was out of town. So Frank went back to Africa.”
“I thought I’d collapse waiting for reaction to that test,” said Sinatra later. “My agent sent word that Columbia was testing some other fellows, among them some fine stage actors. My chin hit my knees, and I gave up. Ava was wonderful at cheering me up, and said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t quit just because you got one telegram.’ Clark Gable kept saying, ‘Relax, skipper. Have a little drink and everything will be all right.’ ”
When Harry Cohn came back to town, he wanted to meet Eli Wallach and test him for the part. Columbia contacted Peter Witt, Wallach’s film agent, and flew the actor in from New York where he was starring on Broadway in The Rose Tattoo.
“That was quite an experience,” said Eli Wallach. “I walked into Cohn’s office and he said, ‘He doesn’t look like an Italian. He looks like a Hebe.’ I screamed at him. ‘Your name is Cohn. How dare you say that to me? I’ve been playing an Italian—Alvaro Mangiacavallo—for fifteen months now in New York, on the road, and in Los Angeles in Tennessee Williams’s play, so don’t talk to me about acting, and I’ve already spent five years in the army, so don’t talk to me about the army!’
“I realized a second later that he had said it intentionally to aggravate me, to see if I would behave like the character. Then, of course, the actor part of me came to the fore, and I really let him have it. Then he said, ‘You going to sign for seven years?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t do that. I’ve never signed a seven-year contract.’ I don’t know if I floored him, but I can tell you that I never had much of a career in the movies.”
Cohn told everyone that he wanted Eli Wallach for the role of Maggio, but he was having trouble negotiating with his agent. “By then we had three tests for Maggio—Eli Wallach, Harvey Lembeck, a well-known comedian of that time, and Frank Sinatra,” said Daniel Taradash, the screenwriter. He had captured the essence of Jones’s sprawling, 816-page novel and condensed it into a 161-page shooting script. “I remember when Frank came in from Africa to test. I saw him in the coffee shop, and he asked me, ‘How do I play the scene and make Maggio laugh and cry at the same time?’ He was so nervous. Eli Wallach made the best test of the three of them—no doubt about it. Everyone agreed. He was superb. Lembeck was not right; he tried too hard to be funny. Frank’s test was good—better than expected—but it had none of the consummate acting ability of Eli Wallach.
“Buddy Adler said to Eli’s agent [Peter Witt], ‘We want your man,’ and the agent gave a price two times as much as Columbia was going to pay. The agent said, ‘Tennessee Williams’s play, El Camino Real, is starting rehearsals and they want Eli. If I don’t get that price, he’s going to take the play.’ This burned Cohn to the core. A guy coming into a prize part and demanding that much money was more than he would tolerate. ‘Forget it,’ he screamed. ‘He’s out. No way.’ ”
Wallach said that money had nothing to do with it. “I was offered the role of Maggio and was going to take it, but I had already committed myself to Elia Kazan to play in Tennessee Williams’s play, El Camino Real, if they got the backing. When the money came through for the play, I grabbed it, because it was a remarkable piece of writing by the leading playwright in America and it was going to be directed by the country’s best. There really wasn’t much of a choice for me. As a stage actor I wanted to do the play, and so I turned down the movie and the role of Maggio. It just put my film debut off by a year or two, but I don’t feel I lost out on some great thing.”
When Frank heard that Eli Wallach had tested for the role, he became depressed, convinced that he no longer had a chance. He and Ava fought daily. She called Harry Cohn in Hollywood and pleaded with him to give Frank the role, saying that if Frank didn’t get it, he would probably kill himself.
Shooting was scheduled to start in March and almost all the parts had been cast, except for Maggio. Fred Zinnemann, Buddy Adler, and Dan Taradash conferred with Harry Cohn in his basement projection room at home about the problem. After running the Wallach and Sinatra tests several times, Dan Taradash said, “Let’s not be so dejected. Frank’s not that bad. I know we were dazzled by Wallach, but let’s try to take another look at Frank’s test and see.”
They ran the test again and again, trying to decide whether they should give the role to Sinatra or test someone else. Cohn went upstairs and got his wife. “I want you to go down there and look at the tests of Sinatra and Wallach,” he said. “Then tell me which one you like the best. Tell me what you honestly think.”
Joan Cohn watched the two tests and told her husband that she was captivated by Eli Wallach but thought he was too splendidly built to play Maggio. “He’s a brilliant actor, no question about it,” she said after watching the scene where Maggio strips down and gets into a fight with two military policemen, “but he looks too good. He’s not skinny, and he’s not pathetic, and he’s not Italian. Frank is just Maggio to me.”
“One crucial difference in Frank’s favor was his size,” said Dan Taradash many years later. “Eli was a pretty muscular guy with a great physique. He did not look like a schnook. He looked like he could take two MPs with no trouble at all. Frank, on the other hand, looked so thin and woeful and so pitifully small that the audience would cry when they s
aw this poor little guy get beaten up. Adler and Zinnemann and Cohn finally agreed, and that’s how Frank got the role. It was by default and had nothing to do with a horse’s head.”
Taradash’s allusion was to Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather, in which a famous Italian singer by the name of Johnny Fontane appeals to the Mafia don for help in getting a movie role that has been denied him. The godfather, who loves Johnny like a son, sends his consigliori to the West Coast to ask the studio head to reconsider. The movie magnate, who cares more for his thoroughbred horses than for humans, refuses; the Mafia lawyer asks him again, but the studio chief remains adamant. The consigliori returns to New York to give his boss the bad news, and a few days later the studio chief wakes up in bed next to the severed head of his most prized steed. He realizes that a man who would casually decapitate a $600,000 horse could just as easily kill him. So he reconsiders and gives Johnny the role, and with it Johnny Fontane regains his star status.
Puzo’s novel, which sold millions of copies, reminded readers that there had once been another famous Italian singer whose career was brought back to life by a movie role that had at first been denied him.
By the time the book was published, Frank’s organized-crime friendships were so well established that it was an easy leap for readers to assume that he, too, had received a godfather’s help in obtaining the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity.
“I heard the [BBC] interviewer say I got the Maggio role through the mob,” Sinatra said. “Well—that’s so far from the truth.” In fact, he sued the British Broadcasting Corporation for saying that it was his crime syndicate ties that landed him the role; he won the lawsuit, and received a retraction.