by Kitty Kelley
“Sixteen weeks,” he said. “I can’t stay in one place sixteen weeks, I’ll kill myself.” He harangued the director about his taking so long to shoot, complained about the script, and refused to rehearse. “Let’s get this circus on the road. Forget rehearsals. Just keep the cameras turning,” he said, refusing to do more than one take.
He threatened to walk off the movie, and the director knew better than to invoke the legalities of his contract. The year before, Frank had walked out on the 125-member company filming Carousel in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, when he was told that the movie was being shot both in standard thirty-five-millimeter Cinemascope and a new fifty-five-millimeter wide-screen process, requiring at least two takes for every shot.
“I will not make two pictures for the price of one,” Frank had said as he stormed off the set. Twentieth Century Fox sued him for one million dollars for breach of contract, but Sinatra could not have cared less.
“They just didn’t know how to handle Frank,” said Beans Ponedel. “You can’t ever tell him to do something. You’ve got to suggest. He was always yelling at Kramer, ‘Don’t tell me. Suggest. Don’t tell me. Suggest.’ ”
“When Sinatra walks into a room, tension walks in beside him,” said Stanley Kramer. “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 wait or 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.”
To distract Frank, the unit photographer, Sam Shaw, took him on cultural excursions to the Prado art museum and engaged him in discussions about art.
Frank had first discovered art back in the ’40’s, when he was appearing at the Paramount. He went to the Museum of Modern Art one day, and, as he said later, “I just couldn’t believe it, all those paintings.” He began experimenting on his own, drawing a lot of clowns first and then branching out into street scenes and backyards.
“I had the sense that Frank was sort of looking to Sam [Shaw] for whatever might have been culturally missing in his life,” said Jeannie Sakol, a former free-lance journalist on location in Spain. “When Sam started talking about art, Frank became really fascinated. Sam was a mentor and opened a door to things that Frank had never seen before. He was in a fretful mood, though, and not terribly happy at the time. I remember one night Sam and I and Frank went out to dinner, and I nearly died of embarrassment. The waitress served us chicken and came back to the table to see if there was anything else we wanted. Frank picked up a chicken leg and moved it up and back in his mouth, back and forth, back and forth.… Sam cajoled him out of it finally, and he put it down, but he was aching for some action. Clearly, I wasn’t it and the waitress wasn’t it, and what was going on wasn’t doing it for him either. He was kind of a bad boy.”
Yet this man who could be so appallingly vulgar in public was also a man of taste with an extraordinary collection of Fabergé boxes, Steuben glass, and Indian crafts, as well as other American art and Impressionist paintings—including Pissarro, Dufy, Boudin, and Corot.
In Spain, Frank became agitated over an item in the New York Journal-American that cast an aspersion on Ava and her relationship with Sinatra. He was so determined to find our where the item had come from that he hired a private detective in New York.
“He called me in and said, ‘I have to find out who gave that item. That’s all there is to it,’ ” said Richard Condon. “Well, he did find out, and to have a rapprochement we arranged a dinner for Frank and Ava and two beards—myself and Otto Preminger. Throughout dinner, Frank and Ava never spoke to us—not one word. 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.”
The reconciliation with Ava lasted only one evening. Since there was no hope for a renewed marriage, Frank wanted to leave Spain as soon as possible. On July first, he refused to work unless Stanley Kramer would promise him that he would be finished on or before July 25, 1956. Kramer explained that he had done his best to revise the schedule but still needed him until August first. Frank stamped his foot and demanded that he be let go on July 28; Kramer said he would try. Frank said that wasn’t good enough; he was leaving July 28 whether Kramer was done shooting or not. The director reminded him of his contract, and Frank told him to sit on the contract; he was leaving on the twenty-eighth. This prompted a flurry of cables back and forth from the director to the production lawyers to Frank’s lawyers and to his William Morris agent, Burt Allenberg. Disregarding the threat of suspension, Frank left on July 28, and the picture was completed without him.
Despite the dissension making the film, Frank received good reviews for his performance. “As the virtual star, the cannon [the Spanish peasants transport the cannon to outside the walls of Avila to destroy a French-occupied fort] does nobly—if it doesn’t exactly out-act Sinatra, Grant, and Miss Loren, it is usually there, like Everest,” wrote Hollis Alpert in the Saturday Review. “While the gun deserves a special Academy Award, Mr. Sinatra must be commended for his restrained and appealing guérillero leader, Mr. Grant for his stalwart, understated British captain, and Miss Loren for her good looks.”
Time magazine applauded Frank “despite spit-curl bangs and a put-on accent.”
The accent was something he had worked on with a Spanish-speaking friend, who was a musician. “He had prepared for the part of the simple shoemaker’s son who leads the revolution against the French by having the script recorded by a heavily accented Spanish voice, which Frank memorized to get the speech exactly right,” said Richard Condon. “This was, unfortunately, recorded by an Argentinian who, among other things, pronounced yes as “jess,” making Frank sound, in the role, as if his dad had somehow scraped together enough, money to send his boy to a preparatory school in Buenos Aires circa 1801.”
Upon leaving Spain, Frank leaned out his hotel window and yelled, “Franco is a fink!” On the trip home with his publicist Warren Cowan, and his wife, Ronnie, Frank never stopped denigrating the Spanish dictator.
“He just hated Spain,” said Ronnie Cowan, who started what she called a “little sexual number” with Frank on that trip to the United States that would be “an on and off thing” for almost twenty years. “He liked to make love lying on the floor listening to his own records. It was great!” she said.
Most women, married or single, made themselves readily available to Frank wherever he went, but he seemed to prefer the few who were indifferent to him. He spent weeks pursuing an actress whose dramatic dark beauty rivaled that of Ava Gardner’s.
“I wasn’t the least bit attracted to Frank and I hadn’t liked his singing either,” said this woman. “I thought he was a bum from the wrong side of the tracks, and I was quite a snob in those days. I was accustomed to monumental men with great style. Frank was not someone I wanted to be seen with, but after he works his charm on you for a while, he gets better.
“Swifty Lazar kept calling and calling me to go out with Frank, and I kept saying no. Swifty lived near Frank and was always getting him girls. He took the scraps that Frank did not want; he always said he liked the fallout. Swifty took me to Romanoff’s one night, and Frank was there. I’d seen him at the Bogarts’ party the week before, when he kept following me around the house. Literally following me. I had ignored him then, or at least tried to, but he kept following me, and Lauren Bacall kept following him. Finally, he turned to her and said, ‘She’s ignoring me.’ Bacall put her hands on her hips and said, ‘Yeah, she’s ignoring you right into the sack.’ She thought I was playing hard to get, and she knew that Frank was interested. She felt very threatened. At Romanoff’s, she was sitting in Frank’s lap, and her husband, Humphrey Bogart, was ne
xt to them. Frank kept asking me to dance, saying, ‘Why won’t you let me take you out? I think you are so beautiful. I want to be with you. Please.’ ”
Frank showered the beautiful actress with flowers and kept begging her to go out with him. After several pleading phone calls from Swifty Lazar, she finally agreed to accompany Frank to San Francisco, where he was making an appearance for the United Nations.
“He picked me up and drove to the airport,” she said. “I remember when I got in the car, the radio was playing one of his records, and he said, ‘That’s your boy.’ I forget which hotel we stayed in, but Frank had arranged for a room for me and one for him, which I found very considerate. I spent the night in his room, of course, but still thought it was very nice of him to arrange for two rooms. After checking into the hotel, we went to his suite and the phone was ringing as we walked in the door. Frank answered it and said, ‘Yes, Captain. Okay, General. Yes, boss. Uh-huh. Okay, boss. Bye-bye.’ It was Lauren Bacall. He shook his head, saying she was too pushy for words. I was quite surprised that she’d called him, knowing we were together, but I hadn’t realized the extent of their relationship at the time.”
When they returned to Los Angeles, Frank insisted that the actress come back to his apartment, where his houseboy was cooking a special pasta dinner with his favorite lemon meringue pie with criss-crosses on top.
“I just wanted to go home, take a shower, and relax, but Frank insisted that I have dinner with him. I finally agreed but said I would have to leave right after the lemon meringue pie. When we got to his apartment, his houseboy came out to get his bags. A few minutes later, I saw my bags coming in too. Frank said, ‘Take them to my room.’
“ ‘Oh, no,’ I said.
“ ‘Please. You must stay with me.’
“ ‘No, Frank. I can’t. I’ve had a wonderful time, but I do want to get home. I really insist. I must.’
“Suddenly, his face twisted and contorted like a prune and he dropped to the floor, put his face in my lap, and started crying. He sobbed like a baby. ‘Please don’t believe what you hear about me,’ he said. ‘Please stay with me. I won’t hurt you. Don’t be afraid. Please, please stay with me.’ It was quite unsettling, but I finally left.
“A few days later I agreed to go to Palm Springs with him. He said he wanted to cook pasta for me. In his house, there was an icon to Ava—a little painting of her on the wall going up the stairs with a candle underneath that he lit every day. It was a shrine to her. He talked about her all the time and how she had walked out on him and how he had lost his voice. He said he was so depressed that he shouldn’t go out of the house during the day because he didn’t want anyone to see him. He kept talking about the pain he felt at being rejected, and the terrible humiliation. I’ll never forget it.”
* * *
As if to get even, Frank seemed to need to humiliate others, women especially.
“He’s a little twisted sexually,” said Jacqueline Park, an actress who later became the mistress of Jack Warner. “There are a lot of odds and ends in his sex life. He loved call girls for orgies and he liked to see women in bed for kicks, but not all the time.… I didn’t see him again because he wanted me to go to bed with another woman.… There were a lot of women who fell in love with Frank but he’d reject them and throw them over. There’s a monster in him who wants to screw the world before it screws him—hurt people before they hurt him. Then he feels guilty about being so ugly, and that guilt makes him a Mr. Nice Guy and so he does favors for some of the girls he’s used or rejected. When Joi Lansing, who was a regular bedmate of Frank’s for years, was dying of leukemia, he paid for all of her hospital bills.”
Judy Garland experienced the same type of treatment. After her marriage to director Vincente Minnelli broke up, she fell in love with Frank and confided to Joan Blondell that he would be her next husband. One night, she invited him to her house for an intimate dinner, and he accepted. She set the table beautifully with silver for two, but Frank never showed up and never called to explain why. Humiliated, she called Blondell in tears and begged her to come over to keep her company. “Oh, please, come,” she said. “I’m alone in this big place I’ve taken. …” Joan went over and, after a few drinks, Judy told her that Frank had stood her up. A few months later, when Judy entered the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for “exhaustion,” Frank bombarded her with telephone calls and sent daily gifts of flowers, perfume, lingerie, and records. One night, he flew a planeload of mutual friends to Boston, and with the hospital’s permission, took Judy out for the evening.
Although Frank dated other women, his secret relationship with Lauren Bacall was already being whispered about among their close friends. Noel Coward, who attended Frank’s New Year’s party in Palm Springs, commented on her possessiveness in his diary January 1, 1956, saying, “Frankie is enchanting as usual and, as usual, he has a ‘broad’ installed with whom he, as well as everyone else, is bored stiff. She is blond, cute, and determined, but I fear her determination will avail her very little, with Betty Bacall on the warpath.”
As the party ended, Frank asked the Bogarts to stay on. Lauren Bacall wanted to, but her husband insisted they leave. In the car going home she said, “We should have stayed.”
Her husband disagreed. “No, we shouldn’t,” he said. “You must always remember we have a life of our own that has nothing to do with Frank. He chose to live the way he’s living—alone. It’s too bad if he’s lonely, but that’s his choice. We have our own road to travel, never forget that—we can’t live his life.”
There was no one in Hollywood whom Frank admired more than Humphrey Bogart. He worshiped the cynical, outspoken fifty-six-year-old actor as an artist, and looked up to him as a kind of mentor, continually asking him what books to read, knowing that Bogart had a thorough grounding in the classics. Bogart had attended Trinity and Andover in preparation for Yale, but had joined the navy instead of going to college. He was everything Frank wanted to be—educated, sophisticated, respected. On screen, Bogie was the ultimate tough guy and in person he had an intractable sense of self.
Bogart, in turn, was amused by Frank’s mercurial temperament. “He’s kind of a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, fighting people who don’t want to fight,” he said. “He’s a cop-hater. If he doesn’t know who you are and you ask him a question, he thinks you’re a cop. Sinatra is terribly funny. He’s just amusing because he’s a skinny little bastard and his bones kind of rattle together.”
Much as he enjoyed Sinatra’s company, Bogart said, “I don’t think Frank’s an adult emotionally. He can’t settle down.” Later, he told reporters that Frank’s idea of paradise is a place where there are plenty of women and no newspapermen. “He doesn’t realize it, but he’d be better off if it were the other way around.”
Bogie and his wife formed a group known as the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, which was dedicated to drinking, laughing, staying up late, and not caring about public opinion. Frank was named pack master, Judy Garland, first vice-president, and her husband Sid Luft, the cage master. Agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar was recording secretary; Nathaniel Benchley, historian; and Lauren Bacall, den mother. Bogie was in charge of Rat Pack public relations because he was always good for an uninhibited quotation, and the press had real affection for him. The more he abused them, the more they liked him. David Niven, Mike Romanoff, and Jimmy Van Heusen were also members of this group, which Bogart said existed “for the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence. We admire ourselves and don’t care for anyone else.”
Some Hollywood Republicans like William Holden resented Bogie’s Rat Pack, which adored Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Adlai Stevenson. “Their conduct reflects on the way a nation is represented in the eyes of the world,” said Holden. “It might sound stuffy and dull, but it is quite possible for people to have social intercourse without resorting to a rat pack and even to drink or do anything without resorting to a rat pack. People have worked for years to lend some dignity to ou
r profession, and the rat pack reflects on the community and on my children and on their children and everybody’s children.”
On February 29, 1956, Humphrey Bogart was diagnosed as having throat cancer. He required surgery and radiation treatments to contain the malignancy. Unfortunately, the doctors operated too late, and Bogie had less than a year to live. As one of his closest friends, Frank visited him regularly when he was in town.
“It wasn’t easy for him,” said Lauren Bacall. “I don’t think he could bear to see Bogie that way or bear to face the possibility of his death. Yet he cheered Bogie up when he was with him—made him laugh—kept the ring-a-ding act in high gear for him. He did it all the only way he knew how, and he did it well.”
Bogie loved to hear about the practical jokes Frank played on their friend, Swifty Lazar, and applauded the lengths to which he would go to torment the tiny, bald-headed agent whose obsession with cleanliness was a familiar joke within the Rat Pack. Bogie used to take off Swifty’s shoes and socks and rub his bare feet in the carpet just because Lazar couldn’t bear naked contact with any floor. Bogie was delighted when Frank called him about hiring a plasterer to go into Lazar’s apartment and brick in his clothes closet with drywall so that when Swifty walked in he thought he was in the wrong apartment. Finally realizing it was his apartment, he went crazy when he couldn’t get to his little suits and velvet slippers. He started screaming at Frank and banging on his door, refusing to speak to him for weeks afterward. Another time, Frank took Lazar’s favorite hat and served it to him under poached eggs, which amused Bogart no end.
In October, when Frank was playing the Sands, he sent a chartered plane to Los Angeles to fly Cole Porter, Martha Hyer, Harry Kurnitz, Nancy Berg, Mike and Gloria Romanoff, the Burt Allenbergs, and Lazar to Las Vegas to celebrate Lauren Bacall’s thirty-second birthday. Bogie did not attend. Instead, he spent the day on his boat with his son.