Frank: The Voice (100 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
Then a successful June show on the BBC buoyed Frank’s morale. The Brits, having just crowned a new young queen, were in correspondingly good spirits. They didn’t come out in huge throngs to hear Frank, but the crowds who did come applauded appreciatively as he sang old songs (“Night and Day,” “Sweet Lorraine,” “You Go to My Head”) and new ones (“The Birth of the Blues” and “I’ve Got the World on a String”) and sipped tea between numbers. His voice gained strength with every stop. “
Sinatra is still the greatest male singer in pop music,” the
New Musical Express
said. “His range and power seem greater than ever.” And his cheekiness (“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Odeon or whatever this joint’s called,” he said at the Blackpool Opera House) rubbed the Brits the right way. They knew all about bloody-mindedness.
Harry Cohn used to say that he could tell whether a movie was any good depending on whether his fanny squirmed or not. “
Imagine,” said the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. “The whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!”
And strangely enough, when Columbia Pictures ran its first
preview of
From Here to Eternity
, “
Cohn had decided to use a new electronic system of recording audience reactions,” Fred Zinnemann recalled. The screening took place over the summer: a few weeks, pointedly enough, after the Rosenbergs were electrocuted.
About two hundred people were, literally, wired to their seats in a large projection room. There were small levers each could push—to the right if they liked the scene, to the left if they didn’t. At first this seemed a ridiculous enterprise, especially discouraging because there was absolutely no reaction from the audience. They sat there like wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s, busy concentrating on those levers. I was convinced we had a disaster on our hands.
Then Harry Cohn came tearing in, carrying a roll of paper twenty-five feet long, with the combined graph of those two hundred people plotted on it, and he said excitedly that the curve indicated Columbia was going to have its biggest-ever hit.
He was so certain of his film’s success that he conceived a crazily inspired plan for the premiere. “We all thought Cohn had gone mad when he decreed that ‘this picture will open in the Capitol Theater on Broadway in New York in August,’ ” Zinnemann wrote.
3
There was no air-conditioning then, and in August New York was a sweatbox. No one had ever heard of releasing a major film in mid-summer. We were convinced that his gambler’s instinct was leading to certain suicide. More was to come: Cohn declared that there would be no publicity, except for one full-page ad in the
Times
which
he
would sign as president of Columbia, urging people to see it.
Wednesday, August 5, was a reliably miserable summer day in Manhattan, the temperature a humid eighty-eight degrees. The smart
money, of course, was at the beach; those unlucky enough to have to stay in town walked around fanning themselves and complaining. “I was in Los Angeles when the picture opened on Broadway, on a sweltering August night,” Zinnemann recalled.
No premiere, no limousines, nothing. At 9:00 p.m., Marlene Dietrich (whom I hardly knew) called from New York and said that it was midnight there but the Capitol Theater was bulging, people were still standing around the block and there was an extra performance starting at one in the morning! I said, “How is that possible? There has been no publicity.” “They smell it,” she said.
William Morris cabled the good news to Frank:
From Here to Eternity
looked like a huge hit, and his performance was a big part of the equation. His mood, already up from a successful week at the Empire in Liverpool, soared. Suddenly Frank was grinning and strutting, and Ava’s eyes were narrowing. But the two of them pulled it together on August 6, when they paid a call on Mr. and Mrs. Earl Wilson at the Savoy. The columnist and his Beautiful Wife were beginning a round-the-world tour, Mrs. Wilson was celebrating her birthday, and the mood was festive. Frank and Ava “
came up from the lobby and were in a merry mood,” Wilson recalled.
“He doesn’t know whether to believe all the talk,” Ava said when Frank went to the bathroom … Frank was torn about what attitude to take about all the buildup. Should he be humble or, as one of his realist friends said, “should he start getting that old shitty feeling toward everybody who’d helped him?”
Including his wife, who after all had been instrumental in getting him the role in the first place?
“There was a series of senseless quarrels with Ava,” Wilson wrote.
She wanted him to stay in London until she was finished shooting her picture; he had no intention of playing the prince consort. “I’ve got a career too, you know,” he said coldly. A couple of nights after they made nice for the Wilsons, the Sinatras had such a violent battle in the St. John’s Wood flat, replete with flying furniture and broken crockery, that their landlord lost his English composure and, red faced, threatened them with eviction. It didn’t matter: Frank was already gone.
“
Dialogue between Ava and hubby Frankie Sinatra as actually heard in London’s swank Ambassador hotel dining room,” Frank Morriss wrote in his August 12 column:
Frankie-Boy: What time is it? Ava: How do I know?
Frankie-Boy: I’ll be seeing you … Whereupon he exits …
That night he packed his bags and flew home. Alone.
When he landed at Idlewild, it was as if he’d gone through the looking glass—from drab, still war-ravaged England, cool and clammy even in August, to hot, pulsating New York City, where everyone
—everyone
, from baggage handlers to cabbies to cops—was congratulating him on his brilliant performance.
Hey, Frankie! Hey, Frankie! Hey, Maggio!
He couldn’t stop grinning. Suddenly everybody wanted to be his friend. The phone in his suite at the Waldorf Towers was ringing off the hook, with more congratulations, and with offers. NBC, which had been interested in him in 1952 but had faded fast when CBS canceled his TV show, was back, talking about an exclusive contract for radio and television. Milton Berle, the guy who used to make fun of his low ratings, wanted Frank to appear on his show for $6,000. Six thousand dollars, for one night—almost as much as he’d made for all twelve weeks of
From Here to Eternity;
more than three times as much as they’d paid him for that night in Naples.
Offers kept flooding in. Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City wanted Frank as soon as he could get there; so did Bill Miller’s Riviera in Fort Lee. He was called for television and films: an Army movie with Dan Dailey; a Fox musical with Marilyn Monroe,
Pink Tights
. And most interesting of all, a waterfront picture with Elia Kazan, set in Hoboken …
In the meantime, MGM was planning to rerelease
The Kissing Bandit—
a backhanded compliment if there ever was one. His agents at William Morris were suddenly all smiles: he could hear it in their voices over the phone.
Frank distrusted every last glad-hander. He preferred to believe the grudging noises his former detractors were making. “
Looking through my Frank Sinatra file today, I discovered that I have been about evenly divided in my praise and my criticism of Frankie-boy,” the Hollywood gossip Jimmie Fidler wrote in mid-August.
Of late, the file is heavily critical, so it pleases me at this time to add something to the good side of the Sinatra ledger.
I am referring to the strong comeback Frank has made, just when everybody figured he was washed up …
About his performance in “From Here to Eternity” a number of columnists are predicting that Sinatra has next year’s Academy Award in his hip pocket.
His performance had thrown everybody for a loop. The toughest reviewers were melting. “
For the first time,” the
New York Post
’s Richard Watts wrote, “I find myself in the ranks of his ardent admirers. Instead of exploiting a personality, he proves he is an actor by playing the luckless Maggio with a kind of doomed gaiety that is both real and immensely touching.”
“Doomed gaiety”—that was good. For the past three years doomed gaiety had been the only kind he’d had. But it was the death scene that got them, he knew it. He and Monty had talked about that scene
a dozen times. The trick, according to Clift, was not overplaying it. Dying was like snow falling.
But now he was living—livin’ in a great big way, as the old Dorothy Fields lyric had it. Again he could stroll into Toots Shor’s like the conquering hero (“You crumb bum!” Toots sang out happily at the sight of him); again he could wink at the Copa Girls and decide which would be on the menu first.
Atlantic City was golden in the late-August sun. Frank flared his nostrils and inhaled the salty air. Skinny spread his well-tailored arms to hug him, then indicated a short, sour-looking man in sunglasses and a fedora. Surely Frank remembered their good friend Sam Giancana?
The boardwalk crowds surged into the club to get a glimpse of Frank; the sunburned honeymooners held each other close as he sang to them, better than ever. Dolly came down and pinched his cheeks some more. Skinny wouldn’t let her touch her purse. He was having to put on extra shows at 2:00 a.m. to accommodate the overflow.
Eternity
was breaking box-office records in New York and Chicago, the only two cities where it was playing so far: canny Cohn had decided to build the fire slowly. And the Oscar talk was gathering steam.
ACADEMY AWARD RACE BEGINS, read an August 30 headline in Lubbock, Texas, where
From Here to Eternity
couldn’t even be seen yet. “Biggest surprise of the film is the reportedly fine straight acting of Song-and-Dance Man Sinatra,” the accompanying story read, a little wistfully.
Naturally, his good fortune couldn’t go uncontested. “
Frank Sinatra has been receiving a merciless needling,” Jimmie Fidler noted, “from a New York columnist—one with whom Frank swapped punches in front of a night club a year or so back. Some of the newspaperman’s cracks have been so ugly that even people who admit they have no great admiration for Sinatra are beginning to take offense.”
In fact, Frank’s assisted mugging of Lee Mortimer at Ciro’s had taken place not a year or so before, but in April 1947—ancient history in newspaper terms. Mortimer had long since had the opportunity to mug Sinatra back, and to savor his downfall. And Frank had fallen and
fallen, but—maddeningly—never quite hit bottom. Now, just as the singer was starting to enjoy an improbable resurgence, the columnist was gently fading into obscurity. Throughout the summer, filling in for the vacationing Walter Winchell, Mortimer snapped at Sinatra’s heels. On August 31, he wrote: “
Those dark cheaters Frank Sinatra is sporting on Lexington Ave. are not to hide him from the autograph hunters. He’s got a beautiful shiner.”
Whether Frank had received an actual black eye from a romantic rival or a metaphorical one from the envious columnist was never answered. It was Mortimer’s last shot at the singer.
Frank called his wife almost every day, even after he’d sent another conquest home in a cab. Ava, after all, was the one he couldn’t conquer. He tried everything on the transatlantic phone that August: at times, knowing that she took pleasure in his success (and disdained him for his failures), he spoke with pride of his growing triumph; but the second he began to sound cocky, he could hear her glancing at her watch. Then there were the bad moments, when she made him crazy enough to try to bully her.
