Frank: The Voice (102 page)

A couple of nights after Frank moved back in with Ava, he told her he’d be home by 2:00 a.m.—and stayed out till 5:00, getting congratulated for everything by his pals. He could take a lot of congratulation.

“
Isn’t it a little late to be coming home?” she asked him.

His lips tightened. “Don’t cut the corners too close on me, baby,” he said. “This is the way my life is going to be from now on.”

That night Ava’s reserved table at the Riviera was empty. His concentration shot, Frank gave a dud of a show.

“
When he was down and out,” Ava said, “he was so sweet. But now that he’s successful again, he’s become his old arrogant self. We were happier when he was on the skids.”

There was a grain of truth to it, but just a grain. The reality was that their relationship was impossible by definition. They were competitors as well as lovers. And now the only glue that held them together was loosening: Ava confided to friends that Frank could no longer satisfy her sexually.

“
Almost since their marriage, the Ava Gardner–Frank Sinatra situation has been what the military experts call ‘fluid,’ ” Dorothy Kilgallen wrote on September 30.

It wasn’t the meals she disliked; it was his choice of dining companions. At Joe E. Lewis’s Copacabana opening, Frank sat ringside with a group including Frank Costello and a comely young thing who reportedly found Sinatra “
devastating.” Ava read the report, and blew up. Ava’s old ally, the quiet but effective MGM publicity chief, Howard Strickling, got wind of the umpteenth domestic disturbance, and
gently reminded her that the studio was still paying her sizable salary. Could she and Strickling figure out a way, just for a moment, to divert the public’s attention from her marriage and redirect it to
Mogambo
? It would be nice if Ava could attend the premiere with her husband; it would also be nice if they managed to look like a happy couple.

Somehow they brought it off. On October 1, at Radio City, an Associated Press photographer got a shot of the pair standing close together and grinning real grins. “
Together again,” the caption read. “The situation may change greatly before press time, but Frank Sinatra and his actress wife, Ava Gardner, were together Thursday night and here’s a picture to prove it.”

The next morning, the papers were full of rave reviews for her performance as Honey Bear Kelly. But when a reporter phoned and read her some of the notices, she told him, “
Don’t believe a word of it—I don’t.”

She might as well have been talking about her marriage.

That night, she and Frank took a TWA Constellation to Los Angeles—she had an L.A. premiere for
Mogambo;
he was booked for a week at the Sands—and, somewhere over Nebraska, they reached an accommodation. A reporter called one of Strickling’s minions (the studio employed a publicity staff of fifty) and wondered aloud about the dissonance between the cozy images and the continuing reports of marital unrest. “
They’re together—and that’s the main thing,” the MGM rep said.

Ava did her best to defend the united front. “
If Frankie goes to New York to do ‘Waterfront’ for Elia Kazan, I’ll accompany him,” she told a columnist. “Meanwhile, we are sort of up in the air. We don’t have a house or even a car.”

It was all a ruse. The moment the press wasn’t looking, they put on their sunglasses and went their separate ways—Frank to 20th Century Fox to discuss
Pink Tights
, Ava to Culver City to see what fresh outrage Metro had in mind for her. But it seemed there was a live possibility outside the studio: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Herman’s younger brother and currently the hottest writer-director in Hollywood (he’d
won Oscars in both categories in 1950 and 1951, for
A Letter to Three Wives
and
All About Eve
), had written a script called
The Barefoot Contessa
, and would be shooting it in Rome in January. Mankiewicz would also be producing. He had already signed Humphrey Bogart, and he wanted Ava, badly. He was bargaining with the studio chairman, Nicholas Schenck, in Metro’s New York office, for her services.

Ava sat up and took notice. Bogart … Rome … a barefoot contessa … She didn’t know what the hell the movie was about, but it sounded just right for her. She decided she wanted it.

Meanwhile, an odd item appeared in Jimmie Fidler’s column:

Most likely the leak was an attempted warning, on Frank’s part, to Ava; but it only steeled her resolve to get out of town—without Frank. On October 5, she officially asked MGM for a temporary release from her contract in order to do
The Barefoot Contessa
.

And Frank went on the radio. He didn’t want to do another television series—it was too hard, and the screen was too small. His future, he felt, would be about making records and movies. In the meantime, though, he could keep his profile high, and his wallet full, with comparatively little effort. On October 6, at Radio City West on Sunset and Vine, Sinatra taped the first episode of a detective-themed new series titled, a little too poignantly,
Rocky Fortune
.

Frank played the title character, “
a footloose and fancy-free young
man”—out of work, in other words—who got a different job assignment every week from the Gridley Employment Agency. Over the show’s twenty-five-week run, Rocky would labor as a process server, museum tour guide, cabbie, bodyguard (to a professional football player—the magic of radio!), truck driver, and social director for a Catskills resort, among other things.

On the premier episode, he took script in hand and read into the mike: “
Hi, I don’t know what it is about me and employment—we start out together but sooner or later, usually sooner, we reach the fork in the road. You take last week: the employment agency sent me out on a job as an oyster shucker, but someone tried to serve me up on a half shell, with a real crazy cocktail sauce—blood.”

It was the radio equivalent of a B movie—unapologetically cheesy, though perhaps there should have been some apologies. Among the writers who produced this claptrap were Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts, both of whom would go on to win Emmy Awards for dramatic television—but Sinatra really should have known better. Still, he imparted a certain tongue-in-cheek verve to the enterprise, and he collected that paycheck.

Of all the numerous characters who’d been buttering Frank up in the last two months, the most insistent was a movie producer named Sam Spiegel. Spiegel was an operator straight out of a Saul Bellow novel: heavy jawed, prow nosed, and pinkie ringed, he had an indefinable Eastern European accent, a looming, slightly menacing stare, and a murky past, complete with at least one deportation and jail time for kiting checks. “
He was always surrounded with beautiful women, whom he graciously dispatched to his friends, or whomever he wanted to sell something to,” recalled George Jacobs. “He seemed like a joke. Yet he was the real deal.”

Spiegel began his producing career in Berlin and fled Germany upon the rise of the Nazis. His path to America was circuitous, and likely illegal: when he finally made it to Hollywood in the late 1930s,
he adopted the alias S. P. Eagle in an attempt to throw off the bloodhounds. Over the next decade he bootstrapped himself into a Hollywood career, forming important alliances with two equally colorful characters, Orson Welles and John Huston. In 1951, Spiegel produced
The African Queen
, with Huston directing and Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in the starring roles: Bogart won an Oscar for Best Actor.

Sam Spiegel began pursuing Sinatra relentlessly. According to Spiegel, the role of the longshoreman and ex-prizefighter Terry Malloy in Budd Schulberg’s script for
On the Waterfront
had practically been written for Frank. The film was even going to be shot in Hoboken: it was perfect. “
For Chrissakes, you
are
Hoboken!” the producer told Sinatra.

But in Hollywood’s eyes, Frank was still not a star. He had given one terrific performance, but in the cold-eyed view of the movie business he might still be a flash in the pan. He had dazzled in an ensemble, but could he actually carry a dramatic picture? Was Sam Spiegel, gambler though he was, willing to make that bet?

In fact, with Sinatra, Spiegel was hedging his bets.

The actor Spiegel really wanted to play Terry Malloy was Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando could carry a dramatic picture; Marlon Brando was It. Not yet thirty—eight years younger than Sinatra—Brando had already redefined the art of movie acting. When he was on a screen, even just scratching himself, you couldn’t take your eyes off him. He had already been nominated for two Academy Awards, once as the oaf Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and then—utterly transforming himself—as the titular Mexican revolutionary in
Viva Zapata!
He had transformed himself again and again—into Mark Antony in
Julius Caesar
, into a motorcycle hood in
The Wild One
.

Marlon Brando could do anything, especially put asses in movie seats. But Brando didn’t want to join the cast of
On the Waterfront
, because both Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg had named names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

For months, the actor refused even to read Schulberg’s script, yet
Spiegel, even as he wooed Sinatra, kept after Brando. “
Politics has nothing to do with this,” the producer told him. “It’s about your talent, it’s about your career.”

Finally, Brando read the script, and saw Spiegel’s point. It was an extremely powerful story, a metaphor for important themes of the era: political corruption, the perils of silence. None of the roles the actor had played so far embodied an inner torment anything like that which Budd Schulberg had written into Terry Malloy. As with Maggio, there was a Christlike quality to Malloy. It was another story about a common man facing down brute authority, and it would have been right up Sinatra’s alley.

Elia Kazan almost agreed. “
Frank Sinatra would have been wonderful, but Marlon was more vulnerable,” the director said. “He had this great range of violent emotions to draw from. He had more schism, more pain, and so much shame—the actor who played Terry had to have a lot of shame.”

An interesting point. Frank was filled with vulnerability, but shame wasn’t quite part of his artistic palette. Not that it was a foreign emotion—he would feel deep shame at crucial moments throughout his life—but it wasn’t one he was fond of showing. Vulnerability was useful: vulnerability could get you laid. Showing shame, by Frank’s lights anyway (and maybe even by the code of the streets of Hoboken), could get you nothing but contempt.

Kazan was right: Brando was the better choice for Terry Malloy. And when Spiegel had to break the news to Sinatra, he found it convenient to blame the decision on the director. It was a rotten business, the producer cooed; a terrible thing—might Frank be interested in the role of Father Barry, the waterfront priest?

Frank swallowed the urge to tell Sam Spiegel that he and Elia Kazan could go fuck themselves. Instead, what he said was that he had already played a priest once, in
The Miracle of the Bells
, and it hadn’t worked out. He was going to leave the turned-around-collar business to Crosby.

With all due respect, Spiegel said,
The Miracle of the Bells
was pap. And that had been years ago, before Frank showed the world what he could really do as an actor. Father Barry was a great part, an important part in a hard-hitting script, Spiegel said. Would he consider it?

He considered it. “
Frank Sinatra’s now practically sure to play the labor priest in S. P. Eagle’s waterfront picture,” Earl Wilson wrote on October 2.

Then, on October 10, Louella Parsons wrote, “
Frank Sinatra has decided against doing ‘Waterfront’ with Elia Kazan in New York. ‘I love the role of the priest,’ he said, ‘but I only had two scenes.’ ”

But what had really happened in the week between Wilson’s column and Parsons’s was that Spiegel and Kazan had given the key role of Father Barry—who was in many more than two scenes in
On the Waterfront—
to Karl Malden, who’d co-starred with Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and had won an Academy Award for the role. Frank had been quite thoroughly shut out.