Frank: The Voice (94 page)

Army drill was just the beginning of Montgomery Clift’s proficiency. Like Sinatra, he had been galvanized by
From Here to Eternity
from the moment the novel came out, knowing at once that he was born to play the role of Robert E. Lee Prewitt, Angelo Maggio’s best friend in G Company. It was almost as if James Jones had been thinking specifically of the actor when he described Prewitt: “
a kind of intensity in the face … a sort of deep tragic fire in the eyes.” Also like Sinatra, Clift was not the first choice for his role: Harry Cohn wanted the Columbia contract player Aldo Ray—a raspy-voiced, muscle-bound former Navy frogman, whose slight air of vulnerability stemmed mainly from his inexperience as an actor. Ray hadn’t worked for a couple of months, his salary was mounting up, and as far as Cohn was concerned, that was that. But Fred Zinnemann, to his great credit, was firm on Clift—so firm that the director threatened to quit unless Clift was cast. Taken aback by the soft-voiced Austrian’s vehemence, the studio chief asked him why.

“
Because I want to make a good picture, and Montgomery Clift is the only actor who can play Prewitt,” Zinnemann said.

He knew what he was talking about. Zinnemann had directed Clift in the actor’s second movie,
The Search
, in 1948, and was well aware of his gifts. The two had collaborated closely, the director even allowing the actor to rewrite his lines, much to the chagrin of the film’s producer. “
His scenes bristled with life,” Zinnemann remembered. “And he filled
the screen with reverberations above and beyond the movie itself.” The role of Prewitt—a sensitive outsider, a boxer who quit fighting because he accidentally blinded a friend in an Army boxing match—required an actor of depth and mystery, one who was himself a sensitive outsider. Montgomery Clift, a tortured homosexual and alcoholic, filled the bill in every respect.

Clift was a brilliantly intuitive, groundbreaking actor, with a gift for vanishing into his roles. He believed in the souls of his characters more than the words they spoke. “
Good dialogue simply isn’t enough to explain all the infinite gradations of a character,” he said. “It’s behavior—it’s what’s going on behind the lines.” And as one who instinctively looked beyond surface appearances, he understood Frank Sinatra’s potential. As early as the fall of 1952, when Sinatra was still a dark horse, Clift told a friend that Frank would be perfect to play Maggio.

Sinatra hit the ground running from the moment he landed in California. First came the week of rehearsals at the end of February, then five weeks of shooting interiors at Columbia. And remarkably, during this intense month and a half, the company and crew of
From Here to Eternity
saw not a trace of One-Take Charlie, the movie-set prima donna. Frank was thoroughly in gear, heeding Zinnemann and, especially, Clift as though his life depended on it. Which, in a real way, it did.

The two actors hit it off instantly. Each man stared into the other’s remarkable blue eyes, recognizing not just the other’s brilliance but also the wounds. “
We had a mutual admiration thing going on,” Frank said later, deflecting with characteristically tough talk his attraction to Clift’s looks and obvious classiness (the actor was related to Abraham Lincoln’s postmaster general and a secretary of the Treasury under Andrew Jackson)—not to mention the instant meeting of minds and sensibilities between Sinatra, the secretly sensitive genius, and Clift, the equally brilliant artist with the troubling sexuality. On the set of Clift’s first movie,
Red River
, John Wayne had ostracized the young
actor, and burst into laughter when the director, Howard Hawks, first tried to rehearse the climactic fistfight between the two men. But remarkably, despite all Sinatra’s swaggering, no evidence exists that, even in the hypermasculine atmosphere of his coterie, he ever made a belittling remark about Clift. Rather, Frank seems to have understood at once that as deeply as he understood Maggio, he would need acting instruction from Clift on the order of the dancing instruction he’d received from Gene Kelly.

“
Monty really coached Sinatra in the part of Maggio,” said Clift’s close friend Jack Larson. “He spelled out every beat, every moment, and Sinatra was grateful.” The process began during rehearsals and continued throughout the shoot. After work was over for the day, the two men often went to the Naples Restaurant up the block, continuing their shoptalk over dinner.

“
By his intensity,” Zinnemann recalled, “[Clift] forced the other actors to come up to his standard of performance.” And he forced Sinatra to raise his game as an actor. As Frank later explained:

In his singing career Frank had gotten huge mileage out of communicating vulnerability, and in Montgomery Clift he recognized a fellow artist. Screen acting, though, involved considerably more than looking soulful and putting a catch in your voice. There was an intense subtlety to it, a poetry of minute gestures. It was Sinatra’s brilliance to understand this, and to observe, minutely, every move Clift made.

As Tom Santopietro wrote:

The rhythms of Maggio’s Brooklynese were music to Frank’s ears: when Sinatra spoke Maggio’s lines, he might as well have been talking himself. He moved into the dialogue just as he inhabited the lyrics of a song, only in this case the words fit like a glove:

Or:

That’s “would not,” not “ wouldn’t.” The difference is tiny but crucial: it instantly and sharply denotes the wised-up street-corner character, circa early-to-mid-twentieth-century Greater New York–New Jersey area, that Damon Runyon immortalized, James Jones humanized, and Frank Sinatra was and would ever more publicly show himself to be. There’s a poetry to this breaking up of contractions into their constituent parts that Sinatra would carry to the end of his life.
⁵
Maggio freed him to become himself.

As a singer, Frank seemed to have understood from the beginning that he could be nobody but himself. As awed as he might have been
by Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday, he was remarkably free from influences. His voice, and the personality behind it, were unique. With acting it was a different story—he’d come to the art late. Singing is a form of acting, but a limited one. And the only persona Sinatra could come up with in his first films was a version of his early stage persona, which emphasized only his better angels—boyish charm, shy modesty.

Now he wasn’t a boy anymore. The world had gotten more complicated, and so had he. His face and hair had thinned; his spirit had darkened. Wanting to update his image in 1948, he’d tried for the delinquent role in
Knock on Any Door
, but he was clearly too old to play a juvenile. Three years later, he’d attempted to bring somber tones to his performance in
Meet Danny Wilson
, but the movie came and went too fast for anyone to notice.

From Here to Eternity
was his big chance, in every possible way: not only because of the distinguished material and company and the huge conspicuousness of the project, but also because of where Frank was in his life. His first legitimate shot at a big dramatic role had arrived at a moment when he was truly old enough, and experienced enough, to give a complicated performance. The paradox was that he had come to dramatic acting late enough in the game that he needed to get up to speed very quickly. “
He was scared,” said Ernest Borgnine, who played Fatso. “He had to prove himself again because he was right down to nothing.” But he was also canny enough (and humbled enough) to realize his great good fortune at playing opposite a master.

An immediate bond between Frank and Monty was alcohol, though both were punctilious about not drinking during working hours. After hours was a different story. The author of
From Here to Eternity
, James Jones, a constant, starstruck presence on the shoot, was the third leg of the triangle. A little man with a big head and a tough scowl, Jones, like Sinatra and Clift, and like the author’s fictional surrogate, Prewitt, was a sufferer: a hypersensitive former boxer and combat soldier battling his own demons of conflicted sexuality and alcoholism. Jones was strongly attracted to Clift, and though the feeling wasn’t mutual, the
actor, who was obsessed with dragging every possible bit of information about the military and his character out of the writer, stayed close. Frank, for his part, was awed to meet the author of a great book, and charmed to hear Jones’s stories about the real Maggio.

“
The three of them became inseparable during the filming of
From Here to Eternity
,” wrote Clift’s biographer Patricia Bosworth.

While Burt Lancaster rolled in the surf (and, off camera, the hay) with Deborah Kerr, and other company members engaged in the usual occupational amours, Sinatra, Clift, and Jones behaved like a trio of moony frat boys on spring break—the worst thing any of them got accused of was dropping beer cans out the windows of the Roosevelt Hotel. Lancaster, wrote his biographer Kate Buford, “
got so used to carrying Sinatra and Clift, dead drunk, to their rooms each night, undressing them, and putting them to bed, that on his birthday for years afterward he would get a telegram from Sinatra with the message ‘Happy Birthday, Mom.’ ”

Frank was also apparently being faithful. (Or just careful. “
After we filmed the knife fight between Montgomery Clift and myself,” Ernest Borgnine recalled, “he said, ‘Oh, hell, you guys are going to get through early. Maybe I’ll come by and we’ll have a couple of drinks, and then some broads, and who knows?’ And he never showed up.”) The gossipmongers
of the era must have felt keenly disappointed. They were watching him carefully for slipups—something with Lana Turner would have been nice, but Lana had gone to Spain on vacation. Marilyn Maxwell had finally given up on him. The only real piece of dirt that spring was his continuing tax problems, which were all over the newspapers, the IRS having just slapped a lien on his income. Never had that measly
Eternity
salary looked so good. The most striking item that March reveals is that sometime during the week of the ninth, while the company temporarily closed down so that Burt Lancaster (who’d been detained wrapping
South Sea Woman
at Warner’s) could rehearse, Frank slipped off to New York—and shopped for matching nutria trench coats for himself and Ava. The height of devotion, if not fiscal responsibility.

The role of Maggio may have had Oscar written all over it, but Sinatra was going to have to work very hard to bring it off—and to convince the world he could. Frank felt defensive enough that March that he went even further into hock to buy full-page ads in the trade papers proclaiming himself “
box office insurance.” The ads trumpeted that he’d been “
a smash success at Riviera, Fort Lee; Chez Paree, Chicago; French Casino, N.Y.; Latin Quarter, Boston; and Chez Paree, Montreal,” and urged the public to “watch for him as Maggio in Columbia Pictures’ forthcoming production, ‘From Here to Eternity.’ ”

Sinatra was talking not just to Hedda and Louella but also to such second-stringers of the Hollywood press as Frank Morriss, who had less than earthshaking business in mind. “
We concocted a little joke, which I hope will work,” Morriss wrote in his column.