Frank: The Voice (114 page)

He was sitting on the left aisle, three-quarters of the way back. Little Nancy, beside him, was squeezing his arm; next to her, Frankie was leaning forward in his seat, his mouth slightly open, watching the proceedings avidly.

The buzz in Frank’s head stopped for a moment when Donna Reed won for Best Supporting Actress. Then it began again. When William Holden won Best Actor instead of Monty, his daughter gave Frank’s arm an extra squeeze.
Don’t be too disappointed if you don’t win, Daddy
, she whispered in his ear.

Don’t you be, either
, he whispered back.

An hour and a quarter into the show, close to the end, Mercedes McCambridge walked to the podium. The buzz in Frank’s head stopped abruptly, and he watched her closely. She was a chunky little broad with a ringing voice and a short haircut, wearing an unflattering white strapless gown—not a looker, but she’d won Best Supporting Actress in 1949 for
All the King’s Men
.

“
Nominees for the best performance by an actor in a supporting role,” she began, “are Eddie Albert, in
Roman Holiday
, Paramount; Brandon De Wilde, in
Shane
, Paramount; Jack Palance, in
Shane
, Paramount; Frank Sinatra, in
From Here to Eternity
, Columbia—”

Here, for the first time, there was applause.

“Robert Strauss, in
Stalag 17
, Paramount. And who, please, is the winner?” She turned and took the open envelope, saw the name on it before she returned to the microphone. With a gasp, she said, “The winner is Frank Sinatra, in
From Here to Eternity
.” And as the audience erupted, she hopped up and down, one small hop, like a little girl who’d just gotten exactly what she wanted for Christmas.

Barely anybody in the theater liked him, but at that moment everyone there felt exactly the way Mercedes McCambridge felt. A great gift had been given to them all: they had witnessed a miracle. Hollywood
loves a show, and there was no show to compare to this. “
A peculiar thing happened and I can’t explain it,” Louella Parsons wrote later. “I ran into person after person who said, ‘He’s a so-and-so but I hope he gets it. He was great!’ ”

Little Nancy burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying. Frankie was gazing at his father in astonishment. Frank kissed his daughter’s wet cheek, grasped his son’s hand, and first walked, then trotted down the aisle. It was an easy, graceful trot, as though a great weight had been removed from his shoulders. The applause grew louder. Frank climbed the stage steps, shook Donald O’Connor’s hand, and kissed him on the cheek. “
Unbelievable,” Frank said, shaking his head. He went to the podium, kissed McCambridge—she cooed with pleasure—and took his Oscar. He bowed deeply as the audience shouted bravos. Then he looked carefully at the gleaming statuette in his hands.

“Um—” he began, glancing up, then looking back down nervously.

“That’s a clever opening,” he said, to laughter. He smiled. The theater then went dead silent: nobody quite dared to breathe. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Frank began, still finding it hard to face the crowd. He clearly hadn’t prepared a speech. “I’m, I’m deeply thrilled,” he stammered. “And, and very moved. And I really, really don’t know what to say, because this is a whole new kind of thing. You know, I—song-and-dance-man-type stuff—” He grinned and glanced over at O’Connor. “And, uh, I’m terribly pleased, and if I start thanking everybody, I’ll do a one-reeler up here, so I’d better not. And, uh, I’d just like to say, however, that, uh—” He smiled mischievously. “They’re doing a lot of
songs
here tonight, but nobody asked me to—”

He didn’t have to say the last word. He had now proved, definitively, that he could do something besides sing.

He was grinning broadly as the crowd laughed, looking around and seeming at ease for the first time. “I love you, though, thank you very much,” he said, adding, as if further explanation were necessary, “I’m absolutely thrilled.” And he blew the crowd a big kiss, took McCambridge’s arm, and walked off.

Watching on television in Santa Monica, Ralph Greenson turned to his wife. “
That’s it,” the psychiatrist said. “We’ll never see him again.”

He was right.

Several of the biographies say that Frank thanked Harry Cohn, Buddy Adler, and Fred Zinnemann that night. In fact, he cleverly thanked everybody by thanking nobody. At his brief press conference backstage, amid the grinning faces of Cohn, Adler, Zinnemann, and Donna Reed
—From Here to Eternity
had virtually swept the evening, winning eight Oscars and tying
Gone With the Wind
—Sinatra expressed his regret that the absent Montgomery Clift had failed to win the Academy Award he so deserved.
¹
“
I wanted to thank Monty Clift personally,” Frank said. “I learned more about acting from Clift—it was equal to what I learned about musicals from Gene Kelly.”

Then he posed for the cameras with Reed, both of them clutching their golden statuettes, both wearing the kinds of smiles that actors never smile in the movies. Frank had been photographed grinning like this once before, the time the cameras had caught him dancing with Lana Turner, the wedding band that joined him to Nancy clearly and indiscreetly visible on his left hand.

The woman he’d left Nancy (and Lana) for, the woman whose ring he still wore despite everything, the woman who had been largely responsible for getting him the role of Maggio, was the one person he never thanked. She was in Madrid, as busy in her way as he was in his.

He drove his son and daughter home, and it was only the thought of them, warm in the car with him and unable to stop talking about the miracle of the evening, that kept Frank from driving the Cadillac into a light pole. The Oscar sat on the seat between him and Nancy Sandra, like a fourth passenger. The rain had stopped; the streets were black
and slick; the streetlights had halos. He drove west on Hollywood, turned south on Fairfax to Sunset, turned right, and continued west. When he pulled up in front of 320 North Carolwood, all the lights in the house were on.

He knew people were waiting for him in the apartment on Beverly Glen: Jule Styne had thrown together a little congratulatory party, with Gene Kelly and Sammy Cahn and Betty Comden and Adolph Green and a few others. There would be a lot of champagne, and a fresh-faced starlet named Charlotte Austin. But Frank wasn’t in the mood to see anybody—everybody who congratulated him seemed, in some small or large way, to take responsibility for his triumph. The one person who had somehow managed not to do this, who had seemed genuinely happy for him without having to take anything at all from him, had been his ex-wife.

Frank and Donna Reed hold their Oscars for
From Here to Eternity
. Hollywood rejoiced in Sinatra’s victory, the greatest career comeback ever. Louella Parsons wrote later: “I ran into person after person who said, ‘He’s a so-and-so but I hope he gets it. He was great!’ ”
(photo credit 40.2)

So he turned left on Sunset instead of right, away from Beverly Glen, and guided the Cadillac over the slick black boulevard, driving carefully through the curves. He passed the Beverly Hills Hotel and turned off Sunset, among the dark, quiet streets with their tall palm trees and big, self-possessed houses. After a little while he pulled over and parked.

Sitting under a streetlight, he picked up the statuette and held it. He looked at it, ran his hand over its cool smoothness, turned it in the light. It was deliciously heavy: eight and a half pounds, the size of a newborn.

He opened the car door and got out, the statuette in his hand.

“
I ducked the party, lost the crowds, and took a walk,” he said years later. “Just me and Oscar! I think I relived my entire lifetime that night as I walked up and down the streets of Beverly Hills. Even when a cop stopped me, he couldn’t bring me down to earth. It was very nice of him, although I did have to wait until his partner came cruising to assure him that I was who I said I was and that I had not stolen the statue I was carrying.”

But he had not stolen the statue. He was Frank Sinatra.

The true origin of this book was a slightly rowdy dinner at a Santa Monica restaurant called Guido’s in September of 2004. I was finishing
Dean & Me
, the memoir I co authored with Jerry Lewis; Jerry was in the midst of preparing his annual Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon and in order to give some of the participants in the show a night off, his manager Claudia Stabile hosted an impromptu party. Present, among others, were the bandleader Jack Eglash, the guitarist (and Claudia’s husband-to-be) Joe Lano, the pianist and arranger Vincent Falcone, the singer Jack Jones, and, to my great good fortune, me. The occasion was convivial and uninhibited and show-biz gossipy in a Vegas-centric way, and at a certain point in the evening the conversation turned to Frank Sinatra.

Several of the men present had worked with Sinatra; almost everyone at the table, myself excepted, had known him well. Given the atmosphere of boozy hilarity, it wouldn’t have surprised me a bit if the talk had been mildly iconoclastic or gently scathing—the Old Man (as they all referred to him) had been dead for six years, after all—but, in fact, it was uniformly reverent.