Frank: The Voice (92 page)

Nobody knew this better than Sinatra, but casting for
Eternity
was in flux, as casting frequently is for big movies. As were Frank’s nerves. He distracted himself by organizing a Christmas show for the
Mogambo
company: he sang carols, native choirs performed, Ford recited “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Christmas passed, then New Year’s, and there was still no word from Columbia. He could exert only so much influence on Harry Cohn, and being thirteen thousand miles removed from the action didn’t boost his confidence. Since Frank was currently without a press agent—he could no longer afford the weekly retainer he’d been
paying Nat Shapiro, and had precious little to publicize anyway—he did what he could. He worked the phones from Nairobi, kept Sanicola jumping, spun the columnists. At least one of those positive reports about Frank’s screen test came straight from Frank himself. And it was sheer genius to convert his desperation—his offer to Cohn to play Maggio for next to nothing—into largesse. (Who was keeping exact track of how much of his
Miracle of the Bells
pay he’d tithed? It had to have been “at least a bulk,” whatever that meant.)

To a certain extent, a publicist was unnecessary. To an extent, by sheer virtue of his continued notoriety and his connection to Ava, Sinatra’s name stayed in the news. This cut two ways, though. Ava was now the star; Frank, the consort. Those who knew something about the pathetic but plucky character of Maggio from the novel (as Hedda Hopper clearly did) appreciated the delicious appropriateness of Sinatra’s
seeking the role, but they were in the minority. Most of the world had had it with him. Even Earl Wilson. “
When Frank Sinatra was flying to Africa and then back to play a nightclub date in Boston, nobody in the press was interested,” the columnist recalled. “Even I wasn’t much interested. I noted that when he arrived at the airport, Frank needed a haircut.”

Ava and John Ford on the set of
Mogambo
, early 1953. Two tough characters who clashed at first, then grew deeply fond of each other.
(photo credit 32.2)

Montgomery Clift and Frank shoot
From Here to Eternity
, Hawaii, April 1953. Sinatra, ordinarily a prima donna on movie shoots, “was very, very good—all the time,” director Fred Zinnemann recalled. “No histrionics, no bad behavior.” He knew the film was his last best chance.
(photo credit 33.1)

T
he second week of 1953 brought a welcome distraction—welcome to Frank, at any rate: Ava was pregnant again. For her part, Ava felt doubly miserable, for she was sick as a dog and she knew the baby wasn’t his.

It might have been Bunny Allen’s; it might have belonged to any one of two or three different propmen, she wasn’t sure. Once she tied one on after work, anything could happen, and frequently did. But she knew it wasn’t Frank’s: the numbers didn’t add up. Conception would
have occurred in early December, right around the time he was playing the French Casino. Maybe even as late as the tenth or twelfth. Happy Birthday, Frank.

She couldn’t bear to tell him that she would have to get rid of this one too, and he mistook her misery for mere physical discomfort. “
He was delighted,” she recalled.

A week later he was gone again.

Had his plane gone down on this trip—as, for example, would the plane of the great young classical pianist William Kapell, later that year—Frank Sinatra’s legend would no doubt have grown over the decades to come. He would not have been forgotten like the two-dimensional Russ Columbo or Buddy Clark; rather, he would have left a large, tragic, stunted legacy, that of a great talent cut short at a low ebb (like Hank Williams, who had died of an overdose that New Year’s Day). The grand and troubled relationship with Ava, never resolved, would have been remembered and romanticized; the dozens of great recordings he had already made would have grown in stature. Even the few slight but charming movies would have taken on a nostalgic glow. His career decline near the end would have given the saga an extra fillip. Sinatra would have been recalled not only as an important figure of
the mid-twentieth century but also as a great should-have-been. Who knew what he might have become?

But his plane didn’t go down (nor, for all his abject fear of heights and flying, would any of the thousands of flights he would take over six decades). Instead, he arrived, unheralded, at Idlewild on a chilly afternoon in late January 1953.

“
Frank Sinatra, needing a haircut, got into town from Africa and Ava and headed for Boston …” This was the full extent of Earl Wilson’s item on Sinatra, final ellipses and all, in his column of Friday, January 23. In fact, Frank had landed in New York on Monday the nineteenth, but he was such old news at this point that Wilson could wait awhile to take note of his arrival. All but incognito, Sinatra was on his way to do two weeks at Lou Walters’s Latin Quarter (where Lou’s daughter Barbara, aged twenty-three, was director of publicity). From there he would fly to Canada and play a week at the Chez Paree in Montreal. As promised, he was touring the provinces. The gigs were all he could get, and he was glad for them.

The next day—it was Eisenhower’s inauguration—Frank got that haircut, flew to Boston, checked in at the Ritz-Carlton, and went over to the Latin Quarter to rehearse. Young Barbara Walters greeted him eagerly, telling him proudly of the newspaper interviews she had lined up. Frank smiled wearily, imagining the line of bullshit he would have to spin for the gentlemen of the press. He took the band through its paces, liked what he heard, and went back to the hotel alone. A little bit after eight, the phone rang. It was Bert Allenberg, calling from the Morris office in L.A. Was Frank sitting down?

Sinatra poured himself a tumblerful of Jack Daniel’s after he hung up. He drank the whiskey, refilled the glass, and drank that one off too. He paced the living room of his suite, fast, talking to himself. “
I wanted to tell somebody but there was nobody around to tell it to!” he later recalled. “I thought I’d go off my rocker.”

The shock of finally getting what he had wanted so badly was so great that at first he wasn’t sure how to feel. One of his first emotions,
irrationally enough, was sharp regret at having agreed to work for so little. A thousand dollars a week … It was not only less than pocket change;
¹
it could brand him for life as cut-rate. A couple of nights after opening at the Quarter, he went over to George Wein’s Storyville club in the Hotel Buckminster to hear Duke Ellington, and got to talking with Pearl Bailey, who was also on the bill.

She asked Frank what he was up to. Another movie? Bailey turned to her husband, Ellington’s drummer, Louie Bellson, and gave him a wink. She just loved to see Frankie in those sailor suits. Bellson gave her a mock scowl.

Frank shook his head. No more sailor suits. “
Pearl, they’ve offered me a movie called
From Here to Eternity
. They’re paying me a thousand bucks a week, which is nothing.”

Bailey looked impressed.
From Here to Eternity
? That big book?

That was the one.

“Take it and don’t look back,” Bailey told him.

He took it. And he’d brought it off without having to put a horse’s head in Harry Cohn’s bed. Mario Puzo was the one who did that, fifteen years later. The famous scene in
The Godfather
has a Sinatra-like singer named Johnny Fontane beg his padrone Don Corleone to help him land a career-changing movie role in the face of strong opposition from a Cohn-like studio chief named Jack Woltz. The novelist knew that Sicilian criminals frequently used dead animals as warning signs to their enemies, and he knew that Harry Cohn was an avid horseplayer (though he never owned a racehorse). Puzo was also aware that Cohn had had close gangland ties since the beginning of his career, that he fancied himself a tough guy—he even wore a gold-and-ruby friendship ring given to him by a smooth mafioso named Johnny Rosselli, Frank Costello’s West Coast representative.