Frank: The Voice (93 page)

Puzo, who was of southern-Italian ancestry, was steeped in his subject. Yet he was also a writer of considerable imagination, a novelist,
not a journalist. And while the lecherous and tyrannical Woltz bore a strong similarity to Harry Cohn, comparisons could also be drawn to other studio heads and producers.

But strong narratives seduce us: we want them to be true. And while
The Godfather
was a powerful novel, the movie version (whose screenplay Puzo also wrote) was even stronger. The sum of the film’s parts—the dark and haunting beauty of Gordon Willis’s cinematography, Nino Rota’s score, and Dean Tavoularis’s production design; the majesty of Francis Ford Coppola’s direction and the actors’ performances—all the components, taken together, had a great and somber force that made the world feel absolute faith in its truth, whatever the messy and ambiguous facts of real life.

Numerous writers and would-be authorities have put considerable effort into cobbling up a case that the Mob really was behind Frank Sinatra’s getting the role of Maggio. Various commentators have constructed elaborate scenarios based on the second-and third-and fourth-hand testimony of unreliable witnesses, many of them definitively unreliable career crooks. And all the mass of speculation rests on two simple assumptions, as neatly expressed in
All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story
, a work taken as gospel by many in the Mob-conspiracy-hunting business: “
Cohn hated Sinatra, and felt he was wrong for the part to boot.”

Or, as fictionally expressed by Jack Woltz (as played by John Marley) to Don Corleone’s consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) in
The Godfather:
“
Now listen to me, you smooth-talking son-of-a-bitch! Let me lay it on the line for you and your boss, whoever he is. Johnny Fontane will never get that movie! I don’t care how many dago guinea wop greaseball gumbahs come out of the woodwork!”
²

Harry Cohn, no shrinking violet, was certainly capable of such an explosion. But Jack Woltz is a fictional character and Harry Cohn was not. And Harry Cohn did not hate Sinatra. In fact, as Cohn’s biographer Bob Thomas wrote, “
Frank Sinatra and Harry Cohn became good friends during the years when Sinatra was enjoying his initial burst of
fame in Hollywood.” And the friendship had legs. In the fall of 1949, after Frank allowed the premiere of
Miss Grant Takes Richmond
to occur during his stint at the Capitol, Sinatra came down with strep throat so severe that an oxygen tent had to be set up in Manie Sacks’s apartment. “
It was the first time since his rise to fame that he had been seriously ill, and he was surprised to learn how few of his so-called friends responded with offers of sympathy and aid,” Thomas writes.

Cohn was a businessman with a soft heart and a hard head. He had flown to New York on business, and gone to Frank’s bedside less out of love than gratitude: Sinatra’s box office at the Capitol had buoyed the take of Columbia’s minor comedy to such an extent that Cohn was able to take out an ad in the trade papers bragging about it. He certainly didn’t hate Sinatra—quite the opposite. But in 1949 and now in 1953, the studio chief was nothing if not a pragmatist.
From Here to Eternity
was a big-budget production, to be shot on location with a star-heavy cast. The budget was creeping up. All the parts had been set except Maggio, and Eli Wallach’s agent was digging in his heels on the actor’s high fee.

Harry Cohn had agonized over the decision. He had met with Wallach, had even provoked him in order to test his mettle. (“
He doesn’t look like an Italian—he looks like a Hebe,” Cohn said when the actor
entered his office. Understandably, Wallach exploded, and Cohn was impressed: the man had fire and presence.) What’s more, Wallach had done a terrific screen test—as had Frank. Cohn kept running the two back-to-back, feeling uncustomarily indecisive. Finally he asked his wife’s advice. Joan Cohn watched the two tests and said of Wallach, “He’s a brilliant actor, no question about it. But he looks too good. He’s not skinny and he’s not pathetic and he’s not Italian. Frank is just Maggio to me.”

Cohn nodded. He had to admit it: the little putz really could act. And (just as important) Sinatra could save the studio some serious money. But there was one more practical consideration. If Frank’s name went above the title along with the other stars’, would people assume
Eternity
was a musical?

Fuck it. Time was wasting. Leave it to the lawyers to hash out the billing. Cohn told Adler to call Sinatra’s agent, then patted himself on the back.

“
Frank Sinatra has been notified to report to Columbia in ten days to start ‘From Here to Eternity,’ ” Louella Parsons noted in her February 2 column. Two days later, Parsons elaborated: “
Talked to Frank Sinatra, who arrived in New York from Boston. He told me Ava Gardner has been in Rome and goes on to London to make another picture.

“ ‘This separation,’ he said, ’is difficult for both of us. I go to California in ten days for ‘From Here to Eternity,’ so I won’t be able to see Ava for at least two months.’ ”

Frank had been ordered to report to Columbia in ten days; opportunity of a lifetime or not, however, he would take a good deal longer to get there. He was booked in Montreal from February 6 to 15; rehearsals for
Eternity
were set to start on the twenty-third. During the intervening week, a nervous Harry Cohn wanted his least experienced and most temperamental star doing everything necessary to prepare—but mostly showing he was ready to be a good soldier. Frank had every intention of complying. Then he received an even more urgent summons.

Louella had been wrong about Ava’s new picture. That movie, a
Robert Taylor historical clunker called
Knights of the Round Table
, wouldn’t start shooting till June. In fact,
Mogambo
was still in process: location work had wound up at the end of January, but there were still interiors to film, at MGM’s Boreham Wood Studios northwest of London. Before that, however, she had some crucial personal business to attend to.

After closing in Montreal, Frank made a flying visit to London, a trip so abrupt that he had to phone in a last-minute cancellation of an appearance on Martha Raye’s TV show, infuriating the writers and producers, who had to rip up the script and start from scratch. Some of the columns snickered that Sinatra was up to his old high-handed tricks, but Dorothy Kilgallen seemed to understand that this trip was necessary. “
Chums say Frankie flew to London,” Kilgallen wrote on the twentieth, “because he hadn’t heard from Ava for a week.”

He’d finally tracked her down in Rome, screwing Clark Gable, for all Frank knew.
³
In truth, Ava being Ava, she was brothel-crawling with her new gal pal Grace Kelly. When Frank asked anxiously how she was feeling, her voice was husky from fatigue and edgy. It was a bad conversation. Just when he needed her by his side to share in his good fortune, she was a million miles away physically and emotionally.

Then she’d gone off the radar screen.

She had checked out of the Grand in Rome; Reenie Jordan and Benton Cole were vague about her whereabouts. Frank had Sanicola phone Metro’s production department in Culver City and extract her drop-dead date for arriving at Boreham Wood.

But she still sounded remote when he reached her at the Savoy—all she would say was that there was some kind of medical problem. That was when he got on a plane.

The newspaper accounts tell how Ava met Frank at Heathrow, minus her customary sunglasses, and didn’t recognize him at first because he was wearing a hat. The man whose icon status in the 1950s would be synonymous with a fedora clearly hadn’t worn one up to this point. The simple reason for the change was that his baldness was
accelerating. And while Frank had begun wearing a hairpiece on film at least as early as 1948’s
The Kissing Bandit
, he wasn’t yet solvent (or shameless) enough to sport a toup in civilian life.

If his wife didn’t recognize him, the public wouldn’t either: Sinatra’s trip to London was not only abrupt but furtive. He told one of the few reporters who tracked him down that he had come to make arrangements for a European tour he’d be doing in the late spring and early summer. This might have been true, but what he was mainly there for (he finally discovered after he landed) was to try to talk Ava out of having another abortion.

Unsurprisingly, her memoir glosses the episode over. “
I didn’t think that big expensive clinic [where she’d had the first abortion in November] was prepared for a second round of someone responding to their ever-so-correct questions with my incorrect answers,” she wrote,

She’d probably avoided the big expensive clinic for secrecy’s sake—and because she could scarcely ask MGM, which had picked up the tab for the first procedure, to pay for another one three months later.

And the procedure was in February, not in May as some accounts have it, and as Ava’s red herring about Frank’s coming over to start his European tour would indicate. A May abortion could have made the baby Frank’s for sure, but she can’t have it both ways. If her tender story about his singing to her as they bumped across the African plain in a jeep is true—and her memory in this instance has a solid ring of truth—then that second (or third
⁴
) pregnancy had commenced while
she was still on location, which means no later than January, and specifically no later than mid-January, because that’s when Sinatra left for his Latin Quarter gig. (Nor could the jeep-bumping-over-the-plain story refer to the first African pregnancy: Frank had departed for his screen test in November before he knew she was with child.)

She meets him at Heathrow; the next thing we know, he’s sitting by her bedside in tears after the procedure. Sometime after he took off his hat, Ava told him where she was going and what she was going for. He can’t have been happy about it. To put it mildly. Coming so soon after the November abortion, this one would have been unacceptable, unimaginable. And yet she was adamant—and of course could never, ever tell him the real reason: not only did she not want a child—not now, not ever—but she also wasn’t sure whose baby this was. (If one dalliance with a bullfighter had driven Frank crazy, an out-of-wedlock child would have ended the marriage for good.) The collision between them, irresistible force and immovable object, must have been terrible. And the tears on his face were surely from fury as much as sadness. Starting with Nancy’s 1947 abortion, this would have been (by his reckoning, anyway) the fourth child he had lost. “
He never got over it, he never discussed it,” Hank Sanicola recalled. “The only thing he ever said to me about it was, ‘I shoulda beaten her fuckin’ brains out for what she did to me and the baby, but I loved her too much.’ ”

Amid the angry bluster, he couldn’t admit to Sanicola that there had been two babies.

Frank and Ava made it up somehow—it can’t have been the usual way—and flew to Paris for a few gloomy days. The cable from Harry Cohn, even with its where-the-hell-are-you subtext, could only have come as a relief:

Excited now, Frank dashed off an answer:

Then, with the best possible excuse, he dashed off, period. They had spent a little over a week together, most of it fighting or in an abortion clinic. The marriage had become a travesty.