Frank: The Voice (97 page)

Ava was in Spain on vacation, after recuperating from the abortion and finally wrapping
Mogambo
, but she wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon: she had become an expatriate. She would remain one, more or less, for the rest of her life, having learned—Frank wasn’t the only one worried about taxes—that she could keep the bulk of her income out of the clutches of the goddamn IRS if she lived overseas. And Europe, with its wine and its siestas, its depressed economy and its relaxed attitudes about all kinds of things that upset puritanical, work-obsessed, Red-obsessed America, was more to her liking anyway.

She was investigating the many advantages of her new turf. Frank wouldn’t have been consoled to know that, as was her habit when he was far, far away, Ava was kicking up her heels. And not alone. As Dorothy Kilgallen noted provocatively in her column: “
Frank Sinatra, who tossed Lana Turner out of his Palm Springs house when he found her visiting his wife a few months ago, may make more blow-top headlines before long. Despite his disapproval—to put it mildly—of their friendship, Lana and Ava have plans to do some vacation chumming in Europe.”

Then, in Ava’s case, there was another bullfighter.

This was a very different one, and this time she was the pursuer rather than the pursued. Mario Cabré had been a clown, a puffed-up poetaster, but Luis Miguel Dominguín was the real deal: the greatest
matador in Spain, after the tragic death of Manolete. Tall, coolly humorous, devastatingly handsome, Dominguín was a great favorite of Ernest Hemingway, who would later write about him—calling him “a combination Don Juan and Hamlet”—in
The Dangerous Summer
. At twenty-six, he was also four years younger than Ava; he also had a gorgeous Portuguese-Thai girlfriend, which made him all the more intriguing. The movie star and the torero smiled, they flirted; he spoke no English. It was three glorious weeks of sun and fiestas, then Lana had to go home and Ava had to return to London to work on
Knights of the Round Table
.

Frank was luckier. In photos from the set, he was all business in his regulation khakis and Smokey the Bear campaign hat, looking as neat and trim as the soldier he never was, eyes wide with interest as he listened respectfully to Zinnemann. For weeks on end Sinatra channeled all his intensity into the role. “
He was very, very good—all the time,” Zinnemann said years later. “No histrionics, no bad behavior … He played Maggio so spontaneously we almost never had to reshoot a scene.” Yet during the shooting of a climactic scene, he finally exploded. Zinnemann recalled:

In Kitty Kelley’s rendition of the incident, “
Frank and Monty had rehearsed the scene standing up, but, just before shooting, Frank decided that he wanted to do it sitting down. Zinnemann objected, but Frank insisted—loudly and profanely. Monty backed Zinnemann and remained standing to follow the script. This so angered Sinatra that he slapped Monty hard. The director tried to placate Sinatra by agreeing to film the scene with Frank sitting if he would also do one take standing. Frank refused and became extremely abusive.”

Zinnemann, Harry Cohn’s wife, Joan, and the unit publicist, Walter Shenson, each gave a different account, but none of them jibe with Kelley’s version, which feels off. Why would the kinetic and impatient Sinatra want to do any scene sitting rather than standing? What seems more likely is that Zinnemann rehearsed the scene as written, and that when Cohn came roaring up (memorably, in a military limousine, still dressed in the white dinner jacket he’d been wearing while dining with the general in command of U.S. Army forces in the Pacific), a Situation developed. Zinnemann chose the better part of valor, and Frank, who had believed passionately in the film from the beginning, but even more so now that he’d put in six weeks’ worth of hard work, simply blew. “
His fervor, his anger, his bitterness had something to do with the character of Maggio,” Burt Lancaster said,

And now they—whoever they were—wanted to neuter his big scene. No wonder he lost it.

“
I was on the sidelines watching but not hearing anything,” Shenson recalled.

In fact, he hadn’t. In the end, as Zinnemann said, “
Sinatra delivered his speech while
seated
.” Frank had caved, not triumphed, and the resulting scene isn’t nearly as powerful as it would’ve been had Zinnemann been able to follow the script, and Sinatra, his artistic instincts. Remarkably, though, during the course of this long day Frank had both rehearsed and capitulated, two courtesies he would be less and less willing to grant his directors as his star began to rise again.

All too predictably, though, Sinatra blamed Zinnemann. (And in all likelihood, kept blaming him. In the seventy-plus linear feet of Fred Zinnemann’s papers in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, there is not a single piece of correspondence from Sinatra.) “
I can’t blame him for being upset,” Zinnemann recalled, years after tempers had cooled—or his had, anyway—“but I wonder whether he ever understood what was at stake.”

In the director’s estimation, the movie itself had been at stake.
Eternity
was made with the cooperation of an all-powerful U.S. Army, not so long after that army had done nothing less than save the free world, and just three months after General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been elected president. It was not a time for tweaking authority. During the filming of
From Here to Eternity
, the accused atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sat on death row; Senator Joseph McCarthy was continuing to conduct hearings of accused subversives, many of them in the movie industry. Fred Zinnemann was a European Jew, with an acute sense of the unpredictability of power. Harry Cohn was a tough American Jew who, as the maker of a movie determinedly friendly to Army interests, could break bread with the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific.

And Frank Sinatra didn’t care about any of it. They had messed with his scene, and they could all screw themselves.

He’d had another reason to be tense. The afternoon before shooting that last scene, Frank had phoned Axel Stordahl. They had a recording date at Capitol set up for the Thursday after he got back from Hawaii, and Sinatra wanted to discuss the song list. But after a couple of moments of chitchat, the arranger fell silent. Frank asked him if anything was wrong.

Axel said he couldn’t be at the session. He was leaving for New York tomorrow.

He was what?

He was beginning a TV show. With Eddie Fisher.

The last three words might as well have been a carving knife plunged into Sinatra’s chest. There was a long silence.

Apparently, Axel hadn’t heard what Frank had said. They had a recording session at Capitol on Thursday night.

Stordahl said he couldn’t be there. He had a contract.

Another deep silence.

The arranger began to elaborate, but then he realized the line had gone dead.

Frank called Alan Livingston and let him have it. Livingston was ready for him. He listened patiently, counted to five, and then almost instantly defused Sinatra’s anger by telling him he’d secured Billy May to lead the session. May was a top-drawer bandleader, one of the hippest arrangers and conductors around (and also an old Livingston cohort who’d done the music for the Bozo the Clown records). A big, hearty guy, tough but cheerful. Livingston knew Frank couldn’t object, and he didn’t.

In fact, though, the executive was playing a shell game with the singer. Livingston had known for a while that Stordahl was leaving—he’d encouraged it. It was time for Sinatra to move on. Axel was wonderful, but those somnolent strings of his were a relic of Frank’s Columbia past. Livingston had made big hits with Nelson Riddle and Nat “King” Cole, and now he wanted to make more big hits with Riddle and Sinatra. Riddle wanted in, too, but Riddle was an arranger’s arranger, a studio man who’d never led a band or made a splash. Livingston would have to work a minor subterfuge.

The morning after his climactic scene, Frank was on an airplane back to Los Angeles. His movie work was done, his fate was in the hands of a thousand imponderables—Hollywood, in other words—and it was time to get back to what had made him great in the first place. To what he could, to a great degree, control.

Just after 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, an unseasonably cool and
rainy day, Frank got out of his car, flicked his cigarette into the gutter, and strode into Capitol’s KHJ studios at 5515 Melrose Avenue. Studio C, down the hall on the first floor, was warm and pleasantly crowded, once again full of familiar faces—Skeets, Zarchy, Miller, Alvin Stoller, Conrad Gozzo—and a couple of unfamiliar ones. One was a sad-eyed trombonist with a jutting lower lip: his name was Milt Bernhart. Frank, who had specifically requested Bernhart after hearing his beautiful solo on a Stan Kenton number called “Salute,” looked right through the newcomer, more concerned with another stranger standing on the podium, right where Billy May should have been. Sinatra turned to a producer he knew, Alan Dell, and with a sideways jerk of his head indicated the serious-looking, chubby-cheeked, V-hairline character with the baton in his hand.

“Who’s this?” he said.

“He’s just conducting the band,” Dell said quickly. “We’ve got Billy’s arrangements.”

May, Dell explained (Livingston had prepped him), had had to leave town unexpectedly to do a gig in Florida. But his arrangements were golden, and what’s-his-name on the stand—Sinatra didn’t catch the name—was very capable.

Frank reviewed the song list: Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen’s “I’ve Got the World on a String,” Koehler and Rube Bloom’s “Don’t Worry ’Bout Me,” a bouncy old Harlan Thompson–Harry Archer tune, “I Love You” (not to be confused with the Grieg-inspired “I Love You” he’d recorded for Columbia, or the Cole Porter “I Love You” he wouldn’t get around to recording for a few more years), and his Dorsey standby “South of the Border.” He’d been singing the last one since he was a kid, and the second two for years. As for “String,” he’d only put it on his repertoire for club dates during the past year, partly in ironic tribute to his troubles, also from a sincere wish that things might actually go his way again, soon. In any case, it was a great song. He liked to perform it at medium tempo, a semi-ballad cadence: ballads were still his home base.