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its coffers under the watchword of “Entertainment, not genius,” was still saving money by cranking out B pictures. When it made the odd A feature, it borrowed stars from other studios. Miracle, with Sinatra on punishment leave from MGM and Fred MacMurray loaned out from Paramount, was an attempt, right down to its reverberating title, to cash in on the success of Bing Crosby’s holy-Joe pictures Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s. The difference was that Crosby had Leo McCarey to direct him, and Sinatra had Irving Pichel. And then there was the fact that Bing, the sly old genius, could play quite a charming and credible priest. Frank, at this stage of his life, had too much sexual vanity and too many internal conflicts to believably act such a role. Maybe he could have pulled it off ten years later, when he was more manly and battle scarred and able to make fun of himself on-screen.

But the movie’s problems didn’t begin with its star. Ben Hecht, who co-wrote the screenplay with Quentin Reynolds, apparently took the job on the condition that he not be forced to read the sappy popular novel he would be adapting.2 And then there was the picture’s glum setting, a Pennsylvania mining town, and its generally dark tone. “Pompous and funereal,” Bosley Crowther wrote of the finished product. And while Crowther was reliably stuffy, in this case he had a point. The story concerned a young actress who died—just like Camille, of a hacking cough—after starring in her first film. The cynical press agent (MacMurray) who lifted her from the burlesque house to movie stardom takes her body back to her Pennsylvania hometown for burial. Miracles occur.

The dark and dazzling Alida Valli played the actress: even The Third Man, the following year, would not be enough to resuscitate her career after this stinker. And as Father Paul, Sinatra, in his first drama, was subdued to the point of seeming depressed. (“Frank Sinatra, looking rather flea-bitten as the priest, acts properly humble or perhaps ashamed,” Time wrote.) The best that can be said about him in this role is that, as would not be the case in The Kissing Bandit, he didn’t sink the movie. It did that all by itself.

Sinatra was ashamed—not just of The Miracle of the Bells, but of the whole year. He was singing junk on the radio. He was losing his audience, his prestige, his hair. And with Sinatra, as we have seen, shame quickly changed to rage. When the movie’s producer, the Hollywood institution Jesse Lasky, reminded the star that he was contractually obliged to attend the San Francisco premiere, Frank bullied the old man until Lasky was forced to plead for his presence. Sinatra went to San Francisco, but in full Monster mode. Ensconced in the biggest suite at the Fairmont hotel with Jack Keller, Bobby Burns, and Jimmy Van Heusen, Frank ordered eighty-eight Manhattans from room service. Up came several waiters pushing carts full of clinking glasses: Sinatra told them to leave the drinks in the entry hall, and there the eighty-eight Manhattans sat for three days, untouched. Unable to sleep at 4:00 a.m., he ordered a piano to be sent to his suite. A store manager had to be awakened, and a delivery-truck driver paid triple time to deliver the instrument. The next night Frank took twenty people out on the town, then brought them back to the suite for a party that didn’t break up till 7:00 a.m. Two hours later, still revving, he took Keller, Burns, and Van Heusen to a swanky haberdasher and bought each man $1,200 worth of cashmere sweaters, ties, shirts, and socks—all of it charged to Sinatra’s suite at the Fairmont, which of course was on the studio’s dime.

Frank slept through the afternoon, then behaved perfectly at the premiere that night. The next morning, though, he decided he had to get to Palm Springs—instantly. Unfortunately, a thick fog had settled in over San Francisco during the night, and the airlines weren’t flying. Sinatra ordered Van Heusen, the pilot, to charter a plane. No planes were to be had. In the end, Frank and Jimmy took a limousine from San Francisco to Palm