Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [225]
The story, such as it was, concerned a meek bank clerk, Johnny Dalton—Sinatra, in his last Bashful Frankie role ever—who saves a gangster from being beaten up by rival thugs, thus earning the crook’s deepest gratitude. The crook, who runs a bookie joint, gives Johnny a thousand-dollar reward—and then, with a few phone calls, parlays Johnny’s thousand into sixty grand. Voilà—the timid little clerk now has enough money to marry his ladylove and fellow bank wage slave, the pneumatic, perpetually sneering, helium-voiced Russell. Except that his sudden wealth arouses everyone’s suspicions. Groucho, as the philosophical waiter in the couple’s favorite luncheonette, hijacks the picture.
It’s all kind of low-grade fun for a little while. Frank is charming and natural, despite the tiresomeness of the milquetoast act, and his scenes with Groucho are pretty good, their on-set enmity notwithstanding. The most surreally delightful touch is Nestor Paiva’s energetic turn as the sunglasses-wearing bookie: with his bald dome and dark round lenses, he bears an eerie resemblance to 1960s photos of Sinatra’s great and good friend Sam Giancana.
Then comes the world’s cheesiest process shot (even Robert De Grasse couldn’t make this dog look good) as Frank and Groucho skip down a soundstage sidewalk with a street scene shakily projected behind them, singing “It’s Only Money,” the lousy would-be title song (one of the two mediocre tunes Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne dashed off for the occasion), and your heart sinks for just how bad movies can be sometimes.
Double Dynamite fizzled, like the dud it was.
Frank kept reading. His nose was always in some tome or other, especially when he was flying (which was often). And there were a lot of good books to read in late 1951. There was John Hersey’s Hiroshima and The Diary of Anne Frank and John Gunther’s big book about the United States and Churchill’s and Eisenhower’s memoirs and Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl and The Caine Mutiny. Then somebody gave him a great big doorstop of a novel called From Here to Eternity, James Jones’s scathing postwar portrait of the prewar U.S. Army. Once Frank started reading it, he couldn’t put it down.
Early in the novel, there was a character Frank couldn’t stop thinking about. His name was Angelo Maggio, and he was a buck private from Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, “a tiny curly-headed Italian with narrow bony shoulders jutting from his undershirt.” A fast-talking, wisecracking, no-shit street guy who liked to drink and play cards and craps and pool and cared little about Army discipline. Frank read all the Maggio parts raptly, speaking his dialogue along with him. He knew this guy. More than that. He was this guy.
The book had come out in February and immediately shot to the top of the best-seller lists. In March, Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures bought the screen rights for $85,000—a fortune in those days, especially for a novel that was critical of the Army in an era of fear and conformity. Soon cynics were calling the project “Cohn’s Folly.”
But from the moment Frank laid his eyes on Maggio, he was obsessed with wanting to play him. Fuck Double Dynamite. It was forgotten anyway. All he needed to turn his career around, Frank began to tell everyone around him over and over and over, was one good role. This was that role. (And it was better than good. As Tom Santopietro wrote in Sinatra in Hollywood: “No wonder Sinatra felt desperate to play Maggio—the character is ingratiating, complex, a bit dim-witted, vulnerable, and ultimately doomed. It was a role that had Oscar written all over it.”) That he was the last person on anyone’s mind to play Maggio was a mere technicality.
30
The Empress Club, London, December 1951. When nothing else got in the way—which was seldom—they cared deeply for each other. (photo credit 30.1)
Ava Gardner writes in her autobiography that Frank