Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [227]
Weitman shook his head. It wasn’t a Paramount picture.
Frank knew, but couldn’t Bob make an exception this one time? It was a nice movie—it had a lot of nice songs and a pretty good story. And it’d been getting pretty good write-ups. Frank thought it, and he, could do business.
Weitman put the question to Paramount’s chairman, Barney Balaban. A long silence on the phone line. Then old Balaban growled: “What are you starting up with that guy again for?”
Weitman mulled it over and decided to go ahead anyway. “Frank was a friend and we knew he had talent,” he told Earl Wilson years later. “We took a chance on him for two weeks with Frank Fontaine, June Hutton and Buddy Rich.”
Ava, though, had plans of her own.
Metro had loaned her to 20th Century Fox for one picture,1 an adaptation of the Hemingway short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” “Adaptation” is putting it extremely loosely. The script, as conceived by the producer Darryl F. Zanuck and the screenwriter Casey Robinson, took the downbeat, stream-of-consciousness tale of a writer dying of an infected wound in the shadow of the African mountain and turned it into a Hemingway extravaganza, replete with grafted-on characters and story elements from The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” (“I sold Fox a short story, not my complete works,” the author later complained.) In addition, the movie’s writer-hero and Hemingway surrogate, Harry Street, played by Gregory Peck, would live, rather than die, at the end of the story. But then, that was big-studio moviemaking in the 1950s.
Legend has it that Papa Hemingway himself, who apparently had seen Ava in The Killers and liked what he’d seen, nominated her to play the love of Harry’s life, “Cynthia, from Montparnasse, a model with green-gray eyes and legs like a colt, who lit a fire in Harry Street that could only be quenched by … The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” as the hard-breathing ad copy put it. The whole Technicolor mess was shot on the Fox back lot—a gigantic cyclorama painting of snowcapped Kilimanjaro was erected on Stage 8—and not in Kenya, as some Sinatra books have reported. However, it might as well have been Africa as far as Frank was concerned: production on the movie was scheduled to run from mid-February through the third week in April, and he badly wanted his wife with him for his Paramount premiere on March 26, about which he was much more nervous than he was letting on.
At first Frank refused, explosively, to let Ava do the movie at all. She told him to fuck himself. Complicated negotiations ensued. In the end, Zanuck, Robinson, and the director, Henry King, worked out a formula by which all her scenes could be shot in ten days, freeing her to get to New York in time for Frank’s big show.
It didn’t work out. On her tenth day of shooting, technical problems developed during a big Spanish civil war scene, outdoors, involving hundreds of extras. Rather than go into costly overtime, King approached Ava, hat in hand, and asked: Could she possibly give him one more day of work?
Ava burst into tears. Frank had been phoning her every day from New York, worrying that she wouldn’t finish shooting in time. She’d kept reassuring him: Everything was going fine. What was she supposed to tell him now? Finally she worked up the courage to call Frank—who promptly blew up at her. She blew up right back. Three thousand miles apart, they couldn’t even make up properly.
Later that week, in a report headlined SINATRA SCRAMBLES TO RECOVER FRIENDLY PUBLIC HE ONCE HAD, the old Hollywood hand Wood Soanes wrote that Danny Wilson had flopped so badly at its San Francisco premiere that exhibitors had demoted it to the second half of a double-feature bill in Oakland. Frank’s troubles were beginning to snowball. Universal International elected not to proceed with the second film in Sinatra’s two-picture deal. “And the crowning blow,” Soanes wrote, “came in a decision of Music Corporation of America to withdraw as his agent.