Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [230]
Ava, on the other hand, had been summoned by MGM to Mexico, to shoot something called Sombrero—a frothy confection about three pairs of lovers, complete with cockfights and bullfights and beauty contests.
It sounded like The Kissing Bandit warmed over, Frank told her. Why not come to Hawaii? He could do a little work, then they could relax.
She smiled mischievously.
Ava (who these days was signing autographs “Ava Sinatra”) wired MGM’s vice president Eddie Mannix that a vacation trip with her husband unfortunately prevented her from being able to report, et cetera—and Mannix wired her right back, expressly forbidding her to go to Hawaii.
Three days later, in Honolulu, Ava got another wire from Mannix’s office, informing her that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had sent Yvonne De Carlo to Mexico in her stead, and that Miss Gardner was now officially on suspension. Stop. All further salary and benefits were to be withheld. Stop.
She flipped the telegram into the wastebasket. They would come crawling back, she knew it.
Frank winked at her. But in truth, he was afraid. He was broke—and now she had nothing coming in, either. The chicken feed he was getting paid in Hawaii wouldn’t take them very far.
The weather on Kauai mirrored his mood: heavy rain on a Sunday afternoon. Ava was back at the hotel in Honolulu, and Frank was playing a county fair in a tent. A leaky tent.
He pulled aside a flap and peered out at the audience. It was just a couple hundred red-faced tourists and hicks in aloha shirts and jeans and muumuus. Jesus Christ. The rain was drumming on the canvas, dripping on the ground. There was no orchestra, just an upright piano on a wooden platform. He closed the flap and looked at Bill Miller sitting on a folding chair, lean as a spider and pale as death—in Hawaii!—and sipping a cup of tea. Miller raised his eyebrows. Sinatra shook his head. Soon he’d be playing revival meetings.
Miller’s thin lips formed into something like a smile.
Suddenly two brown-skinned girls in grass skirts came in, carrying flowered garlands, beaming. They dropped the leis over Frank’s head, one by one, giggling, covering his cheeks with little kisses, and even as he grinned, his eyes grew moist.
Frank turned to Miller. Should they do it?
Miller nodded and rose. Frank pulled the canvas aside and walked out onto the little stage, the garlands around his neck. The small crowd went nuts the second they saw him, clapping over their heads, whistling, stamping the ground. For a minute you couldn’t even hear the rain on the tent. Sinatra was still smiling, the first time he’d been happy in weeks. He sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his legs, and said: “What do you want to hear?”
On the plane back from Hawaii (he and Ava had quarreled, and she’d flown back ahead of him) he sat with his dog-eared copy of From Here to Eternity on his lap, rereading for the tenth time all the Maggio sections—the scenes with the bugler Prewitt, whorehouse scenes, drunk scenes, the fatal fight with Fatso—and marking them up in pencil. After he landed, he began sending telegrams: to Harry Cohn; to the director the Columbia chief had chosen for Eternity, Fred Zinnemann; to the producer, Buddy Adler; to the screenwriter, Daniel Taradash. One wire a week per man, every week, beseeching, cajoling, joking, but always coming straight to the point: he was the only man who could play this role. He signed every telegram “Maggio.”
One night in early June, Sinatra recorded five songs at the Columbia studios in Hollywood. (Three songs per session, the maximum before the musicians went into overtime, was the norm.) It was Frank’s third recording date of only four that year, and the last on the West Coast that he would do for the label. Mitch Miller had flown out for the occasion.
Columbia was about to announce that it was not going to renew Frank’s contract. He hadn’t come close to making back the more than $100,000 Manie Sacks