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By Root 2572 0

standing by in his rumpled airplane suit, his tie loosened, his thin hair flying in the breeze, faked a smile. In fact he needn’t have worried. Though Ava and Gable were old drinking buddies from their co-starring stint in the miserable Lone Star—and had had the obligatory on-location fling—she’d quickly come to see the gulf between image and reality. “Clark’s the kind of guy that if you say, ‘Hiya, Clark, how are you?’ he’s stuck for an answer,” she told friends. She loved him like an uncle—and kept sacrosanct the steamy black-and-white memory of his commanding eyes in Red Dust.

But while the 1932 Red Dust had been shot in its entirety on Stage 6 at MGM, the Technicolor 1950s required greater verisimilitude. Mogambo would be filmed, as Metro’s ad copy trumpeted, “on safari in Africa amid authentic scenes of unrivaled savagery and awe-inspiring splendor.” The savagery was a little too real for comfort: the Mau Mau Uprising had recently begun in Kenya, and Kikuyu rebels had killed dozens of whites. “The movie company had its own thirty-man police force,” Ava remembered, “and when we got to what was then British East Africa, we were under the protection of both the Lancashire Fusiliers and the Queen’s African Rifles … Everyone in the cast was issued a weapon.” There is no record of whether Frank brought his own.

East Africa had never seen a safari quite like this: a cast and crew of almost six hundred, including bearers, guides, chefs, nurses, servants, native extras, and no fewer than eight big-game hunters, chief among them a rakish English expat named Frank “Bunny” Allen. The whole contingent moved from location to location in a convoy of fifty trucks, and, Ava recalled,

once we settled our encampment was three hundred tents strong. And if you think those tents were just for sleeping, think again. My God, we had tents for every little thing you could think of: dining tents, wardrobe tents with electric irons, a rec room tent with darts for the Brits and table tennis for the Yanks, even a hospital tent complete with X-ray machine, and a jail tent in case anybody got a tiny bit too rowdy.

Along the Kagera River on the Tanganyika-Uganda border, the stars (twenty-three-year-old Grace Kelly played Gable’s other love interest) lived in Abercrombie & Fitch–like safari splendor: fancy flown-in French food (Sinatra brought a supply of pasta and tomato sauce), fine wines and liquors, even heated water for baths and showers. It might as well have been a penal colony as far as Frank was concerned. The temperatures rose well into the hundreds during the day; dust blew into every crevice. One shower a day didn’t begin to suffice … But mainly, he was a fifth wheel. Ford liked throwing orders at him, with a broad wink to the others: “Make the spaghetti, Frank.” The malicious old Irishman constantly tested everyone around him for weakness, prodding and needling: one of the first things he told Ava was that he’d really wanted Maureen O’Hara to play her role.

For Frank, all of Mogambo boiled down to one object—a camp chair. While Ford took the cast and crew out into the bush every morning to shoot, Frank parked his ass in that damn chair, rereading that goddamn book for the umpteenth time, thinking about all the other actors who were testing for Maggio, and wondering if Harry Cohn was ever going to call him back.

It didn’t make him especially good company. By the time the movie people returned in the evening, he was two or three drinks ahead of them, grumbling into his glass about the dirt and the flies and Columbia Pictures.

Out in the bush at night, there was little to do but drink, and behind thin tent walls there were few secrets. The show people and crew engaged in the usual location mischief—Gable and Kelly had a hot affair; Bunny Allen had quite a few—but Frank and Ava mainly battled. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that she was feeling lousy. Maybe it was dysentery—a lot of people, including Ford, were sick—but by the time Frank had complained for the thousandth time about his troubles, she had had it. “Why don’t you