Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [247]
“Ava,” he said, “you are married to a Catholic, and this is going to hurt Frank tremendously when he finds out about it.”
“He isn’t going to find out about it, and if he does, it’s my decision.”
“Ava, you’re giving yourself too hard a time. I’ll protect you if the fact that you’re having a baby starts to show. I’ll arrange the scenes, I’ll arrange the shots. We’ll wrap your part up as quickly as we can. Nothing will show. Please go ahead and have the child.”
I said, “No, this is not the time, and I’m not ready.”
What she couldn’t tell Ford—and couldn’t tell the world when it came time to write her memoirs—was that she was no longer certain that she loved Frank, and that throughout the fall she had often detested him. Even now, when his heart’s desire seemed within reach, when he might actually be able to turn things around for himself, he had to leave her for a month, and she knew what that meant. He hated being alone every bit as much as she hated it, and he would find company. He always did.
Frank had to cool his heels for most of Thursday the twentieth while Columbia ran other screen tests on Stage 16 of the Sunset-Gower lot: not all were for Eternity, but one was of the actor and comedian Harvey Lembeck, who was also trying out for Maggio (and had already acted in a service role in Stalag 17—and would wind up in Sergeant Bilko’s squad on The Phil Silvers Show). When Sinatra finally walked into Buddy Adler’s office, he was in a state. The handsome, prematurely silver-haired producer handed him a script, and Frank waved it aside. “I don’t need this,” he said. “I’ve read it many times.”
“I didn’t think he had a chance, anyway,” Adler recalled. “So I said, ‘Well, okay.’ ”
For his test, Frank was to play two drunk scenes: In the first, Maggio interrupts a heart-to-heart talk in a bar between the bugler Prewitt and the prostitute Lorene (to be played by Montgomery Clift and Donna Reed in the movie), amusing them by pretending to shoot craps with cocktail olives. In the second, drunker still, he goads a pair of MPs outside the Royal Hawaiian Hotel into beating him up. Both scenes embody perfectly what Prewitt says of Maggio: “He’s such a comical little guy and yet somehow he makes me always want to cry while I’m laughin’ at him.”
The role, in other words, was an actor’s dream—a softball teed up to be knocked out of the park. Yet as Sinatra walked onto the soundstage, it wasn’t quite as an actor. “Frank had never been that crazy about acting,” Ava said. “[B]ut he knew he was Maggio and besides, he was dying to do a straight dramatic part and escape from the typecasting he’d been subjected to in musicals.”
Maggio would be redemption; Maggio would be vindication. After all, the typecasting of the 1940s was based on unquestioned American stereotypes: an Italian’s role (much like a black’s) was to sing and entertain. Even the downturn in Sinatra’s career could be tied to the country’s accumulated indignation at his hubris—the nerve of the little wop, trying to stand on the national stage! Small wonder that, as Frank remembered, he was “scared to death” when the camera started rolling. Thirteen thousand miles and endless delays, all for one chance, ten minutes of film …
Reports on the result conflict. “The [screen] test was all right but not great,” said the Eternity screenwriter, Daniel Taradash. “We’d tested Eli Wallach, and in terms of acting his test was much better. We’d all settled on Wallach.”
But the man who would direct the movie—and who was conducting Sinatra’s screen test—felt differently. At forty-five, Fred Zinnemann was a filmmaking veteran of more than twenty years’ experience, a Viennese Jew who’d come to Hollywood from Europe as a young man, and now, as the director of The Member of the Wedding and High Noon, had gained a reputation as a meticulous, thoughtful craftsman for whom a film’s moral vision meant as much as the box-office receipts. Zinnemann gravitated to stories that set underdogs against overwhelming forces: High Noon, in which Gary Cooper’s sheriff had to face down a vengeful ex-con