Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [251]
I thought I’d collapse waiting for reaction to that test. My agent sent word that Columbia was testing six other fellows, among them some fine stage actors. My chin hit my knees and I gave up. Ava was wonderful at cheering me up, and said, “I wish you wouldn’t quit just because you got one stinking telegram.” Clark Gable … kept saying, “Relax, skipper. Have a little drink and everything will be all right.”
Drinking rarely made things all right where Frank and Ava were concerned. Given his tendency to prettify the past, his stark language (“thought I’d collapse … I gave up”) is striking. Then sometime while he was waiting to hear from Columbia, the alcohol loosened Ava’s tongue, and she told him about the abortion. The revelation could only have been devastating to him.
Frank’s first thought would have been the terrible memory of Nancy’s abortion. His second would have been the big family he had proclaimed he and Ava would have. His Italian procreative pride had finally collided with his wife’s skittishness about childbearing—not to mention her own physical and professional pride.
The two of them had much in common, but too much of it was negative. And in each, the capacity for intimacy was stunted. The story Ava told on herself about her fury at Frank for interrupting her in her bath, and her general shyness about appearing naked in front of her husbands, clashes tellingly with all the accounts about her fascination with prostitution and anonymous sex, the dalliances with propmen, the naked parading in front of native bearers on Mogambo. If she could see a man as an inferior, her own shaky self-worth wasn’t challenged. She was drawn to strong men but ultimately threatened by them.
For his part, Frank had briefly known, and quickly fled, the confinements of conventional marriage. Jersey City, Hasbrouck Heights—he could still remember that tight feeling in his chest … Nancy had ruled those small households and, during the couple’s tenure in them, ruled him as well. And the big households in Toluca Lake and Holmby Hills cohered around Nancy, not him. He was gone.
He would keep returning for the rest of his life, would be an inveterate dropper-in. He would always be wedded to Nancy; she knew him as no one else did. He craved this intimacy as he craved all intimacy, but with Nancy, as with almost everyone else, the rules were the same: he must be able to leave the second he got bored. And he was too intelligent not to realize that almost nobody in the world defined intimacy his way. The one exception was Ava, who played by the same rules he did. Which made it impossible for them to stay together. The contradictions would torment him till the end of his days.
“Fred Zinnemann … has gone to New York to test stage players for ‘From Here to Eternity,’ ” Hedda Hopper wrote in her syndicated column on December 3, 1952.
The picture will have seven top roles; but Columbia figures with that set-up a Broadway actor or actress can be built into a movie star and put under contract as was Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday.” Seems that every rugged actor in town, including Humphrey Bogart, wants to play the part of Sgt. Warden. Bogie is due to go to Europe for “Beat the Devil” with John Huston. But I hear that picture may be postponed if he lands “Eternity.” Frank Sinatra has already tested for the role of Maggio. From the reports I’ve been getting from those who’ve seen the test I’d wager he’s in.
“Frank’s still in there pitching for the magic [sic] role in ‘From Here to Eternity’; and I think he’s just right for the part,” the columnist noted a week later.
His manager assured me that, despite the printed report, Sinatra was not gumming up the deal by holding out for too much do-re-mi. When he wants a part badly, as he does this one, Frank considers money of secondary importance. If memory serves me correctly, he