Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [255]
Harry Cohn had agonized over the decision. He had met with Wallach, had even provoked him in order to test his mettle. (“He doesn’t look like an Italian—he looks like a Hebe,” Cohn said when the actor entered his office. Understandably, Wallach exploded, and Cohn was impressed: the man had fire and presence.) What’s more, Wallach had done a terrific screen test—as had Frank. Cohn kept running the two back-to-back, feeling uncustomarily indecisive. Finally he asked his wife’s advice. Joan Cohn watched the two tests and said of Wallach, “He’s a brilliant actor, no question about it. But he looks too good. He’s not skinny and he’s not pathetic and he’s not Italian. Frank is just Maggio to me.”
Cohn nodded. He had to admit it: the little putz really could act. And (just as important) Sinatra could save the studio some serious money. But there was one more practical consideration. If Frank’s name went above the title along with the other stars’, would people assume Eternity was a musical?
Fuck it. Time was wasting. Leave it to the lawyers to hash out the billing. Cohn told Adler to call Sinatra’s agent, then patted himself on the back.
“Frank Sinatra has been notified to report to Columbia in ten days to start ‘From Here to Eternity,’ ” Louella Parsons noted in her February 2 column. Two days later, Parsons elaborated: “Talked to Frank Sinatra, who arrived in New York from Boston. He told me Ava Gardner has been in Rome and goes on to London to make another picture.
“ ‘This separation,’ he said, ’is difficult for both of us. I go to California in ten days for ‘From Here to Eternity,’ so I won’t be able to see Ava for at least two months.’ ”
Frank had been ordered to report to Columbia in ten days; opportunity of a lifetime or not, however, he would take a good deal longer to get there. He was booked in Montreal from February 6 to 15; rehearsals for Eternity were set to start on the twenty-third. During the intervening week, a nervous Harry Cohn wanted his least experienced and most temperamental star doing everything necessary to prepare—but mostly showing he was ready to be a good soldier. Frank had every intention of complying. Then he received an even more urgent summons.
Louella had been wrong about Ava’s new picture. That movie, a Robert Taylor historical clunker called Knights of the Round Table, wouldn’t start shooting till June. In fact, Mogambo was still in process: location work had wound up at the end of January, but there were still interiors to film, at MGM’s Boreham Wood Studios northwest of London. Before that, however, she had some crucial personal business to attend to.
After closing in Montreal, Frank made a flying visit to London, a trip so abrupt that he had to phone in a last-minute cancellation of an appearance on Martha Raye’s TV show, infuriating the writers and producers, who had to rip up the script and start from scratch. Some of the columns snickered that Sinatra was up to his old high-handed tricks, but Dorothy Kilgallen seemed to understand that this trip was necessary. “Chums say Frankie flew to London,” Kilgallen wrote on the twentieth, “because he hadn’t heard from Ava for a week.”
He’d finally tracked her down in Rome, screwing Clark Gable, for all Frank knew.3 In truth, Ava being Ava, she was brothel-crawling with her new gal pal Grace Kelly. When Frank asked anxiously how she was feeling, her voice was husky from fatigue and edgy. It was a bad conversation. Just when he needed her by his side to share in his good fortune, she was a million miles away