Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [257]
Amid the angry bluster, he couldn’t admit to Sanicola that there had been two babies.
Frank and Ava made it up somehow—it can’t have been the usual way—and flew to Paris for a few gloomy days. The cable from Harry Cohn, even with its where-the-hell-are-you subtext, could only have come as a relief:
MONTGOMERY CLIFT ALREADY PROFICIENT IN ARMY DRILL STOP SINCE YOU MUST DO SAME ROUTINE, SUGGEST YOU GET BACK FEW DAYS EARLY STOP HARRY.
Excited now, Frank dashed off an answer:
DEAR HARRY, WILL COMPLY WITH REQUEST STOP DRILLING WITH FRENCH ARMY OVER WEEKEND STOP EVERYTHING OK STOP MAGGIO.
Then, with the best possible excuse, he dashed off, period. They had spent a little over a week together, most of it fighting or in an abortion clinic. The marriage had become a travesty.
Army drill was just the beginning of Montgomery Clift’s proficiency. Like Sinatra, he had been galvanized by From Here to Eternity from the moment the novel came out, knowing at once that he was born to play the role of Robert E. Lee Prewitt, Angelo Maggio’s best friend in G Company. It was almost as if James Jones had been thinking specifically of the actor when he described Prewitt: “a kind of intensity in the face … a sort of deep tragic fire in the eyes.” Also like Sinatra, Clift was not the first choice for his role: Harry Cohn wanted the Columbia contract player Aldo Ray—a raspy-voiced, muscle-bound former Navy frogman, whose slight air of vulnerability stemmed mainly from his inexperience as an actor. Ray hadn’t worked for a couple of months, his salary was mounting up, and as far as Cohn was concerned, that was that. But Fred Zinnemann, to his great credit, was firm on Clift—so firm that the director threatened to quit unless Clift was cast. Taken aback by the soft-voiced Austrian’s vehemence, the studio chief asked him why.
“Because I want to make a good picture, and Montgomery Clift is the only actor who can play Prewitt,” Zinnemann said.
He knew what he was talking about. Zinnemann had directed Clift in the actor’s second movie, The Search, in 1948, and was well aware of his gifts. The two had collaborated closely, the director even allowing the actor to rewrite his lines, much to the chagrin of the film’s producer. “His scenes bristled with life,” Zinnemann remembered. “And he filled the screen with reverberations above and beyond the movie itself.” The role of Prewitt—a sensitive outsider, a boxer who quit fighting because he accidentally blinded a friend in an Army boxing match—required an actor of depth and mystery, one who was himself a sensitive outsider. Montgomery Clift, a tortured homosexual and alcoholic, filled the bill in every respect.
Clift was a brilliantly intuitive, groundbreaking actor, with a gift for vanishing into his roles. He believed in the souls of his characters more than the words they spoke. “Good dialogue simply isn’t enough to explain all the infinite gradations of a character,” he said. “It’s behavior—it’s what’s going on behind the lines.” And as one who instinctively looked beyond surface appearances, he understood Frank Sinatra’s potential. As early as the fall of 1952, when Sinatra was still a dark horse, Clift told a friend that Frank would be perfect to play Maggio.
Sinatra hit the ground running from the moment he landed in California. First came the week of rehearsals at the end of February, then five weeks of shooting interiors at Columbia. And remarkably, during this intense month and a half, the company and crew of From Here to Eternity saw not a trace of One-Take Charlie, the movie-set prima donna. Frank was thoroughly in gear, heeding Zinnemann and, especially, Clift as though his life depended on it. Which, in a real way, it did.
The two actors hit it off instantly. Each man stared into the other’s remarkable blue eyes, recognizing not just the other’s brilliance but also the wounds. “We