• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2498 0

had a mutual admiration thing going on,” Frank said later, deflecting with characteristically tough talk his attraction to Clift’s looks and obvious classiness (the actor was related to Abraham Lincoln’s postmaster general and a secretary of the Treasury under Andrew Jackson)—not to mention the instant meeting of minds and sensibilities between Sinatra, the secretly sensitive genius, and Clift, the equally brilliant artist with the troubling sexuality. On the set of Clift’s first movie, Red River, John Wayne had ostracized the young actor, and burst into laughter when the director, Howard Hawks, first tried to rehearse the climactic fistfight between the two men. But remarkably, despite all Sinatra’s swaggering, no evidence exists that, even in the hypermasculine atmosphere of his coterie, he ever made a belittling remark about Clift. Rather, Frank seems to have understood at once that as deeply as he understood Maggio, he would need acting instruction from Clift on the order of the dancing instruction he’d received from Gene Kelly.

“Monty really coached Sinatra in the part of Maggio,” said Clift’s close friend Jack Larson. “He spelled out every beat, every moment, and Sinatra was grateful.” The process began during rehearsals and continued throughout the shoot. After work was over for the day, the two men often went to the Naples Restaurant up the block, continuing their shoptalk over dinner.

“By his intensity,” Zinnemann recalled, “[Clift] forced the other actors to come up to his standard of performance.” And he forced Sinatra to raise his game as an actor. As Frank later explained:

As a singer … I rehearse and plan exactly where I’m going. But as an actor, no, I can’t do that. To me, acting is reacting. If you set it up right, you can almost go without knowing every line … If I rehearse to death, I lose the spontaneity I think works for me … With Montgomery, though, I had to be patient because I knew that if I watched this guy, I’d learn something.

In his singing career Frank had gotten huge mileage out of communicating vulnerability, and in Montgomery Clift he recognized a fellow artist. Screen acting, though, involved considerably more than looking soulful and putting a catch in your voice. There was an intense subtlety to it, a poetry of minute gestures. It was Sinatra’s brilliance to understand this, and to observe, minutely, every move Clift made.

As Tom Santopietro wrote:

Sinatra here took on Clift’s hunched posture, allowing it to emphasize his own vulnerable, frail physique. It’s a physical approach that aided Sinatra immensely in conveying Maggio’s “doomed gaiety.” Maggio may have been a supporting role, but it made Frank Sinatra a top-drawer movie star. By blending small parts of Cagney’s toughness with Bogart’s jaded but vulnerable wiseguy, and overlaying the mix with his own distinctly Italian-American physicality—a lovable underdog with a chip on his shoulder—Sinatra arrived at an entirely original screen persona.

The rhythms of Maggio’s Brooklynese were music to Frank’s ears: when Sinatra spoke Maggio’s lines, he might as well have been talking himself. He moved into the dialogue just as he inhabited the lyrics of a song, only in this case the words fit like a glove:

This outfit they can give back to Custer.

Or:

Man, what I would not give to have this character in the corner poolroom in my hometown.

That’s “would not,” not “ wouldn’t.” The difference is tiny but crucial: it instantly and sharply denotes the wised-up street-corner character, circa early-to-mid-twentieth-century Greater New York–New Jersey area, that Damon Runyon immortalized, James Jones humanized, and Frank Sinatra was and would ever more publicly show himself to be. There’s a poetry to this breaking up of contractions into their constituent parts that Sinatra would carry to the end of his life.5 Maggio freed him to become himself.

As a singer, Frank seemed to have understood from the beginning that he could be nobody but himself. As awed as he might have been by Bing Crosby and Billie Holiday, he was remarkably free from influences.