Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [259]
Now he wasn’t a boy anymore. The world had gotten more complicated, and so had he. His face and hair had thinned; his spirit had darkened. Wanting to update his image in 1948, he’d tried for the delinquent role in Knock on Any Door, but he was clearly too old to play a juvenile. Three years later, he’d attempted to bring somber tones to his performance in Meet Danny Wilson, but the movie came and went too fast for anyone to notice.
From Here to Eternity was his big chance, in every possible way: not only because of the distinguished material and company and the huge conspicuousness of the project, but also because of where Frank was in his life. His first legitimate shot at a big dramatic role had arrived at a moment when he was truly old enough, and experienced enough, to give a complicated performance. The paradox was that he had come to dramatic acting late enough in the game that he needed to get up to speed very quickly. “He was scared,” said Ernest Borgnine, who played Fatso. “He had to prove himself again because he was right down to nothing.” But he was also canny enough (and humbled enough) to realize his great good fortune at playing opposite a master.
An immediate bond between Frank and Monty was alcohol, though both were punctilious about not drinking during working hours. After hours was a different story. The author of From Here to Eternity, James Jones, a constant, starstruck presence on the shoot, was the third leg of the triangle. A little man with a big head and a tough scowl, Jones, like Sinatra and Clift, and like the author’s fictional surrogate, Prewitt, was a sufferer: a hypersensitive former boxer and combat soldier battling his own demons of conflicted sexuality and alcoholism. Jones was strongly attracted to Clift, and though the feeling wasn’t mutual, the actor, who was obsessed with dragging every possible bit of information about the military and his character out of the writer, stayed close. Frank, for his part, was awed to meet the author of a great book, and charmed to hear Jones’s stories about the real Maggio.
“The three of them became inseparable during the filming of From Here to Eternity,” wrote Clift’s biographer Patricia Bosworth.
“They were a motley trio,” a press agent said. “Jones looked like a nightclub bouncer with his thick neck and broken face. And there’s this edgy cocky little wop Sinatra always spoilin’ for a fight, and then Monty who managed to radiate class and high standards even when pissing in the gutter …”
“We would get very, very loaded,” Jones said. “After dinner and a lot more drinks we would weave outside into the night and all sit down on the curb next to a lamppost. It became our lamppost and we’d mumble more nonsense to each other. We felt very close.”
While Burt Lancaster rolled in the surf (and, off camera, the hay) with Deborah Kerr, and other company members engaged in the usual occupational amours, Sinatra, Clift, and Jones behaved like a trio of moony frat boys on spring break—the worst thing any of them got accused of was dropping beer cans out the windows of the Roosevelt Hotel. Lancaster, wrote his biographer Kate Buford, “got so used to carrying Sinatra and Clift, dead drunk, to their rooms each night, undressing them, and putting them to bed, that on his birthday for years afterward he would get a telegram from Sinatra with the message ‘Happy Birthday, Mom.’ ”
Frank was also apparently being faithful. (Or just careful. “After we filmed the knife fight between Montgomery Clift and myself,” Ernest Borgnine recalled, “he said, ‘Oh, hell, you guys are going to get through early. Maybe I’ll come by and we’ll have a couple of drinks, and then some broads, and who knows?’ And he never showed up.”) The gossipmongers