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of the era must have felt keenly disappointed. They were watching him carefully for slipups—something with Lana Turner would have been nice, but Lana had gone to Spain on vacation. Marilyn Maxwell had finally given up on him. The only real piece of dirt that spring was his continuing tax problems, which were all over the newspapers, the IRS having just slapped a lien on his income. Never had that measly Eternity salary looked so good. The most striking item that March reveals is that sometime during the week of the ninth, while the company temporarily closed down so that Burt Lancaster (who’d been detained wrapping South Sea Woman at Warner’s) could rehearse, Frank slipped off to New York—and shopped for matching nutria trench coats for himself and Ava. The height of devotion, if not fiscal responsibility.

The role of Maggio may have had Oscar written all over it, but Sinatra was going to have to work very hard to bring it off—and to convince the world he could. Frank felt defensive enough that March that he went even further into hock to buy full-page ads in the trade papers proclaiming himself “box office insurance.” The ads trumpeted that he’d been “a smash success at Riviera, Fort Lee; Chez Paree, Chicago; French Casino, N.Y.; Latin Quarter, Boston; and Chez Paree, Montreal,” and urged the public to “watch for him as Maggio in Columbia Pictures’ forthcoming production, ‘From Here to Eternity.’ ”

Sinatra was talking not just to Hedda and Louella but also to such second-stringers of the Hollywood press as Frank Morriss, who had less than earthshaking business in mind. “We concocted a little joke, which I hope will work,” Morriss wrote in his column.

Next week, Frank Sinatra will be working in the picture, and I’m going to visit the set. We’re going to show Frankie boy the Match the Stars pictures, including the one of Ava as a child. We’ll just see if Frankie can recognize his own wife. If not there’ll be an awful lot of razzing.

Frank and the papers were virtually collaborators at this point: he was working hard to try to convince them (and by extension the public) that he was behaving himself and up to the task of playing Maggio, and the press seems to have been trying to persuade itself. “Crooner Frank Sinatra Tuesday joined the ranks of film greats who have switched from song and dance roles to straight drama,” proclaimed a wire-service report, mentioning Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell, and Jane Wyman.

Frankie flew 10,000 miles from Africa to Hollywood to try out for the role he coveted and finally won. His highest hope now is that his new impersonation will be well received by the public.

“I know how I feel about it, but how the public will feel is another thing,” he said.

It sounded rather plaintive. In a way Frank was raising expectations, putting huge pressure on himself; at the same time, though, he was asking for what the public had always been reluctant to extend him: tolerance. It was a brilliant job of public relations, one that he couldn’t possibly have brought off himself, and in fact he hadn’t: Eternity’s unit publicist, Walter Shenson (who would go on to produce A Hard Day’s Night and Help!), had taken over the latest Sinatra charm offensive and was stage-managing it in grand style. “I told him that I could do a lot for him if he’d just behave himself with the press,” Shenson recalled.

He was a pussycat. “Whatever you say, kid, whatever you say,” he said. So I started bringing around news people to interview him. A couple of times he said, “I won’t talk to that one. He was rude to Ava.” Then I’d remind him of his promise to cooperate, and he’d be a charmer.

One day I got a call from a press guy saying that the government had just released a statement that Frank owed $109,000 in back taxes. He wanted a comment from Sinatra, so I went to his trailer and told him. He looked at me very calmly and said, “You don’t think this is news, do you? If you owe $109,000, you know about it.” I explained that I was getting phone calls from the press wanting a statement. He said to tell them anything