Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [265]
On the evening of Monday, April 6, Fred Zinnemann and the stars of From Here to Eternity flew to Hawaii for two weeks of location shooting. Burt Lancaster recalled the flight:
Deborah Kerr and me and Frank and Monty are sitting up in the front of the plane. And he and Monty are drunk. Monty, poor Monty, was this kind of a drinker—he’d chug-a-lug one martini and conk out. And Frank was, I believe, having a few problems, and so, when we arrived, these two bums were unconscious. They were gone! Deborah and I had to wake them up.
Harry Cohn, who had already taken up residence at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, met them at the airport, all but tapping his wristwatch. Perhaps, he told Zinnemann, one of the night scenes could be shot right away—maybe that thing with Burt and Deborah on the beach? Zinnemann took Cohn aside and told him gently that there were tides and other logistics involved; it wasn’t a scene that could just be dashed off. Besides, he asked (as Lancaster discreetly helped his two groggy co-stars into a car), mightn’t everyone do better with a day to get acclimated? Cohn grumbled. Zinnemann gave him a Viennese smile. Production began on Wednesday morning the eighth.
The work went fast and mostly smoothly. Frank was still completely engaged, but Zinnemann had stumbled upon an unusual challenge in shooting the scenes between Maggio and Prewitt:
Sinatra was at his best in the first or second take of a scene: in later takes he was apt to lose spontaneity, whereas Clift would use each take as a rehearsal to add more detail so that the scenes gained in depth as we went on. It was an interesting problem when they did a scene together: how to get the best performance from them both in the same take.
As the actor Robert Wagner recalled, “Frank was very conscious of his lack of [acting] training; he was never sure that he would be able to reproduce an effect more than once or twice because he had to rely on emotion more than craft.” But Zinnemann’s account shows that it wasn’t just about temperament: Sinatra knew what really worked for him.
He and Monty labored diligently during the day, but as had been the case the previous month, the evenings were another story. “Every night, after work, we would meet in Frank’s room,” Lancaster recalled.
He had a refrigerator and he would open it and there would be these iced glasses. He would prepare the martinis with some snacks while we were getting ready to go to an eight o’clock dinner. We’d sit and chat about the day’s work and he would try his nightly call to Ava, who was in Spain. In those days in Spain, if you lived next door to your friends you couldn’t get them on the telephone, let alone try to get them on the phone from Hawaii. He never got through. Not one night. When you finished your martini, he would take your glass from you, open up the icebox and get a fresh cold glass, and by eight o’clock he and Monty would be unconscious. I mean really unconscious. Every night. So Deborah and I would take Frank’s clothes off and put him to bed. Then I would take Monty on my shoulders and we would carry him down to his room, take his clothes off and dump him in bed. And then she and I and the Zinnemanns would go out and have dinner.
Ava was in Spain on vacation, after recuperating from the abortion and finally wrapping Mogambo, but she wouldn’t be coming back anytime soon: she had become an expatriate. She would remain one, more or less, for the rest of her life, having learned—Frank wasn’t the only one worried about taxes—that she could keep the bulk of her income out of the clutches of the goddamn IRS if she lived overseas. And Europe, with its wine and its siestas, its depressed economy and its relaxed attitudes about all kinds of things that upset puritanical, work-obsessed, Red-obsessed America, was more to her liking anyway.
She was investigating the many advantages of her new turf. Frank wouldn’t have been consoled to know that, as was her habit when he was far, far away, Ava was kicking up her heels. And not alone.