Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [266]
Then, in Ava’s case, there was another bullfighter.
This was a very different one, and this time she was the pursuer rather than the pursued. Mario Cabré had been a clown, a puffed-up poetaster, but Luis Miguel Dominguín was the real deal: the greatest matador in Spain, after the tragic death of Manolete. Tall, coolly humorous, devastatingly handsome, Dominguín was a great favorite of Ernest Hemingway, who would later write about him—calling him “a combination Don Juan and Hamlet”—in The Dangerous Summer. At twenty-six, he was also four years younger than Ava; he also had a gorgeous Portuguese-Thai girlfriend, which made him all the more intriguing. The movie star and the torero smiled, they flirted; he spoke no English. It was three glorious weeks of sun and fiestas, then Lana had to go home and Ava had to return to London to work on Knights of the Round Table.
Frank was luckier. In photos from the set, he was all business in his regulation khakis and Smokey the Bear campaign hat, looking as neat and trim as the soldier he never was, eyes wide with interest as he listened respectfully to Zinnemann. For weeks on end Sinatra channeled all his intensity into the role. “He was very, very good—all the time,” Zinnemann said years later. “No histrionics, no bad behavior … He played Maggio so spontaneously we almost never had to reshoot a scene.” Yet during the shooting of a climactic scene, he finally exploded. Zinnemann recalled:
One of the last location scenes to be shot in Hawaii was a night exterior—Maggio’s arrest by the military police. Maggio, blind drunk along with Prewitt in a Honolulu park, feels harassed beyond endurance; his rage boils over, he jumps up, berating the policemen, who are twice his size, and attacks them.
The afternoon’s rehearsal was excellent, but Cohn had heard about it and thought that we would be in trouble with the Army—Sinatra was just too provocative. He wanted us to tone things down; the actors and I disagreed with this view, although I felt the objection had come from someone outside, above Cohn.
For a few mad hours I believed that I could get away with shooting the scene as rehearsed and presenting Cohn with an accomplished fact. Night fell; lights and camera were ready. Cohn was not present, but his informers were. At the last moment, he roared up to the set, together with the garrison’s top echelon of officers. They had come ostensibly to watch us at work but it soon became clear that a confrontation could develop and lead to closing down the picture. We were, after all, on army territory. I knew that we could be jeopardizing the whole film; it was a situation I could not win. To quit was out of the question as far as I was concerned.
In Kitty Kelley’s rendition of the incident, “Frank and Monty had rehearsed the scene standing up, but, just before shooting, Frank decided that he wanted to do it sitting down. Zinnemann objected, but Frank insisted—loudly and profanely. Monty backed Zinnemann and remained standing to follow the script. This so angered Sinatra that he slapped Monty hard. The director tried to placate Sinatra by agreeing to film the scene with Frank sitting if he would also do one take standing. Frank refused and became extremely abusive.”
Zinnemann, Harry Cohn’s wife, Joan, and the unit publicist, Walter Shenson, each gave a different account, but none of them jibe with Kelley’s version, which feels off. Why would the kinetic and impatient Sinatra want to do any scene sitting rather than standing? What seems more likely is that Zinnemann rehearsed the scene as written, and that when Cohn came roaring up (memorably, in a military limousine, still dressed in the white dinner jacket he’d been wearing while dining with the general