Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [267]
but also with what he had gone through in the last number of years: a sense of defeat, and the whole world crashing in on him, his marriage to Ava going to pieces—all of those things caused this ferment in him, and they all came out in that performance. You knew this was a raging little man who was, at the same time, a good human being. Monty watched the filming of one of Frank’s close-ups and said, “He’s going to win the Academy Award.”
And now they—whoever they were—wanted to neuter his big scene. No wonder he lost it.
“I was on the sidelines watching but not hearing anything,” Shenson recalled.
I could just see the pantomime of Harry Cohn running up in his white dinner jacket, striding into the middle of the set and making some pronouncement. Then he turned around and walked out and got back into the limousine. The next morning was Sunday, and I was on the beach with the rest of the crew. Cohn spotted me and asked if I had been there last night.
“Did you see that son of a bitch, Sinatra?” he asked.
“Yeah, I saw him but I don’t know what was happening.”
“Well, that bastard guinea was trying to tell us what to do. You know where he is now? He’s on an airplane going back to the studio.”
“How could you send him back without seeing the rushes?” I asked.
“I don’t care,” said Cohn. “That dirty little dago is not going to tell me how to make my movies.”
In fact, he hadn’t. In the end, as Zinnemann said, “Sinatra delivered his speech while seated.” Frank had caved, not triumphed, and the resulting scene isn’t nearly as powerful as it would’ve been had Zinnemann been able to follow the script, and Sinatra, his artistic instincts. Remarkably, though, during the course of this long day Frank had both rehearsed and capitulated, two courtesies he would be less and less willing to grant his directors as his star began to rise again.
All too predictably, though, Sinatra blamed Zinnemann. (And in all likelihood, kept blaming him. In the seventy-plus linear feet of Fred Zinnemann’s papers in the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, there is not a single piece of correspondence from Sinatra.) “I can’t blame him for being upset,” Zinnemann recalled, years after tempers had cooled—or his had, anyway—“but I wonder whether he ever understood what was at stake.”
In the director’s estimation, the movie itself had been at stake. Eternity was made with the cooperation of an all-powerful U.S. Army, not so long after that army had done nothing less than save the free world, and just three months after General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been elected president. It was not a time for tweaking authority. During the filming of From Here to Eternity, the accused atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sat on death row; Senator Joseph McCarthy was continuing to conduct hearings of accused subversives, many of them in the movie industry. Fred Zinnemann was a European Jew, with an acute sense of the unpredictability of power. Harry Cohn was a tough American Jew who, as the maker of a movie determinedly friendly to Army interests, could break bread with the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific.
And Frank Sinatra didn’t care about any of it. They had messed with his scene, and they could all screw themselves.
He’d had another reason to be tense. The afternoon before shooting that last scene, Frank had phoned Axel Stordahl. They had a recording date at Capitol set up for the Thursday after he got back from Hawaii, and Sinatra wanted to discuss the song list. But after a couple of moments of chitchat, the arranger fell silent. Frank asked him if anything was wrong.
Axel said he couldn’t be at the session. He was leaving for New York