Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [275]
And strangely enough, when Columbia Pictures ran its first preview of From Here to Eternity, “Cohn had decided to use a new electronic system of recording audience reactions,” Fred Zinnemann recalled. The screening took place over the summer: a few weeks, pointedly enough, after the Rosenbergs were electrocuted.
About two hundred people were, literally, wired to their seats in a large projection room. There were small levers each could push—to the right if they liked the scene, to the left if they didn’t. At first this seemed a ridiculous enterprise, especially discouraging because there was absolutely no reaction from the audience. They sat there like wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s, busy concentrating on those levers. I was convinced we had a disaster on our hands.
Then Harry Cohn came tearing in, carrying a roll of paper twenty-five feet long, with the combined graph of those two hundred people plotted on it, and he said excitedly that the curve indicated Columbia was going to have its biggest-ever hit.
He was so certain of his film’s success that he conceived a crazily inspired plan for the premiere. “We all thought Cohn had gone mad when he decreed that ‘this picture will open in the Capitol Theater on Broadway in New York in August,’ ” Zinnemann wrote.3
There was no air-conditioning then, and in August New York was a sweatbox. No one had ever heard of releasing a major film in mid-summer. We were convinced that his gambler’s instinct was leading to certain suicide. More was to come: Cohn declared that there would be no publicity, except for one full-page ad in the Times which he would sign as president of Columbia, urging people to see it.
Wednesday, August 5, was a reliably miserable summer day in Manhattan, the temperature a humid eighty-eight degrees. The smart money, of course, was at the beach; those unlucky enough to have to stay in town walked around fanning themselves and complaining. “I was in Los Angeles when the picture opened on Broadway, on a sweltering August night,” Zinnemann recalled.
No premiere, no limousines, nothing. At 9:00 p.m., Marlene Dietrich (whom I hardly knew) called from New York and said that it was midnight there but the Capitol Theater was bulging, people were still standing around the block and there was an extra performance starting at one in the morning! I said, “How is that possible? There has been no publicity.” “They smell it,” she said.
William Morris cabled the good news to Frank: From Here to Eternity looked like a huge hit, and his performance was a big part of the equation. His mood, already up from a successful week at the Empire in Liverpool, soared. Suddenly Frank was grinning and strutting, and Ava’s eyes were narrowing. But the two of them pulled it together on August 6, when they paid a call on Mr. and Mrs. Earl Wilson at the Savoy. The columnist and his Beautiful Wife were beginning a round-the-world tour, Mrs. Wilson was celebrating her birthday, and the mood was festive. Frank and Ava “came up from the lobby and were in a merry mood,” Wilson recalled.
“He doesn’t know whether to believe all the talk,” Ava said when Frank went to the bathroom … Frank was torn about what attitude to take about all the buildup. Should he be humble or, as one of his realist friends said, “should he start getting that old shitty feeling toward everybody who’d helped him?”
Including his wife, who after all had been instrumental in getting him the role in the first place?
“There was a series of senseless quarrels with Ava,” Wilson wrote. She wanted him to stay in London until she was finished shooting her picture; he had no intention of playing the prince consort. “I’ve got a career too, you know,” he said coldly. A couple of nights after they made nice for the Wilsons, the Sinatras had such a violent battle in the St. John’s Wood flat, replete with flying furniture and broken crockery, that their landlord lost his English composure and, red faced, threatened them with eviction.