Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [282]
Of all the numerous characters who’d been buttering Frank up in the last two months, the most insistent was a movie producer named Sam Spiegel. Spiegel was an operator straight out of a Saul Bellow novel: heavy jawed, prow nosed, and pinkie ringed, he had an indefinable Eastern European accent, a looming, slightly menacing stare, and a murky past, complete with at least one deportation and jail time for kiting checks. “He was always surrounded with beautiful women, whom he graciously dispatched to his friends, or whomever he wanted to sell something to,” recalled George Jacobs. “He seemed like a joke. Yet he was the real deal.”
Spiegel began his producing career in Berlin and fled Germany upon the rise of the Nazis. His path to America was circuitous, and likely illegal: when he finally made it to Hollywood in the late 1930s, he adopted the alias S. P. Eagle in an attempt to throw off the bloodhounds. Over the next decade he bootstrapped himself into a Hollywood career, forming important alliances with two equally colorful characters, Orson Welles and John Huston. In 1951, Spiegel produced The African Queen, with Huston directing and Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in the starring roles: Bogart won an Oscar for Best Actor.
Sam Spiegel began pursuing Sinatra relentlessly. According to Spiegel, the role of the longshoreman and ex-prizefighter Terry Malloy in Budd Schulberg’s script for On the Waterfront had practically been written for Frank. The film was even going to be shot in Hoboken: it was perfect. “For Chrissakes, you are Hoboken!” the producer told Sinatra.
But in Hollywood’s eyes, Frank was still not a star. He had given one terrific performance, but in the cold-eyed view of the movie business he might still be a flash in the pan. He had dazzled in an ensemble, but could he actually carry a dramatic picture? Was Sam Spiegel, gambler though he was, willing to make that bet?
In fact, with Sinatra, Spiegel was hedging his bets.
The actor Spiegel really wanted to play Terry Malloy was Marlon Brando. Marlon Brando could carry a dramatic picture; Marlon Brando was It. Not yet thirty—eight years younger than Sinatra—Brando had already redefined the art of movie acting. When he was on a screen, even just scratching himself, you couldn’t take your eyes off him. He had already been nominated for two Academy Awards, once as the oaf Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and then—utterly transforming himself—as the titular Mexican revolutionary in Viva Zapata! He had transformed himself again and again—into Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, into a motorcycle hood in The Wild One.
Marlon Brando could do anything, especially put asses in movie seats. But Brando didn’t want to join the cast of On the Waterfront, because both Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg had named names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
For months, the actor refused even to read Schulberg’s script, yet Spiegel, even as he wooed Sinatra, kept after Brando. “Politics has nothing to do with this,” the producer told him. “It’s about your talent, it’s about your career.”
Finally, Brando read the script, and saw Spiegel’s point. It was an extremely powerful story, a metaphor for important themes of the era: political corruption, the perils of silence. None of the roles the actor had played so far embodied an inner torment anything like that which Budd Schulberg had written into Terry Malloy. As with Maggio, there was a Christlike quality to Malloy. It was another story about a common man facing down brute authority, and it would have been right up Sinatra’s alley.
Elia Kazan almost agreed. “Frank Sinatra would have been wonderful, but Marlon was more vulnerable,” the director said. “He had this great range of violent emotions to draw from. He had more schism, more