Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [283]
An interesting point. Frank was filled with vulnerability, but shame wasn’t quite part of his artistic palette. Not that it was a foreign emotion—he would feel deep shame at crucial moments throughout his life—but it wasn’t one he was fond of showing. Vulnerability was useful: vulnerability could get you laid. Showing shame, by Frank’s lights anyway (and maybe even by the code of the streets of Hoboken), could get you nothing but contempt.
Kazan was right: Brando was the better choice for Terry Malloy. And when Spiegel had to break the news to Sinatra, he found it convenient to blame the decision on the director. It was a rotten business, the producer cooed; a terrible thing—might Frank be interested in the role of Father Barry, the waterfront priest?
Frank swallowed the urge to tell Sam Spiegel that he and Elia Kazan could go fuck themselves. Instead, what he said was that he had already played a priest once, in The Miracle of the Bells, and it hadn’t worked out. He was going to leave the turned-around-collar business to Crosby.
With all due respect, Spiegel said, The Miracle of the Bells was pap. And that had been years ago, before Frank showed the world what he could really do as an actor. Father Barry was a great part, an important part in a hard-hitting script, Spiegel said. Would he consider it?
He considered it. “Frank Sinatra’s now practically sure to play the labor priest in S. P. Eagle’s waterfront picture,” Earl Wilson wrote on October 2.
Then, on October 10, Louella Parsons wrote, “Frank Sinatra has decided against doing ‘Waterfront’ with Elia Kazan in New York. ‘I love the role of the priest,’ he said, ‘but I only had two scenes.’ ”
But what had really happened in the week between Wilson’s column and Parsons’s was that Spiegel and Kazan had given the key role of Father Barry—who was in many more than two scenes in On the Waterfront—to Karl Malden, who’d co-starred with Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and had won an Academy Award for the role. Frank had been quite thoroughly shut out.
George Jacobs, Frank Sinatra’s valet for almost twenty years, recalled in his memoir that in the fall of 1953, his boss was even more preoccupied with work than with matters of the heart. “In what would become a continual aspect of my working for Sinatra, we’d sit and play cards late into the night, and he’d drink ‘Jack’ (Daniel’s) and obsess about his career,” Jacobs wrote.
He was on the comeback trail, though he didn’t feel he was home free again by any means. As far as he was concerned, his career was still up in the air. Although Eternity was doing big box office, Oscar nominations had not been tallied, and Mr. S still did not have his next film job …
The first (of many) people I would see Frank Sinatra hate was the man who went on to be considered one of the grandest of all Hollywood producers, Sam Spiegel. One day I arrived to see the living room half destroyed. Two lamps had been knocked over, broken glass was covering the floor. At first I thought there had been a burglary, until I began cleaning up and found the remnants of several drafts of a script entitled On the Waterfront by Budd Schulberg … I found Mr. S in bed nursing several bad paper cuts on his hands, which he got ripping up the script. He apologized for flipping out and told me he had just been fucked over by the worst real Sammy Glick in the business, Sammy Spiegel … Then he went into a tirade against Sam Spiegel that lasted for the next couple of weeks.
Mysteries abound in Jacobs’s beautifully candid, thoroughly believable autobiography, Mr. S. For one thing, the Sinatra he presents us with is far more human and complex and vulnerable than the two-dimensional images—Sinatra the Thug; Sinatra the Genius; Ring-a-Ding-Ding Sinatra; Sinatra the Wonderful Dad; Greathearted Sinatra the Secret Philanthropist—put forth by so many books and remembrances. Of course Frank could be all these things at various times, but he was also much more: at his center was the compound enigma