Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [301]
Maybe it also had something to do with those 4:00 a.m. phone calls. She was not only exhausted, but furious: She was propping him up, and for what? So he could make up for the thousandth time with that bimbo?
There had been times when the membrane between his private sorrows and his onstage persona was porous: when his depression undermined his timing, his presence, his voice itself. Lately, though, the stage was more and more a refuge. On January 17 he returned to The Colgate Comedy Hour, singing “Young at Heart” and “The Birth of the Blues” in fine style and bantering easily with the audience about the romantic elopement of Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe—which, unfortunately, had held up the movie Frank was supposed to be starring in with Miss Monroe, over at 20th Century Fox. He made a comically resigned face.
In the meantime, his new joke on Rocky Fortune was working the phrase “from here to eternity” into every episode, at least once, and often several times. Sometimes he wondered if anyone was listening.
Then, in the last week of the month, things began to pick up. Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, hearing the Oscar drumbeat grow louder for From Here to Eternity, called Frank in to discuss a multipicture deal. Louis Mayer’s son-in-law Bill Goetz, who was leaving his job as production chief at Universal International to become an independent producer (and trying to get out of the long shadow of his brother-in-law David O. Selznick), called Frank in to talk about playing one of the leads in a screen adaptation of the hit musical Guys and Dolls.
Far more important than either of these calls was a talk Frank had with Ava.
He’d been phoning her every few days, not as often as he wanted, but more than her cool responses seemed to indicate he should. Then, one morning (Los Angeles time, just after the end of the workday in Rome), he caught her in a different mood: uncertain, agitated, needy. Mankiewicz and Bogart were giving her fits, she told him. She and the writer-director had been oil and water from the beginning: it turned out his witty script read better than it spoke, and Ava, having grown no less insecure about her acting ability, couldn’t make it work. She needed to be propped up; the sharp-minded, sharp-tongued Mankiewicz wasn’t a coddler. Early in the shoot, the cameraman, Jack Cardiff, asked Ava to perch on the arm of a sofa while he took measurements for lighting a close-up. Mankiewicz, happening to walk by, saw her there and griped, “You’re the sittin’-est goddamn actress I’ve ever worked with.”
“I was so surprised I couldn’t even get my mouth open in time to say ‘Go fuck yourself’ to his departing back,” Gardner later recalled. “And the truth is I was never able to give him my complete trust after that.”
Unlike Mogambo’s John Ford, Mankiewicz was an intellectual; Ava felt she’d already failed that test with Artie Shaw. She couldn’t win this filmmaker over with tough talk, and she was too mad to try to seduce him.
But Bogart was a bigger problem. Ava was intimidated in the first place by the fifty-four-year-old screen legend, and Bogie, who’d become pals with Sinatra over the past year, and was a world-class needler to boot (“I like a little agitation now and then,” he said; “keeps things lively”), decided to give it to this broad, but good. “On the morning of the first day of shooting, Bogie came by his costar’s dressing room to say hello,” writes Lee Server.
Stuffed into the tiny room were Ava, a makeup man, Ava’s Italian secretary/translator …, Luis Miguel, and Bappie (who had recently arrived from California with an emergency replenishment of Ava’s Larder: Hershey chocolate bars, chewing gum, marshmallows, popcorn, and Jack Daniel’s whiskey). Bogart remarked that it looked like the circus was in town, and when introduced