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felt very awkward about it—who knows what has happened between a man and a woman when it goes sour? Bogie had told me the picture was going well and that Ava had many people with her all the time, including her sister and a bullfighter named Luis Miguel Dominguin, with whom she was in love. I took the damn cake to the studio and knocked on her dressing-room door. After I had identified myself, the door opened. I felt like an idiot standing there with the bloody box—there were assorted people in the room and I was introduced to none of them. I said, “I brought this cake for you—Frank sent it to me in New York, he thought you’d like it.” She couldn’t have cared less. She wanted me to put it down on some table she indicated—not a thank-you, nothing.

Bacall was justifiably furious. With time, though, she realized that Ava’s “reaction had only to do with Frank—she was clearly through with him, but it wasn’t that way on his side. I never told Frank the coconut-cake saga, he would have been too hurt. Bogie always said the girls at MGM were so pampered, so catered to, that they were totally spoiled and self-indulgent. But she was professional about her work, and that’s all he cared about.”

Of course Ava was spoiled. She’d always admitted it. Frank, a prince since childhood, was spoiled too: it was a big difference between the two of them and the Bogarts, who tried to embody their tough screen personae in everyday life.

But Ava had rediscovered her professionalism. In a scene shot in an olive grove in Tivoli Gardens, she recalled, “I had to perform a flamenco-style dance wearing a tight sweater and a cheap satin skirt, enticing my partner, luring him closer, swirling out of his grasp, taunting him with my body.” Her specialty. And she didn’t have to say a word.

It came off splendidly. Mankiewicz was happy, Bogart was happy, Ava was happy. Back in California, Frank was finding it hard to get her on the phone again.

On Valentine’s Day, a gloomy Sunday, Frank sent Ava a cable. He loved her and missed her and hoped she’d be coming back to him soon.

Then he went home and got drunk.

He’d called in a group of friends to play cards. “When we got there he was on the phone to Nancy,” one of them recalled.

But this time she was mad at him. She wouldn’t talk to him.

By the time we got the game started, he didn’t even want to play anymore. He went into the den, opened a bottle, and started drinking alone. Okay. So we keep the game going awhile, and then Sammy Cahn gets up and he goes in to try to get Frank to join us. So what does he see?

There’s Frank drinking a toast to a picture of Ava with a tear running down his face. So Sammy comes back and we start playing again. All of a sudden we hear a crash. We all get up and run into the den, and there’s Frank. He had taken the picture of Ava, frame and all, and smashed it. Then he had picked up the picture, ripped it into little pieces, and thrown it on the floor. So we tell him, “Come on, Frank, you’ve got to forget about all that. Come on and play some cards with us.” He says, “I’m through with her. I never want to see her again. I’m all right. I’ve just been drinking too much.”

So we go back to the game and a little while later Sammy goes back to Frank, and there he is on his hands and knees picking up the torn pieces of the picture and trying to put it back together again. Well, he gets all the pieces together except the one for the nose. He becomes frantic looking for it, and we all get down on our hands and knees and try to help him.

All of a sudden the doorbell rings. It’s a delivery boy with more liquor. So Frank goes to the back door to let him in, but when he opens it, the missing piece flutters out. Well, Frank is so happy, he takes off his gold wrist watch and gives it to the delivery boy.

The next day, the nominations for the 1953 Academy Awards were announced.

From Here to Eternity got thirteen nominations: for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Deborah Kerr), Best Actor (both Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster), Best Supporting Actress (Donna Reed), Best