Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [312]
He didn’t have to say the last word. He had now proved, definitively, that he could do something besides sing.
He was grinning broadly as the crowd laughed, looking around and seeming at ease for the first time. “I love you, though, thank you very much,” he said, adding, as if further explanation were necessary, “I’m absolutely thrilled.” And he blew the crowd a big kiss, took McCambridge’s arm, and walked off.
Watching on television in Santa Monica, Ralph Greenson turned to his wife. “That’s it,” the psychiatrist said. “We’ll never see him again.”
He was right.
Several of the biographies say that Frank thanked Harry Cohn, Buddy Adler, and Fred Zinnemann that night. In fact, he cleverly thanked everybody by thanking nobody. At his brief press conference backstage, amid the grinning faces of Cohn, Adler, Zinnemann, and Donna Reed—From Here to Eternity had virtually swept the evening, winning eight Oscars and tying Gone With the Wind—Sinatra expressed his regret that the absent Montgomery Clift had failed to win the Academy Award he so deserved.1 “I wanted to thank Monty Clift personally,” Frank said. “I learned more about acting from Clift—it was equal to what I learned about musicals from Gene Kelly.”
Then he posed for the cameras with Reed, both of them clutching their golden statuettes, both wearing the kinds of smiles that actors never smile in the movies. Frank had been photographed grinning like this once before, the time the cameras had caught him dancing with Lana Turner, the wedding band that joined him to Nancy clearly and indiscreetly visible on his left hand.
The woman he’d left Nancy (and Lana) for, the woman whose ring he still wore despite everything, the woman who had been largely responsible for getting him the role of Maggio, was the one person he never thanked. She was in Madrid, as busy in her way as he was in his.
He drove his son and daughter home, and it was only the thought of them, warm in the car with him and unable to stop talking about the miracle of the evening, that kept Frank from driving the Cadillac into a light pole. The Oscar sat on the seat between him and Nancy Sandra, like a fourth passenger. The rain had stopped; the streets were black and slick; the streetlights had halos. He drove west on Hollywood, turned south on Fairfax to Sunset, turned right, and continued west. When he pulled up in front of 320 North Carolwood, all the lights in the house were on.
He knew people were waiting for him in the apartment on Beverly Glen: Jule Styne had thrown together a little congratulatory party, with Gene Kelly and Sammy Cahn and Betty Comden and Adolph Green and a few others. There would be a lot of champagne, and a fresh-faced starlet named Charlotte Austin. But Frank wasn’t in the mood to see anybody—everybody who congratulated him seemed, in some small or large way, to take responsibility for his triumph. The one person who had somehow managed not to do this, who had seemed genuinely happy for him without having to take anything at all from him, had been his ex-wife.
Frank and Donna Reed hold their Oscars for From Here to Eternity. Hollywood rejoiced in Sinatra’s victory, the greatest career comeback ever. Louella Parsons wrote later: “I ran into person after person who said, ‘He’s a so-and-so but I hope he gets it. He was great!’ ” (photo credit 40.2)
So he turned left on Sunset instead of right, away from Beverly Glen, and guided the Cadillac over the slick black boulevard, driving carefully through the curves. He passed the Beverly Hills Hotel and turned off Sunset, among the dark, quiet streets with their tall palm trees and big, self-possessed houses. After a little while he pulled over and parked.
Sitting under a streetlight, he picked up the statuette and held it. He looked at it, ran his hand over its cool smoothness, turned it in the light. It was deliciously heavy: eight and a half pounds, the size of a newborn.
He opened the car door and got out, the statuette in his hand.
“I ducked the party, lost the crowds, and took a walk,” he said