Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [95]
And Sinatra broke them virtually from the get-go. He was due to start shooting his first MGM feature, a musical called Anchors Aweigh, in mid-June, but before he even began work, he insisted that the studio hire his pals Styne and Cahn to write the songs. Producer Joe Pasternak shook his head. Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, they were movie songwriters. Burke and Van Heusen, they were movie songwriters. But Gordon and Warren and Burke and Van Heusen were all profitably engaged elsewhere, and Styne and Cahn’s big movie credit was Step Lively, a little RKO picture that hadn’t even been released, and MGM wasn’t buying.
Sinatra, for whom business and friendship were inseparable, dug in his heels.
“It came to such an impasse,” Sammy Cahn wrote in his autobiography, “that Lew Wasserman, head of MCA, came to me to plead, ‘Unless Frank gives in, he’ll lose the picture. Won’t you talk with him?’ I of course went to Frank and said, ‘Frank, you’ve already done enough for me. Why don’t you pass on this one? There’ll be others.’ He looked at me … and said: ‘If you’re not there Monday, I’m not there Monday.’
“I was there Monday. So was he.”
Frank was there, but he wasn’t happy. He was in over his head and he knew it. This wasn’t RKO; he couldn’t just float through a picture on charm and a few songs. He would get to sing in Anchors Aweigh, but he was also going to have to do something he had never done before: dance. And not just dance, but dance alongside Gene Kelly.
Kelly was three years older than Sinatra, and the same height, but forty pounds heavier. The forty pounds was all muscle, and there began the differences between Frank Albert Sinatra of Hoboken and Eugene Curran Kelly of Pittsburgh, who was unlike anybody Sinatra had met in Hollywood. Handsome, tough, cheerful, and athletically brilliant, Gene Kelly was a walking paradox: a blue-collar jock who happened to be a superlative dancer, the opposite of the slim, ethereally elegant Fred Astaire. (Even years later, when Sinatra and Astaire might have become friends, Frank remained intimidated by the dancer’s aura. “Frank thought Fred was the class act of all time,” said the director Bud Yorkin, who worked with both men at different times. “He said, ‘I can’t be Fred Astaire.’ ”) Sinatra was intimidated by Kelly, too—not by his classiness, but by his sheer dancing ability. Very fortunately for him, though, Kelly shook the singer’s hand, looked him in the eye, and decided to help him out.
Every meeting between two men, and especially between two men who might reasonably see themselves as competitors, is essentially an encounter between Robin Hood and Little John—a joust on a log over a stream, with one bound to wind up on his behind in the water. Kelly, who was both starring in Anchors Aweigh and directing its dance sequences, maturely decided that if he held Frank Sinatra’s hand rather than kicked his ass, they would both come out the better for it.
What conditioned Kelly’s decision was not just professional wisdom but confidence. He wasn’t worried about yielding his position to Sinatra. (For one thing, though he had enlisted in the Navy early in the war, the Navy decided Kelly could best serve by making propaganda films, and allowed him to act in Hollywood on the side.) Sinatra saw his self-assurance, and respected it. And so it was settled in a split second: the two men decided to like each other.
The movie was directed by a boy wonder named George Sidney (who, four years earlier, had produced Ava Gardner’s screen test—and would go on to direct Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat, Bye Bye Birdie, and Viva Las Vegas). Anchors Aweigh was a standard MGM musical of the 1940s, built around the idea of two sailors on leave in Los Angeles—kind of a run-through for the much more successful On the Town, four years later.