Frank_ The Voice - James Kaplan [96]
The ace MGM scenarist Isobel Lennart wrote the inspired characterization, which might as well have been cooked up by George Evans. Sinatra got to wear a uniform that at once flattered his slim physique and countered the draft-dodger image. (So flattering was that sailor suit that Frank would find it difficult to get out of it for the rest of his brief career at MGM.) And he got to act like a complete dunce around women. He was sweet and convincingly gentle.
The picture had several dance sequences, most notably a groundbreaking scene in which Kelly tripped the light fantastic with the Hanna-Barbera-animated mouse Jerry, of Tom and Jerry fame. But making Jerry Mouse move gracefully merely involved hand painting thousands of cels. Making Frank Sinatra dance was something else again.
Kelly did his heroic best. As Sinatra told his daughter Nancy:
I was born with a couple of left feet, and I didn’t even know how to walk, let alone dance. It was Gene who saw me through. We became a team only because he had the patience of Job, and the fortitude not to punch me in the mouth because I was so impatient. Moviemaking takes a lot of time, and I couldn’t understand why. He managed to calm me when it was important to calm me, because we were doing something that we wanted to do. Apart from being a great artist, he’s a born teacher, and he taught me how to move and how to dance. We worked hard and he was a taskmaster. Rehearsal for each routine took eight weeks every day. I couldn’t dance exactly like he danced so he danced down to me. He taught me everything I know.
This is remarkably self-knowing. Frank was pathologically impatient, a characteristic that power and fame aggravated. (It was on Anchors Aweigh that his hatred of doing anything more than once, especially where the movies were concerned, earned him the nickname “One-Take Charlie.”) Underneath was always a panicky uncertainty. He could be sweet when he was unsure: when he stepped on the actress Pamela Britton’s toes during a dance number, he “quickly apologized,” he recalled. Whereupon Britton “smiled bravely and said, ‘Oh, that’s all right. You’re very light on my feet.’ ”
But more to the point was another confession: “Because I didn’t think I was as talented as some of the people who worked [at MGM], I went through periods of depression and I’d get terribly embarrassed.” When Frank felt humiliated, his first reaction was to bark commands. If others were humiliated in the process, all the better.
His hot-blooded reactions endeared him to no one, even the Job-like Kelly. “We used to play mean, nasty tricks on Frank Sinatra, because he was always a pain in the neck,” Kelly’s assistant on the film, the dancer Stanley Donen, told his, Donen’s, biographer. “He didn’t want to work and was very quixotic and quick to anger, so we used to take great pleasure in teasing him.”
Kelly and Donen came up with a great practical joke, revolving around the MGM commissary, where they broke for lunch every day with Sinatra:
The MGM commissary had square tables with blue plastic tops, pushed against the walls, like in a cafeteria. Every table was square, all but one, and that belonged to Gerry Mayer [Louis B.’s brother, who ran the studio’s physical operations].
So one day, mean bastards that we were, Gene and I said to Frank, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have a round table? It’s so much nicer that way, because then we could sit closer together.” As soon as Frank heard us say that, he said, “You watch, I’ll get us a round table.”
There was no way Frank was going to get us a round table. We knew that. Then, when he was told to forget it, he got into this huge argument. He steamed and he fumed and threw fits and said he was going to quit. All this for a round table.
Early in the shoot of Anchors Aweigh, Sinatra, insecure about how he was coming across in the movie (and probably worried about all those single takes), asked to see rushes. Pasternak told