His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [117]
“I realized a second later that he had said it intentionally to aggravate me, to see if I would behave like the character. Then, of course, the actor part of me came to the fore, and I really let him have it. Then he said, ‘You going to sign for seven years?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t do that. I’ve never signed a seven-year contract.’ I don’t know if I floored him, but I can tell you that I never had much of a career in the movies.”
Cohn told everyone that he wanted Eli Wallach for the role of Maggio, but he was having trouble negotiating with his agent. “By then we had three tests for Maggio—Eli Wallach, Harvey Lembeck, a well-known comedian of that time, and Frank Sinatra,” said Daniel Taradash, the screenwriter. He had captured the essence of Jones’s sprawling, 816-page novel and condensed it into a 161-page shooting script. “I remember when Frank came in from Africa to test. I saw him in the coffee shop, and he asked me, ‘How do I play the scene and make Maggio laugh and cry at the same time?’ He was so nervous. Eli Wallach made the best test of the three of them—no doubt about it. Everyone agreed. He was superb. Lembeck was not right; he tried too hard to be funny. Frank’s test was good—better than expected—but it had none of the consummate acting ability of Eli Wallach.
“Buddy Adler said to Eli’s agent [Peter Witt], ‘We want your man,’ and the agent gave a price two times as much as Columbia was going to pay. The agent said, ‘Tennessee Williams’s play, El Camino Real, is starting rehearsals and they want Eli. If I don’t get that price, he’s going to take the play.’ This burned Cohn to the core. A guy coming into a prize part and demanding that much money was more than he would tolerate. ‘Forget it,’ he screamed. ‘He’s out. No way.’ ”
Wallach said that money had nothing to do with it. “I was offered the role of Maggio and was going to take it, but I had already committed myself to Elia Kazan to play in Tennessee Williams’s play, El Camino Real, if they got the backing. When the money came through for the play, I grabbed it, because it was a remarkable piece of writing by the leading playwright in America and it was going to be directed by the country’s best. There really wasn’t much of a choice for me. As a stage actor I wanted to do the play, and so I turned down the movie and the role of Maggio. It just put my film debut off by a year or two, but I don’t feel I lost out on some great thing.”
When Frank heard that Eli Wallach had tested for the role, he became depressed, convinced that he no longer had a chance. He and Ava fought daily. She called Harry Cohn in Hollywood and pleaded with him to give Frank the role, saying that if Frank didn’t get it, he would probably kill himself.
Shooting was scheduled to start in March and almost all the parts had been cast, except for Maggio. Fred Zinnemann, Buddy Adler, and Dan Taradash conferred with Harry Cohn in his basement projection room at home about the problem. After running the Wallach and Sinatra tests several times, Dan Taradash said, “Let’s not be so dejected. Frank’s not that bad. I know we were dazzled by Wallach, but let’s try to take another look at Frank’s test and see.”
They ran the test again and again, trying to decide whether they should give the role to Sinatra or test someone else. Cohn went upstairs and got his wife. “I want you to go down there and look at the tests of Sinatra and Wallach,” he said. “Then tell me which one you like the best. Tell me what you honestly think.”
Joan Cohn watched the two tests and told her husband that she was captivated by Eli Wallach but thought he was too splendidly built to play Maggio. “He’s a brilliant actor, no question about it,” she