His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [118]
“One crucial difference in Frank’s favor was his size,” said Dan Taradash many years later. “Eli was a pretty muscular guy with a great physique. He did not look like a schnook. He looked like he could take two MPs with no trouble at all. Frank, on the other hand, looked so thin and woeful and so pitifully small that the audience would cry when they saw this poor little guy get beaten up. Adler and Zinnemann and Cohn finally agreed, and that’s how Frank got the role. It was by default and had nothing to do with a horse’s head.”
Taradash’s allusion was to Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather, in which a famous Italian singer by the name of Johnny Fontane appeals to the Mafia don for help in getting a movie role that has been denied him. The godfather, who loves Johnny like a son, sends his consigliori to the West Coast to ask the studio head to reconsider. The movie magnate, who cares more for his thoroughbred horses than for humans, refuses; the Mafia lawyer asks him again, but the studio chief remains adamant. The consigliori returns to New York to give his boss the bad news, and a few days later the studio chief wakes up in bed next to the severed head of his most prized steed. He realizes that a man who would casually decapitate a $600,000 horse could just as easily kill him. So he reconsiders and gives Johnny the role, and with it Johnny Fontane regains his star status.
Puzo’s novel, which sold millions of copies, reminded readers that there had once been another famous Italian singer whose career was brought back to life by a movie role that had at first been denied him.
By the time the book was published, Frank’s organized-crime friendships were so well established that it was an easy leap for readers to assume that he, too, had received a godfather’s help in obtaining the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity.
“I heard the [BBC] interviewer say I got the Maggio role through the mob,” Sinatra said. “Well—that’s so far from the truth.” In fact, he sued the British Broadcasting Corporation for saying that it was his crime syndicate ties that landed him the role; he won the lawsuit, and received a retraction.
For some, though, the suspicion always remained, understandably so, given Harry Cohn’s organized-crime ties and Frank’s various friendships within the Mafia. Later, one writer suggested that Frank Costello made an overture on Sinatra’s behalf through Johnny “Don Giovanni” Roselli, the Las Vegas-Los Angeles capo Mafioso, to get Frank the role of Maggio. Harry Cohn wore a friendship ring from Roselli, the syndicate man identified in Justice Department files as the key “to keeping peace in the movie industry in Hollywood.” Years later, Frank proposed Roselli for membership in the Friar’s Club.
Another writer, Leonard Katz, stated that when Sinatra asked for help in getting the role, Frank Costello simply contacted George Wood of the William Morris talent agency and some top movie executives on the West Coast. “It was a favor they couldn’t refuse because of favors received in the past,” he said. “Costello acknowledged to close friends that he was the one who got Sinatra the part, but he never talked about the circumstances in detail.”
“Sinatra and Frank C. were great pals,” said former columnist John J. Miller. “I know because I used to sit with Frank C. at the Copa, and Sinatra would join us all the time. He was always asking favors of the old man, and whenever Sinatra had a problem he went to Frank C. to solve it. Maggio would have been easy for Costello, who was tied in tight to George Wood, Sinatra’s agent.”
A vice-president of the William Morris Agency, George E. Wood was also a good friend of Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, a member of the Vito Genovese Mafia family in New York.
“George [Wood] was perfect for Frank because he knew all the gangsters,” said Abe Lastfogel many years later.