His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [121]
Montgomery Clift coached Frank through every syllable of his part, spelling out every beat, every movement, every motion that Maggio made. He taught him not to rely on the words but to go beyond to the characterization. “Good dialogue simply isn’t enough to explain all the infinite gradations of a character,” Monty told Frank. “It’s behavior—it’s what’s going on behind the lines.”
Sinatra was grateful. “I learned more about acting from him than I ever knew before,” he said. “But he’s an exhausting man. After those army sergeants drilled us all day, we’d have dinner—usually at Monty’s room or mine. Then Clift would jump up and say, ‘Now show me how you do that about-face again.’ I’d plead with him to lay off, but he’d start to practice all over again.”
Most nights, Frank had dinner with Monty, Zinnemann, Deborah Kerr, and Burt Lancaster; afterward, he and Monty would grab their bottles and go to Frank’s room, where he would try to call Ava in Nairobi. International calls took hours in those days, and Monty and Frank drank as they waited. By the time the Honolulu operator made a connection with Ava’s African location, she was usually out for the evening, which gave Frank reason to drink the night away. Neither he nor Monty could stand being alone, so they spent endless hours together drinking, returning to their rooms so drunk that Burt Lancaster would have to put them both to bed.
Clift’s drinking, exacerbated by his drug addiction, became uncontrollable during filming, and one night before the whole company was scheduled to leave for California, Monty and Frank showed up drunk for an important night scene. Within minutes Monty passed out, and the director was alarmed because the scene could not be postponed. Frank grabbed Monty, shook him, slapped him in the face, and then walked him to his trailer, where Frank spent the next hour sobering him up enough to go before the cameras.
“Frank was wonderful to work with about ninety percent of the time,” said Zinnemann, who did not elaborate on the other ten percent.
On the last night of shooting, Frank turned on both Monty and Zinnemann as they began the scene in which Maggio is drunk and Prew is worried about his being caught by MPs. Frank and Monty had rehearsed the scene standing up, but, just before shooting, Frank decided that he wanted to do it sitting down. Zinnemann objected, but Frank insisted—loudly and profanely. Monty backed Zinnemann and remained standing to follow the script. This so angered Sinatra that he slapped Monty hard. The director tried to placate Sinatra by agreeing to film the scene with Frank sitting if he would also do one take standing. Frank refused and became extremely abusive. Alarmed by what was happening, Buddy Adler called Harry Cohn at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where he and his wife were dining with Air Force General and Mrs. O’Daniel.
“That call came in the middle of dinner,” said Joan Cohn Harvey. “Buddy said if Harry didn’t get over there fast—within the next five minutes—everything was going to blow up because Frank and Fred were really going at it. They were arguing about the way a scene was to be played. ‘C’mon,’ yelled Harry. ‘We’ve got to go. That Buddy is so spineless.’ ”
Minutes later, an Air Force limousine arrived on the set and Harry Cohn jumped out in his white dinner jacket. “What the hell is going on here?” he yelled. He fired questions at everyone. How dare an actor tell the director what to do? Why wasn’t the director following the script? Why can’t the producer see that things are under control? He then threatened Zinnemann, saying that he would shut the picture down if things weren’t done his way.
“I was on the