His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [140]
“A few of the women, like Ava and Lana, were public idols themselves and priceless examples of feminine beauty,” she wrote. “Many more, of course, have been the fluffy little struggling dolls of show business, pretty and small-waisted and similar under the standard layer of peach-colored Pan-Cake makeup)—starlets who never got past first base in Holly wood, assorted models and vocalists, and chorus girls now lost in the ghosts of floor shows past. Others belonged to the classification most gently described as tawdry.”
Frank sent Miss Kilgallen a tombstone carved with her name. Then he incorporated her into his nightclub act, ridiculing her as “the chinless wonder.” At the Copa he said, “Dorothy Kilgallen isn’t here tonight. I guess she’s out shopping for a new chin.” At the Sands, he held up one of his car keys and said, “Doesn’t that look like Dorothy Kilgallen’s profile?” He continued his unstinting vitriole for the next nine years, refusing to relent until the day she died. Informed of her death in November 1965, he said, “Well, guess I got to change my whole act now.”
After directing Not as a Stranger, during which Frank went on a drunken bender with Robert Mitchum and Broderick Crawford, tore down the walls of his dressing room and ripped out phones, Stanley Kramer swore he would never use him again, even if Kramer had to go begging with a tin cup. Yet, months later and against his better judgment, he signed Frank to play Miguel, the Spanish peasant boy in The Pride and the Passion which began with sixteen weeks of filming in Spain in April 1956. Spain was tantalizing to Frank because Ava was there, living a few miles outside of Madrid, but he later regretted signing the contract as much as Kramer did.
His contract specified that “no other artist is to receive better living accommodations than those provided for Sinatra; that he is to be paid ten thousand dollars per week and supplied with twenty-five dollars per day for tips and incidentals, plus reasonable baggage allowance.”
Sinatra refused to stay on location “in the sticks” with Cary Grant, Sophia Loren, and the rest of the cast, insisting on his own suite at the Hotel Castellana Hilton in Madrid. He also insisted on having a car at his disposal and demanded that Kramer pay five thousand dollars to transport his Thunderbird from Los Angeles to Madrid. Kramer offered him a fifteen-thousand-dollar Mercedes with a chauffeur instead. Frank wanted a convertible, and refused to work until he got one; the transatlantic negotiations between his agents and the director’s lawyers over the car went on for weeks.
“His entrance to Spain was preceded by this controversy,” said novelist Richard Condon, who was a publicist at the time. “Kramer prevailed on the transportation, but Francis would not forgive him. They argued through intermediaries also over a stereophonic record player for Frank’s hotel suite, and on the first night of shooting in a village south of Madrid, Frank summoned Kramer to him before the assemblage of the extras, crew, and players, and said that if Kramer didn’t get him out of there and back to the hotel by eleven-thirty that night that Frank would piss on him. That got things off to a lame start.”
The director became alarmed about Frank’s heavy expenses after the first week and cabled company lawyers in Los Angeles about his $644 bill for long distance calls and cables, one of which went to his Chicago bookie.
“The ten thousand pesetas cash were spent entertaining Sinatra’s various friends and hangers-on,” wrote the director’s assistant. “I hope to be able to resolve this problem in some reasonable manner with Sinatra, but will be careful not to take a stand so equivocal that it is difficult to back out of.”
Yet, the next week, Frank flew Peggy Connolly in to stay with him and gave the twenty-four-year-old singer the right to charge anything to his account, including her beauty salon bills, jewelry