His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [141]
A few days after her arrival, Frank was sitting in his hotel suite with Richard Condon and others when Ava called. Frank sauntered to the phone to talk to her.
“You goddamned jerk,” she yelled so loudly that everyone in the room could hear. “You’ve been here how many days and you don’t even call me.”
“I’ve been busy,” said Frank.
“What’s happening?”
Peggy Connolly walked into the room and listened to Frank’s end of the conversation. A few minutes later, he hung up.
“Was that Ava?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Are you going to see her?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, I won’t like it at all. I didn’t come here so you could see Ava.”
Frank looked at her for a few seconds and then very calmly told her to go back into the bedroom, pack her bags, and leave. Weeks later, he sent her a twenty-thousand-dollar grand piano and begged her to return. She did, but not even Peggy Connolly could make Spain tolerable for Frank. He complained to everyone. “Who found this creepy place, a drunken helicopter pilot?” he asked Kramer, fuming about the primitive state of telephone service in Franco’s Spain. He had mailed 143 letters to the United States and on the back of each envelope he had written “Franco is a fink” in English.
“Sixteen weeks,” he said. “I can’t stay in one place sixteen weeks, I’ll kill myself.” He harangued the director about his taking so long to shoot, complained about the script, and refused to rehearse. “Let’s get this circus on the road. Forget rehearsals. Just keep the cameras turning,” he said, refusing to do more than one take.
He threatened to walk off the movie, and the director knew better than to invoke the legalities of his contract. The year before, Frank had walked out on the 125-member company filming Carousel in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, when he was told that the movie was being shot both in standard thirty-five-millimeter Cinemascope and a new fifty-five-millimeter wide-screen process, requiring at least two takes for every shot.
“I will not make two pictures for the price of one,” Frank had said as he stormed off the set. Twentieth Century Fox sued him for one million dollars for breach of contract, but Sinatra could not have cared less.
“They just didn’t know how to handle Frank,” said Beans Ponedel. “You can’t ever tell him to do something. You’ve got to suggest. He was always yelling at Kramer, ‘Don’t tell me. Suggest. Don’t tell me. Suggest.’ ”
“When Sinatra walks into a room, tension walks in beside him,” said Stanley Kramer. “You don’t always know why, but if he’s tense, he spreads it. When we were shooting in Spain, he was impatient. … He didn’t want to wait or rehearse. He didn’t want to wait around while crowd scenes were being set up. He wanted his work all done together. He was very unhappy. He couldn’t stand it, he wanted to break loose. Eventually, for the sake of harmony, we shot all his scenes together and he left early. The rest of the cast acquiesced because of the tension, which was horrific.”
To distract Frank, the unit photographer, Sam Shaw, took him on cultural excursions to the Prado art museum and engaged him in discussions about art.
Frank had first discovered art back in the ’40’s, when he was appearing at the Paramount. He went to the Museum of Modern Art one day, and, as he said later, “I just couldn’t believe it, all those paintings.” He began experimenting on his own, drawing a lot of clowns first and then branching out into street scenes and backyards.
“I had the sense that Frank was sort of looking to Sam [Shaw] for whatever might have been culturally missing in his life,” said Jeannie Sakol, a former free-lance journalist on location in Spain. “When Sam started talking about art, Frank became really fascinated. Sam was a mentor and opened a door to things that Frank had