His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [151]
Yet, loath to rehearse, Frank dashed off eleven shows in fifteen days, sailing through with little attention to detail. At CBS, one show would have taken seven days to film, and the star would have been required to rehearse. At ABC, Frank made his stand-in, Dave White, do the rehearsing while he simply jumped in at the last minute to do the filming.
“It was a brutalizing experience for actors who take their work seriously, let me tell you,” said actor Maurice Manson. “I only lasted one day with that man, and one day was too much for me.
“We were doing a four-person skit—a light comedy bit with me as the producer, Frank as the talent scout, and Kim Novak as the girl who is discovered and taken to a drama teacher, played by Celia Lovsky. As the movie producer, I was sitting at my desk going through scripts. Frank was supposed to knock on the door and then walk into my office. When I heard him knock, I said, ‘Come in.’ Frank opened the door and then fell to his knees, and started barking like a dog. I thought he’d had an epileptic fit or something, but when all his stooges on the set laughed uproariously, I realized that it was his idea of a joke. I didn’t think it was a bit funny myself and was quite unnerved. We started again, and this time he got through the door. As the camera came in for closeups, I said the lines from the script: ‘Well, what do you think of the girl?’ The film was rolling as Frank said, ‘Don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to feel her up yet.’ Again his stooges screamed and hollered as though that was the funniest thing in the world, so Frank kept it up all day. We finally got something in the can after a few hours of nonsense, but it was awful, and Celia and I looked horrible, probably because we were both so done in by Frank’s antics.
“I’m sure that he wasn’t being malicious and trying to make us look bad. It’s just that he didn’t care about the acting or the ensemble. He wouldn’t take the time to rehearse. He wouldn’t even learn his lines. He just read them off the TelePrompter. He was forty-two years old at the time, but he acted like a stupid teenager. It was a case of arrested adolescence.”
The series made its debut on October 18, 1957, with the New York Herald-Tribune hailing it as “a triumph in almost all departments,” while The New Yorker criticized it as “under-organized and a little desperate; and that for a show described as ‘the most expensive half-hour program in history.’ ”
By November, Variety had dismissed the series as “a flop, rating and otherwise.” The New Republic said it was suffering from that “terrible disease that afflicts television variety shows. It has no name, but the symptoms are superficial smoothness, lack of emotion, cheerful banality, and something that can only be called intentional dullness.”
Dean Martin was Frank’s guest star the next month, which the Chicago Sun-Times found regrettable. “They performed like a pair of adult delinquents, sharing the same cigarette, leering at girls, breaking up on chatter directed to the Las Vegas fraternity, plugging records, movies, and the places where they eat for free, and swigging drinks at a prop bar.” Some critics objected to Frank’s use of such words as “broads” and “mother grabbers,” and others found Dean so nonchalant as to be indifferent. The chemistry between the two men, who were close friends, did not ignite ratings.
Even Frank’s Christmas show with Bing Crosby was condemned by Variety as “static, studied, pretentious, and awkward.… Even discounting the often sloppy production … the absence of central theme or point of view, the fact is that Sinatra never seemed at his best or at his easiest, and the attitude infects his guests.”
Network executives were panicked by Sinatra’s low ratings, which placed the show a sorry third to M Squad and Mr. Adams and Eve, which starred Ida Lupino and Howard Duff. But Frank remained calm and confident. “Those guys in the gray flannel suits—I just don’t dig ’em,” he said. “You’d think they’d give a show a chance to build. But no. The show wasn’t on