His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [204]
“I know all that,” said Sinatra. “I didn’t tell you how to schedule the picture. I just told you what I wanted, and you told me, in front of witnesses, that you could do it. That was the deal. So now do it! You hear?”
The cast held its breath waiting for Robson to explode, while Frank’s friends egged him on with contemptuous asides.
“For them, Sinatra seemed a kind of loaded gun which they would point at the director’s head,” said Saul David, the producer.
“Sinatra never seemed to be alone,” said his co-star, Trevor Howard. “There were always four men with him. Fellows who never took their hats off, even in nightclubs. It’s all a bit like a gangster film. A few days before Sinatra arrived on location in Cortina, the bodyguards flew in. They found there wasn’t a single Sinatra record on the jukebox, so they took it apart and stocked it with nothing but Frank’s songs. All part of the service, I suppose.”
Given the director’s methodical style and the star’s extreme impatience, an eruption was inevitable. It occurred a few weeks into shooting, when Frank stomped off the set and refused to return. The studio tried to appease him by putting a yacht at his disposal for a ten-day cruise.
“We went to Portofino and Santa Margherita and Rapallo and then came back,” said Dexter. “The most memorable moment was pulling up alongside Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, the Christina, and seeing Jackie Kennedy, the president’s widow, on board. I pointed her out to Frank, saying that she was an attractive woman with a good background—the kind of woman he should be interested in. He looked over at her and shook his head. ‘It would never work,’ he said. ‘Never.’ I sensed that he felt Mrs. Kennedy was unobtainable to someone like him.
“He’d already been paid a visit by Ava Gardner, who was the greatest love of his life. She was in Sicily making The Bible with George C. Scott and flew up to see him after a big fight with Scott. She stayed at the villa for a couple of days. I came over one night to have dinner with them and she was lovely. Frank was still trying to revive the relationship, but she started to hit the bottle and … It was painful for Frank to see the woman he adored destroying herself with booze. He never got over her. Ever.”
After a few weeks in Italy, Von Ryan’s Express moved on to Spain. The night before filming was completed there, Brad and Frank attended a dinner party at the Belgian consul’s home in Malaga. They returned to the Pez Espada hotel in Torremolinos and stopped in the bar after midnight for a drink. Minutes later, an aspiring young actress sat down and tapped Frank on the shoulder. As he turned around, the young woman threw her arms around him and the flashbulbs popped as Frank pushed her away.
Furious with what he saw as a ruse, he screamed that no one was allowed to take his picture without permission. A Stuntman who was with them grabbed the photographer, lunged for the camera, removed the film, exposed it, and smashed the camera on the floor. The hotel manager threw the couple out, and Sinatra and his party finished their drinks and left. As Brad and Frank passed a big painting of Francisco Franco, Spain’s Fascist dictator, they spat on the floor.
Hours later, the police arrived looking for the assailants the girl had described after filing charges against Frank and Brad, alleging they had tried to kill her. Under the Spanish system of denuncio, any person could accuse another of a crime and it became the burden of the accused to prove himself innocent. Furthermore, police could detain anyone for questioning, without official charges, for a seventy-four-hour