His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [211]
Dexter tried to comfort his friend, saying that Frank, Jr., probably had tried to call.
“My son never calls me,” said Frank. “He puts as much distance between us as he possibly can.”
Frank drove to Mia’s apartment that night as he had promised to do. When he walked in, he was surprised to see that she had cut off her long golden hair.
“I chopped my silly hair off because I was bored with me,” she said.
Once he recovered from the shock Frank said, “It’s terrific. Now you can go out for Little League like the rest of the boys!”
Mia told Corinne Entratter that she’d done it because she’d become too prideful about her long hair. “Mia was always so vain about her hair, always twisting it and pushing it, so I was quite shocked when she clumped it all off. I asked her why she’d done it and she said, ‘I just thought I should not have anything I should be vain about.’ It was almost like something a nun would say.”
The next day, when Mia joined Frank and Brad Dexter for lunch at the Beverly Wilshire, Sinatra greeted her by saying, “Hiya, Butch!”
For weeks, Frank and Dexter had been discussing plans for launching a new phase in Frank’s career that would concentrate on his acting. Having been made vice-president of Sinatra Enterprises in charge of production, Dexter was looking for the kinds of properties that would showcase Frank as an actor and do away with the japing antics of his last few movies, which Bosley Crowther of The New York Times said were characterized “by many globs of sheer bad taste that manifest a calculated pandering to those who are easily and crudely amused.” The critic dismissed Von Ryan’s Express as “outrageous and totally disgusting,” and said that Marriage on the Rocks was nothing more than “a tawdry and witless trifle about a bored married man.”
“It is provoking to see this acute and awesome figure turning up time and again in strangely tricky and trashy motion pictures that add nothing to the social edification and encouragement of man,” he said. “One after another of his pictures in the past several years has been a second- or third-rate achievement in dramatic content and cinema artistry, and the only thing to be said for a few of them is that they have galvanized and gratified some elements that prefer lurid action and bravado to solid commentary and sense.… What grieves a long-time moviegoer is to remember how bright and promising he used to be, beginning with his charming performance with Gene Kelly in the musical Anchors Aweigh.”
Frank was aware of the shortcomings of his recent movies and said, “I guess the trouble has been that at the time I did these pictures, nothing better seemed to be available. It all boils down to material.”
Brad Dexter hoped to resurrect Sinatra’s film career with quality work.
“I wanted Frank to develop the professional pride in his movies that he had in his recordings,” he said. “We talked about it a lot and he said that he wanted to inherit Bogart’s mantle and be an actor’s actor, so I started looking for the best stuff I could find for him. I brought him Harper, and he loved the story, but Mickey Rudin blocked the deal because he didn’t want Elliott Kastner and Jerry Gershwin, who owned the property and developed the script, to get paid $400,000 to produce a picture which might only make it on Sinatra’s name. The movie went to Paul Newman instead, and everyone made a fortune. I wanted Sinatra Enterprises to acquire Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, so I sent the book to Frank and told him to read it. He called me back saying he couldn’t understand a word and didn’t see it as a movie, so I had to turn it down. The movie was later made by Stanley Kubrick and made millions.
“Finally, I got Frank to agree to do The Naked Runner, a suspense drama in which he was to play an unwitting assassin, a role that would capitalize on his explosive, combustible personality. Frank was all for it, and so I started production work in London in 1966, but there were problems, real problems, because Frank was going through his Mia period and was beset trying to decide whether