His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [81]
Frank’s next film for MGM was The Kissing Bandit with Kathryn Grayson, who strenuously objected to their love scenes. “I couldn’t stand kissing him because he was so skinny, so scrawny,” she said.
The critics also objected.
“Except for appearing gawky, which seems not very hard for him to do, and singing the Nacio Herb Brown songs rather nicely, he contributes little,” said Bosley Crowther of The New York Times.
“While his songs aren’t bad, his acting is,” said Justin Gilbert in the Los Angeles Mirror.
To recoup their investment, MGM executives decided to put Frank back into sailor-suit musicals with Gene Kelly. This time, though, they gave top billing to Kelly, and kept their fingers crossed that they could repeat the success of Anchors Aweigh with Take Me Out to the Ball Game and On the Town.
“I made both of those films with Frank and Gene,” said Betty Garrett, “and they were great to work with. We had weeks of grinding rehearsals before we ever started shooting, and we became very close. There was a lot of horsing around, especially with the dancers, patting each other on the behind, pinching, hugging, and all that. Frank worked hard on all the dances; he had a natural grace and moved easily. Gene never had him do anything terribly complicated, and in their numbers together, he geared them to what Frank could do. Frank was quick, but he hated to rehearse, particularly the book part, saying that if he did a scene more than once, he’d get stale.
“At other times, he could be perfectly awful, kidding around and wasting time. Frank did that a lot in On the Town when Gene and Stanley Donen were directing. In those days, any kind of disapproval from his coworkers or friends really upset him. He was very touchy about any sort of social ostracism. We knew this, so when he was late to one of our recording sessions and held up everybody for hours, including the orchestra, we decided as a joke to give him the silent treatment and not speak. I can’t tell you how upset Frank got with us for doing that. He went crazy.
“Another time, he held Gene up and pushed his patience to the limit. Gene got mad at him and Frank suddenly got very remorseful and did a complete turnaround. While we went to lunch, he stayed there with Gene setting up for the next shot, which is normally the job of the stand-in. He adored Gene, and just didn’t want to get on his bad side.”
Frank, who was thirty-four years old when he made those two films, was sensitive about having the MGM makeup men fit him with hairpieces to cover his receding hairline and incipient baldness; he worried about covering the facial scars from his mastoid operations, and he fretted about having to have his large ears taped back. One day, he walked into Betty Garrett’s dressing room, where she had a picture of her husband, Larry Parks, taped to the mirror. Frank looked at himself and then stared at the photograph.
“I hate your husband,” he said. “He has what I call a noble head. I’ve got a head like a walnut.”
“He just didn’t seem comfortable with his looks,” said Betty. “I remember the first day of shooting On the Town. I came up behind him and patted him on the fanny to wish him luck. We’d been doing that for six weeks in rehearsals, but this time he turned on me and snarled, ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him until Gene told me that when they put the sailor pants on him, he didn’t have any behind. In fact, he was actually concave. They had to call wardrobe and make symmetricals for him, which are like padded cheeks for the fanny. He was humiliated that he had to be built up like that, and didn’t want any of us to find out.
“He was a sweet guy, though, and very good to me when we were doing Take Me Out to the Ball Game. I remember that we were doing a two-shot of a little scene together and they shot the master shot, then they shot over my shoulder to get a close-up of Frank and started to move the camera away. He yelled, ‘Hey, wait a minute. How about a close-up of