American Prince (20 page)

United Artists was thrilled with the way
Trapeze
turned out. The high quality of the movie only made me want to leave Universal more desperately. As grateful as I was to Universal for giving me my start, after I made
Trapeze
I just couldn’t stand the thought of going back to my low-budget contract roles. Once again, Lew Wasserman came through for me. He said to Ed Muhl, the president of Universal, “If you let Tony do outside pictures, that’s only going to enhance his value to Universal. Why don’t we make it a brand-new seven-year deal, starting now, but you’ll let him make every other picture for an outside studio?” Universal agreed. Both sides benefited, and Lew once again demonstrated that he was the smartest man in the business.

After
Trapeze
I did a movie for Universal called
Mr. Cory,
directed by Blake Edwards. We went to Lake Tahoe for the location shoot. Charles Bickford, a big, burly actor who played in a lot of westerns, was cast as my sidekick. In the movie, I play a busboy in a summer resort who becomes a successful high-stakes poker player. I make so much money playing poker that I open my own casino. Then I get in trouble with one of the other owners, who shoots me, but I survive and end up in the arms of one of the movie’s two leading ladies.

Kathryn Grant, a sweet girl who always wore her hair in bangs, was in the picture. She was twenty-two years old, and I was attracted to her, but I didn’t pursue her, because she was engaged to Bing Crosby. Martha Hyer was also in the film, and she was also very desirable, but Al Hart, the president of City National Bank in LA, was looking after her. She liked me, but she was scared that Al might show up and catch us fooling around, which would mean bye-bye to her house in Palm Springs.

After the success of
Trapeze,
Harold Hecht spoke to Lew and told him that he wanted to make another picture with me. I told Lew that that worked for me. Harold said, “We have a screenplay called
Sweet Smell of Success.
You’ll play a tough guy. It’ll be good for your career because—”

“I love it,” I said. Harold didn’t have to say another word. I was never going to pass up a chance at a serious role.

The film was about a sleazy gossip columnist named J.J. Hun secker, who was based on real-life gossip columnist Walter Winchell. In our initial conversation the movie’s producers—Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster—said they were going to get Orson Welles to play Hunsecker, and I would play Sidney Falco, a hustler willing to do Hunsecker’s dirty work for a chance to get ahead. In the end the studio decided they didn’t want Orson because his movies weren’t doing much box office, so Burt ended up playing Hunsecker. After we began shooting I realized that Burt was a great choice for the role. He had a quiet strength that was perfect for conveying the brutal qualities of the character he played.

The director was Alexander Mackendrick, who had made
Tight Little Island,
an excellent European film. Burt and Harold were thrilled to get him, but what they didn’t know was that Sandy, as everyone called him, was a perfectionist of the first order. A typical ten-day shooting schedule would take us a month or more. And once Sandy began directing the movie, he brooked no interference from anyone. He was going to film it exactly the way he wanted to, and he wasn’t going to take any guff from anyone, including Harold and Burt.

The set was a replica of Manhattan’s 21 Club. In one scene, Burt is having lunch at the club when I come into the club looking for him. Burt’s line is, “Don’t sit down, Sidney. You failed me.”

I say, “Wait, give me a chance. Let me tell you what happened.” Then I slide into the booth next to him, and we begin to talk. There’s wonderful dialogue in the scene, but we had a problem with the blocking. Burt was sitting and eating on the outside of the booth’s bench seat. So Sandy says, “Why don’t we have Burt slide over and let Tony sit on the outside? That would make the shot more intimate.”

But Burt didn’t want to slide over. He wanted me to walk over to the other side of the table and sit down because he felt that his character wouldn’t let anyone box him in like that. The character Hunsecker would have always made sure that he sat so he could get away quickly; he was a newspaperman who had made a lot of enemies.

Burt and Sandy started arguing about it. Sandy raised his voice to Burt, and then Burt went apeshit. He got up and pushed the table over, sending all the plates and glasses and food crashing to the floor. Then he raised his fist to hit Sandy. Sandy put his hands up to defend himself, but he didn’t back down. He was a strong man, and he wasn’t going to take any nonsense from anyone, even Burt. Burt took a deep breath, everyone calmed down, and we did it Sandy’s way.

The truth was that Sandy had been driving Burt and Harold crazy right from the start of filming. Sandy wanted every detail to be just so, and too often Burt and Harold didn’t think Sandy’s perfectionism was necessary. If we were drinking cocktails, Sandy wanted the drinks to be a certain color. If we were having dinner in the movie, he wanted what we were eating to be the kind of food that the characters would choose. He insisted that all these things were necessary, but no one else saw the need, which only made Sandy surly and ill-tempered. He wanted his pictures the way he wanted them. Everyone agreed that details were important, but he was slowing the production down so much that it was costing Harold and Burt a lot of money.

Sandy was also big on delving deeply into the script and the characters. It wasn’t enough to have a ruthless newspaper columnist pitted against a desperate press agent who would do anything to advance himself. Sandy wanted the tension between the two men to build in a way that satisfied his sense that it was happening naturally. Clifford Odets, the acclaimed playwright, had written the script, and Sandy was having Clifford rewrite it as we were filming. When we shot the film on location in Manhattan, Clifford would be sitting in the back of the unheated props van, typing pages in the freezing cold at two or three in the morning.

One night I went into the prop truck to see what Clifford was up to, and he said, “Come here, kid. I want to show you something.” I looked over his shoulder as he typed, “The cat’s in the bag, and the bag’s in the river.” In the scene he was working on, my character plants a bag of marijuana on Hunsecker’s sister’s boyfriend. Hunsecker then asks me whether I have done my dirty deed, and Clifford’s rewrite of my answer was the “cat’s in the bag” line.

A lot of the movie’s characters had lines like that. Kello, the cop, had a line where he said, “Come here, Sidney. I want to chastise you.” Police captains don’t talk like that. “Get the hell over here, Sidney” would have been a lot more realistic. But I couldn’t change Clifford’s lines, and they were always undeniably poetic.

We all knew that
Sweet Smell of Success
would be a unique, interesting movie. What we didn’t know was that it would get lots of review coverage, and that Walter Winchell and other gossip columnists would be furious about it. The film was good, but Sandy took so long to make the picture that Burt and Harold never forgave him. Sandy didn’t work in Hollywood again for another six years.

As for me, people were surprised to see me playing such a serious part. The movie wasn’t for teens, my core audience, and when the word got out that I was playing a despicable press agent, a bad guy, I got bum-rapped by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. So I was very disappointed, not with the picture—I knew what a good film it was and what a good performance I had given in it—but with the reaction to it. The media just refused to acknowledge me as a serious actor.

After
Sweet Smell of Success,
I went back to Universal and did
The Midnight Story,
a contrived, completely forgettable movie about a cop who becomes obsessed with solving the murder of a priest. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

A
round this time
I was still spending a lot of time with Frank Sinatra. Frank didn’t serve in the military during World War II, and his critics accused him of being a draft dodger, so he was constantly veering from being defensive to being pugnacious. On the one hand, he avoided getting into fights, especially about his patriotism, or lack of it, but on a lot of occasions—especially when he was drinking—he provoked them. Someone would stare at Frank, who after all was a huge star, and his response would be
What are you looking at me like that for?
The next thing you knew, Frank’s friend and bodyguard Jilly Rizzo, who was a strong little motherfucker, would be busting heads.

At the time, Frank was King Kong in Hollywood, and I admired him for that. A lot of people hated him because so many people kissed his ass. Frank didn’t give a shit. He had plenty of power, plenty of money, and plenty of muscle. He always had a couple of tough-looking guys around who looked after him, traveling wherever he went.

One night Frank and I were having dinner at a restaurant in Palm Springs, and some guy looked at Frank and yelled out something nasty. Frank got up out of his chair and started toward the guy. I could see from the guy’s face that he wasn’t afraid of Frank at all, but then Frank’s two musclemen got up and took matters in hand, literally. One of them grabbed the guy by the throat, and the other pulled back his sports jacket and let the guy see he was packing a piece in a shoulder holster. They didn’t even have to hit the guy. He got the message instantly. Those guys weren’t fooling around.

Frank wasn’t afraid of throwing his weight around, but he was also capable of great kindness. Paul Horn had taught me to play the flute for
Sweet Smell of Success,
so sometimes I’d come over to Frank’s house and practice playing my flute for him. Frank was impressed that I was learning this new skill for my part in the movie, and he noticed that I was playing a cheap flute I’d picked up. So without telling me, he went out one day and bought me a magnificent flute, a priceless gift that I cherish to this day.

Frank used to call me up and ask me if I wanted to go to Vegas with him that weekend. He’d come by my house in his Karmann Ghia, and off we’d go. It was Frank who put the Sands Hotel on the map. When Frank started showing up at the Sands to perform, the Sands became
the
place to be seen. He sang there without a contract. When he was finished with his gig there, Frank would return home carrying a duffel bag full of cash.

I don’t know how they did it—there were no mobile phones in those days—but whenever Frank and I drove up to the Sands, a greeting party was always standing outside waiting. They’d take our luggage up to our rooms while Frank and I went right to the tables to play blackjack or craps. Then Dean Martin would show up, and Frank and Dean would sit in the lounge and drink Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. I wasn’t much of a drinker, and certainly not in their league. One night they insisted I drink with them, and by the time I had downed two Jack Daniel’s, I was practically unconscious. I had a vague memory of Frank and Dean taking me by the arms and marching me outside, and the next thing I knew I was in the swimming pool, fully dressed!

I climbed out of the pool, dripped my way upstairs to my room, changed clothes, freshened up, and went back down to the casino. I was still a little dizzy, but at least I was keeping my eyes open. When Frank saw me, he said, “Where have you been?”

“Somebody threw me in the pool,” I said. “I had to go upstairs and change.”

Frank said, “Who in the world would do that?” I told him I thought he might have had something to do with it, but he denied it, and I couldn’t be sure I had remembered it right.

Those were fun times, very carefree. My career was rolling right along, and when I was with Frank and Dean and the guys, I could forget about the sorry state of my marriage. They were all ten years older than I, and more experienced. Frank and the boys didn’t even start functioning until late in the afternoon, so to fit in with their schedule, I would sleep late too.

Sometimes Frank asked me to be his beard. He’d meet a showgirl at one of the other casinos and arrange to have me come over at the end of her show and escort her back to the Sands. I would wait for her until after the show, and when I met her, I’d say, “Why don’t we bring a few of your girlfriends as well?” Then we’d all crowd into a cab and drive to the Sands.

One time when Frank saw me coming with this bevy of beautiful girls, he said to Dean, “That’s my boy. Look at that. I send him to get one girl, and he comes back with four.”

Frank liked to have fun in Vegas, but his belligerence surfaced there just like it did in LA. I remember one night at the Sands when he got very drunk. He said something nasty to Carl Cohen, who was in charge of gambling at the casino, and Carl belted him so hard that Frank flew into the pit between the tables, and onto the floor. He was out cold. To his credit, Frank never held it against the guy. Or maybe he was just too drunk to remember it.

Frank was part owner of a casino called the Cal-Neva Lodge. It had lots of bungalows on Lake Tahoe, and as its name indicated, it sat on the California-Nevada border. The truth is that Frank bought his piece for Sam Giancana, who ran the Chicago mob. The state of Nevada had barred Giancana from even entering a casino, so Giancana found a way to “own” the casino through Frank.

While I was up there, Frank came over and said, “I want to introduce you to somebody, but don’t bring anybody with you; come alone.” I walked into this opulent suite at the hotel, and sitting there on a couch was a man wearing glasses. He got up, and although he was diminutive I could sense by the way he carried himself that he was important. Frank introduced me to the man, who was Sam Giancana.

Sam said, “I love the movies you make. Keep it up.”

“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” I said. Later, FBI wiretaps caught Giancana at the Cal-Neva, and as a result Frank was forced to sell his interest in both the Cal-Neva and the Sands. Giancana never forgave Frank for the loss of the Cal-Neva. Frank was lucky Giancana didn’t have him killed. Disappointing friends like Sam Giancana could be a very dangerous business.