Frank: The Voice (35 page)
Authors: James Kaplan
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #United States, #Biography, #Composers & Musicians, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Singers, #Singers - United States, #Sinatra; Frank
The movie was directed by a boy wonder named George Sidney (who, four years earlier, had produced Ava Gardner’s screen test—and would go on to direct
Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat, Bye Bye Birdie
, and
Viva Las Vegas
).
Anchors Aweigh
was a standard MGM musical of the 1940s, built around the idea of two sailors on leave in Los Angeles—kind of a run-through for the much more successful
On the Town
, four years later. A tongue-in-cheek Kelly played the wolf of the fleet, and Frank was the goofily shy former church choirmaster Clarence Doolittle.
The ace MGM scenarist Isobel Lennart wrote the inspired characterization, which might as well have been cooked up by George Evans. Sinatra got to wear a uniform that at once flattered his slim physique and countered the draft-dodger image. (So flattering was that sailor suit that Frank would find it difficult to get out of it for the rest of his brief career at MGM.) And he got to act like a complete dunce around women. He was sweet and convincingly gentle.
The picture had several dance sequences, most notably a groundbreaking scene in which Kelly tripped the light fantastic with the Hanna-Barbera-animated mouse Jerry, of
Tom and Jerry
fame. But
making Jerry Mouse move gracefully merely involved hand painting thousands of cels. Making Frank Sinatra dance was something else again.
Kelly did his heroic best. As Sinatra told his daughter Nancy:
I was born with a couple of left feet, and I didn’t even know how to walk, let alone dance. It was Gene who saw me through. We became a team only because he had the patience of Job, and the fortitude not to punch me in the mouth because I was so impatient. Moviemaking takes a lot of time, and I couldn’t understand why. He managed to calm me when it was important to calm me, because we were doing something that we wanted to do. Apart from being a great artist, he’s a born teacher, and he taught me how to move and how to dance. We worked hard and he was a taskmaster. Rehearsal for each routine took eight weeks every day. I couldn’t dance exactly like he danced so he danced down to me. He taught me everything I know.
This is remarkably self-knowing. Frank
was
pathologically impatient, a characteristic that power and fame aggravated. (It was on
Anchors Aweigh
that his hatred of doing anything more than once, especially where the movies were concerned, earned him the nickname “One-Take Charlie.”) Underneath was always a panicky uncertainty. He could be sweet when he was unsure: when he stepped on the actress Pamela Britton’s toes during a dance number, he “
quickly apologized,” he recalled. Whereupon Britton “smiled bravely and said, ‘Oh, that’s all right. You’re very light on my feet.’ ”
But more to the point was another confession: “
Because I didn’t think I was as talented as some of the people who worked [at MGM], I went through periods of depression and I’d get terribly embarrassed.” When Frank felt humiliated, his first reaction was to bark commands. If others were humiliated in the process, all the better.
His hot-blooded reactions endeared him to no one, even the Job-like Kelly. “
We used to play mean, nasty tricks on Frank Sinatra, because he was always a pain in the neck,” Kelly’s assistant on the film, the dancer Stanley Donen, told his, Donen’s, biographer. “He didn’t want to work and was very quixotic and quick to anger, so we used to take great pleasure in teasing him.”
Kelly and Donen came up with a great practical joke, revolving around the MGM commissary, where they broke for lunch every day with Sinatra:
The MGM commissary had square tables with blue plastic tops, pushed against the walls, like in a cafeteria. Every table was square, all but one, and that belonged to Gerry Mayer [Louis B.’s brother, who ran the studio’s physical operations].
So one day, mean bastards that we were, Gene and I said to Frank, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have a round table? It’s so much nicer that way, because then we could sit closer together.” As soon as Frank heard us say that, he said, “You watch, I’ll get us a round table.”
There was no way Frank was going to get us a round table. We knew that. Then, when he was told to forget it, he got into this huge argument. He steamed and he fumed and threw fits and said he was going to quit. All this for a round table.
Early in the shoot of
Anchors Aweigh
, Sinatra, insecure about how he was coming across in the movie (and probably worried about all those single takes), asked to see rushes. Pasternak told him that this wasn’t done. When actors saw themselves on-screen, the producer said, they always asked for retakes, which cost time and money. Sinatra exploded; Pasternak relented. “Listen,” he said, “I’m not supposed to do this, but I’ll make an exception and let you see them. Just you, though, and nobody else.”
Sinatra arrived for the secret screening with an entourage. This
time Pasternak was the one who got furious. “I said just for you,” he told Frank. “Not for half a dozen.”
Frank announced, once again, that he was walking off the picture. Pasternak told him to go right ahead. Sinatra walked—then, not wanting to test his expendability, came back the next day.
But the pattern had been set. One afternoon, a United Press reporter who was on the set to interview the pianist José Iturbi got more than he bargained for: a choice outburst from a frustrated Sinatra. “
Pictures stink and most of the people in them do too,” he told the writer. “Hollywood won’t believe I’m through, but they’ll find out I mean it.”
He had already pushed the limits by insisting on Cahn and Styne and upsetting the producer with his special needs. This blasphemous tantrum was the kind of thing that could get an actor, even a high-paid one, run out of town. Sinatra’s team quickly went into damage control. “It was the hottest day of the year,” his manager Al Levy told the press. “
Naturally he was tired, but that crack was never intended for that fat fellow with the glasses [the reporter].” And Jack Keller quickly placed a statement by Sinatra (written by Keller) in the papers:
It’s easy for a guy to get hot under the collar, literally and figuratively, when he’s dressed in a hot suit of Navy blues and the temperature is a hundred and four degrees and he’s getting over a cold to boot.
I think I might have spoken too broadly about quitting pictures and about my feeling toward Hollywood.
To say the least. And while it could certainly get hot under the klieg lights of a soundstage, especially in those pre-air-conditioned days, the summer of 1944 was in fact a typically temperate one in Culver City. In fact, as the war raged across Europe and the Pacific, it was a lovely summer in Los Angeles—a city of low white and pastel buildings, smogless in those days, full of fragrant blossoms and, for every
working actor and screenwriter, five unemployed ones. Frank knew this, even as the black headlines blared of invasions and battles. Hollywood had its charms, and Sinatra was not about to lose them. Despite the aggravation of working at MGM, there were too many compensations: One day when the gaffers had taken around an hour too long to light the set, Frank simply got up and walked off the soundstage, into the studio alley. Turning right, down another alley to another soundstage, he went through another heavy door, with its sign saying QUIET PLEASE, past gaping extras, and up to a petite blonde deliciously filling out a tight WAC uniform. Her back was to him, but when she saw the reaction of the assistant director she’d been speaking to, she turned: it was Lana. She was in the midst of shooting another service comedy, this one about the Women’s Army Corps and titled
Keep Your Powder Dry
. She was also in the midst of leaving her second husband for the second time (long story), and seeing Peter Lawford, Bob Stack, and the exotically handsome Turhan Bey. But her big grin at Sinatra said she wouldn’t mind seeing a lot more of him, soon. And quite soon, she was, he was, they were.
Even as he exhausted himself rehearsing dance sequences (and stepping out with Lana), Sinatra continued to do his radio shows that summer: it was important to maintain his multimedia presence. It was also expensive. Lucky Strike allowed him to broadcast his
Your Hit Parade
segments from the West Coast on the condition that the singer pay out of pocket for studio rental, Stordahl’s orchestra, and the AT&T phone feed to New York. The total was $4,800 per show, $2,000 more than his weekly salary.
Even Sinatra couldn’t be everywhere at once. In July, he had to cancel a scheduled return to the Riobamba in Manhattan; to replace him, MCA sent a kid whom the agency’s man in Cleveland had spotted singing with the Sammy Watkins Orchestra. The tall, dark, athletically handsome twenty-seven-year-old, out of Steubenville, Ohio, had been
christened Dino Crocetti, but naturally that wouldn’t do for a stage name. Wrote the ever-perceptive Lee Mortimer in the
Daily Mirror
, “
In Sinatra’s singing spot is a chap by the name of Dean Martin, who sounds like him, uses the same arrangements of the same songs and almost looks like him.” In a later blurb, Mortimer added a fillip: “Sings and looks like Sinatra—only healthier.”
Frank and Gene Kelly play a couple of sailors on shore leave in MGM’s
Anchors Aweigh
, 1945.
(photo credit 14.2)
Sinatramania. The Paramount, October 12, 1944. Frank’s publicist, George Evans, hired an ambulance to park outside the theater and issued the ushers bottles of ammonia “in case a patron feels like swooning.”
(photo credit 15.1)
I
n Hollywood, Sinatra was just one star in a galaxy (not to mention an official pain in the ass); in New York he was king. And, after finishing
Anchors Aweigh
in September, he came east to reclaim his crown. He was about to begin a new stand at the Paramount, the first in over a year. On the long train ride east, while Sanicola and Al Levy and Stordahl and his bodyguard Al Silvani played gin rummy, drank, and stared out the window, Frank read.
It was a habit he had picked up on the Dorsey bus, during the long rides through the night from city to city. He’d begun with dime novels, but quickly grew bored with the cheesy writing and flimsy plots. He wanted more than diversion; he wanted to improve himself. Now and then on the road he had been introduced to witty people who wanted to do more than gossip—they wanted to talk about the Depression and the New Deal and the labor movement. And while Sinatra had strong, inchoate emotions about the things they were discussing, to his embarrassment he lacked both the words and the hard knowledge to participate fully.