Frank: The Voice (90 page)

It wasn’t just that she felt she couldn’t act. Usually she didn’t want to, much. “
The truth is that the only time I’m happy is when I’m doing absolutely nothing,” she wrote in her memoir. “I don’t understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamned duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.”

Nice work if you can get it. “
Let’s put it this way,” Ava told Hedda Hopper before leaving for Africa. “I was going to be a secretary. But I’d rather be a star than a secretary … I’ll go along with acting so long as it gives me financial security.”

Oddly enough, though, she was having more fun making
Mogambo
than she’d ever had on a picture before. Ford was a great director, despite his surliness—or maybe because of it. He was a strange cat: a self-invented character and natural storyteller, obsessed with manliness (and perhaps a closeted homosexual), prone to the most outrageous verbal cruelties … It was said he was the only man who could make John Wayne cry. Ava was made of sterner stuff. She brought the director around, after he’d zinged her early on, by telling him to take that handkerchief he was always chewing—nervous habit—and shove it up his ass.
¹
That did the trick with John Ford. He put his arm around her shoulder, took her aside, and said, “
You’re damn good. Just take it easy.”

Besides, the part she was playing, the tough and careless sexual firecracker pioneered by Harlow in
Red Dust
, was made-to-order for Gardner. “
For someone with my naturally irreverent temperament,” she recalled,

Ava sparkled in
Mogambo
. At the peak of her charm and beauty and wry elusiveness, she seemed, for the first time in her movie career, like the best possible version of herself on-screen. Even by her own account, she would never again be quite as good. No doubt the slightly sadomasochistic waltz she did with Ford—tension and release—helped her achieve that ease. It also didn’t hurt that the director was more than a little in love with her.

She was well aware of Ford’s devotion. But that didn’t make it any easier to tell him she wanted to leave the shoot after less than three weeks and have an abortion. He was a devout, if highly conflicted, Catholic; and this was, after all, the early 1950s. “
Jack Ford tried quite desperately to talk me out of it,” she wrote.

What she couldn’t tell Ford—and couldn’t tell the world when it came time to write her memoirs—was that she was no longer certain that she loved Frank, and that throughout the fall she had often detested him. Even now, when his heart’s desire seemed within reach, when he might actually be able to turn things around for himself, he had to leave her for a month, and she knew what that meant. He hated being alone every bit as much as she hated it, and he would find company. He always did.

Frank had to cool his heels for most of Thursday the twentieth while Columbia ran other screen tests on Stage 16 of the Sunset-Gower lot: not all were for
Eternity
, but one was of the actor and comedian Harvey Lembeck, who was also trying out for Maggio (and had already acted in a service role in
Stalag 17—
and would wind up in Sergeant Bilko’s squad on
The Phil Silvers Show
). When Sinatra finally walked into Buddy Adler’s office, he was in a state. The handsome, prematurely silver-haired producer handed him a script, and Frank waved it aside. “
I don’t need this,” he said. “I’ve read it many times.”

“I didn’t think he had a chance, anyway,” Adler recalled. “So I said, ‘Well, okay.’ ”

For his test, Frank was to play two drunk scenes: In the first, Maggio interrupts a heart-to-heart talk in a bar between the bugler Prewitt and the prostitute Lorene (to be played by Montgomery Clift and Donna Reed in the movie), amusing them by pretending to shoot craps with cocktail olives. In the second, drunker still, he goads a pair of MPs outside the Royal Hawaiian Hotel into beating him up. Both scenes embody perfectly what Prewitt says of Maggio: “
He’s such a comical little guy and yet somehow he makes me always want to cry while I’m laughin’ at him.”

The role, in other words, was an actor’s dream—a softball teed up to be knocked out of the park. Yet as Sinatra walked onto the soundstage, it wasn’t quite as an actor. “
Frank had never been that crazy about acting,” Ava said. “[B]ut he knew he
was
Maggio and besides, he was dying to do a straight dramatic part and escape from the typecasting he’d been subjected to in musicals.”

Maggio would be redemption; Maggio would be vindication. After all, the typecasting of the 1940s was based on unquestioned American stereotypes: an Italian’s role (much like a black’s) was to sing and entertain. Even the downturn in Sinatra’s career could be tied to the country’s accumulated indignation at his hubris—the nerve of the little wop, trying to stand on the national stage! Small wonder that, as Frank remembered, he was “
scared to death” when the camera started rolling.
Thirteen thousand miles and endless delays, all for one chance, ten minutes of film …

Reports on the result conflict. “
The [screen] test was all right but not great,” said the
Eternity
screenwriter, Daniel Taradash. “We’d tested Eli Wallach, and in terms of acting his test was much better. We’d all settled on Wallach.”

But the man who would direct the movie—and who was conducting Sinatra’s screen test—felt differently. At forty-five, Fred Zinnemann was a filmmaking veteran of more than twenty years’ experience, a Viennese Jew who’d come to Hollywood from Europe as a young man, and now, as the director of
The Member of the Wedding
and
High Noon
, had gained a reputation as a meticulous, thoughtful craftsman for whom a film’s moral vision meant as much as the box-office receipts. Zinnemann gravitated to stories that set underdogs against overwhelming forces:
High Noon
, in which Gary Cooper’s sheriff had to face down a vengeful ex-con without the help of the fearful townsfolk, was seen by many as a parable for the McCarthy era.

Angelo Maggio is nothing if not an underdog, a cog in the great machine of the U.S. Army, in rebellion—much like his friend Prewitt—against that institution’s many strictures and inequities, as well as its bullies. Prewitt has his ethnicity, his white Americanness, on his side. But Maggio is a little man, an Italian, with no weapons except his Brooklyn chutzpah and his wits. His physical delicacy is part of his charm. Zinnemann had seen Eli Wallach’s screen test and been bowled over by his acting, but he had misgivings. Wallach was a physically powerful man. The minute the director saw Sinatra’s small frame and narrow shoulders and haunted eyes, he was intrigued. When Frank condensed all the pain of the last two years into ten minutes of screen test, Zinnemann was floored.

In his office, Buddy Adler was getting ready to go home. “
Since [Sinatra’s] was the last test of the day, I didn’t intend going down on the stage,” the producer recalled.

Adler’s recollection conveniently foreshadows Sinatra’s Oscar and elides all the complications surrounding Eli Wallach—leave it to a producer to spin a good yarn. Cohn was out of town, in New York talking to his moneymen. But it would be almost two months before final casting for
Eternity
was set, including Maggio. And Frank would not go back to Africa for three long weeks.

One thing he knew, though: he had nailed it, no matter what Harry Cohn wound up deciding.

Meanwhile, Ava’s pregnancy threw Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer into a tizzy. Once she had notified her MGM publicist and her agent of her intention to have an abortion, the front office fired off a vehement, if euphemistic, cable to John Ford:

But by this time, Ava and Ford were as thick as thieves. The director cabled back:

Ford’s cable was a remarkable performance itself. In forty-three words, he established his faith in his star, the integrity of his shoot, and his winking solidarity with his Jewish corporate masters. A masterpiece of persuasion, and an undeniable call to action.

MGM made all the arrangements. Ava Gardner was an extremely valuable asset, and MGM was very good at making arrangements. Transportation had to be set up, a clinic in London contacted—abortion was legal in England—and publicity spun. The cover story was a tropical disease, painful but not too serious, although the
Los Angeles Times
’s page-one lead was attention-grabbingly dramatic:

Frank got the news along with everyone else, and, at length, reached her by phone in London.

Her voice was weak. There was an echo on the line. God only knew who was listening in.

He’d been worried sick about her. Was she okay? What had happened?

What had happened was that like a moron, she’d eaten some fucking lettuce, which any sane white person in Africa knew you should never do in a million years … More important, though—what about his screen test?

He told her, and she was happy for him. Genuinely happy, even though she had just aborted their child … But she was so tired—would he understand if she slept a little?

Of course he would understand. She should get her rest, and he would call her when he got to New York.

The first thing he did when he hung up was drive to Billy Ruser’s jewelry store in Beverly Hills and pick out a present, for her birthday and Christmas—a pair of earrings, emeralds to go with her eyes. Ruser, an old pal, helped Frank himself.