August 5, 1953—The New York premiere of the film adaptation of James Jones’ World War II novel From Here to Eternity marked more than the first hint of public success for one of Hollywood’s great multi-Oscar winners. It also marked the comeback of arguably the most significant entertainer of the 20th century: Frank Sinatra.
You can assess From Here to Eternity from almost any angle and find something of interest:
* as a successful sidestep around Hollywood’s censors that still conveyed the essence of a (for its time) sexually frank novel;
* as a masterful screenplay telescoping a work of fiction that is sometimes too sprawling for its own good;
* as a brilliant study of men and women caught up in both an uncaring military machine and the maelstrom of war (forget Pearl Harbor, the much-ballyhooed—and just as quickly forgotten—movie about the same “Day of Infamy”);
* as a triumph of the actor’s art, not only in its two male leads, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, but in the two actresses cast against type as their promiscuous lovers, Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed; and
* as the first of director Fred Zinnemann’s Oscar-winning examinations of systema that ironically makes outcasts of one of true believers (the other film being A Man for All Seasons, about English chancellor-turned-Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More).
But above all, this film interests me as the pivotal point in the career of Ol’ Blue Eyes. Recall the multiple ways the cocky little kid from Hoboken, N.J., had been thrown back on his heels the last few years before the film’s release:
* His TV show was canceled;
* He was regarded as a Hollywood has-been, only four years after starring opposite Gene Kelly in one of the great movie musicals, On the Town;
* He’d suddenly, frighteningly lost his voice one night at the Copacabana, and even afterwards could no longer negotiate the high notes he’d once managed with aplomb;
* His 10 years at Columbia Records had come to an end, following falling sales (his original audience of bobbysoxers had grown up) and increasing acrimony with studio head Mitch Miller over idiotic novelty records he’d been forced to record;
* His two-year marriage to Ava Gardner was crumbling.
Altogether, you had here a man utterly prepared to sing what he would later call “suicide songs”(and, if at least one biographer, J. Randy Taraborrelli, is to be believed, he actually attempted to kill himself, after a breakup with Gardner), a onetime sensation ready to hit the skids, with a Britney Spears-style nervous breakdown in the making. Except it didn’t happen.
Why it didn’t has been the subject of endless speculation. The story we’ve all heard—immortalized in fictional form, of course, in the “dead horse in the bed” scene in The Godfather—is that, when Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn balked at casting Sinatra in From Here to Eternity, some Mafia associates of the singer strong-armed the movie mogul into changing his mind.
On balance, I’m inclined to believe the other, far more prosaic version of what happened—i.e., that after Eli Wallach, originally tapped as scrappy buddy Maggio, encountered a scheduling problem with the Tennessee Williams play Camino Real, Cahn thought of how much cheaper it would be to pay Sinatra now than in his MGM heyday ($8,000 versus $150,000), thought he was both ethnically (Italian) and physically (skinny) right to play this beleaguered underdog role, thought that maybe Gardner wasn’t so far gone in pleading the case for her soon-to-be ex-husband, and gave him the role after all.
Not that there’s no foundation to this legend of the Sinatra career. Though Sinatra gossip-biographer Kitty Kelley discounts it, I think there may well be an element of truth to the notion that Bergen County, N.J., mob associate Willie Moretti visited Tommy Dorsey to persuade him to allow his young sensation to go solo. Dorsey, insistent on his rights, wanted to be paid—if Sinatra was to be believed in a bitter comment he made onstage years later, seven million dollars—and for a man of such famous intransigence, perhaps only a gun held to the head would induce him to let Sinatra out of his contract.
I should mention right here another reason for my growing (I was nowhere near this interested as a teen or twentysomething) interest in Sinatra: so many of the people and events of his life, in addition to Moretti, come from Bergen County, where I have lived virtually my whole life:
* The Rustic Cabinet, where Sinatra first sang professionally when he wasn’t serving as a headwaiter, was a roadhouse in Englewood Cliffs;
* Nelson Riddle, the great arranger who created the lush orchestrations that redefined him as the foremost interpreter of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s, hailed from Ridgewood;
* The Riviera, a Fort Lee nightclub owned by Bill Miller (father of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller), was where Sinatra played the engagement that announced that the singer was back and bigger than ever; and
* Dolly Sinatra, his beloved mother, was put up in a very fine house in the same city, overlooking New York.
Sinatra’s music career—probably his ultimate legacy—revived virtually simultaneously with his film career, but he always credited the movie with being the real factor behind his return to prominence. His hunger to play his doomed character, his visceral understanding of the part, paid off a thousand times. "He does Private Maggio like nothing he has ever done before," Time Magazine observed, in one typical comment.
You can assess From Here to Eternity from almost any angle and find something of interest:
* as a successful sidestep around Hollywood’s censors that still conveyed the essence of a (for its time) sexually frank novel;
* as a masterful screenplay telescoping a work of fiction that is sometimes too sprawling for its own good;
* as a brilliant study of men and women caught up in both an uncaring military machine and the maelstrom of war (forget Pearl Harbor, the much-ballyhooed—and just as quickly forgotten—movie about the same “Day of Infamy”);
* as a triumph of the actor’s art, not only in its two male leads, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, but in the two actresses cast against type as their promiscuous lovers, Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed; and
* as the first of director Fred Zinnemann’s Oscar-winning examinations of systema that ironically makes outcasts of one of true believers (the other film being A Man for All Seasons, about English chancellor-turned-Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More).
But above all, this film interests me as the pivotal point in the career of Ol’ Blue Eyes. Recall the multiple ways the cocky little kid from Hoboken, N.J., had been thrown back on his heels the last few years before the film’s release:
* His TV show was canceled;
* He was regarded as a Hollywood has-been, only four years after starring opposite Gene Kelly in one of the great movie musicals, On the Town;
* He’d suddenly, frighteningly lost his voice one night at the Copacabana, and even afterwards could no longer negotiate the high notes he’d once managed with aplomb;
* His 10 years at Columbia Records had come to an end, following falling sales (his original audience of bobbysoxers had grown up) and increasing acrimony with studio head Mitch Miller over idiotic novelty records he’d been forced to record;
* His two-year marriage to Ava Gardner was crumbling.
Altogether, you had here a man utterly prepared to sing what he would later call “suicide songs”(and, if at least one biographer, J. Randy Taraborrelli, is to be believed, he actually attempted to kill himself, after a breakup with Gardner), a onetime sensation ready to hit the skids, with a Britney Spears-style nervous breakdown in the making. Except it didn’t happen.
Why it didn’t has been the subject of endless speculation. The story we’ve all heard—immortalized in fictional form, of course, in the “dead horse in the bed” scene in The Godfather—is that, when Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn balked at casting Sinatra in From Here to Eternity, some Mafia associates of the singer strong-armed the movie mogul into changing his mind.
On balance, I’m inclined to believe the other, far more prosaic version of what happened—i.e., that after Eli Wallach, originally tapped as scrappy buddy Maggio, encountered a scheduling problem with the Tennessee Williams play Camino Real, Cahn thought of how much cheaper it would be to pay Sinatra now than in his MGM heyday ($8,000 versus $150,000), thought he was both ethnically (Italian) and physically (skinny) right to play this beleaguered underdog role, thought that maybe Gardner wasn’t so far gone in pleading the case for her soon-to-be ex-husband, and gave him the role after all.
Not that there’s no foundation to this legend of the Sinatra career. Though Sinatra gossip-biographer Kitty Kelley discounts it, I think there may well be an element of truth to the notion that Bergen County, N.J., mob associate Willie Moretti visited Tommy Dorsey to persuade him to allow his young sensation to go solo. Dorsey, insistent on his rights, wanted to be paid—if Sinatra was to be believed in a bitter comment he made onstage years later, seven million dollars—and for a man of such famous intransigence, perhaps only a gun held to the head would induce him to let Sinatra out of his contract.
I should mention right here another reason for my growing (I was nowhere near this interested as a teen or twentysomething) interest in Sinatra: so many of the people and events of his life, in addition to Moretti, come from Bergen County, where I have lived virtually my whole life:
* The Rustic Cabinet, where Sinatra first sang professionally when he wasn’t serving as a headwaiter, was a roadhouse in Englewood Cliffs;
* Nelson Riddle, the great arranger who created the lush orchestrations that redefined him as the foremost interpreter of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s, hailed from Ridgewood;
* The Riviera, a Fort Lee nightclub owned by Bill Miller (father of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller), was where Sinatra played the engagement that announced that the singer was back and bigger than ever; and
* Dolly Sinatra, his beloved mother, was put up in a very fine house in the same city, overlooking New York.
Sinatra’s music career—probably his ultimate legacy—revived virtually simultaneously with his film career, but he always credited the movie with being the real factor behind his return to prominence. His hunger to play his doomed character, his visceral understanding of the part, paid off a thousand times. "He does Private Maggio like nothing he has ever done before," Time Magazine observed, in one typical comment.
Six months later, Sinatra was rewarded with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. He would be nominated one more time, for his turn as a desperate drug addict in The Man With the Golden Arm, but the role of Maggio is what transformed him from has-been to an entertainer truly meant for eternity.
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