Kaplan James - Sinatra: the chairman

E leven days after winning the Oscar for From Here to Eternity, Frank Sinatra sat down and typed a note to a friend, clearly in response to a congratulatory letter or telegram. The note, on Paramount Pictures stationery and in Franks customary, too-impatient-to-press-the-shift-key style, began,

april 5, 1954

dear lew

my paisan mr sinatra is still on cloud nine and the bum refuses to come down

That bummr sinatrawas so thrilled, the note continued (still all lowercase, still in the third person), that he was ridiculous. And then, after a final thanks to the recipient, came the signature: maggio.

Its a charming letter and a fascinating one.Daniel Taradashwith telegrams touting his perfect suitability for the part, and he had signed every wire just as hed signed this note: Maggio.

Frank Sinatra had identified so powerfully with the character not only because Angelo Maggio was a skinny, streetwise Italian-American from Brooklynlike Sinatras native Hoboken, close geographically to Manhattan but oh so far awaybut also because Maggio was one of the worlds downtrodden, a little man who drank to ease his sorrows and spoke truth to power with wisecracks. When Sinatra first read From Here to Eternity in late 1951, he was feeling considerably downtrodden himself. His records were no longer selling; he was having vocal and financial problems; the IRS was after him. He had become infamous, pilloried in newspapers across the United States, after leaving his wife and three children for Ava Gardner. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had recently terminated his movie contract, and he would soon also be dumped by Columbia Records, as well as by his talent agency, the Music Corporation of America.

Hes a dead man, the talent agent Irving Swifty Lazar declared in 1952. Even Jesus couldnt get resurrected in this town. Maybe not, but Frank Sinatra could. Literally overnightafter the Academy Awards ceremony on March 25, 1954Sinatra brought off the greatest comeback in show-business history. And he had done it all in Hollywood, a ruthlessly Darwinian company town that reviles losers but has the sappiest of soft spots for a happy ending. His Oscar underlined the fact that he was also a freshly viable recording artist with a new contract at Capitol Records, where he and a brilliant young arranger named Nelson Riddle had begun creating the string of groundbreaking recordings that would revolutionize popular music in the 1950s.

And quite suddenly that spring, without a shred of embarrassment about its fickleness, the entire entertainment industry began throwing itself at his feet. The whole world is changing for Frank Sinatra, Louella Parsons wrote in her syndicated column of April 19. Today he has so many jobs offered him he can pick and choose.

Parsons was talking about movies, although television, radio, and nightclubs were also calling. Among the film possibilities offered to Sinatra: a supporting part alongside the hot-as-a-pistol young St. Louis Woman, alongside Ava Gardner.

This was distinctly problematic for several reasons. For one thing, Gardner, whod been outraged that Metro had dubbed a professional singers voice over hers in Show Boat, was determined never to make another musical. For another, she had come to hate Hollywood with a passion. She was living as an expatriate, cohabiting in Spain with the charismatic and brilliant bullfighter Luis Miguel Domingun, the darkly handsome torero whose rivalry with his brother-in-law Antonio Ordez would later inspire Ernest Hemingways long