Frank Sinatra: How Frankie Came to Hollywood

Sinatra's career needed a flat-out miracle at this point, but in a state of desperation, he found a fix that proved not only a survival strategy, but also a means of reinvention. From Here to Eternity, James Jones's scorching WWII bestseller about Army life in Hawaii before the attack on Pearl Harbor, was going to be one of the year's most prestigious films, and he wanted the role of Maggio, a sad, doomed soldier. No one involved with the movie wanted any part of him; Eli Wallach seemed about to get the part. Ava Gardner, who now had clout Sinatra no longer had himself, placed calls around town and even mentioned Sinatra for the role in interviews. It worked. Tail between his legs, Sinatra screen-tested and re-screen-tested for the part, cut his asking price from $150,000 to $8,000, and landed the role. He was now part of a cast that included Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed. When the film was released, critics loved it and they loved him in it. The bruising Sinatra had taken from past years was visible in his face, making him all the more touching. When the picture received 13 Academy Award nominations, one was for Sinatra's performance. And he won.

Overnight, Sinatra obliterated his bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed '40s screen image and turned around his career. The movies he chose during the '50s (including Young at Heart, The Tender Trap, Guys and Dolls, High Society, Pal Joey) fine-tuned his image as a swinging, slightly melancholic, likably disreputable womanizer. That persona was reinforced by a string of albums he made under a new contract with Capitol Records, work that stands to this day among the greatest made by any American artist.

Sinatra used his re-established cachet to expand his range and staying power by venturing off into trickier screen territory. He was so compelling as a heroin junkie in director Otto Preminger's 1955 taboo-busting The Man With the Golden Arm that he was nominated for an Oscar. In 1957, in The Joker Is Wild, he played a real-life entertainer who runs afoul of gangsters. Then, for director Vincente Minnelli in Some Came Running, he was unusually persuasive as a novelist who returns home from the war to find his hometown a stranger place than he remembered it. These were brave choices for a performer who'd started out as a callow band singer. In fact, in an era of big smiles and Technicolor, his screen image was one of the angriest of any American actor. On this unlikely track, Sinatra finally became a Top 10 box-office attraction.

Fully armed and confident again, Sinatra the star began to throw around his weight. He became infamous for refusing to do retakes that he felt killed his spontaneity. He walked off the set after a single day of shooting the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's prestigious stage musical Carousel when he grew impatient at the prospect of having to shoot scenes first in widescreen, then again in a super-widescreen format. But the turn Sinatra's career took had more to do with what he liked than what he disliked. Just when it appeared he was on a great Hollywood roll, he took a bizarre detour with fellow Rat Pack cronies Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, and began to make a series of larky, in-joke ensemble comedies. The Vegas heist flick Ocean's Eleven in 1960 was the first of them, but the decade continued with Sergeants 3, 4 for Texas and Robin and the 7 Hoods. At first, the public loved these movies, though Sinatra came off in them as surly. At their best, they gave off a voyeuristic charge as the glamorous Rat Pack guys drank, gambled and mistreated women in a sanitized version of what we all imagined happened offscreen.

It isn't as though Sinatra completely sidestepped opportunities to perform on-screen at the level to which he originally aspired. He redeemed himself by playing a haunted Korean War veteran in director John Frankenheimer's classic 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate. He was reportedly considered by William Wyler to star as the ne'er-do-well gambler in Funny Girl, and by Vincente Minnelli to play the shrink in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. But when Sinatra wasn't killing time with the Rat Pack, he was cashing checks for working in movies like the godawful Left Bank musical Can-Can (1960). He scored a massive box-office hit with Von Ryan's Express in 1965, and he looked surprisingly at ease in a series of neo-Bogart roles, playing morose detectives in Tony Rome (1967), Lady in Cement (1968) and The Detective (also 1968). The self-indulgent Rat Pack movies, though, had alienated critics. Movies began to look like something Sinatra did to jolly up his dead time between carousing with his friends.

The '60s had, of course, with the advent of the Beatles and all that followed, moved Sinatra permanently out of the cutting-edge music mainstream. By the '70s, he was an internationally revered show business institution--anything he touched was a major event--but he didn't have the kind of active following that box office is made of. So, after the 1970 comedy Western Dirty Dingus Magee bombed, Sinatra announced he was retiring from show business. The international headlines that resulted only made people want him more. He came out of retirement in 1973, and continued performing to huge audiences and turning out records. As for movies, many were reportedly offered to him--including an original musical version of The Little Prince. He played a cop in The First Deadly Sin as late as 1980, and four years later did a cameo in Cannonball Run II. But by then, he had basically cashed in his chips.

Sinatra could always be counted on to stop shows with his swaggering approach to the hit "My Way," and in his singing career the self-aggrandizing sentiments of that song rang true. In Hollywood, that individualistic bravado is harder to bring off, and Sinatra had to have realized that the major turning point in his Hollywood success was when his wife, Ava Gardner, got her way and got him his role in From Here to Eternity. But more than any other singer who's tried to parlay music success into movie stardom, and more than most actors who spend their whole lives in Hollywood, Sinatra did indeed do things his way.

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