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Fight of the Century!

Writer's picture: George SeminaraGeorge Seminara

Fight of the Century

Frank, Brando, and Cheesecake  

George Seminara 

 

 




Born to Italian immigrants in Hoboken, New Jersey, Frank Sinatra's life story has probably been told better and more frequently than is important today. My interest lay in Hoboken. Frank grew up in that crucial hub of international commerce on the Hudson River. Its docks were close to the train yard. Ships from Europe would pull into port, longshoremen (or as my computer is telling me longshore-persons), would empty the boats. Much of the goods would be loaded on long trains bound for the west. Hoboken was a tough town.    

 

Frank decided that he was going to leave Hoboken forever. He was going to be famous. He would become a great singer and star on the silver screen. Lots and lots of words have been written about how Frank Sinatra became a movie star. Was the mob involved? Did it include a horse's head in the bed of a producer? Who's to say? One thing I can say is the man could pick a role. Insisting on playing Maggio, a supporting role, in From Here To Eternity. He fought hard to be cast in the role. Stop thinking about the horse's head! Man! Anyway, Frank was a genius in the part, and for his troubles, He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1953. 

 

Frank Sinatra had confidence. It has often been said that his ego traveled in its own bus and got to Vegas an hour before Frank. When Sinatra got to heaven, he pulled out a headshot, signed it, and handed it to god! What I'm saying is the man was a little full of himself. He had a huge ego. He felt that he was perfect for another role. He was trying to ply that Maggio magic and win another Oscar. He wanted to play Terry Molloy in On The Waterfront. He wanted this so bad he was willing to do anything for the chance. Luckily, director Elia Kazan did not own horses. Not even a string of polo ponies! In Richard Schickel's bio of Kazan, Brando refused the role of Terry Malloy. Sinatra seized the moment and contacted producer Sam Spiegle, The African Queen, Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia. So, not a slouch in the producing department. Sinatra felt he had  "a handshake deal." But as my momma always told me, "Get it in writing!" 

 

Director Kazan still wanted Brando. ("All I ever hear is Brando, Brando, Brando!" complained Sinatra.) Kazan enlisted actor Karl Malden to shoot some Brando-like method actors as "screen tests." It would also show Spiegle that a "Method Actor" would bring more gravitas to the role. Malden, who met Kazan at the Group Theater in New York, set up to direct a screen test with the impossibly attractive pair of real-life method actors. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.  

 

Side Bar: The Method was a Russian import.  Konstantin Stanislavski, a big wig at the Moscow Art Theater, created a system for actors to fully embody their role by experiencing rather than representing the character. Be not do, as I used to say to students. Stanislavski's homeboy, Richard Boleslavski, came to New York City and hipped some young theater folk on the new deal. The Method. There were more than two people in attendance when Boleslavski explained it, but two created their own schools, Lee Strasberg - The Actors Studio and The Stella Adler Studio. All of these folks were members of the Group Theater, and there was a big falling out amongst the members when Adler quit in a huff.  

 

Stella Adler had her students, Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Robert De Niro, Melanie Griffith, and Warren Beatty, to name a few. All of whom believed that Adler had the real deal, having actually studied IRL with Stanislavski. Strasberg had his students, Dustin Hoffman, Monty Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn, and Al Pacino. They even have their own TV show. Like Rome and The Church of England, they both teach the same stuff, but its practitioners can't agree on which one is right. Let's not go that far, but wars have started for less than Adler and Strasberg.  

   

Back to the regularly scheduled program: 

 

When Brando (Team Adler) saw the screen test of Paul Newman (Team Strasberg), he signed his name on the dotted line. Sinatra, in a word, had a cow! He was infuriated! He demanded the next best part, Father Barry, the waterfront priest. But Karl Malden could also read a script and signed on to play that part. Frank freaked out and secretly hated Brando. Not that secretly, because I'm writing about it.  

 

On the Waterfront cleaned up, winning eight Academy Awards on 12 Nominations. Marlon Brando won for Best actor. Now, Frank publicly hated him. 

 

A year later, Joseph L. Mankiewicz wrote to Brando and offered him the part of Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. The rumor was that Cary Grant, Mankiewickz' star in the Philadelphia Story, recommended Brando. According to some "Yellow Journalistic report" I have somewhere, Cary Grant called Brando on the phone to say, "I suggested you for the part… Frank Sinatra desperately wants the role. I heard you don't like Sinatra. Take the role just to piss him off."  

 



Brando described his singing voice as "the mating call of the Yak!" He rejected the role. Mankiewicz sent him a note with a bouquet of roses. "I understand you're apprehensive because you've never done a musical comedy. You have nothing – repeat nothing – to worry about because neither have I. Love Joe." Somehow, Brando said yes.  

 

The role of the sophisticated, stylish, masculine professional gambler, Sky Masterson, appealed to Frank Sinatra's vanity. It was who he saw when he looked in the mirror. Not a skinny kid from Hoboken, New Jersey. Besides, it had one of the most excellent musical numbers ever written (If you are a good looking guy in a fedora with a pair of dice in your mitt.) "Luck Be A Lady Tonight." Sinatra wanted the best role for himself. He was also frustrated that Brando had a singing role when by his own admission, Brando sang like a horny ungulate! (Send your kid to vet school and see what you learn!) 

 

Note #1: Ungalate: a hoofed, herbivorous quadruped mammal such as a pig, cow, deer, horse, elephant, or rhinoceros. 

 

Note #2: For all the theater kids out there. You all know that in Guys and Dolls, Sky Masterson is the Romantic Lead; he has two great songs, Luck Be A Lady and My Time of Day. Nathan Detroit is the comic lead. The character has a few songs, mostly in duets or with the cast, such as Sue Me and Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat. But the best part of the whole production belongs to Nicely-Nicely Johnson! He sings the first song, I Got a Horse Right Here, and sings lead in the finale, Sit Down You're Rockin' the Boat. He is also in virtually every other number in the whole dang show!  

 

The production began, according to Sinatra biographer James Kaplan, with Frank detesting the ground that Brando walked on. He was carrying a grudge against Brando for On The Waterfront. Sinatra called him Twinkle Toes, Mr. Mumbles, The "Actor." Brando made it worse when he asked Sinatra for help with his musical numbers. Sinatra blew him off because he "didn't go for that Method crap." Until this moment, Brando was not wholly aware of Sinatra's feelings. 

 

According to all reports, Brando was trying to be friends. Sinatra's antagonism started to bleed out of the studio, and the press reported that Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando "apparently" were having a bit of a feud on set. That was with the studio press department trying to spin it as a light-hearted rivalry. The studio released a bunch of portraits of the two men, hamming it up for the camera. They are surprisingly real. After the photo shoot, they stopped talking to each other and began using intermediaries.  

 

Sinatra, who everyone on the set knew hated cheesecake, wanted to change his snack from cheesecake to Apple Pie in one of the scenes. "But everyone knows Mindy's is famous for its cheesecake." Brando was perfect in the rehearsal but would purposefully blow the take, so they would have to re-do it. Craft services would place a fresh slice of cheesecake in front of 'Ol Blue Eyes, the camera would roll, and he would have to take another bite. Sinatra threw his plate to the ground on the ninth attempt and stabbed his fork into the table. He yelled at Mankiewicz, "These effing New York actors! How much cheesecake does he think I can eat?"  




In his book, Bud, Brando's friend, Carlo Fiore, revealed that things took an ominous turn when Sinatra's soon-to-be ex-wife, Ava Gardner (Hubba, Hubba), visited the set and spent all her time in Brando's dressing room! Sinatra had reportedly opined on set that Brando was a little "Light in his Loafers."  

 

It's odd that after casting aspersions on Brando's sexuality he would become extremely jealous. "What the hell was Ava doing in there for hours, playing canasta!?!" But was Frank jealous enough to hire some goons? It was a well know item that Marlon Brando got on his Harley and rode along Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills after difficult days at the studio. I wasn't there, Carlo Fiore swears it's true. At a rest stop, Brando got confronted by three men who pulled a gun on him and forced him to get into a car. They took him for a ride and allegedly made all kinds of threats before leaving him in the Hollywood Hills in a distressed condition and the actor had to explain to people that he was actually involved in an accident. Fiore recalled: "Marlon told me, 'One of the goons told him, he was going to offer Marlon a choice. 'He could kill me, a quick and easy death with a bullet in the heart. Or else he'd let me live. If he let me live, he'd castrate me and carve up my face so that no plastic surgeon could ever repair it'… Marlon told me he had never been so frightened in all his whole life, 'I was sweating blood. And I also shit my pants.'" That is not a pretty picture.  

 

Although the film became a success at the box office, the feud between Brando and Sinatra did not wash away that easily. Years later, Brando inadvertently managed to anger Sinatra once again by taking the role of Don Vito Corleone, in Francis Ford Coppola's magnum opus The Godfather, even though Sinatra had personally reached out and requested the part from Coppola. Unsurprisingly, Brando delivered a brilliant performance, winning him another Academy Award. Sinatra was steamed, but what happened next really ticked him off! 

 

Brando, however, did not attend the awards ceremony. He sent actress Sacheen Littlefeather, who was costumed as a  Plains Indian to decline the Oscar on his behalf.  Littlefeather refused to even touch the statue at the podium as she announced to the crowd that Brando was rejecting the award in protest of "the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry ... and on television and movie reruns (Which, if you think for a second, was redundant.) and also regarding the recent happenings at Wounded Knee." Frank was apoplectic!  

 

A last note, this time with Irony: Littlefeather repeatedly claimed that her father had White Mountain Apache and Yaqui ancestry. However, her sisters, as well as researchers who have looked into the claim, confirm that he was of Spanish-Mexican ancestry with no known ancestors who had a tribal identity in Mexico, and he had no connection to the Yaqui or White Mountain Apache tribes of Arizona. Ironic, no?  

 

I wish I could tell you that the two men became best buddies and roommates at the actor's home in Malibu. Playfully teasing each other in their sunset years. But I cannot. There was never a rapprochement, as the French are wont to say. They never exchanged even a Christmas card. Frank was buried in a blue serge suit with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a pack of Camels next to his parents in Coachella. (Right between the main stage and the concession stand.) Marlon had his ashes combined with the cremains of his old pal, Wally Cox, and thus mixed, the ashes were scattered in Death Valley and Tahiti.  

 

 Done.  


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