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| From top: Betty Garrett, Celeste Holm, Vivian Blaine |
The enduring image of Mr. Frank Sinatra is as a ring-a-ding-dinging, woo-flinging Vegas lounge wiseguy, crooning and joshing with the Rat Pack and dating a plethora of broads and dames. But these were the Capitol years. Let me tell you a thing or two about Frank, the Columbia years, when he was doing MGM musicals and drew a highly unusual bunch of women as romantic partners: older, bigger, assertive-yet-oddly-sexy and mature; they could easily get Frank in a headlock and have him crying uncle if he stepped out of line.
Why? Was this, well, we forget that the older Frank was really skinny, a kind of a runt, and during WW2, he stayed home and wooed the soldier's stateside wives and sweethearts via his seductive croon over the radio. He was so seductive he might have driven the soldiers to angry mutiny unless they spinned his appeal to something called 'the mother instinct' and played up Frank's skinniness --he needed to be fed. He was good natured about this ploy, regularly letting himself be carried off by strong winds on the Jack Benny show, and in his MGM pictures it was his more athletic buddy Gene Kelly who got the top billed girls. Sinatra made a play for these lading ladies, was c-blocked by Kelly and then 'settled', as we all sometimes do, for the one who likes us rather than the one we like. It's always the right decision for a man, allowing him to keep the power and avoid jealousy, especially if the one who likes you is Betty Garrett, who makes mothering instincts both sexy and scary. She's not even interested in marriage so much as sexual acquisition.
In musicals On the Town and Take Me Out to the Ballgame (both 1949), Frank got clubbed over the head and dragged back to the cave (or at least carried over the shoulders) of rootin-tooin' Garrett. The relationship was perhaps best summed up by Garrett's song (as she chases Frank around the bleachers at the stadium), "It's Fate, Baby it's Fate," hurting his hand with her grip and carrying him over her shoulders. In On the Town she's a randy cabbie who sings "Come up to My Place," and in a move very bold for the 1949, carries Frank up to her apartment, getting rid of her sniffling roommate, and presumably engaging in some "afternoon delight" before meeting back up with the other sailors atop the Empire State Building. For some reason, perhaps because he's only got a 24 hour pass and she's older and independent, the censors apparently didn't squawk about it. Class has a lot to do with it too. Sinatra was the boy from Brooklyn, naive and too scrawny for heavy lifting (you wouldn't see him carrying Garrett, for example). He snuck past the moral chaperones like a slender ghost.
The war was long over, but the mother instinct remained all through the next decade. He had a marriage-minded broad in the nasal-belting Adelaide (Vivian Blaine) in 1955's Guys and Dolls, though here he was playing a Runyan version of his budding Vegas self. By the next year he had matured and so did this 'type.' Enter the staid, supportive, witty, and patient Celeste Holm. Frank still had to give up the prettiest belle at the ball, an ethereal Grace Kelly, always hypnotic to watch, in High Society (1956), before 'settling' for Holm, but now he had the film's most magnetic charm and outpaced the designated stealth fiancee, Bing Crosby. What was just a dizzy moment between Jimmy Stewart and Hepburn in Philadelphia Story becomes in Society truly smoldering. A lot of the film is pretty slow, stagey going, with Bing on autopilot and lots of business with Grace Kelly being 'cold' but like the magic upstairs music room in Holiday, there's an escape from all the swank, a hidden bar that slides out from behind a false front of books, in neighboring Uncle Louis Calhern's study, and then by the Apollonian infinite dressing room swimming pool.
Kelly and Sinatra do a weird variation on the Cukor film's public library where Stewart's book is located, thus establishing him as an immortal soul, and instead the books conceal a hidden bar, where Sinatra's immortal soul is revealed in drinking and singing (it's clear that Sinatra really takes command when given a chance to pour drinks). The way Kelly opens up and starts following Sinatra's lips around like a mouth to a flame is truly, as they say, hot. But their attraction is supposed to evaporate in the light of hungover day. Play around with gamins though he may, Sinatra belongs to the staid if sassy Celeste Holm.
It's hard to get a nail on Holm, who also in 1956 played a reverse of her role in Society, by being the girl that Sinatra proposes to, but then gives up because he's in love with marriage-obsessed Debbie Reynolds in The Tender Trap. A swinging New York wooer of single career girls, Sinatra has a constant stream of dames, presumably, but he does most of his dating with Holm, whose classy carriage (she's an orchestra violinist) and Broadway wit belies the de rigeur longing for marriage and stability. She and Sinatra originally make fun of Reynolds, whose obsession with marriage and three kids in the country seems placed in her mind by a telepathic censor, but for all her culture and love of a wild party (she shows up early the next mornings at Frank's blow-outs to help clean up), Holm's just a plain old-fashioned girl wanting the ring. We need, for some reason, to hear how desirable Holm is over and over again, that she's attractive and hip, and good, too good for Frank, all this from David Wayne's butch mix of condemnation and envy over Frank's loucbe lifestyle. So we don't feel he's throwing her over for being too big for him, or too dowdy, she finds love on the elevator going downstairs, with Sinatra's neighbor (and an orchestra lover) Tom Helmore.
Now with spunky Reynolds roping him into marriage despite his Don Draper levels of babes, this was a Frank in transition. He was now drawing the A-list stars, but the stars on the virgin side of the old dichotomy--Doris Day and Reynolds--and on the other, rat pack stalwart Shirley MacLaine, whose 'party girl' make-up and a solid range of acting chops (she could carry starring roles with ease, playing many variations of eternal women- as in Women Times Seven and What a Way to Go!), didn't preclude her willingness to play the doormat, adopting some Vivian Blaine-shrillness as the girl who won't stop chasing Sinatra even into his hometown where he goes to make plays for a frigid English teacher in Some Came Running (1958). He marries her in a fit of pique and she happily take her pimp's bullet to save his life and open him up for more mutual love relationships. Were any of them coming? Or just some more mothering broads and frigid career girl virgins?
Sinatra's Joey is, indeed, not too smart. Hayworth is wisely jealous of Novak and wants her gone from the club, and when Frank stands up to her, the club is canceled, right before opening night. But Frank suddenly has principles. Principles! We liked him better lolling around in silk pajamas in his private yacht stateroom, even if Hayworth looks a little old by this point, and made to wear a lot of gray, and her hair in the final musical dream number (below) is almost 80s Philly girl shaggy. Poor Frank, getting the dames but plain bad at dame juggling, unless at least one of them was as patient and in it for the long con like Celeste Holm.
By 1960 his matron thing had receded even farther. In 1960's Ocean's Eleven he was married (and estranged by) Angie Dickinson, a 'broad' with some maternal class but enough MacLaine good-time sharpie about her that she was wise to all Danny Ocean's tricks. An ironic mention of the old mother instinct is found in a snatch of dialogue between Dean Martin and Dickinson upon their meeting up:
DM - What made you come back? I've come to the conclusion it must be love. Mother loveBut by the early 60s it was like Frank was in the process of graduating, until one final matron came to his rescue when he played a rattled ex-GI in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Here her arrival to his rescue is most peculiar, she drops everything to be with this twitchy mess of a man, for no real reason. Is she a spy? Or is the mothering instinct here gone rogue, gone red, found its way into the cold nether regions of intrigue? She's sexy and smart, and her love is so total and so unearned, its like a suffocating ice cold embrace. Frank can't escape her if she wanted to. She sees a gaping wound in his soul and slides her knife of presence right on in.
AG: I'll consider many things: mistress, plaything, toy for a night, but I refuse to be a mother, that's out.
DM - Don't get me wrong, I'm the mother....
Do I have a purpose here, in following this 'mother instinct' thread? You tell me. It's late and I'm tired and my girl is gone to Scranton PA for the Office wrap party. And my kitchen sink is busted and the super won't answer and I'm all alone. My steel shutters don't work. I am perhaps too close to the problem, twisting in the wind by my own stunted development. I'm an alcoholic, an ex-rock band member, a writer, a tripper, a freak, a Pacific Northwest railroad grain car banger, a voiceover guy, an underground filmmaker, a children's television workshop writer, a blogger on film, a reviewer of New Age music, and a guru, going for the nurturing broads, divorced by an Argentine socialist film professor, and never at home in any of those roles. So where am I in my quest to be liberated from appealing largely to a girls' mother instinct? Can Frank tell me?
Probably, but he's unavailable for comment. He's flown, off to the next seedy marquee and the next microphone. Maybe this time around he won't let MGM bill him as a little runt being chased by unmarried older women with amok mother instincts. Maybe then he won't have to spend the rest of his film career transitioning, trying vainly to escape the tender trap, the high society dames gone slumming, the brass blonde matrons and sassy molls, the gum-cracking showgirls who all went to feed him so he gains a little weight. Maybe those of us who follow in his wake won't confuse maturity and womanizing, and won't try to escape the hyrda's many-stringed apron the way we do now, by finding a different apron, settling for the one that ties us up faster than the rest, like we're some prize package just waiting for the easiest bow.