His Way: An Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra by Kitty Kelley

Author:Kitty Kelley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780307767967
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1986-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

“Frank Sinatra would’ve done anything to get Jack elected, so it’s kind of ironic that he almost capsized the campaign early on when he tried to break the blacklist by hiring Albert Maltz,” said Peter Lawford. “God, was that a mess. The ambassador took care of it in the end, but it was almost the end of old Frankie-boy as far as the family was concerned.”

On March 21, 1960, Murray Schumach wrote a story in The New York Times disclosing that Frank had hired Maltz, one of the Hollywood Ten, to write a screenplay of The Execution of Private Slovik, a book by William Bradford Huie about the only American soldier executed by the U.S. Army for desertion since the Civil War. Frank planned to direct and produce the story himself.

Frank’s friendship with Albert Maltz had started in 1945 when Maltz wrote the Academy Award-winning short against racism, The House I Live In. But then Maltz had been imprisoned, fined, and blacklisted for refusing to answer the questions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he had moved to Mexico in 1951. It was there that Frank called him with the screenplay offer that would break the blacklist.

Sinatra’s decision to hire Maltz unleashed the most rabid partisans from both sides of the “Red or dead” issue. Only months earlier, Otto Preminger had announced that Dalton Trumbo, another blacklisted screenwriter, had written the script for Exodus, which would soon be released. Preminger’s bold act was the first chink in the seemingly impregnable blacklist. The director’s stand encouraged Kirk Douglas to use Trumbo for the script of Spartacus, the story of a Roman gladiator based on a book by Howard Fast, then an avowed Communist.

By announcing the signing of Maltz before the movie was shot, Sinatra joined a select group of men determined to bring an end to the invidious blacklist.

“I had not worked on a film in Hollywood since 1948,” said Maltz, “and I, like others who were blacklisted, kept hoping that the blacklist would be broken, so to receive Frank’s call in 1960 was enormously exciting to me. I went up to see him, and we discussed the story, which we both agreed would say that the enemy in the war was not the United States Army, but the war itself. I point this out because of the irony of being blacklisted as a subversive who was trying to overthrow the government of the United States, and here I was setting out to say that the enemy in the war was not the United States, but war itself. Frank said that he had been thinking of hiring me for a long time and that it was very important to him to do so and to make this film. He said that if anyone tried to interfere with his hiring me, they were going to run into a buzz saw. He anticipated all the problems and the outcry from the American Legion types, but he said he didn’t care. He wanted to break the blacklist.

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