The furious co-star who “slugged” Frank Sinatra in the face: “I threw it”
It may be difficult to comprehend nowadays, but Frank Sinatra wasn’t always the untouchable legend of stage and screen that he is remembered as. In fact, less than a decade after he first burst onto the scene in the early 1940s and had ‘bobby soxers’ all over America in a frenzy, his career hit a downslide so alarming that he began to worry it was all going to go away.
To illustrate how devastating this downturn was, in 1945 and ’46, Sinatra was on top of the world. He recorded 36 singles, starred in four movies, and sang on 160 radio shows all within those two years, cementing ‘Sinatramania’ as a true cultural phenomenon.
Barely two years later, though, he had fallen to number four on DownBeat’s list of most popular singers, and in 1950, rumours emerged of his affair with Hollywood star Ava Gardner. As he was still married to his wife, Nancy Sinatra, this did considerable damage to his public image. After they divorced, Sinatra was so strapped for cash that he had to borrow $200,000 from Columbia Records to pay his back taxes.
By 1952, Sinatra had fallen on such hard times that his concerts were often only half full. At one particularly chastening gig in Chicago, only 150 people turned up to a venue that could accommodate 1,200. The desperate crooner needed money fast, so he signed up to make Meet Danny Wilson, a musical written to suit his particular talents and life story. After all, in the movie, he played a singer who rose to fame with shadowy gangland figures backing him, became a teen idol, and then fell on hard times after scandal rocked his career.
The turbulent battle between Sinatra and Shelley Winters
While he shot the movie, Sinatra was reportedly not a happy camper, leading to arrogant and combative behaviour on set. To his chagrin, he was paired with A Place in the Sun star Shelley Winters as his female lead, and she was already known at that time to give as good as she got. She was no shrinking violet, and she certainly wouldn’t let Sinatra get away with acting poorly just because his career was circling the drain. Unsurprisingly, these two combustible elements had a habit of, well, combusting. Spectacularly.
Once, while shooting at Burbank Airport, Winters and Sinatra spent hours calling each other everything under the sun, getting angrier and angrier as the day went along. “The mildest things we called each other were ‘bowlegged bitch of Brooklyn blonde’ and ‘skinny, no-talent stupid Hoboken bastard,'” Winters wrote in her memoir Shelley: Also Known as Shirley.
However, when the shoot dragged on into the wee hours of the morning, the stars’ verbal sparring morphed into something much more physical. “Around three in the morning, Frank flew into a terrible rage at me,” Winters alleged. “I screamed like a fishwife and I think I slugged him.” A furious Sinatra reportedly didn’t retaliate physically, but left the set in a rage, while Winters went home to stew.
On another occasion, Sinatra’s improvisations during a hospital scene got on Winters’ nerves and put her on edge. Then, when he ended the take with the unscripted line, “I’ll go have a cup of Jack Daniels, or I’m gonna pull that blonde broad’s hair out by its black roots,” she saw red. Before the director had even ended the take, she admitted, “I grabbed a convenient bedpan and threw it. It connected.”
Naturally, one star hurling a metal bedpan at her co-star’s head couldn’t be allowed to stand, and production was shut down. It would have stayed shut down, too, had Nancy not contacted Winters personally and asked her to finish the production, if only for Sinatra’s children. After all, he was in dire need of this payday, and was only a few months away from Columbia dropping him as a client.
Winters agreed, and Meet Danny Wilson crawled over the finish line, only to make very little impact at the box office. It would take until the following year and his Oscar-winning performance in From Here to Eternity for Sinatra to resurrect his career, but in the meantime, he made a point of reminding the world about his distaste for Winters. He had a weekly TV show at the time, and as part of his sign-off each and every week, he would say – as if he were uttering the worst swear words imaginable – “I leave you with two words: Shelley Winters.”
