“His arch-enemy number one”: did Frank Sinatra threaten to have Marlon Brando killed?
Hollywood history is littered with clashes between big personalities, and when they were both at the peak of their powers, there were few bigger than Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando.
In one corner was ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’, one of the bestselling recording artists of his era and a superstar known the world over, who segued into acting, won an Academy Award, and became every bit as successful on the silver screen as he was in the recording booth.
In the other corner was the transformative method man who arguably made a bigger impact on the art of screen acting than anyone before or since, with Brando’s immersive techniques and complete dedication to performance influencing every single generation of performers who followed in his wake.
Each man had a reputation for refusing to back down from anyone, so it was only natural they ended up hating each other with every fibre of their respective beings. The animosity began when Sinatra threw his hat in the ring to play Sky Masterson in the 1955 adaptation of Guys and Dolls, only for Brando to be cast instead.
It was Cary Grant who’d recommended him for the gig, who allegedly informed Brando that Sinatra was gunning for the part and he should “take the role to piss him off.” He did, which left Sinatra fuming, to the extent he spent most of the production openly criticising Brando for his singing and dancing abilities, or in this case, his complete lack of them.
According to Brando’s close friend and fellow actor Carlo Fiore, things got so bad between them that Sinatra threatened to have him killed. In Darwin Porter’s biography, Brando Unzipped, the On the Waterfront star was out riding his motorcycle in the early hours of the morning when he was ambushed by three men and stuffed into the back of the car.
“Marlon told me, ‘One of the goons told me he was going to offer me a choice,'” Fiore recalled. “‘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 life; ‘I was sweating blood.'”
Sinatra was long rumoured to have close ties to organised crime, and when three suspiciously mob-looking fellas abducted Brando and threatened to murder him, Fiore was left in no doubt over who was responsible. “I’m sure Sinatra was behind this whole thing,” he claimed. “He threatened and intimidated other people in his life, or so I heard. Why not Marlon? His arch-enemy number one.”
While there’s no way of proving whether or not it was really Sinatra who’d dispatched his criminal friends to issue a threat on Brando’s life, Fiore certainly seems to think so. Based on how heated their feud became, it’s not entirely out of the realm of plausibility either.
