“I was warned”: even Hollywood’s most hated director called Frank Sinatra “unbearable”
One of two things will happen if you put two noted arseholes in the same room: they’ll either hate each other’s guts, or they’ll get on like a house on fire. Frank Sinatra was known for being a hothead, which meant there was every chance tensions would flare when he worked with Otto Preminger.
While there’s no shortage of accounts celebrating ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ as a warm, kind, caring, and easygoing fella, there are also plenty of tales surrounding his nastier side. If somebody orders a mob hit on a comedian for telling a joke about them, then it goes without saying they’ve got a short fuse.
Whether he was in the recording booth or on a movie set, the ‘Chairman of the Board’ carried himself with a certain sense of self-importance. That was understandable, to a certain extent; he was Frank fucking Sinatra, one of the most famous people on the planet who’d conquered music and cinema, so he had more right than most to view himself as a cut above the people he worked with.
That doesn’t make it right, and several co-stars have attested that he wasn’t always the easiest guy to work with, but he must have been a right nuisance for Preminger to call him out for his behaviour. A three-time Academy Award nominee with a solid filmography underlines that the filmmaker was good at his job, regardless of how many high-profile collaborators hated his guts.
Living up to his nicknames of ‘Otto the Ogre’ and ‘Otto the Terrible’, both Anthony Hopkins and Kirk Douglas compared him to a Nazi. Paul Newman said he was “a fascist asshole,” Billy Wilder referred to him as an enemy, Laurence Olivier branded him a “bully,” Adam West blasted him as “despicable,” and Jean Seberg called him “the world’s most sadistic film director.”
That doesn’t even include Lana Turner quitting Anatomy of a Murder before shooting had even started because she didn’t want to share a set with him for that long, Iman Haywood recalling that “destroyed me with his screams” on The Human Factor, or the filmmaker getting slapped by Robert Mitchum.
Working with Preminger wasn’t sunshine and roses, but he and Sinatra seemed to cancel each other out on 1955’s The Man with the Golden Arm. The production went off without a hitch, behind-the-scenes blowout, or screaming match between them, even if the director admitted his leading man was a bit of a pain in the arse.
“I was warned about Sinatra, and I had my misgivings,” he told Evelyn Herbert. “I was told he was difficult. I could see that he was; he was a highly temperamental man, very touchy and very, very moody. He has a chip on his shoulder all the time. He’s full of contradictions. If he thinks a person is untalented, he can be unbearable. And you always have a feeling he may be about to blow up.”
It’s almost as if Preminger was talking about himself, which probably explains why he didn’t personally end up on the receiving end of Sinatra’s wrath, as “unbearable” as he could be.
