The Oscar-nominated role Frank Sinatra snatched away from his arch-nemesis: “He thought I was bluffing”
Since the dawn of time, people in positions of power have been much more likely to make enemies than the average Joe, and as one of the biggest names in both music and cinema at the peak of his performative powers, Frank Sinatra made a few.
That’s the price of success, and since he was fully aware he was a megastar, ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ was prone to flaunting it in front of others. Whether he was ordering his mob-affiliated goons to beat the shit out of comedians, rubbing shoulders with the president of the United States, or booting Peter Lawford from the ‘Rat Pack’, he wasn’t shy of flexing his muscles.
If there was one person in Hollywood he despised more than anyone else, though, it was Marlon Brando. The feud between the two all-time greats has become the stuff of legend, with their heated confrontations on the set of 1955’s Guys and Dolls barely even the tip of an iceberg crafted from animosity.
Sinatra desperately wanted to play Sky Masterson in the stage adaptation, and after Cary Grant had urged Brando to “take the role to piss him off,” he got it, and relegated his opposite number to second billing as Nathan Detroit. Things got so bad between them that, according to the method man’s close friend, Carlo Fiore, Sinatra even had Brando kidnapped and threatened with death at the hands of the mafia.
Those closest to The Godfather legend, a movie that Sinatra also loathed with every fibre of his being, referred to the crooner as Brando’s “arch-enemy number one,” so you can only imagine how the latter felt when the former ended up snatching a plum part in a high-profile picture away from him, especially when it culminated in Sinatra’s only ‘Best Actor’-nominated performance at the Oscars.
“When I had about 30 or 40 pages of the script ready, I gave one copy to Sinatra’s agent and one to Marlon Brando’s agent,” The Man with the Golden Arm director Otto Preminger mischievously revealed to Peter Bogdanovich. “I got a call the next day from Sinatra’s agent, who said, ‘He likes it very much’. I said, ‘All right, I’ll send him the rest of the script as soon as I have it’. He said. ‘No, no. He wants to do it without reading the script.'”
The downside is that the filmmaker had to reach out to Brando and let him know that, regardless of how much he fancied embodying Frankie Machine in the classic noir, it was Sinatra’s. “He couldn’t believe me,” Preminger reflected. “He thought I was bluffing.” He wasn’t, and he wasn’t best pleased, but it also became a full circle moment in the feud between the two heavyweights.
The year previously, Brando had declined an offer to play Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, which saw Elia Kazan offer the gig to Sinatra instead. He accepted, but when Brando changed his mind and decided he fancied the part after all, ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ was told his services were no longer required. Since he won an Oscar for the film and Sinatra didn’t for The Man with the Golden Arm, you could even say he got the better end of the deal.
