Why Frank Sinatra hated Marlon Brando: “Take the role to piss him off”
There is no shortage of stars dating back decades who virtually worshipped the ground that Marlon Brando walked on, but suffice to say, Frank Sinatra was not one of them.
Having burst onto the scene and completely reinvented the face of screen acting forever, Brando has become a borderline deity among his peers and successors, but ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’ had a very different opinion of the method technique’s most famous proponent.
Their feud was one that rumbled on for years, and it was born from nothing more than professional jealousy. Sinatra was already a massive star and a best-selling crooner by the mid-1950s, so more often than not, if he indicated he wanted the lead role in a musical, it was almost guaranteed to be his.
However, the team behind the 1955 adaptation of Guys and Dolls had other ideas. Legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn had stumped up a million dollars for the film rights to the story, with Sinatra campaigning hard to be cast in the leading role of Sky Masterson.
Unfortunately for him, Goldwyn and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz wanted Brando to take top billing, with his Academy Award win for On the Waterfront making him one of the most in-demand names in Hollywood. The problem was that he’d never made a musical comedy before, but he was eventually convinced.
While his decision may have been partly influenced by his desire to keep stretching himself as a performer, there may have been a more spiteful element to Brando agreeing to Guys and Dolls, with Cary Grant reportedly calling him up and informing the star he’d recommended him for the role.
“I suggested you for the part,” Grant is said to have told Brando. “Frank Sinatra desperately wants the role. I heard you don’t like Sinatra. Take the role to piss him off.” Whether that’s true or apocryphal doesn’t really matter, because what can’t be denied is that the Rat Pack frontman was furious that he was forced to cede the spotlight as third-billed character Nathan Detroit.
Because he wasn’t a trained singer, it goes without saying that Brando’s vocals could be described as passable at best, especially when he discovered, to his horror, that his singing voice wasn’t going to be dubbed. He thought he sounded “like the mating call of a yak,” with Sinatra so seething that he’d been overlooked for Masterson that he flat-out refused to assist Brando with his vocal gymnastics.
The entire shoot was fraught with tensions between the two that threatened to descend into violence on a regular basis, and the fences were never mended between Brando and Sinatra. They were both icons in their own right, but things got so heated they couldn’t stand the sight of each other.
