Like Frank, though, he was rescued by fate in the form of a new singing persona and a World War II movie. Actually, Dean didn’t so much change his voice as what he did with it. Always languid, he became frankly indifferent; without Jerry around to interrupt his singing, he began to act the drunk and interrupt himself. It suited him; audiences loved it.
Another break: In 1957, his agents got him cast in a key role in the screen version of Irwin Shaw’s best-selling novel, The Young Lions. Playing a roguish Broadway singer miscast as a G.I., Dean held his own against Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando and was suddenly a hot commodity once again.
He might have drifted into anything, but he never really got the chance to go it purely alone; probably he didn’t want it; he might have even been scared. Within two years of splitting with Jerry, he found himself teamed, unofficially but semipermanently, with Frank, starting with a trip to some sleepy town in the Midwest.
Of course, Frank knew that Dean would be a perfect choice for the role of Bama Dillert, a honey-drippin’ card shark in the upcoming film Some Came Running. A gambler, roué, souse, and cynic with a southern accent just like the one Dean sported as a bit of shtick, he was capable of being played right by no other actor in the world. If it took till mid-’58 for Frank to offer Dean the role, the likely reason is that he was waiting to see how The Young Lions turned out.
It turned out fine; the role was Dean’s.
Like Frank’s career-saver, From Here to Eternity, Some Came Running was based on a big fat book by James Jones (even at twelve hundred pages, it had been cut in half by editors at Scribner’s). Frank was cast as Dave Hirsch, an ex-G.I. with a literary bent who drunkenly wanders back to his small Indiana hometown, where he does battle with his respectable older brother, falls for a priggish schoolmarm, and is in turn fallen for by a big-city floozy who has floated into town in his wake. MGM production head Sol Siegel had bought the book for $200,000 before it was published, then assigned it to in-house auteur Vincente Minnelli, who’d almost entirely abandoned the gaiety of his classic musicals for broody, atmospheric melodrama. The $2-million production (not counting Frank’s $400,000 guarantee against a piece of the gross) would be shot throughout the late summer and fall of 1958, with eighteen working days scheduled for location in Madison, Indiana, population 10,500, a wee bit of Americana just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, where mob-run casinos such as the plush Beverly Hills Club flourished.
Dean signed on to play Bama, an itinerant gambler who befriends Hirsch, and the cast was rounded out with Arthur Kennedy as the banker, Martha Hyer as the prig, and Shirley MacLaine as the floozy (“the pig,” as Bama calls her), Ginny Moorhead. MacLaine knew Dean from having worked with him and Jerry on Artists and Models, her second film, three years earlier; she’d met Frank soon after on the set of Around the World in 80 Days—his one-shot in that dull parade of cameos came when she popped into a Barbary Coast saloon where he was playing the piano.
MacLaine was a kid when she showed up in Madison—just twenty-four, with a two-year-old daughter and a husband who spent most of his time on business in Tokyo. She’d worked in Hollywood for three years, but nothing in her green, bubbly life prepared her for the world in which Frank and Dean lived. For two weeks in Indiana, she got a glimpse of the strange, intoxicating lives to which powerful men entitled themselves.
For starters, each of them made an abortive visit to her hotel room, trotting over for a quickie from the house they’d rented next door. Rebuffed but nevertheless taken with her spunk, they adopted her as a mascot—the only woman who’d be allowed to enter their confidence without sexual payment in return. They dragged her along when they went on trips to gambling joints near Cincinnati; she was allowed to sit with them while they gussied themselves up for an evening’s leisure. “Their white shirts were crisp and new,” she recalled, “the ties well chosen, the suits expensive and impeccably tailored.… Their shoes were uncommonly polished and I was certain their socks didn’t smell. Underneath it all, I sense their underwear was as white and fresh as soft, newly fallen snow.”
There was nothing so pristine, though, about some of the people they hosted on the set. Frank didn’t get to the Midwest too often, and his presence there occasioned visits from the region’s hoods—Sam Giancana, top man of the Chicago Outfit, among them. If the sterilized grace of Frank and Dean descending a hotel staircase in fedoras hadn’t convinced MacLaine that they were privy to things she’d never even imagined, then a few days around Giancana did the trick. He cheated her in meaningless games of gin and pulled a real .38 out of his jacket when she menaced him with a water pistol. “I knew he was a hood of some kind,” MacLaine recalled, “but at that point it was all so theatrically dangerous and amusing to me.”
Less amusing was the behavior of her costars around Madison and on the set. MacLaine had been bred with southern manners and was a fresh enough actress to still defer to her directors. Frank and Dean didn’t particularly care whom they offended. They were, naturally, besieged by local gawkers throughout their stay, and they treated them with beastly crudeness. Riding the film company bus to and from work, Frank would sit by the window and disparage the fans who lined up outside for a glimpse of celebrity flesh; smiling and waving, he’d mutter deprecations under his breath: “Hello there, hillbilly!” “Drop dead, jerk!” “Hey, where’d you get that big fat behind?” Seized by hunger early one morning, he woke a hotel manager demanding a meal; the frazzled man arrived with food and beer, only to find himself in a shouting match with Frank that devolved into a fistfight—which Dean complained blocked his view of an old movie on TV.
On the set, Frank was just as bearish, walking around between takes grousing repeatedly, “Let’s blow this joint.” Many evenings, he’d go to such lengths to amuse himself in the small town that he was in no shape—or mood—to work the next morning. “His eyes would be like two urine spots in the snow,” said one crew member, “and when I saw his hangover look I would keep walking.”
Minnelli, of course, didn’t have that luxury. A notorious perfectionist, he continually rankled the cast with requests for additional takes of scenes that Frank felt had already been filmed satisfactorily. Dean and Frank began to mock Minnelli’s fussiness, his pursed lips, his aesthetic ambitions.
Not long into the production, with the town dressed up for the film’s climactic carnival scene, Minnelli was taking, Frank thought, an inordinate amount of time setting up a shot. The director circled around the camera several times, sizing up various angles; he closed his eyes and fell into deep concentration; around him, extras made merry with the free rides and snacks, and his principal actors stood waiting for direction. MacLaine could feel Frank tightening up. Finally, Minnelli came to a solution to whatever was troubling him. He turned to his crew: “Move the Ferris wheel!”
That did it. Frank left the set, left the town, left the whole state. They found him at home in L.A., adamant that he would put up with not one whit more of artsy-fartsy bullshit. Sol Siegel, the budget ticking away, made Minnelli promise to compromise the purity of his vision for the sake of getting the damn film made.
They finally did it—only 10 percent over budget. When the picture finally came out, to so-so reviews and big box office, MacLaine got her first Academy Award nomination (Minnelli, ironically, swept the Oscars with his other film of the year, Gigi), and Frank walked away with at least a half million.
But Dean might’ve made out best of all: Not only did he prove that The Young Lions was no fluke, that he really could pull off a dramatic part, but he had a new best-friendship, sealed in booze, broads, gambling, and Italian food. Some Came Running premiered in January 1959; that same month, Frank served as conductor for Dean’s album Sleep Warm, and the two of them screwed around together for the first time on the stage at the Sands. It was almost like the Martin and Lewis days all over again.
If Frank and Dean shared a natural kinship, it was also a curious one. Their