Sinatra

by Anthony Summers

  On the eve of the 1973 inauguration, in the lobby of Washington’s Fairfax Hotel, Frank spotted the columnist Maxine Cheshire, who had months earlier asked him whether his mob ties might embarrass Agnew. On encountering her now, he abused her as “nothing but a cunt,” a two-dollar whore. For public consumption, Nixon was said to be “livid.” In private, a White House tape transcript reveals, he said Cheshire was worth “two bits, not two dollars.” Two weeks after the inauguration, Nixon asked Frank to sing at a White House reception for the Italian prime minister.

  The lure of performing at a state occasion induced Frank to interrupt his retirement. He had never been so honored, even by Kennedy. At the reception in April 1973 he sang ten songs, mostly old favorites, and at Nixon’s personal request closed with “The House I Live In.” The president told the audience Frank was as an entertainer “what the Washington Monument is to Washington . . . the top.”

  The Nixon administration embraced Frank so thoroughly that, wherever he might be in the world, accredited callers could reach him through the White House switchboard. He even acquired a Secret Service code name—“Napoleon.” Nixon and his men were already enmeshed in the Watergate affair when Frank performed at the White House, but he remained undeterred.

  In October, accused of taking kickbacks, Agnew pled no contest to tax evasion charges and resigned. Frank had given him refuge in his home while the pressure was on, had urged him to cling to office, and made a massive contribution to his legal costs. After Nixon’s resignation, he was one of the first to offer comfort when the former president emerged from seclusion.

  Watergate troubled Frank little. His only known comment, in a conversation with Tina, was a shrugged “Nobody’s perfect.” It did look as though he might be wavering in his loyalties when, three months after Nixon’s resignation, Frank appeared at a state fund-raiser for New York Democrats. His course, however, was set. From Gerald Ford to Reagan—Frank kept a lower profile during the Jimmy Carter presidency— and then from Reagan to George H. W. Bush, he was to bask in the Republican sunshine.

  Frank’s new affiliation did not really change him, according to Tina, who said he remained a supporter of liberal causes—of a woman’s right to opt for an abortion, of handgun reform. He moved, she said, “to his own beat.”

  As early as the Kennedy administration, according to one of his closest friends, Frank had imagined he might be honored with an ambassadorship. “He worked his head off for John Kennedy in hopes this would come about,” Sonny King recalled. “Then the same thing happened with Ronald Reagan, and still it never came to pass. He became bitter about politics, and sad.” It was a ludicrous aspiration. The questioning of Sinatra at a confirmation hearing would have been an unthinkable embarrassment to any administration.

  Gore Vidal, a liberal Democrat, thought Frank “a neutered creature of the American right . . . an Italo-American Faust” whose deal with the Republican devil got him nowhere. Joseph Cerrell, a political consultant who worked with Frank before the defection, was more to the point. “I think Sinatra would fall into the category of doing it for his ego . . . he likes the attention. I think he’s still a little kid from Hoboken who likes to be stroked by presidents.”

  Another factor may have contributed to Frank’s abandoning the Democrats in favor of the Republicans. Shirley MacLaine was told at the time he made the switch, she said, that he did so under pressure from the mob. The Mafia, she was given to understand, had decided that for them the grass had become greener on the Republican side of the political divide.

  AFTER THE MOST OVERT OF THE STROKING, at the White House reception in 1973, Nixon made a suggestion. “You must get out of retirement,” he told Frank. The president was preaching to the converted.

  “I didn’t think he would stay retired,” recalled Bill Miller, Frank’s pianist for nearly forty years. “I was on a retainer at the time, not a salary, and I stayed on that retainer for a year and a half. So I knew. Why would he keep me on?”

  “A great artist is a great artist,” said Reprise executive Bob Regehr. “How many times did Judy Garland retire? And each time she came back. Singers retire, actors retire, bullfighters retire, but they all come back.”

  Frank himself would claim he had never said he was quitting, that he had merely wanted a rest. The notion that he had even spoken of “retirement,” he lied, was just “a figment of somebody’s imagination.” Pressure to return, he said, had come from his children and in thirty thousand letters from “people who wanted to hear me sing.” More candidly, he admitted that he simply “missed the crazy world of show business.”

  The radical change of lifestyle, from a frenzied schedule to puttering around at home, had not worked. Rosalind Russell said Frank simply got bored. “He couldn’t stand it,” said his longtime music copyist, Vern Yocum. “He had lived with that adulation, that spontaneous reaction from people that was almost like food to him. He couldn’t live without it.”

  The comeback began in the guise of “private” appearances at public events. In February 1972, just seven months into the “retirement,” Frank had sung at a Palm Springs police show. In the spring, he had performed at a Salute to Ted Agnew Night in Baltimore. In April the following year, three days after the White House concert for Nixon, it was announced that Frank would star in an hour-long television special. Discussions had begun on a return to Las Vegas, and he was working on a new album, Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. Frank had never been called “Ol’ Blue Eyes”—that was invented by the art director at Reprise—but the tag rapidly became common parlance around the world.

  The televised concert marking Frank’s “official” return began the way the retirement show had ended, with his face illuminated by a single spotlight. The audience gave him a rapturous welcome, though the ratings and reviews were less encouraging. The new album did well, but it was not a smash.

  The previous year, when Frank had sung for Agnew, his voice had sounded a little “cracked,” the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn wrote. He had apologized to the audience on that occasion, then vocalized for months to get the voice back in shape. It still sounded “rusty,” though, to Dwight Whitney, reporting for TV Guide on the taping of the concert. Frank’s lip trembled as he began singing, and he blew one of the lyrics. Cecil Smith of the Los Angeles Times noted that the face in the spotlight was “puffier, rounder in the jaw” now, and Frank had a paunch. He was nearly fifty-eight, had punished his body throughout his adult life, and it showed.

  That night, and dozens of times in the year that followed—in Las Vegas, Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, Japan, and Australia—he sang a song that, like “My Way,” was a French original with English lyrics co-written by Paul Anka:

  I know I said that I was leaving But I just couldn’t say good-bye It was only self-deceiving . . . Let me try again.

  When he sang “Let Me Try Again” in late 1974, at Madison Square Garden, twenty thousand people roared approval. “Ah, Frankie everlovin’,” former bobbysoxer Martha Lear wrote in the arts section of the New York Times, “here we are at the Garden dancing cheek to cheek, and the lights are low and it’s oh so sweet. . . . It’s Ol’ Blue Eyes now, with the paunch and the jowl and the wig, and the hell with them. The blue eyes still burn, the cuffs are still incomparably shot, the style, the style, is still all there, and what’s left of the voice still gets to me like no other voice, and it always will.” A concert around the same time at Carnegie Hall was described in Newsweek as an “oldsters’ Woodstock.”

  Others agreed about Frank’s voice, but saw little else to praise. “That style he set was big enough and broad enough to carry the careers of half a dozen others,” Ralph Gleason wrote in Rolling Stone, remembering 1941, “but Ol’ Blue Eyes is a drag that Frankie never was. . . . It is simply weird now to see him all glossed up like a wax dummy, with that rug on his head looking silly, and the onstage movement, which used to be panther-tense, now a self-conscious hoodlum bustle.

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��His possible appearance is the occasion for bodyguards and hush-hush phone calls and big security plans and a blanket of secrecy. . . . I don’t think anyone but those clowns on his payroll really think any of this panoply of power is necessary. . . . For Frank Sinatra, whose voice made him the friend of millions of Americans, to carry on like a Caribbean dictator holding back history with bodyguards and a secret police is simply obscene. . . . I think he went somewhere that makes him alien now to me in a way he never was before.”

  Thomas Thompson catalogued the more recent sordid episodes— the abuse of female journalists (Maxine Cheshire had not been Frank’s only target), the beating of the hotel guest in a restroom at Palm Springs, the support for the corrupt Agnew—and expressed exasperation. “Frank is back onstage,” Thompson noted, “a scowl darkening his blue eyes like a storm in the late afternoon, starring this time in a continuing drama with scenes so ugly and unpleasant that you want your money back. . . . I cannot begin to understand this man—indeed I doubt that he understands himself.”

  George Frazier, the legendary Boston Globe critic, addressed Frank directly: “All your life you wanted to be a big man, but the wrong kind of big man. . . . You’re a sad case, Frankie. I think you’re the best male vocalist that ever lived, but I also think you’re a miserable failure as a human being.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Frank had once reassured Tina after the death of a close friend. “I will never get old.” He turned fifty-nine, though, as 1974 ended, and he was still alone.

  33

  Barbara

  FOUR YEARS EARLIER, when Marianna Case was seeing Frank, she had become aware of an older woman named Barbara Marx who sometimes turned up at the Palm Springs house. Once, when Marianna sat to Frank’s right at dinner, he placed Marx to his left. She stared at Marianna, made her feel “uncomfortable.” Later, Lois Nettleton also met Marx. The bold way she spoke to Frank, Lois thought, suggested they knew each other well. “She was trying to urge Francis to go back, to come out of retirement. She was kind of really at him about it. And finally he said ‘Stop it!’ or something to that effect. They seemed close, but I never thought of it as a romantic thing.” At a later meeting, however, Lois’s feminine radar did pick something up. Marx now seemed oddly possessive toward Frank. Eventually, she would have the right to be.

  Barbara Marx was the wife of Zeppo, the youngest of the Marx brothers and, though Frank would long date other women and keep Marx on a string, she was to become the fourth Mrs. Sinatra.

  She was born Barbara Blakeley in 1927 in Missouri, the daughter of a small-town butcher who fell on hard times, relocated, and eventually settled with his family in Long Beach, California. According to a fragment of a ghostwritten memoir she commissioned and then aborted, she grew up promising herself that she would “pursue a life of excitement.”

  In her teens Barbara was tall, “long-stemmed,” and blond. She entered beauty contests, tried modeling, appeared at auto shows and in department stores, and found work in New York for a while. She married a young would-be singer and gave birth to a baby boy. Back in Long Beach, when the marriage failed, she ran a School of Modeling Arts for a while. That proved either insufficiently rewarding or not exciting enough. Barbara’s “secret yearning,” she said, was to live in Las Vegas.

  She moved there with her young son when she was in her late twenties, and became a showgirl at the Riviera. The hotel, Mafia-run like so many others in Las Vegas, boasted a casino, 250 rooms, and a gigantic open-air pool. The showgirls and dancers, fluttering about in silk and sequins, were one of the principal attractions. Their on-stage job, said Ed Becker, who was the Riviera’s entertainment director at the time, was to be “beautiful objects.” Off stage, after the midnight show, they “had to spend an hour or two in the lobby cocktail lounge, to be sort of reachable to high rollers.” The hotel was billed as the “meeting place for celebrities,” and Barbara hooked a minor one.

  Zeppo Marx was a casino regular. He would come in night after night, Becker recalled, “with his tongue hanging out, panting over Barbara.” Zeppo and Barbara became a couple, and married in 1959. He was fifty-eight, she thirty-two. She moved into his Palm Springs home and became a decorative figure in local society. Barbara’s life became one long round of mornings on the golf course or the tennis court, lunches at the Racquet Club, and dinners out.

  One day, probably less than a year later, Ava Gardner arrived in Palm Springs on one of her occasional visits to see Frank. As she was waiting for him, she recalled, she decided she would like a tennis game. “I called the Racquet Club and asked for somebody to come over and play with me. A pro came over, and he said, ‘Mrs. Sinatra, Barbara Marx lives just across the fairway and she loves tennis. Why don’t you invite her over? We can play some doubles.’

  “We played tennis that afternoon, and we were sitting inside having Coca-Cola when Frank arrived. I introduced him to Barbara and the others. He was livid. . . . He had been looking forward to this homecoming, and there in his house were a bunch of strangers. That was the first time they met. I introduced him to that cow!”

  Barbara turned up often at the house during the 1960s, George Jacobs remembered. “Zeppo was in his sixties and sick all the time, and often at night when he’d gone to sleep Barbara would sneak out and visit Mr. S.... she lived across the golf course from us. And he’d say, ‘Who the fuck asked her to come over?’ He hated her at first. Wouldn’t date her, and everywhere we’d go she’d show up. He said, ‘Who keeps inviting her around?’ ” As late as the summer of 1971, eleven years after their first meeting, the relationship with Barbara seemed to be going nowhere. Tina thought Barbara was merely “a stopgap, a one-night stand with an extended visa.”

  She was wrong. By 1974, Barbara was divorced from Marx and being seen constantly with Frank. He did not give her an easy time. Though Barbara liked a drink herself, she often sat in silence as Frank caroused with his rougher cronies. She preferred him to “hang out with the elite,” Jilly Rizzo’s friend Joey Villa said. Frank saw other women, and Barbara objected to that. Yet she never gave up.

  In the spring of 1976, sixteen years after their first meeting, Frank asked Barbara to marry him. He arrived unexpectedly at a family gathering with the bride-to-be on his arm wearing, as Tina remembered it, a ring “with a diamond the size of a quail’s egg.” He had not told his daughters he was getting engaged. Dolly Sinatra had not taken to Barbara. “I don’t want no whore coming into this family,” she had said. Rather than confront his mother, Frank sent his attorney to tell her he was getting married again.

  The marriage, on July 11, was a grandiose affair at the home of former ambassador Walter Annenberg. The more than a hundred guests included Ronald Reagan—he interrupted his presidential campaign to attend—Spiro Agnew, Gregory Peck and Kirk Douglas and their wives, and the heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, who had treated Frank’s father during his last illness. The bride’s matron of honor was Bea Korshak, wife of the attorney and mob associate Sidney Korshak. Frank’s daughters attended, but Frank Jr. did not. For all her misgivings, his mother was present.

  The couple took their vows, the Ladies’ Home Journal reported, “before a black marble fireplace banked with gardenia trees and two cloisonné cranes holding more white flowers delicately in their beaks.” When the judge asked Barbara whether she took Frank “for richer or for poorer,” Frank answered for her. “Richer, richer!” he joked. His wedding gift to her was a peacock-blue Rolls-Royce. She gave him a green Jaguar. At the reception after the ceremony, Sidney Korshak quietly handed Tina a cheap pen. He urged her to keep it as a souvenir because, he said, it had saved her a great deal of money. Frank and Barbara had used the pen, he explained, to sign a prenuptial agreement. According to Tina, in her book My Father’s Daughter, the agreement stipulated that Frank’s existing assets, as well as his future earnings, would not go to Barbara. It did, however, provide her with a generous monthly allowance. Barbara had balked at signing it, Tina wrote, until the last possible moment.<
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  Frank had had his doubts about marrying Barbara as he had before marrying Mia. A year or so earlier, he had been joined at Lake Tahoe by his first wife, Nancy, who later called one of her daughters to confide that she was about to take a vacation with her former husband. They spent several days together and then, Tina recalled, had a “romantic interlude” at the Palm Springs house. Later, and just minutes before marrying Barbara, Frank told his daughters that he had been hoping to reconcile with Nancy—a quarter century after their divorce.

  He had also been clinging, as ever, to the fantasy that he and Ava could make a fresh start. Pete Hamill had recently encountered a tipsy Ava in Frank’s New York apartment. “Frank would ring her in London,” her friend Spoli Mills said, “and pour out his heart.”

  Even when the marriage to Barbara was set, Ava’s companion Reenie Jordan said, Frank “called her several times and asked if she would come back. . . . I asked her why she told him no, and she said, ‘Reenie, Frank’s getting old and he needs someone who’s going to be there. You know I’m not going to take his shit and stay there, with all his friends. But Barbara will stay with him. He’ll have somebody with him.’ . . . The last call before he got married again, Ava told him to marry Barbara.”

  “Not too much news,” Ava scrawled in a letter to Mills, “Frank and his gal finally tied the knot yesterday—That wedding sure fucked up our invitation to Palm Springs house. . . . I need a vacation. . . . I’ve got a monumental hangover.”

  Being married, Frank said nine months later, gave him a “kind of wonderful tranquillity.” It also seemed to have renewed his appetite for work. He made ninety-two concert appearances in those nine months alone. There would be well over a thousand live performances between 1976 and 1990.