Frank had so many people stay with him at the Compound. Tony Bennett, who Frank always said was “the best singer in the business,” came once with his girlfriend of the time, Peggy Lee. Ella Fitzgerald was a guest. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton came too, during their most tempestuous phase, in the late sixties. They drank too much and argued all the time in front of people; it was like the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in which they’d pretty much played themselves. One day I came in off the tennis court and found them sitting by the pool. As I walked past, Richard turned to Frank and said, “Wow! Those are some legs on that girl!”
Elizabeth, who was coming to the end of her Hollywood heyday, looked up and complained, “I suppose my legs are terrible?”
“They’re stubby,” Richard replied, taking a slug from his whiskey, “and so are your fingers.”
Furious, she jumped up and rounded on him. “Then I want the biggest fucking diamond ever to go on my stubby fingers!” she cried. In due course, Richard did just as he was told and bought her the sixty-nine-carat “Taylor-Burton” diamond for over a million dollars from Cartier. Frank always said that was my fault.
Whenever it was too hot to stay in the desert, Frank would relocate to Villa Maggio in Pinyon Crest, the house he’d named after his character in From Here to Eternity. The property was an Alpine chalet four thousand feet above sea level and an hour’s drive from anywhere. It was surrounded by a wilderness full of coyotes and snakes.
Up there playing gin, playing tennis, or lying by the pool, Frank began to quiz me about my life before Zeppo. When I told him that I’d been a showgirl at the Riviera, he asked, “How come I didn’t meet you in Vegas then? Didn’t you come to any of my shows?”
“I was too busy working,” I replied. “Anyway, I did see you one night. You were in the bar at the Sahara with all your pallies.”
“Well, what happened?” Frank asked, perplexed.
“I was walking past the door with some girlfriends and you asked me to come in, but I kept on walking.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to deal with a drunk,” I told him flatly.
From the look on his face, I could tell that kind of hit him in the stomach. Frank Sinatra didn’t get too many rejections.
It was at Pinyon Crest one night that our spirited game of charades ended with his hurling the clock against the door after I’d called time. I’ll never forget the fire in Frank’s eyes and the way he looked at me. His expression was full of anger and frustration, but there was something else—desire. I think I knew then that something would happen between us someday. I just didn’t know when.
SIX
“Sinatra in Greece with Blonde”—the photo that appeared
of me when I was secretly dating Frank.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
Angel Eyes
When Frank announced in March 1971 that he intended to retire from performing, he sent a shock wave around the world. Nobody could believe it. He was only fifty-five years old, and his voice was still as good as ever; in fact, many believed it had improved with age. What was he thinking?
But Frank was tired of entertaining people, especially when all they really wanted were the same old tunes he had long ago become bored by. He’d been singing since he was a teenager, and he felt burned out. He’d been divorced from Mia Farrow for three years, and his life was based firmly in Palm Springs. In his honor the city fathers renamed the street he lived on (Wonder Palms Road) Frank Sinatra Drive. Frank joked with Bob Hope that his road was thinner than the nearby Bob Hope Drive and that at cocktail time his was lit up while Bob’s was shrouded in darkness.
Most of all, Frank was having fun. He wanted nothing more than to drink with Jimmy and his friends, play games, host dinners, and travel for pleasure, not work. He’d made more than enough money; he had his own record company, Reprise, as well as a Budweiser distributorship, shares in an airline, and numerous real estate ventures. With his own film company, he was an executive at Warner Brothers and had his own building on the Goldwyn lot. All told, he had around seventy staff. The company that made Jack Daniel’s had made him a “Tennessee Squire,” and his friend Angelo Lucchesi from the company gifted him a plot of land on the site of their distillery in Lynchburg to thank him for being such a devoted ambassador. Frank hoped to go see it one day. He’d set up a medical education center in Palm Springs in his father’s name and planned on being even more philanthropic in retirement, so there was plenty to keep him occupied.
As he said in a statement issued to announce his retirement, the previous thirty years of touring and recording a hundred albums with over two thousand songs had given him “little room or opportunity for reflection, reading, self-examination, and that need which every thinking man has for a fallow period; a long pause in which to seek a better understanding of changes occurring in the world.” Tickets to his retirement concert in Los Angeles on June 13 that year sold out within hours of being released. The event was so oversubscribed that the organizers decided to spread the evening’s entertainment across three separate theaters with different acts performing in rotation and Frank moving from one to another. In typical style, he turned the night into a benefit for the Motion Picture & Television Fund, a charity close to his heart because it supported entertainers who hadn’t been as lucky as he had.
Zeppo and I were offered tickets to this memorable event, which made the cover of Life magazine, and found ourselves in prime seats at the Los Angeles Music Center’s Ahmanson Theatre. We were sat near some of Frank’s closest friends, including Vice President Spiro Agnew, U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan, governor of California. It was quite a night. There were tears in people’s eyes long before the man who called himself “a saloon singer” walked onto the stage. Having just performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion alongside old friends such as Tony Bennett, George Burns, and Barbra Streisand, Frank finished up at ours. Rosalind Russell, one of his closest friends, who was sitting with us, Cary Grant, and Jack Benny had to go up and introduce him just after midnight even though Roz was in pieces. “This assignment is not a happy one for me,” she announced. “Our friend has made a decision … not one we particularly like … He’s worked long and hard for us for thirty years with his head and his voice, and especially his heart. But it’s time to put back the Kleenex and stifle the sob, for we still have the man, we still have the blue eyes; those wonderful blue eyes; that smile. For one last time we have the man, the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century.” Dear Roz had cancer by then and was giving herself frequent pain shots; I don’t know how she got through it.
Frank performed an amazing set that included all his greatest standards, such as “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “All or Nothing at All,” “Ol’ Man River,” and “That’s Life.” He sang with an intensity that I’m sure echoed the emotions in his heart and received one standing ovation after another. He’d almost always closed his shows with the song “My Way,” but that night he stood in a circle of light and sang “Angel Eyes.” Holding my breath as he came to the final verse, I realized why he’d picked that song. The lyrics could have been written for him:
Try to think that love’s not around
Still it’s uncomfortably near.…
And have fun you happy people.
The drink and the laughs are on me.
While I sat wondering if this really would be the last time I’d hear Frank sing, the light shrank to a single spot on his face as he stood alone on the dark stage. Blue smoke from the cigarette he’d just lit curled around his head. “Excuse me while I disappear …,” he sang. The light faded and then cut out as he vanished between folds of velvet in the wings. In darkness, I gasped and then allowed my tears to fall as several thousand people rose to their feet as one, calling for the encore that never came. What an exit.
Back home, I tried to focus on a son who continued to delight and infuriate me in equal measure. Increasingly rebellious and wit
h a fighting spirit I guess he must have inherited from me, Bobby was fortunately past his Haight-Ashbury phase but still knew how to push my buttons. After leaving Cate for Berkeley, he became the only white in an all-black class of over fifty pupils.
He told me: “I want to know how it feels to be black because this is what they’ve endured all these years.” He developed interests in the Black Panther political movement as well as yoga and the history of religions. Whenever I invited him for the holidays, I’d tell him, “You have to cut your hair and pull up your jeans, Bobby. I can’t take you into Tamarisk looking like that.”
One day, when he was about to go back to college, he announced, “Mother, we can never communicate again unless you read this book about racial struggle. It’s called Soul on Ice, and it was written by one of my professors, Eldridge Cleaver.”
I read a couple of chapters and thought, Ugh, but when Bobby left for Europe to spend some time with his father, I picked it up again and waded through to the end. As soon as Bobby got back, I told him triumphantly, “Guess what? We can communicate!”
“What?”
“I finished it!”
“Finished what?”
“Soul on Ice!”
Bobby shook his head and said, “Oh, Mother, that was so yesterday! I’ll send you something much better to read.” After Berkeley, he chose a college in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, to study French history, literature, and philosophy for two years. He became a linguist and embraced all things European. In that picture-postcard lakeland setting, Bobby also fell in love. The girl in question was an ivory-skinned farm girl with blond hair to her waist. She was named Sylvia, and he wrote and told me he was eager for me to meet her family, which could mean only one thing.
“Don’t do anything rash,” I wrote back. “I’ll fly over this summer and we’ll talk.” I only hoped I wouldn’t be too late.
I was still worrying about Bobby when Dinah Shore hosted her first charity golf tournament at Mission Hills in Palm Springs, an annual event that went on to become one of the highlights of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tour. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Zeppo refused to partner me on the course. Just as I was wondering who I could play with instead, Frank asked if I’d consider playing with “a former superstar.” I was flattered, of course, but quite taken aback. I wasn’t nearly good enough to partner the man who sometimes teamed up with Dean Martin, a scratch player. I also knew how impatient Frank could be—he’d infuriate Dean by suggesting they skip a couple of holes when people were already playing or head to the greens nearest the clubhouse. “Hey, Dag” (short for Dago), he’d call to Dean, “fourteen’s open. Let’s go!” He’d have a bar set up on a golf cart on the seventeenth fairway, at the back of his house, so they could stop and have a drink. How would he react when I was constantly hunting for my ball in the rough?
The night before the tournament Dinah threw a party at her house. I was sitting opposite Frank, and when the person next to him got up from the table, he leaned across and asked me quietly, “Would you please come over here and sit next to me, Barbara?” It was all very subtle, but we sat together for the rest of the evening.
The following day the two of us went around the course in his golf cart. We’d wave and smile at the spectators and players we passed, but mostly we were on our own. Not much was said and nothing happened, but sitting side by side in that little electric cart, our knees touching, seemed hopelessly romantic. Whenever I was about to swing my club, he’d stand close enough for me to catch his soapy, lavender scent. Our fingers might brush when he helped me choose a club or our eyes meet when we headed back to the buggy. As the tournament drew to a close, Frank smiled and asked, “Will you come and have dinner with me tonight, Sunshine Girl?” I loved that he used the nickname for me only Zeppo and a few others used around the club.
It was later that evening, as Zep played gin nearby, that Frank offered to fix me a martini in the den. When he pulled me into his arms, I was caught completely off guard, but I found myself returning his kiss with just as much ardor. There was no way to avoid that flirtation. Besides, I was as lost and lonely as he was. My marriage was all but dead. Bobby was grown and living abroad; I didn’t have to protect him anymore. Whatever happened next between Frank and me—and I knew then that something would—I wouldn’t try to stop it. I was happy again, for the first time in years, and it felt so good.
Eva Gabor always threw terrific poolside parties at her home in Palm Springs. The younger sister of the actresses Zsa Zsa and Magda, Eva was a four-times-divorced socialite in the Pamela Harriman mold. She was crazy about Frank; they dated for a while and she’d been hopeful of marriage. When they split up, someone recommended that she see a shrink in Pasadena, but when she got there the analyst told her he had three patients who thought Frank was going to marry them. That news alone helped her get over him.
Standing at Eva’s bar during one of her parties by the pool in late May 1972, I got chatting with a friendly barman who asked me about my vacation plans. “I’m flying to Switzerland to see my son, and then I’m going to Monaco to visit my friends the Ittlesons,” I told him.
A voice at my elbow startled me. “Monaco?” I knew who it was before I turned. “I’ll be in Monaco too in a couple of weeks. Maybe we could meet up?” Frank’s eyes, which seemed bluer than ever, dared mine to look away. Nobody else in the world could look right through you the way Frank could. “I know the Ittlesons,” he added, drawing on his cigarette. “We could get together.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Sure,” I replied as nonchalantly as I could, although my stomach was doing backflips.
“I stay at the Hôtel de Paris. I’ll call you when I get into town.” Frank smiled and walked away, moving to another guest and another conversation as if nothing at all had just happened.
I’d first met Henry Ittleson and his wife, Nancy, at the Hillcrest Club in L.A. Henry, who was one of Zeppo’s favorite gin rummy partners, had founded the Credit and Investment Company in New York in the 1930s and used his and Nancy’s considerable wealth to set up the Ittleson Family Foundation. Nancy, a caramel blonde addicted to tennis, had the best houses, the finest china, and the most expensive crystal, but she liked to surprise her guests by serving home-cooked American fare like fried chicken and ham. She was a hoot.
Eager to get away from the increasingly stifling atmosphere at home, I’d jumped at the chance to stay with the Ittlesons after my planned visit to Bobby in Neuchâtel. I hoped to persuade my hippie son to accompany me to Monte Carlo for what I knew would be the trip of a lifetime. Whether he would agree to or not was anybody’s guess. By the time I boarded my plane for Europe, the butterflies in my tummy were doing somersaults. Quite apart from what might happen in Monaco, I could only guess what Zeppo would get up to while I was away. While my second marriage disintegrated around me, Bobby was talking about marrying a girl I’d never even met. I’d told him he was far too young and needed to finish his education, but that only seemed to make him more determined to defy me.
And then there was Frank, who was in London as I left but had promised to fly down and meet me, far from prying ears and eyes. Even within the relatively safe company of the irreproachable Ittlesons and with Bobby as a chaperone, I knew I was crossing a line. What was I letting myself in for? Was I about to be seduced by one of the world’s greatest romantics? Would it be something to fold away in my memory, a story to lift out and tell my grandchildren one day? Could I, Barbara Blakeley, live with that?
Not only was my entire future at stake personally and financially, but I was in danger of losing my only son to a world far away from mine, in Switzerland. Was I also at risk of losing my heart to the one man some might say was the worst possible choice a woman could make? Only time would tell.
I am rarely superstitious and have never believed in omens that are supposed to foretell an event in the future, good or bad, which is just as well, because my journey to the South of France was beset with misfortune.
A strike by French air traffic controllers meant that after leaving Bobby I had to travel to the South of France by train from Geneva. It was twilight as I boarded the overnight Swiss Rail train alone and was shown to my four-berth second-class cabin, which, fortunately, I had to myself. Bobby wasn’t with me or even really speaking to me after I’d not only forbidden him to marry Sylvia but told him that he couldn’t bring her with him to the Ittlesons’ as he’d asked. “Henry is absolute death on houseguests,” I explained. “Besides, they run a straight house, and Nancy tells me they have only two guest cottages, so I’m sure they wouldn’t be thrilled to have you in one of them with some girl. As it is, they’re going to have a rough time accepting your bohemian style!”
Bobby’s face fell. My visit to him in Neuchâtel hadn’t been the success he’d hoped it would be. After meeting Sylvia with the big blue eyes at her parents’ vineyard home, I told him, “This is not the girl or the family for you.” Although I hated to dampen my son’s youthful passion, I was convinced that his marrying Sylvia would be a mistake. I knew what I was talking about. I’d married impetuously young, and although doing so had given me the gift of a son, the failure of that first marriage had scarred me for life.
“Well, Mom,” he told me calmly, “without Sylvia, I’m not coming to Monaco.”
So I was alone in my carriage that night as the train climbed a mountain pass in the shadow of Mont Blanc. The doubts that had been worming their way into my brain since I’d set off from Los Angeles seemed to dig deeper with every clickety-clack of the train taking me into the Alps and then down to the Côte d’Azur. Frank probably wouldn’t even show up, I told myself. His schedule was famously changeable, and with an air strike, how could he even get to France from London?
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