“But, Frank,” I countered, “you wouldn’t be taking anything away from Liza—just doing it your way. ‘New York, New York’ is much more of a man’s song. I mean, those lyrics—‘king of the hill’? That’s the story of your life!”
He wouldn’t have it at first, but I’d keep trying to work my idea into the conversation whenever I could. I’d managed to influence his musical choices several times in the past simply by telling him, “Oh, I love that song, darling. It’s one of my favorites,” if I heard him practicing a number I particularly liked. He’d sort his music into three piles—“yes,” “no,” and “maybe”—and one word from me was usually enough to get something added to the “yes” pile. Our friend Steve Wynn, owner of the Golden Nugget hotels at that time, had a running joke with Frank about the song “Luck Be a Lady,” which Steve understandably wanted Frank to sing whenever he performed in his casinos. Sitting opposite him on a plane en route to Atlantic City or Vegas, Steve (whom Frank called “the Kid”) would wait anxiously to see which pile “Luck” would go into. Once, he made the mistake of picking up the music from the “no” pile and telling Frank, “But you have to sing this at the Nugget!” at which Frank slapped his hand and seized it back. Seeing Steve’s doleful expression, he upgraded “Luck” to a maybe and then, eventually, to a yes. Frank, with mischief in his eyes, went through that routine every time he saw Steve after that.
I fell foul of Frank’s obstinacy a few times too. When a would-be songwriter cornered me backstage once and begged me to play Frank a tape of a song he’d written, I listened to the number and thought it was great. The trouble was, Frank refused to hear it, so one morning I put the tape on very loud in my bathroom next to his as we were getting ready to go out. Frank came bursting in and yelled, “What are you listening to that rubbish for? Don’t you know you’ve got the original right here?” I had to laugh.
Getting him to sing “New York, New York” was almost as tricky; I knew I was going to have to think of some other way to persuade him. Fortunately, I had several people on my side, including friends, fellow musicians, and executives at his record company, who were all for it. After a while, Liza’s show closed and her single dropped off the charts, so Frank wouldn’t be treading on her toes in any way. Then in 1978, when the New York governor Hugh Carey was running for reelection, I spotted my chance. I told Frank, “Okay, then, don’t record ‘New York, New York,’ but at least work up an arrangement to sing at Carey’s inauguration gala. Try it out there and see what happens.” He finally agreed and asked Don Costa to arrange a brassy version for his voice accompanied by his usual big orchestra. He performed it at Radio City Music Hall in October of that year. Brought to life with his unique phrasing and impeccable timing, the number he almost didn’t sing brought the house down.
A year later Frank relented and recorded what was to become a Sinatra anthem. He incorporated it into his Trilogy set of albums—Past, Present, and Future—his first new recordings in six years, chiefly because he’d been so busy touring. Those albums went straight to number one and garnered six Grammy nominations. Although he never admitted I was right to have suggested “New York, New York” for him, I know he always felt a great personal connection to the song because he chose it thereafter as his closing number, replacing “My Way.” Not that he gave me any credit for that; he said only that it was too strong an opener and needed to be moved to the back. The irony was that the number’s biggest fan (yours truly) rarely got to hear it all the way through because, by the time he was on his finale, I’d be slipping out the side door on his cue of “These little town blues are melting away …” But at least I heard it whenever we went to the big sporting events, because Frank’s version of “New York, New York” was adopted by the Yankees and played after every victory, a fact that made us both very proud.
Barry Manilow performed a wonderful song for Frank called “Here’s to the Man,” which was a fine tribute. The lyrics to the song he co-wrote with Bruce Sussman were
Here’s to you who wrote the book from your biggest fan
Here’s to old blue eyes, no need for goodbyes
This one’s for you
Here’s to the man
It was another song entitled “Here’s to the Band,” written by Sharman Howe, Alfred Nittoli, and Arthur Schroeck, that I also persuaded Frank to record. Because of his love of music and lyrics and his great respect for the members of his orchestra, I thought it would be the perfect song for him. It was autobiographical as well as a tribute to the band members, who did such a great job in his shows. One memorable stanza goes
To start at the ground and reach for the top
To have such a wonderful career, I just gotta stop
Stop and turn around to thank everyone that sits on the stand
’Cause I wouldn’t have made it without them, here’s to the band!
As the century approached its ninth decade, Frank celebrated a remarkable forty years in show business. To mark the event, and his sixty-fourth birthday, he was invited to take center stage in a glittering televised tribute.
Recorded at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for a two-hour special on NBC, the thousand-ticket show entitled Sinatra: The First Forty Years was sold out months in advance. Frank and I sat at a horseshoe-shaped table decked with white flowers as the actor Glenn Ford opened the proceedings and one great entertainer after another stepped onto the stage and said nice things about Frank. Telegrams of congratulations were read out from around the world, including those from Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, the Israeli and Egyptian leaders we’d met on our trips to the Middle East.
With Bobby on my right, I sat next to my husband of three years and laughed with him at comics like Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Rich Little, Milton Berle, Pat Henry, and Charlie Callas. Gene Kelly, Dean Martin, Harry James, and Cary Grant all spoke warmly and humorously about their friend. Tony Bennett sang “(Frank’s) Kind of Town,” and Sammy Davis, Jr., announced, “I love you, Barb,” before singing two numbers. Paul Anka did a funny take on “My Way,” and the tenor Robert Merrill sang the entire list of Frank’s fifty movie titles before thanking him for raising $1 million for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center at a benefit at the Metropolitan Opera House. Frank then performed five terrific numbers, including “New York, New York,” and ended with “I’ve Got the World on a String,” which he said summed up how he felt about his life.
The songwriter Jule Styne presented Frank with the prestigious Pied Piper Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; Caesars Palace donated $100,000 in his name to the cancer foundation set up in memory of his friend John Wayne, who’d recently passed away. Dean presented Frank with an honorary diploma from his Hoboken high school before leading him in his first prom dance, because he’d missed the original. It was a hilarious end to a great night. As I sat at the top table, wearing an exquisite pearl choker Frank had bought me, dressed in a strapless fuchsia gown by Arnold Scaasi, I felt like a million dollars. My delight and pride as Frank’s wife must have been evident to every green-eyed female in the place.
Wherever Frank went, women threw themselves at him. Young and old, they’d scream his name and lay flowers at his feet. I only had to gaze at the sea of upturned faces during one of his performances and feel the adoration coming from the audience like a heat wave. It was unbelievable. No wonder he never wanted to quit that business.
I’d had several years of on-the-road training, so I fully accepted that women would always be part of the deal with Frank. Not only was he sexy, powerful, and charismatic but much of his charm was his flirtatiousness, and his female fans expected nothing less. From the day we took our wedding vows, though, Frank went out of his way to make me feel incredibly secure. Not only did he invite me to accompany him almost everywhere, which meant that he was rarely alone, but he never stopped showing his love for me. “Don’t take any notice,” he’d tell me when a woman homed in on him at a party or dinner and tried to seduce him. Even when strange
rs turned up at the gates of the Compound claiming to be the mother or grandmother of his child, I learned to ignore them as he did. This was old hat to him, after all. If Frank had sired as many children as people claimed he had, there would have been an entire subrace of blue-eyed singers with an aversion to garlic and an unusual obsession for neatness. In Frank’s words, if he were the womanizer everyone made him out to be, he’d have been a wonder of nature preserved in a specimen jar at Harvard.
There was one female fan of his that I came to recognize because she followed him so devotedly for years. I suppose these days people would call her a stalker. Her name was Betty Brink, and she’d been left some sort of inheritance that allowed her to purchase a front-row seat for virtually every concert Frank gave. We’d spot her ringside in auditoriums across the United States, and then we’d jet off to London, Paris, or Tokyo, and sure enough, Betty would be sitting there too. It was spooky. Even more so when we’d turn up at a restaurant and find Betty sitting in the next booth, her head tilted to listen to our conversations, to which she would occasionally chip in. She had an attractive face and blond hair, and once I came on the scene, she tried to make herself over to look more like me. She even researched which hairdressers I used and asked them to fix her hair just the same. She did everything she could to imitate me, wearing the same kinds of clothes and even adopting my way of walking and talking.
One day she went into the beauty shop at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, having made an appointment under my name. The girls there didn’t know it wasn’t me until she began to cause trouble, throwing cans of hair spray all over the place and making unreasonable demands. When they dialed my room and I picked up the telephone, they realized she was an impostor and threw her out. On another occasion, I received a call from one of the chicest restaurants in New York asking, “Are you coming, Mrs. Sinatra? It is two o’clock and we’ve been holding your table for sixteen for over an hour.”
I had made no such booking, and someone, probably Betty, had called up and made the reservation to make me look bad. Not long afterward, when Donald Trump was building his fifty-eight-story Trump Tower in New York, he called and left a message with Frank’s secretary, Dorothy. “Could you please ask Barbara to confirm if she wants three or four apartments in the Tower, because she only talked about three last time.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but Betty Brink did. She’d gone to the building site claiming to be me, and one of Donald’s staff had believed her. She’d not only viewed the prospective apartments but told them how she was going to knock down walls and decorate them just so to make a perfect place for “Frank and me” to live. I wouldn’t have minded because Betty was really rather pretty, but she had an ass the size of a house.
When Frank found out about her latest trick, though, that was the end for him. He told Mickey Rudin, “You have to get rid of that crazy dame. She’s not to come to the shows anymore; she’s not to be sold a seat at any venue where I’m performing. In fact, she’s barred from being anywhere near us.” He must have made it pretty clear, because Mickey went to see Ms. Brink in person and laid it on thick.
Not long afterward, we were at Caesars Palace for a series of shows and I came down in the elevator one night to take my seat. Walking past a small bar, I looked in and spotted a woman sitting by a mirror with a heavy black veil over her face. I stopped in my tracks, wandered in, and tapped her on the shoulder. “Hello, Betty,” I said. She was panic-stricken that I’d recognized her and begged, “Don’t tell Mr. Rudin that I’m here, Barbara! Please don’t tell him.” Poor Betty, I think she was truly sick. She died a few years ago, and I heard afterward that she’d spent her entire fortune seeing Frank perform around the world and ended up in debt to loan sharks. It was so sad that the love of a man she’d never even met could have turned to that kind of obsession and ruined her life.
We had a lot of crazies after Frank over the years, and we handed most of their details to the police or the FBI. Frank was always more concerned about my safety than his own; after all, as far as women were concerned, I was the enemy. He sent me to a shooting range in Cathedral City to learn how to use a gun and had Jilly give me a tiny pistol to carry in my purse. I was also told to carry a rifle on my saddle whenever I was out riding in the desert. Fortunately, I never had to use either weapon, although I did wish I had something on me when I found a strange woman in my bedroom at the Waldorf one day. “Who are you?” I asked, taken aback.
“Are you Barbara?” she replied, frowning. An image of her pulling out a gun and shooting me dead flashed before my eyes. I didn’t respond, so she smiled and pleaded, “Barbara, I’ve got to talk to Frank. Please, you have to help me!”
I managed a smile and told her, “Just a minute. I’ll get someone who can.” I went and found Jilly, who rushed in and escorted her out of there. I have no idea what she had in mind for me or for Frank, but it could have been the end.
Another strange woman gate-crashed a party we threw at a hotel, and when I asked who she was, she told me, “I’m a close friend of the family.”
“But I am the family!” I informed her. She turned tail and fled.
One woman tried to get in to see Frank at our home in Los Angeles because she claimed that he kept buzzing over her house in a plane. Later she followed me to a restaurant and burst in to announce she’d had a child by Frank. She carried the fantasy on and on, bombarding us with mail that said things like “I know Frank’s trying to reach me, Barbara, so would you please just give him this number and tell him he can call.” She was completely loco. After a while we stopped hearing from her and hoped she’d given up. One day Frank opened a newspaper in Palm Springs and saw her photograph accompanying a story that she’d been run over and killed on Date Palm Drive, just a few miles down the road from our home. God only knows what she was doing there.
Frank attracted women. He couldn’t help it. Just to look at him—the way he moved, and how he behaved—was to know that he was a great lover and a true gentleman. He adored the company of women, and he knew how to treat them. I had friends whose husbands were “players,” and every time the husbands had affairs my friends were showered with gifts. Well, I was constantly showered with gifts, but no matter what temptations Frank may have faced when I wasn’t around, he made me feel so safe and loved that I never became paranoid about losing him.
Privately, I sometimes discussed the possibility with my two French girlfriends (who seemed to know about these things), and one of them warned me against complacency. “No matter how much he loves you now, you don’t know what could happen in the future,” she said. “You must have a Plan B.” Thinking of Lee Annenberg’s advice when I married Frank, to “be nice, be sweet, be adorable, but look the other way,” my Plan B was to look the other way, if ever I had to. I had a great life, traveling the world with the man I loved, who went out of his way, every day, to please me. From the day he’d married me, I felt cherished from dawn till dusk. He’d named a plane and a boat after me. He bought me the most exquisite things and took me to the finest places. If ever I was unwell, he’d sit with me and take care of me in the sweetest and most attentive way. I was confident that he truly loved me and that we’d both finally found contentment and tranquillity in each other’s arms. And he never gave me cause to think otherwise.
With my own unhappy past and for a man like Frank, that was no mean feat. He could have had anyone he wanted. He could have left me at any point, but he never did; he never even came close. There were some who did their utmost to split us up, but that only made us more determined to stay together and prove them wrong. Ours was a deep love that would stand the test of time. I knew from the moment he kissed me on the terrace of his hotel suite in Monaco that I was the luckiest girl alive, and my luck—thank goodness—never ran out.
No matter how crazy our lives were and how much traveling we did, Frank made sure we spent a month in Monaco each summer reliving the first blissful days of our romance. It was his one guaranteed vacation a year, al
though he usually performed at Princess Grace’s Red Cross Gala, so it wasn’t entirely work-free.
He’d check us into the Churchill Suite of the Hôtel de Paris, where it all began, and we’d enjoy long days in the cabanas down on the beach just as we had when Bobby joined us from Switzerland. The hotel staff loved having Frank to stay and would do anything for him. When he complained about the low quality of the sound system in the bar, for example, they let him replace it—to his slight regret. The speakers that once played gently muted background piano morphed into some high-tech high-fidelity system that could really hurt your ears in the wrong hands.
We’d revisit our favorite clubs and restaurants, like New Jimmy’z and Le Pirate, with the Ittlesons and any other friends who were in town. Our most frequent companions were probably Greg and Vero Peck and Cary Grant. Frank flew us to Biarritz; he treated us to the finest dinners; he borrowed a yacht for a cruise to St.-Tropez.
One memorable summer Kirk Kerkorian leased Robert Maxwell’s fifty-five-meter superyacht Lady Ghislaine and sailed a group of us including Michael Caine, Roger Moore, and their wives to St.-Tropez for lunch and some retail therapy. We girls not only had the greatest fun shopping but then had the chance to dress up every night in clothes by our favorite designers, like Pucci and Armani, as well as our finest jewelry, including a few knuckle benders and the Holy Shit Necklace.
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