Lady Blue Eyes

by Barbara Sinatra

  There were always a lot of laughs, especially when George Schlatter or “Bullethead” Rickles was around. One night Rickles and Frank and Jilly were in the bar at the Hôtel de Paris sheltering from the pouring rain. All of a sudden, there were some flashing lights and Frank scowled. “Get out there and tell those f***ers to stop taking photographs of me!” he said. “I’ve had enough paparazzi today. No more pictures.” Jilly and Rickles went outside, took a look around, saw nothing, and came back in, soaking wet. They ordered another drink, but a few minutes later there were more flashing lights, so they hurried outside again to try to find the photographers who were irritating Frank. This went on for some time until finally they realized what the problem was. They were in the middle of a thunderstorm, and it was only lightning. Realizing the storm had passed, they came back in and told Frank, “It’s okay, we took care of it. They’re gone.”

  Rickles usually stayed in the Hôtel Hermitage, across the street from the Hôtel de Paris, so he and Jilly worked out a special arrangement. When the time came for him to come over and start a day’s carousing with Frank, Rickles would stand out on his balcony. If everything was going according to schedule and Frank was in a good mood, Jilly would stand on his balcony and wave a white napkin. If Jilly waved a red napkin, that meant Rickles should lock himself in his room and stay away until the coast was clear.

  On one of his first visits to Monaco, Rickles came down to the Beach Club to meet us, but when he got to the gate, the guards wouldn’t let him in. He went to another gate, but it was the same story. He wasn’t a guest of the hotel and had no authorization to be there. “Hey, wait a minute!” he told the guards. “I’m friends with Frank Sinatra!” The French gorillas looked at him blankly, so he broke into “My Way.” They might never have let him in but for Jilly, who heard what he described later as the worst rendition of Frank’s famous song and went outside to shut him up.

  Another memorable night was the Fourth of July just after Frank had won an important victory testifying to Congress about his supposed ties to shady characters and horseracing. We went to New Jimmy’z to celebrate and were sitting at one of the long banquettes near the indoor water feature that led to the pier on the shore. A photographer politely asked Frank if she could take his picture, and he told her, “Sure, baby, take as many as you want.” Just as she was about to click the shutter, someone on the opposite banquette shoved her so that she fell onto the table, scattering drinks. Words were exchanged, but nothing more happened until later, when Frank, Jilly, and a few others went out onto the pier to set off cherry bombs and firecrackers to show their American patriotism.

  Some of those sitting on the opposite banquette complained that our group was too rowdy (which I’m sure they were). Among them was Hélène Rochas of the perfume house, who almost jumped out of her skin when a firecracker exploded near her. She was with a socialite named Kim d’Estainville, who picked up a half-empty bottle of vodka and threw it at us. It landed on our table, bounced off, and hit me full on the side of my head.

  Bobby was the first on his feet, even though I didn’t want him to get involved. He rushed over to d’Estainville, who was sandwiched between others with no easy way to get out. “Did you just throw a bottle at my mother?” Bobby demanded.

  “What are you going to do about it?” d’Estainville replied.

  “Get out of there and apologize!” Bobby insisted.

  “Why, kid? Are you going to make me?” he said.

  Before Bobby could respond, the lumpen shape of Jilly Rizzo flew with surprising grace toward the banquette. Monsieur d’Estainville didn’t know what had hit him as he was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and yanked to his feet.

  This can’t be good, I thought, and I was right; a huge fight erupted. Everyone was throwing punches, even Frank. Tables, chairs, and lamps were flying all around me. To calm my nerves, I sat perfectly still drinking my martini and praying that nothing else would hit me. When people started taking pictures, Frank grabbed one of the cameras, pulled the film out, and threw it into the water. He then peeled off a hundred-dollar bill and handed it to the photographer as compensation. Needless to say, Monsieur d’Estainville ended up getting wet too.

  Almost as soon as the trouble had begun, though, it was over. I finished my martini, Frank straightened his jacket, Jilly cracked his knuckles, and we grabbed our coats and went back to the hotel. The following morning there was a knock on the door, and four armed officers walked in asking for Jilly, who—they’d been informed—was the instigator of the fracas. Like in a scene from a Marx Brothers movie, Jilly hid, his feet sticking out beneath the heavy silk drapes, while the police conducted a quick search and left without finding him. Sitting on the couch with a bag of ice pressed to my head, watching the whole drama unfold, I suddenly knew what it must have felt like to be a gangster’s moll.

  Prince Rainier heard about the fight the following morning and came to ask us about it. “What in the hell happened?”

  We tried to explain and I showed him my bruise, but he just shook his head. “You were in Monte Carlo, Frank, and not some backstreet joint in New York!” he chided.

  Frank, Bobby, and I would spend time at the Grimaldi Palace with Grace and Rainier, swimming or playing games, or we might go with them to their summer home in the hills above Monaco at a place called Roc Agel. Grace adored Frank, and the feeling was mutual. They had a wonderful friendship, and not just because he often performed in her gala. That was always such a highlight, though, held at the Sporting Club right on the water and ending in the most spectacular fireworks display.

  Cary Grant made sure he was in one of the best seats for that because he was not only a great friend of Grace’s and Frank’s but probably one of Frank’s most devoted fans. He once said of my husband that he was the most honest person he’d ever met and had a “simple truth, without artifice” that scared people. I never forgot that. Tears would roll down Cary’s face when Frank sang some of his most moving songs; Cary felt the words so deeply. Cary was such a sweetheart, and I think Grace felt closer to him than to almost anyone. They’d first met in 1955, when they were filming Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief in the South of France, just before she met and married her handsome prince.

  Grace was a fabulous woman who liked to surround herself with her children and her friends and make everything fun. Rainier was funny too and surprisingly down-to-earth, but it was Grace who was the playful one with a gleam in her eye. She reminded me of Dinah Shore because of her wicked sense of humor and great storytelling ability. She liked to have a drink and some laughs, yet she looked like the most elegant creature alive.

  She also had great compassion and was very kind to Bobby, for which I will always be grateful. Bobby worked on the one movie his father ever made—Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks. When Rainier discovered that the film was finished and that Bobby had even played a minor role, he insisted that he bring it to the palace for a special screening during a party he and Grace were hosting. Poor Bobby knew that was a bad idea and so did I, but Rainier could be most insistent, so my son did as he was asked. Grace assembled about thirty influential people she knew to watch the movie, whose premise was that Count Frankenstein brings a dead caveman back to life in his castle laboratory. It was described by one critic as “like a deranged Italian soap opera.” As the movie started rolling, featuring its characters Igor, Goliath, and Ook, silence descended on the room like a shroud. Bobby appeared on screen, followed by his grandmother Marge, who was so short that the sleeves of her dress scraped the ground, and finally his father, Bob, hopping in front of the camera in between duties as director.

  Rainier, who’d insisted that this was a good idea in the first place, clammed up. Prince Albert fled the room, leaving Bobby to face the music. Bobby sat there sweating and wanting to run away too when Grace saved the day. Having picked up on everyone’s discomfort, she suddenly forced a laugh and cried, “Ha ha ha! Oh, Bobby, this is so funny. You never told us it was a comedy!” The ice w
as broken, and everyone else felt free to laugh too. What a darling she was.

  In 1978, she and Rainier invited us to the wedding of their daughter Caroline to her first husband, Philippe Junot. Everybody imaginable was there, including royalty from across Europe mingling with movie stars and celebrities. The Pecks had a villa not far from Monaco and hosted several parties for us and the other wedding guests. When the paparazzi tried to climb over the fences to see in, Greg took great delight in turning the garden hose on them.

  One night when Frank was cooking us all pasta, he and Greg began to nag Cary about not having a date, because he was the only one of us who was on his own. Frank asked Cary, “Isn’t there a girl in London you like?”

  “Well, yes, there is one,” Cary admitted, “but every time I take her out all she talks about are her previous boyfriends.”

  Frank looked at Greg and Greg looked at Frank, and the two of them nodded. “That’s it!” Frank said. “She’s the one. Call her and tell her to come.” So Frank sent his plane to collect this woman to be Cary’s date for the week. Her name was Barbara, and within a couple of years they were married. Barbara was his fifth and final wife, and was with dear Cary until the day he died.

  We had a fabulous time at Princess Caroline’s wedding, but not everyone was as relaxed and happy as we were. Enjoying the setting of yet another party, this time at the villa of David Niven, I happened across Rainier standing by a tree on his own. I could tell by his face that something was wrong, so I asked him if he was all right. He complained miserably, “My daughter’s marrying a playboy.” Then he pointed out various members of the groom’s family. “You see them? They’ve been married four times. And that couple there? They’ve been married three times.” As a devout Catholic, he thoroughly disapproved. I was wondering how to slip away when I spotted Greg talking to a statuesque woman. Lamely, I made my excuses and joined them. No one introduced us, and she went on talking about her son doing this and having that until finally Greg asked, “Well, who is your son?”

  She smiled and paused a moment before explaining, “King Juan Carlos of Spain.”

  Dear Greg, he made a similar faux pas on the day of the wedding. I was standing in line between him and Frank to meet the bride and groom when a man in a crisp white uniform plastered in medals approached us. When Greg shook his hand, he asked, “Don’t I know you? Weren’t you in The Guns of Navarone?” The man shook his head. “How the West Was Won then?” Greg pressed, frowning. No was the reply. “Well, who are you?” Greg finally inquired. To his eternal embarrassment, it was Prince Michael of Greece.

  Leaving for the reception later on, we saw a famous beauty who was married to a Middle Eastern prince. She was wearing the most unbelievable diamonds, and as I passed by I leaned forward and said into her hair, “Nice ice!” She spun round and asked, “Qu’est-ce que? Ice?” but there was no time to explain and we moved on. A few hours later she came up to me, pointed to my jewelry with a smile, and said, “Nice rocks!”

  Ava Gardner was at the reception, and Frank spoke to her briefly while I was chatting with the actor Ricardo Montalban. Then I noticed Frank speaking privately to Cary a few minutes later. Shortly afterward, Cary took Ava gently by the arm and walked her out. When he came back half an hour later, I asked him what had happened, and he smiled sadly and said, “Ava needed to go and lie down. Frank asked me to make sure someone drove her back to her hotel.” I nodded my understanding and thanked him for his kindness.

  Frank was still so protective of Ava, not least because she’d frequently call him up and tell him what was going wrong in her life. Once, she was badly bitten breaking up a fight between her dogs, so Frank offered to pay her medical bills. Another time she called to tell him she had pneumonia and needed to go to Barbados to recuperate, so he arranged it. He was always sending her money; that was the type of heart he had. He took care of people he loved. I never minded a bit; I knew Ava Gardner wasn’t a threat anymore.

  I was having a manicure at the Compound one day when Frank’s housekeeper, Vine, came in to tell me I was wanted on the telephone. “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Miss Gardner,” she replied, giving me a look.

  Ava wasn’t in the habit of calling me up, so I was quite taken aback, but I took the call. After the opening niceties, Ava said suddenly in that wonderfully deep voice of hers, “Tell me, Barbara. Are you and Frank really happy?”

  “I can only tell you this,” I replied, “I’m very happy. You’ll have to ask Frank if he is as happy as I am. He’s in Las Vegas right now, and you can call him there if you like. I’ll give you his number.” I have no idea if she ever called and asked him the same question; if she did, Frank never mentioned it. All I knew was that Jilly said to me later, “So, Ava called you, huh?” I nodded, but nothing more was said.

  When Grace and Rainier were about to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, we invited them to spend it with us in Palm Springs and were delighted when they accepted.

  They came with their children, and we threw them a series of parties and dinners, inviting old friends Grace had known in the business. Frank bought the happy couple a Fabergé box as an anniversary gift, and we made sure the weeklong celebrations were as wonderful and warm as the events Grace hosted in our honor each year. We had a cake made for them, and they cut it and made speeches before Grace insisted that everyone smear icing all over one another’s faces. “It’s an old tradition in Monaco!” she cried, licking frosting from her chin, but to this day I think she made that part up.

  In spite of her fun side, Grace was very religious and went to church almost every day. As they were staying with us over Easter, she got up at six o’clock on Easter Sunday morning and drove to a little church she liked in the mountains outside Palm Springs for Mass. The rest of us late risers chose to go to the St. Francis of Assisi Church in nearby La Quinta, for which Frank, Cubby Broccoli, Frank Capra, and Franco Zeffirelli had been the chief fund-raisers. We piled into a convoy of cars and arrived as the service was starting, virtually doubling the congregation. Father Blewitt, the celebrant, welcomed us in before inviting some of our guests to take part in the Mass. He announced to the congregation that the day’s readings would be by Roger Moore, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, and Tom Dreesen.

  One by one, the everyday churchgoers of La Quinta began to take notice. “Isn’t that Cary Grant passing the plate?” one whispered to another in astonishment. “And who’s that over there?” Prince Albert walked up to the altar with the gifts while Rainier looked on. Frank stood up first, and then Roger did his bit, followed by Greg Peck, one of the greatest actors in the world, who gave a biblical reading worthy of Moses. As Frank always said, when Greg spoke, the earth stood still. Tom Dreesen read his passage, and then, just after he’d sat back down, Father Blewitt asked Tom if he wouldn’t mind also telling a joke. Tom was horrified, but Frank elbowed him and said, “Tommy, get up there and tell them a joke.” I worried for him, because although he always made me giggle, I wasn’t sure that was his crowd. Tom’s mind was clearly working overtime as he made his way to the lectern, but then he sang the lines as in a psalm, “I’m the priest of this church and I make two hundred dollars, but that’s not enough.” Then he sang, “I’m the bishop of this church and I make four hundred dollars, and that’s not enough.” Finally, he sang, “I’m the organist of this church and I make two thousand dollars, and there’s no business like show business.” The whole event was a scream and, without doubt, the best Easter Mass I ever attended. Father Blewitt certainly talked about it for years.

  Our summers in Monaco provided us with some of the best times of our lives for many years. Having raised a great deal of money in Vegas hosting the Sinatra Magic Carpet Weekend, we decided to hold one in Monte Carlo for the Princess Grace Foundation–USA, which supports young performing artists. We charged $25,000 a head and raised well over a million dollars.

  Those who bought tickets were flown into Nice and invited to parties as well as Frank’s p
erformance at the gala and all sorts of glitzy events they couldn’t normally get into. Our friend the entrepreneur John Kluge let us use his yacht for some of the parties, and the advertising mogul Mary Wells Lawrence and her husband, Harding (CEO of Braniff Airways), hosted a lunch for our guests at which Prince Albert turned up in a speedboat. The venue was their eighteenth-century villa, Villa Fiorentina, at St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.

  Dear Mary, she threw another party in Frank’s honor at Villa Fiorentina one summer to which she’d invited Henry Ford and King Juan Carlos, among others. The villa was a forty-five-minute drive from Monte Carlo, and Frank hated being in cars longer than about fifteen minutes. He felt trapped in the small space, no matter how fascinating the company or interesting the scenery. It wasn’t until years later that I found out he suffered from car sickness but never admitted it. Everyone (including me) just assumed he was grumpy, and no one wanted to travel with him. Needless to say, Bobby and I got stuck with him that night, and Jilly rode separately with Don Rickles. Frank never stopped complaining the whole way along that winding coastal road. “How much farther?” he’d ask. “Can’t you go any faster?” Then, the closer we got, “I’m not going to this damn party.”

  We finally arrived at the villa with its steps leading to an enormous veranda. As we pulled in the gravel driveway, we could see everyone waiting for us in the setting sun. Musicians were playing, and the alfresco dinner was prepared. Frank stepped out of our car, took one look at those strangers on the terrace, and said to Jilly, “We’re going back.” I’m sure there were a lot of complicated reasons—chiefly that he didn’t want to be the center of attention yet again, especially surrounded by people he didn’t know and might not like. It wasn’t logical for him to complain about being in the car and then choose to sit in it for another forty-five minutes, but there was little logical about Frank.