Lady Blue Eyes

by Barbara Sinatra

  Frank appeared onstage and after a couple of songs peered up at our box and said, “Where’s my girl? There she is. Say hello to Barbara, everybody.” A spotlight dazzled me, but I smiled and waved. Frank said, “I love you. Do you love me?” I nodded. “Then I love you twice,” he announced. A great romantic, Pavarotti thought that absolutely marvelous and applauded enthusiastically. He remained riveted through the rest of the performance. By the time Frank took his final bow, Pavarotti’s face was wet with tears. Having composed himself, he used gestures and hand signals to let me know that he’d like to go backstage. “Down,” he said, pointing and smiling. “Frank. Down.”

  I waited in the wings with this giant among singers for Frank to emerge from his dressing room. I knew my husband would be nervous to meet one of his heroes too, but I could hardly believe what happened next. In a surprisingly agile motion for such a large man, Pavarotti dropped to his knees, took Frank’s hand, and kissed it. Frank looked at me and I looked at him and we both thought, Surely this should be the other way around?

  At the Radio City benefit for Sloan-Kettering a year or so later, Pavarotti sang his arias so movingly, mopping the perspiration from his brow throughout with his trademark white handkerchief. Frank was due onstage for the next few numbers, which would include their riveting finale of “Santa Lucia” and “O Sole Mio.” There was a momentary delay before Frank walked out, looking like a toothpick compared to Pavarotti. In his hand he was carrying a large white tablecloth with which he pretended to mop his brow. Pavarotti cracked up, and then those two musical legends embraced in a scene of extraordinary warmth. In front of a crowd of six thousand they laughed at each other like two schoolboys in the corner of a playground, oblivious to all those around them. It was the most charming sight to see.

  After the show they chatted animatedly in half English, half Italian and bonded somewhere in between. Finally, Pavarotti asked Frank, “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  Frank nodded and frowned. “Yes, Maestro,” he replied, suddenly serious. “I’ve been having trouble with how to end a cresendo, especially a long one. I’d really like to know the proper way to finish.”

  Pavarotti looked at Frank and placed a bear of a hand on his shoulder. “ ’Ats’a easy, Francis,” he told him with that twinkly smile of his. “You just-a shut-uppa you mou!”

  Frank was adored around the world, and not just by Italian opera singers. The Japanese went nuts for him. The English abandoned their legendary reserve to give him standing ovations. The Europeans mobbed us. When he performed at the Concert for the Americas in the Dominican Republic in the middle of a steamy jungle, the Caribbean crowds were unbelievable. But one area of the world where he was revered to an almost religious extent was South America—Rio de Janeiro in particular.

  There was a false promise offered up by commitment-shy men all over Brazil: “I’ll marry you when Sinatra comes to Rio.” For some reason, Frank had never played Rio de Janeiro, so the promise was the Latino equivalent of “when Hell freezes over.” Would-be brides would sigh sadly in response, believing that they’d probably never marry. But in 1980, all that changed. From the day Frank announced that he’d be touring South America, starting with Brazil and Argentina, Catholic priests across the continent were inundated with wedding bookings. The impossible had happened—Frankie was coming to town.

  Not surprisingly perhaps, from the moment we arrived in Rio we were given a rapturous reception. Having landed at the airport, we had to be flown by helicopter to a military base because of the crowds. Once we reached our hotel, our motorcade was surrounded. There were hundreds of fans, yet only a few police officers to hold them behind a small blockade. “Okay, let’s go!” Jilly yelled as we leapt from the car and ran toward the building. No sooner had we stepped a few paces than the crowd burst through the barricades and swamped us. I was behind Jilly and Frank was behind me and my face was pressed up against Jilly’s back. The screams around us were deafening. More and more people started to break through the police cordon to rush at us. I realized that if one of us stumbled, we’d be trampled to death. Reaching a bottleneck near the hotel entrance, we were pushed up against a wall as hands started tearing at our clothes. I was wearing real diamond earrings and thought, Good God! I’m going to lose everything! We were nearly killed in the crush until Jilly and the security guards finally pushed us inside.

  A few days later Frank performed at Rio’s Maracanã Stadium, one of the largest football stadiums in the world. More than 175,000 people made it an event that went into the Guinness Book of Records as the largest paying audience for a single performer. I was escorted to a seat in a VIP area at the front of the stadium just a few minutes before Frank’s show began. I could feel the pressure of the audience anticipation all around me; it created a palpable sensation on my skin. It had been raining hard all day, and his thousands of fans—most without umbrellas—were soaked through from hours of waiting for their hero.

  As Frank stepped onto that high center stage, the crowd exploded. I had to cover my ears to protect them from the roar. The fans who had waited a lifetime went absolutely crazy, and the waves of noise that rippled from the far end of the stadium to the stage and back again almost knocked him off his feet. Suddenly Frank looked skyward, and all of us followed his gaze. The rain had stopped. Talk about divine intervention. “Obrigado. Thank you,” Frank said to the heavens, and the crowd erupted once more. I could tell the man who’d begun his career as a saloon singer in smoky little joints in New Jersey was as overcome as I was by the outpouring of adoration. For a moment he was speechless. The orchestra played the opening bars of “The Coffee Song” with the line, “They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil …,” but few could have heard a note, except perhaps the millions watching it on television sets across Central and South America. Frank began to sing,

  Way down among Brazilians

  Coffee beans grow by the billions

  So they’ve got to find those extra cups to fill

  and the response was incredible.

  I could see he was thrown. Even when the crowd settled down a bit and allowed him to go on, he was overwhelmed. So much so that when the time came to sing “Strangers in the Night,” he was completely unable to—the first time I’d ever seen that happen. He stood up there on the stage, eyes welling, as the music carried on without him. Then the most amazing thing happened. Almost every one of the 175,000 people in that arena, many of whom had learned to speak English by listening to Sinatra records, began to sing the words to him, heavily accented. “Strangers in the night, exchanging glances. Wond’ring in the night, what were the chances …” Their voices welled as one until the night air was filled with the melody. Tears slid down my face as well as down Frank’s. It was one of the most beautiful sounds I ever heard.

  Eventually, Frank pulled himself together and joined in. The crowd sang with him for a while, and then they listened in return, enjoying every moment. Halfway through a number, he’d stop so he could listen to their serenade. When he sang the last note of his final song and the roar of the crowd deafened us once more, he put down his mike and waited for a moment, taking it all in. Suddenly, he looked skyward. The rain began again. For the tearful people in that stadium that night, it was the most memorable and magical of moments. I’ll certainly never forget it as long as I live.

  Because Frank was the kind of man who’d drop everything and rush to the aid of a friend in need, it was natural that Nancy Reagan should call us in March 1981 when someone tried to assassinate Ron. It was not long after Frank had produced and directed the first of Ronnie’s presidential inaugural galas and we’d both attended his seventieth birthday party.

  We were asleep in Las Vegas when the telephone rang. “Ronnie’s been shot!” a distraught Nancy told Frank. “Can you come?” The would-be assassin, John Hinckley, had fired six shots as the president left a speaking engagement at a Washington hotel, seriously injuring three of his aides as well. Having lost JFK to a bullet,
Frank was afraid that history was repeating itself. He canceled his performance that night and arranged an immediate flight to D.C. When we arrived at the White House, we were met by Nancy and her family plus a host of others, including Billy Graham, one of Ronnie’s closest friends. It was so strange for me to finally meet the evangelist who’d converted my mother and aunts to his particular brand of faith forty years earlier. Reverend Graham was quieter than I’d imagined him to be, soft, sweet, and warm in person and far less of the rabble-rouser I’d expected. He and Frank became Nancy’s stalwarts through that difficult time as Ronnie underwent surgery for a punctured lung. Fortunately, the president made a full recovery.

  (Later that same year, the world lost Anwar Sadat to an assassin’s bullet, something that affected Frank deeply. He mourned the loss of the one he called “the single man of the desert who has stood tall in the sand begging for peace.” I could only send my heartfelt condolences to his widow, Jehan, the first lady of Egypt.)

  Nancy Reagan was never a close friend, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she seemed to have a crush on my husband. After all, I was quite used to that, and if I’d wanted to I could have flirted right back with hers. What I wasn’t so accustomed to was the time and commitment she expected of Frank for the causes she and Ronnie espoused. I felt that she took a little too much advantage of Frank’s huge heart. As well as making him director of entertainment at the White House, Nancy appointed him to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and she got him involved in her Just Say No antidrugs campaign, as well as her charitable organizations for children and foster grandparents. She also invited him to the White House frequently to perform at fund-raisers and dinners. Frank was completely unfazed, of course. During long-distance telephone calls and their lunches together whenever they were in the same town, I think he became Nancy’s therapist more than her friend.

  When he wasn’t busy in Washington, Frank continued to entertain his devoted fans and accepted invitations to perform at benefits and concerts around the world. He never stopped raising millions for causes including muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes, St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, the University of Nevada, and the Desert Hospital. At a benefit for the last at what was then known as the Canyon Country Club, he cooked dinner and waited tables at a $1,500-a-plate benefit before slipping into his tux to sing. As a man who had championed the careers of people like Sammy Davis, Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, and Lena Horne, Frank campaigned for civil rights long before it was fashionable. In 1945, he’d made a ten-minute film on racial intolerance aimed at teenagers and called The House I Live In, which won an Oscar. He wrote articles and addressed student rallies nationwide with passion and conviction about the importance of equality. Which is why it was a shame when he was criticized for performing in Sun City in Bophuthatswana, South Africa, during the era of apartheid. Having taken a black comedian with him, he announced to the mixed-race audience, “I play to all people of any color, creed, drunk or sober.”

  President Lucas Mangope was so indignant at the picketing and the controversy that surrounded Frank’s visit that he crowned him King of Entertainment in a tribal ceremony that took me straight back to my time with Father Rooney in Africa. My “royal” husband went on to address the Bophuthatswana Senate as I sat watching proudly, and then he became the first white man to receive the tribal homeland’s Order of the Leopard. It was just one of many awards he received in his lifetime, most of which he kept in a glass display case. Bobby was with us on that trip and hit it off right away with Eddie Mangope, the president’s son. They remained friends until Eddie’s tragic death.

  Eager to do more, see more, Frank traveled as much as ever, crisscrossing our great country and the globe. As always, friends would join us every now and then, dipping in and out of the tour as it suited them, and we always enjoyed the company. One of them, Dennis Stein, came once accompanied by his fiancée, Elizabeth Taylor, whom I’d introduced him to by sitting them together at a dinner in Los Angeles. Frank and Elizabeth didn’t always see eye to eye, and the main problem between them was her lack of punctuality. My perfectionist husband had always been a stickler for timing because of his years of performing. He may have been an impatient man, but he was always professional and his impeccable sense of timing was reflected in his music. If a ticket for one of his shows stated the performance would start at 7:30 P.M., he expected to hear the orchestra strike the first note at 7:29. After so many years of people running around making sure that everything ran like clockwork, his demands were always met.

  Unfortunately, Elizabeth was almost always running late. Dennis used to tell her that any event they were going to was an hour earlier than it really was in the hope of at least getting her there on time. One morning halfway through our tour, we were in our suite at the Waldorf getting ready to leave when Dennis came rushing in, clearly a nervous wreck. “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “Elizabeth’s in the bathtub and she doesn’t want to come out yet.”

  “But our plane leaves in less than an hour!” I said.

  “I don’t know what to do,” groaned Dennis.

  “I do,” Frank growled. “Leave her there!” Poor Dennis, he really wanted to come with us, but his girlfriend refused to get out of the tub so we had to leave them behind.

  Another time Frank was touring with the singer Pia Zadora, who came on after Don Rickles and warmed up the audience. Pia might have been born in Hoboken, but that didn’t automatically qualify her to open for Frank. Her husband, Meshulam Riklis, an Israeli businessman and Vegas casino boss, was determined to make a star of his young wife. She’d had some early success as a pop singer and a child actress, but he sent her to the best music coaches to get her properly trained. One night, as I was about to play gin rummy with Riklis, he asked me if I wanted to bet.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  “What do you want to play for?”

  I thought about it for a moment and then replied, “Your plane.” Riklis had an even bigger plane than Frank’s, which was like an airliner.

  “My plane?” he said, but then he nodded. When he lost the game, he agreed that we could use his plane for our next tour, which I was thrilled about. Hoping to save face, he challenged Frank to a game of gin, but my husband hadn’t had Zeppo Marx as a teacher. Frank agreed that, if he lost, Pia Zadora could open for him on the tour. And so it was that the little-known singer got possibly her biggest break, opening for Sinatra. She was much better than I thought she’d be, but Pia and Frank were never going to have a marriage of minds. Not least because, whenever Frank finished a show in the middle of a tight tour like the one they were on, he walked offstage and stepped straight into his limo. He made it a rule never to be more than a fifteen-minute drive to the airport because he wanted to be on the plane, sitting down with a glass of Daniel’s as we took off. His management team was always trying to persuade him to play venues that were farther than fifteen minutes from an airport, even installing a TV and a bar in his car to keep him occupied, but nothing would change his mind.

  One night after a show Pia made the mistake of dawdling to say hello to some people backstage. She and her husband arrived at the airport in their limousine half an hour later to discover that they had missed the flight—their flight. They were never late again.

  Continuing our tour, we flew to France, and in Paris, Frank performed at the famous Moulin Rouge. I was in the audience with the Pecks and seated next to the French prime minister Jacques Chirac.

  Jacques was a tall man and quite flirtatious, as only the French can be. We got along famously. I was wearing a pair of five-carat diamond drop earrings that night, and a dress with a high collar. Just before the concert began, one of my earrings hooked onto my collar and fell off. Realizing that it was missing, I began to search for it in my clothing, on the table, and on the floor. Before long, I had everyone on their hands and knees looking for my diamond, including waiters and waitresses, Greg, Veronique, an
d Monsieur Chirac.

  “Oh dear,” I cried after several minutes’ fruitless searching. “I’m never going to get that earring back.”

  The future president of France took me by the shoulders and said firmly, “No one loses anything with me, Barbara. We’re going to find it.” I smiled and told him that made me feel better. We looked and looked, but the diamond was nowhere to be seen. It seemed hopeless. Then Jacques suddenly caught sight of something glinting in the cuff of his trouser leg. To our astonishment, my earring had somehow rolled into his pant cuff. I was so relieved and happy that we found it, but just as I was thanking him, the music started and Frank’s performance began. As we all sat down again, I discreetly pulled off my other earring and put them both in my purse for safekeeping, until I could get the clasps altered to be more secure.

  After Paris we flew to London, where Frank was to perform at the “Francis Albert” Hall for the queen in aid of a children’s charity whose patron was Princess Margaret. Frank had met the queen and the princess several times before, but I never had and was a little nervous. Once we’d settled in, we went to visit Cubby Broccoli in his London house with our friend Pat DiCicco. A discussion ensued as to how to curtsy to a monarch, so Pat played the queen while we practiced, which was a hoot. Later that night, as we were waiting to meet her at a reception, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see another of our friends, the businessman Kirk Kerkorian. He grinned and said, “Not so bad for two little kids from the sticks, huh?” I had to stop myself from laughing out loud. Not surprisingly in such company, I found the queen rather stiff, although I did meet her again years later at one of the big studios and then afterward at a dinner on the royal yacht Britannia moored in Long Beach, where she seemed far more relaxed.