I’d invited the jeweler Marina B to come to the suite with her wares so that Eydie and I could shop privately, but by the time she arrived Eydie was asleep. Marina had her jewelry in a black velvet roll and looked around for a flat surface. “Where shall I put it?” she asked.
Looking at Eydie, I smiled and said, “Roll it out on her chest. When she wakes up she’ll see it.” So Marina did as I suggested, and we pored over her jewelry with some girlfriends I’d invited over, but Eydie never woke up. Later, when she spotted my new trinkets, she said, “How come I didn’t see it? Where was I?”
“Underneath,” I told her.
Steve and Eydie were among the stars who helped salute Frank when he was given a Society of Singers ELLA Award for lifetime achievement at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. Others included George Burns (who was ninety but still managed a song), Tony Bennett, Jack Jones, and Peggy Lee, who’d always had a crush on Frank, but then who didn’t? That was the last time Frank sang with Ella Fitzgerald, who serenaded him with “There Will Never Be Another You.” I loved Ella—she was the best: laid-back, easy, and brilliant. Frank had had the greatest respect for the singer known as the First Lady of Song ever since they’d worked together in the fifties. “She has great pipes,” he’d say. They were very close even though they didn’t get to perform together as much as either of them would have liked. As for me, I just liked the way Ella perspired—she was real. She was also terribly nice and extremely humble and performed some of my favorite songs, like “Have You Met Miss Jones?” and “Miss Otis Regrets.”
After making a good recovery from his cataract operations, Frank was in reasonable health and better spirits. We went back to Europe, where he gave another milestone concert amid the ruins of Pompeii. He launched an album of Christmas songs and enlisted old friends like Angie Dickinson to help him man a charity hotline. He sang with another old pal, Shirley MacLaine, in New York. She came to the house so they could rehearse together and he liked her a lot.
So, life was good and our days were filled with the usual fun and frolics—until, that is, the night of May 6, 1992. Jilly Rizzo was about to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday with a gang of us in Palm Springs. He’d spent the previous day at his house with Tony O, cooking “gravy” for the pasta and preparing for the party Frank had helped him arrange. The house was full of friends, and they were all looking forward to the big event. Jilly? Seventy-five? No one would have believed it.
At around midnight, Jilly decided to go back to the house of his girlfriend Betty Jean and get a (relatively) early night so that he’d be fresh the following day. Betty Jean had taken his car, so he borrowed her white Jaguar XJ and headed home. Just as he was crossing a major intersection on Dinah Shore Drive, a car driven by a drunk smashed into the side of Jilly’s Jag at considerable speed. The electronics locked down on impact, and the gas cap was knocked off before the car burst into flames. Unable to open the doors, Jilly was trapped inside and burned to death.
When I first heard the news early the next morning, I couldn’t believe it. As George Schlatter said, no one expected Jilly to die of natural causes, but we still didn’t expect something like that. On a day when we should have been celebrating his life, we were mourning his death. The biggest trauma for me was wondering how to tell Frank. I let him sleep in as usual until lunchtime, although I was terrified that he might wake early and hear it on the TV news, so I kept going into his room to check. Then, when he finally emerged in his pajamas and was sitting in the den reading the newspaper (which I’d scanned to make sure the story wasn’t in it), I wandered in and sat down. Taking a deep breath, I blurted, “Darling, I have some very bad news for you. Jilly’s not with us anymore. He was in a horrible accident early this morning, on his birthday. I am so very sorry.” Frank sat there in stunned silence. After I told him what happened, he withdrew in just the same way he had with the passing of Dolly and Dean, locking himself away, not speaking and not wanting to be spoken to.
Somehow, he managed to pull himself together enough to be a pallbearer at Jilly’s funeral, which was held at the same church where Dolly’s service had been. And, boy, was there a cast of colorful characters. I hardly recognized any of them, but there they all were—in their suits and with faces so somber they must have known him for years. For once, there were no cameras and no press. I guess the “boys” arranged that. Frank didn’t even notice. He went through the motions of that day, but then he went back to sitting alone with his memories.
I knew one thing that really bothered him was the same thing that had bugged him when Dolly’s plane went missing—had Jilly suffered? When he’d heard from the mountain rescue crews looking for his mother that the plane had broken up on impact and Dolly had been killed instantly, he was so relieved. I only wished I could tell him something similar about Jilly, but it didn’t seem likely from the information we had. Salvation came in a phone call from a friend who owned a local pizza delivery service.
“Barbara,” he told me. “I have something to tell you about the night Jilly died. You must decide whether to tell Frank or not, okay?” He paused. “One of my men was delivering pizza that night and witnessed the accident. He saw Jilly at the window of the car screaming for help.”
“Oh, God!” I cried, wondering how this news could possibly help Frank.
“I just want you to know that Jilly died of the smoke before the fire got to him,” he said. “That’s what the guy saw with his own two eyes. I didn’t know whether to tell you or not, but I thought it might help.”
I thanked him and put down the telephone. What he’d said helped me to come to terms with Jilly’s death, and I was comforted by the fact that he hadn’t suffered in the way we’d all imagined. After some private agonizing, I decided the information might help Frank too, but I knew I had to pick the right moment to tell him, because timing was everything. I waited until we were completely alone. He listened in silence. He was quite overcome, but I could tell it helped him too. From that moment, I believe, he was able to pick up the pieces and go on.
Performing was Frank’s therapy, so within a few weeks we were back on the road. We started in Europe but then just kept on going for the next two years, delighting his many fans. I think Frank believed that if he stopped working he’d die, so he agreed to a grueling schedule of concerts that had him crisscrossing the globe again and performing back in Vegas as usual every New Year’s Eve. He held a fund-raiser in L.A. for his friend the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, then set off for gigs in Germany, Sweden, and England.
We were home briefly for the funeral of Sammy Cahn, who had written the lyrics to some of the greatest songs Frank ever sang, including “Come Fly with Me,” “Love and Marriage,” “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “High Hopes,” and “All the Way.” Frank once said the great thing about Sammy’s songs was that they really said something. I think he must have felt that, with Sammy gone, his recording career was truly over. Concentrating on his live performances instead, we’d travel on average two weeks in every four.
Whenever we came home, we’d unpack, unwind, and go on a diet after weeks of eating in the world’s finest restaurants. I had a surefire diet plan comprising eight hundred calories a day with no fat, sugar, or salt. I still wanted to lose those two pounds I’d been desperate to lose since my teens, and Frank was watching his weight too, with child-size portions of his usual food. When I could I’d escape to the beach with friends like Dinah Shore, Jolene Schlatter, Suzy Johnson, Angie Dickinson, and Bee Korshak, on what we called a “fat farm,” where someone supervised our exercise regime and cooked all our food so we couldn’t cheat. (Frank sent Jilly and “the Fat Man” Mickey Rudin away once to a special fat farm, and they both gained seven pounds. We found out later that they’d sneaked to the local bus station each night and eaten their way through its vending machines.)
We’d start each day with a long walk on the beach before coming home to play cards and eat healthfully. Walking across the dunes behind Dinah one
day, I noticed that her hair was really thin, with her scalp showing through. Dinah had always had such great hair. I knew then that she was going through chemotherapy, but typical of Dinah, she didn’t want anyone to know. I hid my shock and figured that if she wanted to tell me, she would. Eventually, she had to, because she got very sick. I was in Europe with Frank, but Angie and Bee went to Dinah’s house every day and sat in her living room just in case she wanted to see them. She never did. That funny, fun gal who so loved life chose to keep her suffering to herself to the end.
I can’t recall whose idea it was that Frank record an album of duets with other singers, but I know he didn’t like the notion much at first. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to work with friends like Liza Minnelli, Julio Iglesias, Bono, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and Barbra Streisand—plus several contemporary artists he’d never heard of—it was more that he didn’t think his seventy-eight-year-old vocal cords were up to the job.
He hadn’t cut a new album in almost a decade. It was one thing to wow an audience of enthralled fans worshipping at the shrine of Sinatra, people who could be won over by his legendary charm if he hit a bum note. But to lay down some tracks onto a little metal disc that could be played anywhere and listened to with clinical appreciation frightened him. As he once said in an interview, “Once you’re on that record singing, it’s you and you alone.”
Frank had a management team around him by then. It wasn’t my place to say anything, though, and I butted out mostly. My husband wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet, after all, and I knew that if he didn’t think he could do something, then he wouldn’t. He was wise like that—he made all the right moves. To begin with, he refused even to consider the duets album and asked his team, “Why would I want to record all those songs again?” Under pressure, he eventually capitulated but warned everyone, “This better be good.”
I went with him to the studio at Capitol Records in L.A. for his first session in the summer of 1993. Frank preferred to record at night, when his voice was warmed up, and he also liked to work to a tight deadline, which gave him the stimulus he needed. The plan was that the vocals he recorded that night would be edited and melded in with those of the other stars, who would record their parts later in studios around the world and phone them in on a new digital telephone line the producer had set up. With typical thoughtfulness, Frank had arranged for flowers and thank-you notes to be waiting for each of his fellow singers before they cut their vocals. We walked into the studio to find the musicians and engineers waiting, along with a film crew hired to record the historic event. There must have been well over sixty people crammed into that hermetically sealed space. Each of their faces, even those of the old-timers who’d been with Frank for years and whose children he could name, were full of the usual Sinatra anticipation. A few minutes after we arrived, though, their idol suddenly turned to me and announced, “I’m not going to sing tonight.”
I looked around the room and saw the shock wave hit. Quietly, I asked him, “Can’t you at least do one song?” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry,” I told the producer, Phil Ramone. “Frank’s not going to sing tonight.” That was that. We turned and walked out as the musicians began to pack their instruments away.
The following day we went back in, and Frank was full of voice.
“Are you ready?” the sound engineer asked.
“I’ve been ready since I was a kid,” Frank quipped.
Playing around with tempos and phrasing, changing songs slightly as he went, Frank was on fire. In one session alone, set up like a live gig, he recorded nine complete songs, and when it was done his orchestra gave him a standing ovation. Frank knew he hadn’t been up to it the previous night, and secretly, that bothered him. Rather than lower his exacting standards and appease the waiting crowd, he decided not to sing at all.
It was during the recording of that first Duets album that Frank was told it would make “I’ve Got a Crush on You” with Barbra Streisand more personal if he said her name, especially as she’d sung the line “Oh, you make me blush, Francis.”
Frank liked and respected Barbra enormously, as did I, but he was bothered by the request. “I’m not singing to any woman other than my wife,” he declared. Pressed by those who were eager for him to do it, he finally agreed to record an overdub in Atlantic City replacing the word baby with Barbara. He told me, “I’m going to pretend I’m singing it to you. It’ll be to my Barbara with all the a’s, not to the other Barbra.” He really was such an old-fashioned sweetheart about things like that.
Frank’s confidence in his recording ability had been seriously shaken by his experience with the Duets album. Everyone told him he was great, just like they always did, but he knew the truth. He fretted about what the critics would say and fully expected them to feed him to the dogs. He needn’t have been concerned. Although his voice wasn’t as it had once been, he sang with the kind of emotional honesty and rich resonance that only comes with experience. Duets became his bestselling album, smashing Billboard records and going multi-platinum. One critic wrote, “Is Sinatra half the singer he was? Actually, he’s about three-fifths the singer he was—but that still makes him about twice the singer anyone else is.”
Duets was so successful that Frank was encouraged to make Duets II, which gave him a chance to record songs with Steve and Eydie, Frank Jr., Lena Horne, Stevie Wonder, Patti LaBelle, Willie Nelson, Neil Diamond, Gladys Knight, and some other great singers. Like its predecessor, the album sold millions of copies and introduced him to a whole new generation of fans. That old Sinatra magic I’d first experienced in Wichita more than fifty years earlier still had as many people as ever under its spell.
In March 1994, my seventy-eight-year-old husband collapsed onstage in Richmond, Virginia. Halfway through “My Way,” he turned to Frank Jr. and asked, “Can you get me a chair?” Before Frankie could find one, Frank crashed facedown on the floor as the audience of almost four thousand gasped. The orchestra gamely kept on playing as Tom Dreesen and Frank Jr. ran to his side, loosened his tie, and checked that he was still alive. Frankie must have feared the worst as he looked down into his father’s face. There was a doctor in the audience, and he leapt up onto the stage to tend to Frank as people wept. An ambulance was called, but by the time the paramedics arrived, Frank was able to sit in a wheelchair.
Even as he was being wheeled offstage, Frank was blowing kisses and waving to his audience, who were on their feet giving him thunderous applause. He was taken to the hospital, where the doctors diagnosed dehydration in the southern heat, exacerbated by his blood pressure medication. They wanted to admit him and run some tests, and one senior doctor insisted he stay because he didn’t want anything to happen to “the great Frank Sinatra” on his watch. Frank listened to what he had to say and then asked, “Are you finished, Doc?” The consultant nodded. Frank turned to Tom and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” He got on his plane and flew home.
When I heard that he’d collapsed, I was really shaken. For some reason, I hadn’t gone on that leg of the tour. All those years of being stuck to him like glue, watching his every move, enjoying all his triumphs and helping him through his lows, and the one time he was taken ill I wasn’t there. I knew how much performing took out of him; he’d lose up to fifteen pounds per tour. I should have been there to make him drink extra fluids before he went on; I might have kept him from dehydrating. What if that had been the end? I would never have forgiven myself.
When I met him at the airport at midnight, I was still scared, but he put me instantly at ease. “I’m fine, beautiful,” he reassured me as he accepted my hand to help him down the steps. “It was just too darn hot.” He had no intention of resting, and as soon as he was feeling better, he picked up the tour where he’d left off. Over the next few months, he worked as hard as ever, pushing himself to the limit, but I could tell he was increasingly tired. His schedule, which included performances in Hershey, Pennsylvania; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Omaha; Syracuse; Atlantic Cit
y; and Foxwoods casino in Connecticut, would have fatigued someone half his age. He went on to perform in New York as part of a celebration to mark the anniversary of Ellis Island. We were the guests of Malcolm Forbes, who earlier in the day took us all out on his yacht Highlander, moored near the Statue of Liberty. I sat at a card table on the deck of that magnificent vessel as it cruised around Battery Park, playing gin rummy with two of the richest men in the world—John Kluge and Charles Wallstadter, owner of the Continental Telephone Company. I only wish I’d been playing for big money, because I beat them. Later that month, we flew to Manila and had dinner with Imelda Marcos, the president’s widow, whom we’d first met when her yacht pulled up next to ours in Monte Carlo. She was a real character and a lot of fun to be with. I liked her. Everyone talked about how many shoes she had, but I think a lot of people have just as many—only she blabbed about it.
Back home between shows Frank still needed entertaining, so we had as many houseguests as ever, including the English comic actor and musician Dudley Moore and his statuesque girlfriend Susan Anton. I guess their relationship must have been fairly new, because when they arrived they retired to their room and didn’t come out for three days. I had trays of food and several jugs of Bloody Marys sent in, and our other guests, who included the Pecks, the Rickleses, and the Schlatters, sent in empty glasses, dirty plates, and anything else unappetizing, until the couple finally traipsed out with big grins on their faces.
Frank celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday in the desert but then went back on the road. Some commentators began to suggest that he was going on longer than he should, and I was starting to feel the same way. At the beach house one afternoon, he’d been too breathless to get back up the dune after a stroll and I’d had to call a doctor. That great big heart of his was undoubtedly weakening, which was affecting his breathing and his voice. He knew he wasn’t always up to it but was once again talked into the concert. Frank was surrounded by a great many people—musicians, valets, riggers, managers, and roadies—whose livelihood depended on his working. He considered them family and didn’t want to let anyone down. There was backstabbing from as far down as you could go to as high up as you could go—even his dressers were bad-mouthing each other; it was hysterical. He had some wonderful people on his staff who’d been with him for years and were utterly devoted, but he also had a few who—especially when they saw the Sinatra train running out of steam—wanted to make the most of the time they still had.
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