by Kitty Kelley
“You’re kidding,” said Weinstock. “You can’t believe what you’re saying. I don’t know your woman. I’ve never seen her before in my life. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, Sinatra, aren’t you the Sinatra I read about in books who can have all the girls he wants, a great well-known, notorious lover? Do you really mean you’re afraid of me, a hick from Salt Lake City, Utah, bothering a man of your obvious prowess?”
“Have some respect for the boss,” said one of Frank’s henchmen. “Keep your hands down if you want to live, you know, you do what we tell you to do, you know. You put your hands up again and I’m going to bust every bone in your body. If you want to live, if you want to stay from getting killed, you’ll keep your hands down.”
“Look, you son of a bitch, the name is Frank or Mister Sinatra,” said Frank, who then snapped his fingers to his entourage. “Okay, boys.”
Weinstock said that minutes later, back in the cocktail lounge, he was rushed by several men and left with rib injuries, facial cuts, and bruises all over his body. Terrified, his sister ran up to Frank.
“Mr. Sinatra,” she said. “You must have made a mistake. That’s my brother. Please help him.”
“Don’t talk to me, baby,” said Frank.
With that, he and his party left by the kitchen door. Weinstock summoned police and was taken to the station, where he was told by an officer that this kind of skirmish wasn’t at all unusual for Frank on his home ground of Palm Springs. Weinstock later was told that one policeman wanted to arrest Sinatra that night but was stopped by his superior officers and later fired.
Unable to get the Palm Springs police to file charges, Weinstock decided to sue for $2,500,000 in damages.
Immediately after filing suit, Weinstock said he began getting anonymous phone calls threatening him, his wife, and his child. “I had a lot of those calls. Always from men saying I better back off and drop the charges or I’d be sorry,” he said. “I hung up on them, but it was very frightening.”
“My client only sustained minor injuries,” said Marvin E. Lewis, Sr., the San Francisco attorney handling the case, “but it’s time someone put a stop to Sinatra’s bullying behavior.”
To that end, Lewis planned to parade through the courtroom former victims of Frank’s bodyguards, including Frederick Weisman, who had been badly clubbed in the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge in 1966, as well as Eddie Moran, the parking lot attendant who was beaten up in 1960. He planned to subpoena files from newspaper morgues to prove what he claimed was Frank’s penchant for bullying. But the court ruled that such evidence was inadmissible. Lewis also planned to investigate Sinatra’s finances so he could prove that his client deserved a multimillion-dollar judgment. Knowing Frank’s influence in Palm Springs, Lewis filed suit in federal court in Los Angeles.
“I don’t trust trying a case against Sinatra in Riverside County,” Lewis said.
The trial started shortly after Frank returned from Australia, but he did not appear in the courtroom. Nevertheless, Marvin Lewis addressed the jury as if he were present.
“We’re trying this case because a man has taken the law into his own hands,” he said. “We’re not going after him just because he has money, but the only way to punish a man of his wealth is through his pocketbook. What should we be suing him for? Bananas?”
Frank’s attorney maintained that Weinstock was drunk and had approached Barbara Marx, offering to show her the way to the ladies’ room, on the night in question. Jilly Rizzo admitted that he had hit Weinstock, but only after the businessman had supposedly called him “a guinea bastard.” He denied that he was Frank’s bodyguard.
“Sinatra don’t need no protection,” said Rizzo. “He’s man enough to stand up and defend himself in his own way like any man should.”
The trial lasted two weeks and the jury came back in favor of Frank and his sidekick, Jerry “The Crusher” Arvenitas, but awarded Weinstock $101,000 in damages in a judgment against Jilly. The judge overturned the jury’s verdict and granted Rizzo a new trial. But both sides agreed to settle out of court.
“I felt that justice had not been done,” said Marvin Lewis, “but I was glad that we at least had gotten a [jury] verdict against Jilly. That way they couldn’t walk off and say that they had no responsibility. But I know it would have been a different story if I’d had the opportunity to cross-examine Frank Sinatra and have the jury see him under cross-examination. … I thought they would be so angry at him for not coming into court and not going on the stand to give his view of what had happened that it would work against him. I really believed that. Evidently, it didn’t.”
31
“If I had as many love affairs as you’ve given me credit for, I’d now be speaking to you from a jar in the Harvard Medical School,” said Frank in a speech to Hollywood press agents. Yet this man, described by Playboy as “a bona fide sex idol with the stamp of his epoch on him,” sang pleadingly for “one last caress” before “it’s time to dress for fall,” and women responded generously. Some, including Pamela Churchill Hayward, he would have married, but the British beauty had declined the offer shortly after the death of her husband, producer Leland Hayward, in March 1971. Six months later, she married Averell Harriman.
“Frank is very good to widows,” said Joan Cohn Harvey. “I know, because after Harry died, he made a pass at me, but I wasn’t interested. I didn’t need the rush, and I told him so. Somehow I managed to say no nicely enough because I got roses the next day, and we remained friends.”
Edie Goetz was not so fortunate. After her husband’s death in 1969, Frank had courted her romantically, although she was several years his senior.
“Frank took such good care of me, and was so good for me after Billy died,” she said. “We traveled everywhere together. He took me to Palm Springs and to New York for Arthur and Bubbles Hornblow’s twenty-fifth anniversary party.… And, oh, the presents. … He bought me stereo speakers for the house, and one Christmas he gave me an embroidered bag—you couldn’t see the embroidery under a magnifying glass it was so fine, and inside there was a solid gold box which was engraved: ‘To Edie, With Much Love—Noel. Francis.’ When he married Mia, he gave me a double Fabergé frame with his picture and hers. Later, he told me to take Mia’s picture out and put two of him in, so that’s what I did.… We had such a friendly love affair. … He called me ‘sexy.’ … It was gay and fun. …”
Then one night while they were sitting in the library of Edie’s Holmby Hills mansion, Frank suggested turning their relationship into something more permanent. Edie, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer and one of Hollywood’s most important hostesses, was horrified at the prospect.
“Why, Frank, I couldn’t marry you,” she said bluntly. “Why … why … you’re nothing but a hoodlum. …”
Without saying a word, Frank left the house and never spoke to Edie Goetz again.
Other women, like Hope Lange, Lois Nettleton, and Victoria Principal, might have longed to become the next Mrs. Frank Sinatra, but they were simply pretty interludes along the way for Frank, who had sworn off marriage. “I’ve been married three times and that’s enough,” he said. “I’m not getting married again!”
“It was a happy time, his mellow period, after he’d retired and before he went back into show business,” said Victoria Principal. “We were very discreet. Few people even knew about our relationship. But I will always treasure the memory of those happy months we had together.”
It was during that retirement period that Frank had begun seeing Barbara Marx, who was still married to her second husband, Zeppo, the youngest of the Marx Brothers. She and Zeppo lived near Sinatra on the Tamarisk golf course in Palm Springs. An excellent tennis player, Barbara had been frequently invited to Frank’s house as a doubles partner for Spiro Agnew.
“That’s how the relationship started,” recalled Peter Malatesta. “At first she just came over for tennis, but after a while she was there all the time.”
Shortly before Barbara
accompanied Frank to the Nixon-Agnew inaugural in 1973, she sued Zeppo for divorce. She was awarded $1,500 a month alimony for ten years, plus a 1969 Jaguar. Frank immediately replaced it with a brand new one.
Born October 16, 1930, in Glendale, California, Barbara Jane Blakeley had aspired to be a beauty queen and after high school had entered several local contests. She was crowned Belmont Shore Fiesta Queen in Long Beach in 1946. The next year, she was named Miss Scarlet Queen with the sole duty of christening a tuna boat of the same name. After her marriage to Robert Harrison Oliver, an executive with the Miss Universe pageant, she opened a modeling school. She served as a hostess for the Junior Chamber of Commerce and coached the beauty contestants, saying that a girl had to learn how to tuck in her fanny if she wanted to get anyplace. She warned contestants that the majorette strut would cause “posterior proliferation.”
After divorcing her husband, she took her young son, Bobby, and moved to Las Vegas, where she became a showgirl at the Riviera Hotel. She also modeled for the California designer, Mr. Blackwell, who became famous for his annual list of the World’s Ten Worst Dressed Women.
“Barbara is not a woman of humor, nor is she very intelligent, but she’s beautiful, she’s sweet, and she’s incredibly patient,” Blackwell said. “I started designing in 1956, and she was my number one model. She was always prepared when she walked down the runway, and in New York she spent her last buck to find the best pair of high heels to make my clothes look better. She knew I liked high heels, and so she wore them. She’s very accommodating that way.
“We were very poor then and had to share a hotel room to save money. We used to spend hours together talking about our dreams for the future, and Barbara said she needed to marry a man of position. She was very ambitious. Not for a career, because she really didn’t want to work, but she said she needed to marry a man of means. She loved jewelry.
“So we both set out to save her from the bar stools of Vegas. You see, during the shows, the dancing girls would sit on the stools and attract customers. They had to get acquainted with the big rollers, so to speak. That’s how she met Zeppo, who was about twenty years older than she was and part of the Marx Brothers comedy team. He was an inveterate card player, but he was the most famous and important man she had met up to that point, and so she set her sights for him. I helped by borrowing jewels and mink coats for her to wear when she went out with him so that she would look good—like she didn’t have to marry for money, you know what I mean? She desperately wanted to marry Zeppo because of the good life he could give her and her young son.
“After three years, Zeppo finally proposed and they were married in 1959. That got her into the Palm Springs Racquet Club and the Tamarisk Country Club, which was very important to her. She became good friends with Dinah Shore. Zeppo brought her into a new world of money and social prominence that she had never known before. He wasn’t the classiest man in the world, I’ll grant you that, but he was the best that Barbara could do for herself at the time … and he was a good launching pad to get Frank later on.… When Zeppo finally asked her to get married, she told me that there wouldn’t be much cash available to her because he lived off a trust fund, but he promised that she could charge everything she wanted and live very comfortably.”
“Barbara’s life hasn’t been a bed of roses,” said Dinah Shore. “Her son, Bobby, has always been the most important thing in her life. It wasn’t easy raising him alone in Vegas. She was determined that life run smoothly for Bobby, and it has. He’s a wonderful young man.”
The Marx marriage lasted thirteen years—until Barbara fell in love with Frank.
“Zeppo told me, ‘She left me with a deck of cards and an old Sinatra album,’ ” said his nephew, Arthur Marx. “My dad [Groucho] was giving Zep one thousand dollars a month to live on before he died in 1979.”
Everyone seemed to like the pretty, blue-eyed blonde who was uninhibited in her devotion to Frank, helping him with his parties, accompanying him on the golf course, traveling with him around the world. She got along as well with Rosalind Russell as she did with Jilly Rizzo.
“She’s just perfect for him,” said Phyllis Cerf Wagner. “If Frank feels like cooking an Italian dinner, that’s what she feels like doing. If Frank feels like going out and going to a nightclub, that’s what she feels like doing. If Frank feels like picking up and coming to New York or going to Europe or having her go with him to every performance and bring friends, that’s what she feels like doing.”
As bright and shiny as the California sun, Barbara looked like a blond Ava Gardner without the layers of sensuousness—and without Ava’s fiery temperament. Calm and reassuring, she was willing to let Frank shine alone in the spotlight while she stood by his side contentedly. She was more interested in setting up tennis games, playing gin rummy, and shopping with her girlfriends than in pursuing a career. Friendly and uncomplicated, she posed no threat to Frank, nor was she someone who would make him feel intellectually inferior. Like a California sunflower, she was pretty, cheerful, and hearty enough to survive his tempers and moods.
The only drawback to the relationship was Frank’s mother, Dolly, who could not stand Barbara, and took every opportunity to tell her so. Mrs. Sinatra’s maid, Celia Pickell, who worked for her for ten years, cringed every time the two women were in the same room together.
“Dolly would say just horrid things to Barbara, and there was nothing none of us could do to stop her,” she said. “Dolly would say real loud, ‘I don’t want no whore coming into this family.’ If she had to eat at the same table with Barbara, it was awful. She’d say horrible things, and Barbara would go running from the table in tears, but there was nothing Frank could do about it. He’d say something like, ‘Aw, Mom,’ but that was it. The first wife, Nancy, was very good to Mrs. Sinatra, but Dolly never liked her either. I remember when Dolly went to the hospital in Houston, Texas, and I went down there with her. Nancy, Sr., came to see her, and Dolly said, ‘What did you come out here for? We don’t need you.’ Poor Nancy said, ‘Why do you say those things? Your son sent me to help you.’ But Dolly wouldn’t be nice. ‘Well, we don’t need your help. So go.’ Dolly spoke her mind about everything.”
Despite his mother’s objections, Frank continued seeing Barbara, though he sometimes subjected her to insults and abuse.
“In the south of France, he slapped her across the face for laughing at him, and she could not come out of her hotel room for two days,” said Gratsiella Maiellano, girlfriend of Pat DiCicco, a good friend of Frank’s. “It was in the lobby of the Hotel de Paris, and Frank told her to go to her room and shut up or else he would kill her.… We had been sitting at the pool looking at a Spanish magazine picture story of Frank, and I was translating it for everyone. He had been taken in by a girl reporter at the Marbella Club. She had fooled him and never said she was a newspaper girl. Frank took her to dinner and put his arm around her, and she sold those pictures to a magazine and wrote a story about him, how coarse he was, how sullen. She wrote that Frank was so ill-bred that he ordered a bottle of Château Lafite to be sent to the kitchen, not knowing that only the nouveau riche would do something that boorish. He was really pissed off when we started laughing. That’s when he hit Barbara and made her go to the room.”
Still, Barbara wanted to marry Frank and began pressing him to make their relationship permanent. He refused, and at the end of 1974 he ended the relationship.
“Frank had all sorts of problems deciding whether he really wanted to be married again—whether he should be married again,” said Dinah Shore.
Barbara sought refuge with her best friend, Bea Korshak, wife of the Mafia’s labor lawyer, and admitted the frustration of living with a man who refused to marry her. The Korshaks took her to dinner that evening at Gatsby’s with Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin. Barbara confided that her on-again, off-again relationship with Frank was finally off—for good.
“This time, I’m through with that bastard,” she said. “I’ve had it.�
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A few days later, a watered-down version of that conversation was reported in Joyce Haber’s column in the Los Angeles Times, accompanied by a photograph of Barbara, who was incensed to see the story in print. That night, she carried on about the press in general and Miss Haber in particular until agent Swifty Lazar said, “If you don’t want to be written about, you should have stayed married to Zeppo.”
Frank had flown to New York City, where he was seen having dinner with a former girlfriend, Nancy Gunderson. When he returned to the West Coast, he saw the Los Angeles Times item and called Barbara for dinner, resuming their relationship. But she did not accompany him on his next trip to New York City, where Frank was to sing with Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie at the Uris Theater, so he escorted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who showed up for his opening night with Jilly Rizzo. Backstage later with the Peter Duchins, Jackie was starry-eyed. “I wish it were all starting again,” she said breathlessly.
Jackie’s feelings toward Frank had changed dramatically since the days when she was married to John F. Kennedy and wouldn’t let Sinatra into the White House. The thaw had occurred during her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, when Frank invited the couple to attend his concert in Providence, Rhode Island. Jackie flew up with the Sinatra party and met Ari later at July’s for Chinese food. Shortly after Onassis’s death, Jackie was lunching with attorney Edward Bennett Williams at the “21” club. Frank was there as well and wanted to extend his condolences, but hesitated to approach the table without their permission. He sent a waiter over with a note, asking if he might stop by when they finished eating.