His Way

by Kitty Kelley

  No sooner had the pictures of Jackie and Frank taken at the Uris Theater hit the press than Barbara decided to fly to New York to join him, vowing never to leave his side. She accompanied him on his European concert tour in January 1976, and in Israel she wrote a wish on a piece of paper and although she’s not Jewish, stuck it between the ancient stones of the Wailing Wall, begging God for a marriage proposal. By May 18, her prayers were answered with a seven teen-carat diamond engagement ring that cost Frank $360,000.

  “Barbara is wearing a diamond engagement ring as big as Hoboken, New Jersey,” wrote syndicated columnist Suzy, who broke the news.

  “Yes, it’s true,” snapped Frank, “but it’s nobody’s goddamned business.”

  Unable to face his mother with her future daughter-in-law, Frank sent Mickey Rudin to break the news. Dolly reviled him, calling the lawyer a son of a bitch who was robbing her son blind.

  “Oh, don’t say those things, you hurt my feelings,” said Rudin, trying to placate Dolly.

  A few hours later, Frank went over to his mother’s home, but before he could say hello, according to Celia Pickell, she started yelling at him.

  “You fucking no good bastard, you were going to get married and not even tell me, weren’t you?” she hollered.

  “You know I can’t tell you because you always give me hell, Mama,” said Frank, looking like a frightened little boy.

  “Then Barbara tried to be nice again, and she and Frank went out and bought some dresses for Dolly so she could pick one to wear to the wedding,” recalled Celia Pickell. “Barbara brought them over, but Dolly wouldn’t speak to her. She said she was going to keep all the dresses because that would mean less money to be spent on Barbara. She kept saying, ‘I don’t want no whore coming into this family,’ but we’d tell her how nice Barbara was, and she finally gave in and resigned herself to the marriage, but she didn’t like it one bit.”

  Everyone else wished Frank and Barbara well, including some of their former spouses.

  “She’ll make him a wonderful wife and hostess,” said Zeppo Marx. “She plays golf well and tennis well. She’s an all-around good girl. He’ll never find anyone better, that’s for sure.”

  Ava Gardner, who had relied on Frank for years, said, “I’m glad he has found happiness with Barbara. Even though we were divorced long ago, I’ve always counted on Frank to advise me in business affairs. He’s always been so generous with his time and interest. I’m sure his new wife won’t object if I continue to call on him in the future.”

  To throw off the press, Frank announced that he and Barbara would marry on October 10, 1976, at the Beverly Hills home of Kirk Douglas, all the while planning a secret July 11 ceremony at Sunnylands, the Walter Annenbergs’ thousand-acre estate in Rancho Mirage, California. Not even the 120 guests knew for sure that they were invited to a wedding, but they suspected because their invitations for “an engagement party” were imprinted with “Pray Silence,” one of Frank’s favorite expressions, and called for neckties, which seemed extremely formal for the 115-degree weather.

  A few close friends like Dinah Shore and Johnny Carson did not receive invitations because Frank was still fuming about their treatment of Spiro Agnew. Carson had refused to have the former vice-president on The Tonight Show to plug his book, and while Dinah had Agnew on her television show, she asked him a question that Frank found too probing. Because of that question, Frank barred her from the wedding, although Dinah was one of Barbara’s closest friends.

  The only invited guest who declined was Frank, Jr., who pleaded a singing engagement on the East Coast. As a wedding present, he sent his father a carton full of paperback sex manuals.

  “What the hell is this supposed to mean?” Frank asked him.

  “Well, fourth time. There must be something wrong,” said Junior. “I figured maybe you needed some help.”

  Sworn to absolute secrecy about the wedding plans, Barbara was put to the test when Zeppo called her on July 10 to ask whether she and Frank were getting married the following day.

  “Oh, no, dear,” she said. “Frank and I aren’t getting married until October tenth.”

  After Zeppo made another call and found out that the wedding was indeed set for the next day, he shook his head sadly.

  “It really hurts me that she felt she had to lie to me,” he told a reporter. “It must have been orders from Sinatra.

  “Frank doesn’t seem embarrassed that he stole my wife. We remain very friendly. And I’ve never said anything bad about him. I think Barbara and Frank will be very happy, and I believe she will fit into the Sinatra family. Now she is with someone younger—someone she really wants to be with. But I wouldn’t dream of attending their wedding … not that I’ve been invited.”

  The next day at three P.M. armed guards stood outside the gates of the Annenbergs’ estate to ensure that no reporters or photographers were admitted. Pacing up and down in front of the black marble fireplace in the Annenbergs’ drawing room, the sixty-year-old bridegroom waited with Judge James H. Walsworth, while his forty-six-year-old bride changed into her wedding dress, a drifting beige chiffon by Halston. After a few minutes Frank became impatient. “Hurry up, Barbara,” he said. “Everyone thought I would be the one who wouldn’t show up.”

  Minutes later the beautiful blonde appeared on the arm of her father, Charles Blakeley, and stood alongside Frank, who was flanked by his best man, Freeman Gosden (Amos of Amos ’n’ Andy), and Bea Korshak, the matron of honor, who was wearing the antique sapphire and diamond necklace that Barbara and Frank had given her the night before. Reading the civil wedding vows, Judge Walsworth asked Barbara: “Do you take this man for richer and for poorer?”

  “Richer, richer,” said Frank, causing everyone to burst into laughter.

  “All she wants to do is make Frank happy. That’s her goal,” asserted Barbara’s mother, Irene Blakeley. “And he wants her to have the best of everything.”

  After the ceremony, a champagne reception was held in the Annenbergs’ marbled atrium decorated with bouquets of bouvardia, garlands of gardenias, and huge sprays of lilies of the valley. The bride cut a four-tiered wedding cake with a knife festooned with stephanotis. As she and Frank paused to make a wish, presidential contender Ronald Reagan piped up: “If you can’t think of anything you want to ask for, I can make a suggestion.” Everyone laughed.

  Waiting outside for the guests, who included Spiro Agnew, Jimmy Van Heusen, Gregory Peck, Dr. Michael DeBakey, Leo Durocher, and Sidney Korshak, were air-conditioned buses to transport everyone a few blocks to the Sinatra compound for an elaborate seafood dinner and a view of the couple’s wedding gifts to each other: hers was a $100,000 peacock blue Rolls-Royce with license plates reading BAS-I for Barbara and Sinatra; his from her was a $100,000 gray twelve-cylinder Jaguar.

  The couple planned to honeymoon with three couples from New York—the Morton Downeys, the Bill Greens, the Paul Mannos—and set off the next day for Frank’s mountain chalet in Idylwild, about fifty miles from his Palm Springs compound. Frank stayed up late drinking with Bill Green that night and didn’t go to bed until four A.M., hours after Barbara was asleep. As he stood up to retire, he walked over to his friend, and cupped Green’s face in his hands.

  “Bill, sometimes I wish someone would really hurt you so I could kill them,” he said. This was his way of telling his friend how much he cared for him.

  Although she had been living with Frank for years, marriage opened up a whole new world to Barbara, who suddenly found new respect and attention as Mrs. Frank Sinatra. Town and Country wanted to photograph her; Charlotte Curtis, society editor of The New York Times, interviewed her; designers threw open their doors to her, knowing that Frank would shower her with clothes, jewelry, and furs.

  “He’s turned every single day into Christmas,” said Barbara, who exulted in her new possessions. “It knocks me out. Maybe I appreciate it more because I didn’t always have all this.”

  Frank gave his bride free r
ein to redecorate his Palm Springs compound. “Do what you want,” he told her. “Do it exactly the way you want it, and then I want to see it.”

  With no financial restraints, Barbara started refurbishing. She commissioned a new master bedroom, new dressing rooms, new closets, and a new bathroom. She also ordered new furniture in soft shades of orange, Frank’s favorite color, and jolted the salespeople at Kreiss in Los Angeles when she made a down payment on some dust ruffles and a few pieces of wicker.

  “Mrs. Sinatra opened her purse and took out ten thousand dollars in cash that still had the Caesars Palace wrapper on it,” said Bahman Rooin, a Kreiss salesman. “That was the way she made the down payment on her order.”

  Embracing her husband’s life, Barbara followed Frank everywhere.

  “I travel with him, that’s really our life,” she said. “We’re really on the road most of the time, and a plane is almost our home or a hotel, or whatever. … So in order to try to make some kind of normalcy out of it, out of that crazy kind of life, I travel with him and try to make it as comfortable as possible.”

  Frank’s opening nights in Las Vegas were always an exciting spectacle that brought the entire Sinatra family together, with Barbara sitting ringside for every performance. Dolly especially loved the neon lights and all-night glitter of these occasions, when movie stars like Kirk Douglas and Cary Grant flew from Hollywood to be in the audience to pay homage to her son. She also enjoyed the bawdy comedians of Las Vegas, especially Don Rickles. She laughed uproariously at his insulting humor, which was not unlike her own, but if she were traveling with Sister Consilia, she refused to let the nun attend the show with her.

  “He’s too off-color for you, Sister,” she said.

  The smiling, gray-haired Dolly would spend hours in the cavernous casino of Caesars Palace playing the slot machines. Whenever she ran out of money, she dispatched a courier to her son, who peeled off several hundred-dollar bills so she could continue feeding the one-armed bandits. She even had a slot machine at home that she had rigged. The eighty-two-year-old matriarch was catered to at the casino, where she knew all the pit bosses and dealers and bookmakers. She relished the attention they showered on her as Mama Sinatra. She accepted it as her due.

  For her son’s opening on Thursday, January 6, 1977, Dolly and her New Jersey houseguest, Anna Carbone, a doctor’s widow from Cliffside, made plans to take a chartered Learjet from Palm Springs to Las Vegas. Dolly much preferred going on her own to being part of her daughter-in-law’s entourage on an earlier flight.

  At four P.M., the two women were picked up by one of Frank’s employees and driven to the airport, where they boarded the small, luxurious jet, which was stocked with a fruit basket, liquor, cookies, cheese, and crackers for the twenty-minute flight to Las Vegas. The pilot and co-pilot greeted them and radioed the control tower for permission to take off.

  The tower radioed back that the pilot would have to wait twenty minutes because there was another plane in the vicinity flying at a higher altitude. At four fifty-five P.M., the twin-engine Learjet taxied down the runway and disappeared into low clouds. Instead of making a scheduled right turn toward Las Vegas, the plane inexplicably turned left and headed for the San Gorgonio Mountains, forty miles off course.

  The pilot, who had flown this route many times before, knew that the mountain range was in his path, but he couldn’t see it. At the altitude they were flying the precipitation that hit the ground as rain was a white swirl of blinding snow in the sky. He radioed the tower asking for permission to increase his altitude from nine thousand feet to seventeen thousand feet to escape the snow-capped monster looming ahead—the highest peak in southern California. The tower granted permission but retracted it. Flying at 375 miles an hour, the pilot begged the air traffic controller to change his mind—and fast—but it was too late. The response was garbled, and the blip representing the Learjet vanished from the radar screen as the plane slammed into the icy, unyielding 11,502-foot mountain. The impact was so powerful that the wings and tail were sheared from the fuselage. The sudden, violent deceleration hurled the crew, the passengers, and their luggage across the snowswept folds of the mountain, scattering limbs and shredded pieces of clothing in the trees.

  The operators of the Learjet service, Jet Avia, Ltd., immediately contacted Sinatra’s attorney, Milton Rudin, who flew from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to tell his most important client that his mother’s plane had disappeared in a turbulent snowstorm. Shaken but bolstered by hope that she would survive, Frank decided to go on with his opening night show as if nothing had happened. Without alluding to the missing plane, the sixty-one-year-old entertainer sang so smoothly and joked so easily that his audience gave him a standing ovation.

  When there was no word by midnight, Frank began to lose hope, and when the rescue efforts had to be called off because of snow and driving winds, he canceled the rest of his engagement and returned with his wife to Palm Springs to wait. Frank, Jr., joined him a few hours later, as did Jilly Rizzo and Mickey Rudin.

  Early the next day, the weather had improved enough for Civil Air Patrol helicopters to circle the mountain ridge to search for some trace of wreckage, but there was nothing. Hope that Dolly might be alive all but faded, and the vigil in the Sinatra compound became a deathwatch.

  The next morning, Frank was so tormented by the image of his mother buried alive under a freezing blanket of snow that he insisted on going up with one of the Air Patrol helicopter pilots, Don Landells, to search for her. Twisted with grief, he boarded the plane and sat in silence, straining to catch a glimpse of anything moving below. The pilot circled for hours, but there was no trace of the jet or of any of its passengers. All that could be seen was the rescue team in bright orange parkas slogging their way through the towering snowdrifts. The longer the helicopter hovered over the mountain, the more hopeless the situation looked. Finally, Frank signaled the pilot to return home. He called the San Bernadino sheriff from his compound to say that he did not want the rescue team to take any unnecessary risks while searching for the crash site.

  The next morning, Sunday, January 10, Landells went up again and flew over the estimated site of the crash. This time, he noticed a bit of disturbed snow in a sparsely wooded area. Circling lower, he spotted Dolly’s large muumuu dress hanging from a tree. He also saw the fuselage resting against a sharp cliff and bits and pieces of bodies strewn along the mountain ridge. After notifying authorities, he called the Sinatra house and told Mickey Rudin that there was no longer any hope.

  Although Frank had expected to hear the worst, he could not quite accept the fact that his mother had not somehow managed to survive. She had been the most important person in his life, the one most responsible for his incredible success. It was her temperament that had shaped Frank and her ambitions that had fueled him.

  He closeted himself with his grief. No one, not even his wife or children, could reach him. Months later, he said, “Her death was a shame, a blow. Especially because of the manner in which she died. She was a woman who flew maybe five times a year. I could understand if it happened to me.”

  Frank buried his mother with a requiem mass at St. Louis Roman Catholic Church in nearby Cathedral City, where she had prayed every Sunday; he laid her to rest alongside his father in Desert Memorial Park. Carrying the coffin were Jimmy Van Heusen, Dean Martin, Leo Durocher, Pat Henry, and Jilly Rizzo.

  “My father was devastated by his mother’s death,” said Frank, Jr. “The days after were the worst I had known. He said nothing for hours at a time, and all of us who were nearby felt helpless to find any way to ease his agony.… Back at home after the terrible hour at graveside, I felt it best not to leave him alone. Sitting with him and watching the tears roll one by one down his face made me feel even more desolate than I had on the night the kidnappers dragged me out into the snow half-dressed.”

  “The death of Frank’s mother was a trying and difficult time for Frank,” said Barbara. “It’s the only time I have seen hi
m that sad.”

  “This was the first time Frank broke down in public,” said his mother-in-law, Irene Blakeley.

  Abashed by his public tears, Frank later was asked if he cried alone, and said, “Well, I don’t do that. I haven’t done that in a long time, except for recent grief, but pretty much alone. I would think so. It’s a kind of a—it’s a personal and an embarrassing moment, I think, particularly in a man, you know.”

  Frank turned to his long-neglected religion for reassurance, clinging to the Catholic priests who had been so much a part of his mother’s life. Her death seemed to bring him painfully in touch with his own mortality, and, as if in atonement, he began inching his way back to the church. Soon he decided that he wanted to return to the sacraments and to remarry his Protestant wife of six months in front of a Catholic priest. To do that, though, she would have to take instruction, and he would have to obtain an annulment of his first marriage, which had taken place in Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Jersey City. There was no need to annul the marriages to Ava Gardner and Mia Farrow because those had not been performed in the Catholic church and therefore were not recognized as valid. Only the 1939 marriage to Nancy Barbato—the marriage that had produced his three children—counted in the eyes of the church. Consummation of a marriage no longer precluded an annulment. The revised Code of Canon Law would make it easy for him to dissolve that first marriage, and Barbara readily agreed to do whatever was necessary to qualify as a Catholic.

  “Let me tell you that after his mother died, Frank became a totally committed Catholic, and Barbara then took instruction to convert,” said Richard Condon. “I remember one evening we were having dinner at ‘21’ in New York at a big round table, and I was with Barbara. Somehow we got to talking about her difficulty in understanding what the priest was teaching her about being in a state of grace. Now, I resigned from the Catholics when I was thirteen, but I still remembered the theory well, and we spent forty minutes at the table talking about a state of grace. I have no reason to believe in the month I spent in Spain with Frank [during the making of The Pride and the Passion in 1956] he was even a service Catholic—I mean the type who goes to mass every day or even on Sunday—but after his mother died, he became devotedly Catholic. Devotedly. Perhaps it was the apparition of death. …”