In the end, it was decided that there was no merit to any of the allegations against these attorneys. All of the charges were dismissed before they reached trial stage.
Kidnapping Postscript
As Presiding Judge William G. East reviewed case files, preparing to send them to the appellate court for Amsler’s and Irwin’s appeals, he discovered that someone had tampered with a key report. He found the original draft of a letter that had been sent to the court from a medical facility, which noted that Barry Keenan was legally insane at the time of the kidnapping and thus should be diverted to psychiatric counseling as opposed to being sent to prison. He also noticed what he believed was a doctored copy of the same report, which had been submitted to the court by Sinatra’s attorneys.
Barry Keenan said, “The judge believed that the prosecution had manipulated the report and sent it back slightly rewritten, changing the wording to make it less favorable to me. Someone had changed it so that it wouldn’t give the judge a reason to give me probation. The judge got so incensed with what had been done to the report that he censured the prosecuting attorneys and reduced my sentence to twelve years.”
As a result, Barry Keenan would go on to serve only four and a half years behind bars; his two partners spent three and a half years in prison. Keenan was released in 1968. “I don’t think this would ever happen today,” he says. “I was unbelievably lucky. Some might say that the system failed miserably. I guess I can see that point of view too. But whatever the case, by 1969 I was ready to start my life over again and put the Sinatra kidnapping behind me.”
Growing Up Sinatra
Frank Sinatra Jr. went on with his life and career after the kidnapping, but with no real change in his relationship with his father. “As for the two men in my family, and their choked and halting relationship,” Tina Sinatra recalled, “our family crisis didn’t forge a breakthrough, as it might have in the Hollywood version. Dad and Frankie went on as they had in the past, not quite connecting. They loved each other and knew it, but it had taken a near-death experience to bring them close and together. When the trauma was over, the connection was broken.”
As a performer, Frankie may never have projected his father’s charisma or magic, but he does have a certain serenity that is very self-assured. His 1971 album Spice, for the RCA subsidiary Daybreak Records, is an accomplished, distinctive album that still holds up.
Nancy Jr. somehow seemed to sail through her teen years, fascinated with boyfriends and school, and also music. She was about eight when Frank left with Ava, and even though she was very upset about it, at least she had eight good years with him. It was foundation enough for her to continue a good relationship with him. Like Frankie, she wanted more, of course. However, also like Frankie, she had resigned herself to reality. She signed as a recording artist with Frank’s Reprise label in 1961. In 1963, Frank sold Reprise to Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, Inc., a movie company controlled by Jack Warner. This gave the company a real shot in the arm in terms of distributing its product. Reprise president Mo Ostin stayed on as head of the label, and Frank retained a 20 percent stock interest and became a vice president and consultant of Warner Bros. Picture Corp.
In 1964, Nancy was twenty-four and well on her way to becoming a success at the new Reprise Records. She had found her own identity and, because she shared her father’s proclivity for concentration and focus, never let anything get in her way. The biggest problem she would face, and it would be very soon, would be the disintegration of her marriage to the young actor Tommy Sands.
Tina, who was sixteen in 1964, was the only Sinatra offspring who went through a difficult teenage rebellion. She felt, like many teens, as if nothing was right or good in her world. At this time she was attending school at the Catholic institution of Marymount, which was so restrictive in its philosophy that she seemed ready to burst with impatience and frustration by the end of every school day. The nuns didn’t know what to do with her, and neither did her parents.
Frank gave Tina a powder-blue Pontiac Firebird convertible for her birthday, but it probably wasn’t the best gift for a rebellious teenager. When she snuck out with her friends in the middle of the night to go dancing while visiting Frank in Palm Springs, he was very disappointed in her. For Tina, that was punishment enough; his disenchantment in her was crushing. Suggesting two totally different parenting styles, Nancy Sr. reacted differently when Tina did the same thing in Los Angeles: She hit the roof and grounded her daughter for weeks. After a couple of years watching Tina act as if she were angry with the world, Frank and Nancy sat her down at the dining room table to try to figure out what was bothering her. In their hearts, they both knew what it was, though. As the youngest, Tina had been the one most affected by Frank’s leaving the family for Ava, and they suspected that she had never gotten over it. She didn’t want to discuss it with them, though, so there wasn’t much they could do about it.
“When he left home, I was a baby,” Tina would explain, “so I wasn’t accustomed to a man in the house, a father. I didn’t feel the wrench; I didn’t know him. Conversely, I had to deal with this very nice man coming into our lives from time to time. It was always—certainly—a special occasion. But there was a point when you realized that everything had to be just . . . so. You know, we had to get cleaned and washed and combed and groomed, and it wasn’t comfortable. And he would come and go and come and go. And I didn’t know where to find him. What I felt was that when he was around, I was different. I couldn’t figure out why. Who is ‘he’ that I should change? I used to feel nervous when I was going to see him. I had anxiety.”
Frank was relieved that Tina didn’t want to talk about Ava. If she felt more comfortable dealing with it privately, he felt it was probably for the best. Unpacking these sorts of complex emotions was never Frank’s forte. Nancy Sr. still hadn’t worked through her own anger and disillusionment. Therefore, she too was less than eager to work through it with her youngest daughter.
In fact, Nancy Sr. still clung to the hope that Frank would return to her. She and Nancy Jr. often discussed it in a dreamy, romantic way. Nancy Jr. actually seemed to encourage her mother in this fantasy, and their idealizing of Frank while wishing and hoping for his return to the family only served to upset Tina. “I just felt that my dad had moved on and I couldn’t understand why my mother wouldn’t let this thing go,” she later admitted. “Of course, I was sixteen and thought I had all the solutions to all of the problems in the world.”
Prelude to the Best
In January 1964, Frank Sinatra recorded the patriotic America, I Hear You Singing album with Bing Crosby and Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians. Then, later that month, he recorded Frank Sinatra Sings Days of Wine and Roses, Moon River and Other Academy Award Winners. With this album, he kept up with the times. He quietly and seamlessly moved from concept albums into collections of covers of current hit records by other artists. While not considered by Sinatra purists to be a memorable album, Wine and Roses did include the lovely “The Way You Look Tonight,” as arranged by Nelson Riddle.
In February, Frank and Dean appeared together on a Bing Crosby television special. By this time, Bing was also a Reprise recording artist; indeed, Frank was corralling the best in the business for his label, such as Rosemary Clooney, Jo Stafford, Keely Smith, and Dean Martin. With the exception of Martin, though, few were able to sustain a career at Reprise.
In April, the trio—Frank, Dean, and Bing—recorded the soundtrack album for Robin and the 7 Hoods. Then, later in the month, Frank was off to Hawaii to begin work on the film None but the Brave for Warner Bros., his debut as a director (Nancy’s husband, Tommy Sands, also appeared in this antiwar film, along with Clint Walker and Brad Dexter). None but the Brave finished its principal photography by June. “It’s an antiwar story that deals with a group of Americans and a group of Japanese stranded together on a Pacific island during the war,” Sinatra explained. “I tried to show that when men do not have to fight, there is a community of int
erests.”
Of Frank’s work as a director, Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas noted, “Sinatra’s style is straightforward and understated. It is to his credit that he tackled a serious subject on his first try when he could have taken the easy way out with another gathering of the Clan.” When released later in the year, the movie did well at the box office.
In Frank Sinatra: An American Legend, Nancy recalls that her dad almost drowned while in Hawaii during production of None but the Brave. It happened while Frank was attempting to rescue Ruth Koch (producer Howard Koch’s wife) after she was swept away by an undertow. (Mrs. Koch was brought safely back to shore by a wave while Frank was on his way out to get her.) “He struggled against the surf for thirty-five minutes,” Nancy wrote, until he was finally rescued by fire lieutenant George Keawe, who later said, “In another five minutes he would have been gone. His face was turning blue.”
It is interesting that Nancy credits Keawe with saving Frank’s life when it is well known among Sinatra’s inner circle—and has been reported countless times in the media—that actor, producer, and close friend of Sinatra’s Brad Dexter actually rescued him. “[When I reached him], Frankie was whispering with a sort of incredible wonder, ‘I’m drowning,’ ” recalled Dexter. “He couldn’t see anything. I’ve seen people drown, and they lose their eyesight and go blind—and he was completely white.”
Sinatra later had a falling-out with Dexter over the film The Naked Runner (which he would produce), prompting him to do what he often did, banish another longtime friend from his kingdom. Later, when someone asked Frank how Brad was, Frank responded, “Brad who?” This unfortunate situation regarding Dexter may explain why Nancy decided not to give credit to him in her official Sinatra history for saving Frank’s life.
(At the time, Frank and Joey Bishop were also estranged. No one, including Joey himself, seemed to remember what caused the problem between them. However, Bishop sent Sinatra a telegram after he heard of the near drowning: “You must have forgotten who you were. You could have walked on the water.” Joey recalled, “I got a call from him the next day like nothing had happened between us.”)
On June 9, 1964, Frank was back in a studio in Los Angeles recording the It Might as Well Be Swing album, arranged by Quincy Jones and featuring the Count Basie band. If a person can only have one Sinatra album in his collection, perhaps this should be it, because it includes one of his most memorable performances, “The Best Is Yet to Come.” The remarkable Count Basie orchestra presses the music onward insistently, persistently. It’s clear that all—singer, musicians, producers, and arrangers—were having the time of their lives.
On June 27, 1964, Warner Bros. released Robin and the 7 Hoods, the film that gave birth to the Sinatra classic “My Kind of Town,” the musical tribute to Chicago that went on to become one of Frank’s trademark songs. The movie was a satire on the old Robin Hood fable and starred Rat Packers Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, with Bing Crosby.
A month later, on July 13, Frank celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first time he stood in a recording studio with Harry James and sang “From the Bottom of My Heart” for the Brunswick label. It had been twenty-five years of music, performances, and images, so many of which had helped shape American culture, becoming the soundtrack to so many lives. And to paraphrase an appropriate song title, for Frank Sinatra the best was indeed yet to come—or at least it seemed that way when he met the woman who would become his third wife.
Part Ten
THE MIA YEARS
Mia
He met her in September 1964 when he was filming the movie Von Ryan’s Express for 20th Century–Fox. She was a young blonde waif, one of the stars (along with Ryan O’Neal) of the new Peyton Place television show. She was loitering about the movie set, eyeing Frank Sinatra while wearing nothing but a sheer white nightgown from the wardrobe of her show. Reed thin, with pale skin and luminous blue eyes, she was at once childlike and seductive. At just five feet five inches and weighing only ninety-eight pounds, she had the figure of a young boy. However, she possessed something Frank would later describe as “some kind of female magic.” He couldn’t help but want to know her. He tapped her on the shoulder.
“How old are ya, kid?” he asked her.
“That’s hardly a question to ask a lady,” she responded. Then, with a flick of her long blonde mane, she answered, “I’m just nineteen.”
“I was hers instantly,” Frank recalled. “I loved that hair, man. I think the hair’s what got me.”
Born on February 9, 1945, in Beverly Hills, Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow—Mia—was the third of seven children of actress Maureen O’Sullivan and her husband, director John Farrow.
When she was a youngster, Mia’s home life was unusual in that she and her siblings lived in a nursery with its own kitchen that was separate and apart from the main house. Maureen, who worked as a successful actress in films throughout Mia’s adolescence, once explained that her husband enjoyed peace and quiet when he got home from work on the set (no easy feat with seven children) and “didn’t like everything messed up.” The children, therefore, were basically raised by nannies, trotted out in their expensive “Sunday best” when the rich and famous of the entertainment industry visited . . . and then sent back to the nursery at the end of the evening.
Farrow never criticizes her parents for her upbringing. “There was a magical element to it,” she’s said. “We lived in beautiful homes, our gardens were beautiful, even the nannies dressed beautifully. Beautiful birthday parties, and we had beautiful clothes. And people spoke well and thought well of each other in those days in Hollywood.”
At the age of nine, Mia contracted polio. Before she left to be treated at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, the sensitive youngster wrapped all of her toys as gifts and presented them to her brothers and sisters. But after she left the house, all of the toys—and in fact the rest of her belongings—were burned by one of the maids because they were thought to be contagious. (Mia eventually recovered from the disease, with only a residual and permanent weakness in one arm.)
Mia attended a Catholic boarding school in London as well as schools in Madrid and Beverly Hills. Upon graduation from Marymount, she left Los Angeles and headed east to New York to become an actress. In short order, she found herself appearing in the off-Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest, replacing Carrie Nye (later Mrs. Dick Cavett). She signed a contract with 20th Century–Fox and appeared in a film, replacing Britt Eklund in Guns at Batasi.
Troubles on the home front kept Mia preoccupied in the early 1960s. Her father, John Farrow, had an unfortunate eye for the ladies and a thirst for liquor. He died in 1963 of a heart attack at the age of just fifty-three. The loss was very difficult for the family. In the midst of her grief, Maureen accepted a job on the Today show as cohost opposite Hugh Downs, a job she regretted having taken since broadcasting wasn’t for her. Her eventual departure from the program opened the door for someone better suited for the job: Barbara Walters.
In August 1964, nineteen-year-old Mia began work on Peyton Place. As the pensive and brooding heroine Allison MacKenzie, she became very popular when the soap debuted in the fall of that year. She was a good actress with a raw, convincing quality, especially in big dramatic moments. The camera loved her. Still, despite the experienced ingénue she played on television, in real life she didn’t have boyfriends in school; she was a wallflower. Some people thought she was kooky, what with her dreamy disposition and the fact that she ate only organic foods. After one writer interviewed her, he wrote, “She is a fawn turned woman for an hour; a stranger from some asteroid where girls walk barefoot on the rims of flowers.”
In fact, Mia was anything but simple-minded or weak-willed. She also wasn’t naïve. In her own way, she could be seductive and even manipulative. She was ambitious. She was smart; she knew what she wanted out of life. She wanted to be a famous actress, there was no doubt in her mind about it.
&nb
sp; First Blush of Romance
When Frank saw Mia looking starry-eyed around the set of Von Ryan’s Express, he couldn’t help but approach her. While she was young and innocent-seeming, she had a certain sensuality that drew him in. He walked over to her and asked her to sit down and chat.
As Mia took her seat, she dropped her purse and out of it fell all sorts of things between his feet and under his chair: a stale doughnut (“Oh my, I’m so sorry!”); a can of cat food (“Oh no, I’m so embarrassed!”); a ChapStick (“No! No! No!”); even her retainer (“Oh my God!”). He couldn’t help but be amused as she repeatedly apologized while collecting her scattered things. As she stuffed everything back into her purse, he was charmed by her. Her long straight hair was definitely a turn-on for him; her doe-eyed, shy glance mesmerizing. In a 1960s world where skinny fashion models were all the rage, Mia’s look definitely worked for her.
Mia and Frank talked for a few minutes while she explained why she was on the lot: “I act on a TV show called Peyton Place. Ever hear of it?” As she prattled on, he listened and watched. When their eyes locked, it was clear to him that something significant had just happened. Frank was certain that he’d just shared a real moment with a girl young enough to be his daughter.
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